RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE EARTH

Working with a brilliant bunch of young people in their twenties (to produce ‘Love, Anger & Betrayal’ last year) massively ramped up my capacity for rage – on their behalf, as well as my own. So, this slightly angry thread is really for them:

1. 2015 Paris Agreement: brief trip down memory lane. It’s more than a decade since that super-symbolic target of 1.5°C was gavelled into existence in Paris as the maximum average temperature increase that would still allow for a reasonably stable climate for humankind by the end of this century.
2. “Well, yes, but…..” A whole bunch of scientists immediately questioned the arbitrary nature of this threshold, pointing out that it was never going to be realistic without a dramatic shift in climate geopolitics. Still, it was the best we had at the time, and it still is. With one slight problem….
3. Still on the up (2015 – 2026). Annual emissions of CO₂ and methane continue to arise year on year – from 408.8 ppm (parts per million) in September 2015 to 426.6 ppm in September 2026. That’s physical reality. Targets are just targets.
4. Toxic Positivity Scientists pointing out that these annual increases in greenhouse gas concentrations make the 1.5°C threshold totally impossible to achieve are consistently and sometimes viciously attacked.So that’s the last decade or so. Which brings us to September 2026.
5.  ‘Sorry, guys, it’s now 1.8°C, not 1.5°C’. A couple of weeks ago, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) broke ranks to tell us that 1.5°C is completely “unattainable”, thus confirming what many were saying more than 10 years ago. And the best we can hope for now, apparently, is a minimum average temperature increase of 1.8°C, despite Inger Andersen, UNEP’s Executive Director, acknowledging that “there are no good outcomes above 1.5°C”.But don’t panic – we can now look forward to an era of…..
6. ‘Coping and containment’. Yup – that’s UNEP’s best slogan for the next few decades! These UNEP dullards are sunk so deep in their ‘nihilistic lassitude’ (as Tim Winton puts it) that they have literally nothing left to offer on the kind of radical decarbonisation that our future still depends on. “We have to live with this warmer world”. So suck it up!
7. Or, rather, ‘suck it back down’. According to UNEP (and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) the only way of eventually getting back from the ‘overshoot’ of 1.8°C to the still all-important 1.5°C will be by sucking billions and billions of tonnes of CO₂ back out of the atmosphere over the course ‘of the next few decades’.
8. Nature-based withdrawals And the best way of doing that, the argument goes, is by harnessing the power of Nature herself – absorbing as many of those billions of tonnes as possible through protecting forests, replanting forests, restoring wetlands, peatlands and mangrove swamps etc. The usual ‘nature to the rescue’ advocacy.
9. Oops … did you miss something, Inger? Just a few days after this little bombshell, a paper in Environmental Research Letters (from Spark Climate Solutions) summarises what scientists like Johan Rockström have been pointing out for the last three years: those natural systems are increasingly incapable of absorbing any more CO₂ – precisely because rising temperatures and climate impacts are driving increasingly scary feedback loops.
10. Emitting, not Absorbing Simply put, most of these ‘potential CO₂ sinks’ on which UNEP’s entire corrupted argument is based are likely to become CO₂ emitters – with forests in flames, or struck down by disease, with wetlands drying out and permafrost melting, with marine systems laid low by worsening heat waves, and so on. And this, according to Spark Climate Solutions, will add (not subtract!) as much as 0.2°C to 0.4°C to average temperature increases.

Disturbing, isn’t it? Even if you’re not still in your twenties. And then imagine how much more disturbing it would be, if you were still in your twenties, if you knew that you’re going to be betrayed, time after time, by politicians still stuck in the age of fossil fuels – as in Andy Burnham limbering up to issue revised permits for the Jackdaw gas field and the vast Rosebank oil field. This, apparently, being ‘the pragmatic thing to do’.

Leaving many young people in their twenties with one frail but cruel and desperate hope: that the ‘Godzilla El Nino’ currently bearing down on the world (including little old UK) will be so devastating, killing so many people (hundreds of thousands, perhaps), disrupting the lives of so many people (tens of millions, perhaps) and causing so much economic damage, $ hundreds of billions, perhaps), that a social tipping point (a Godzilla of a social tipping point, powered by rage and compassion) might just force enough politicians in enough countries to call time on this utterly corrupt, suicidally insane world of fossil fuels.

RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE EARTH.

Jonathon Porritt 22 September 2026