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By Root 742 0

Climate Change Act now legally mandates the government to achieve 80 percent reductions by 2050 and to achieve several intermediate milestones along the way. Much credit for the Act goes to Friends of the Earth, who mobilized hundreds of thousands of British voters to write to their members of parliament on the subject. Adopting legally mandated climate change targets has helped make the U.K. an acknowledged international leader in global-warming negotiations and is now bringing about a belated revolution in renewables as well as a renaissance of nuclear power. Cynics often grumble: “The government isn’t doing anything,” but in Britain that is simply not true.

Although the combined lobbying force of industry was once aligned against action on carbon emissions, today there are many very powerful companies that strongly and publicly support action on climate change. Google, one of the richest companies on the planet, is sponsoring an ingenious program called “RESome economists have argued for a wait-and-see approach with climate change, arguing that adopting clean technology in a few decades’ time when it is cheaper is better than deploying expensive alternatives today. This argument flies in the face of basic climate science. A group of scientists led by Oxford University’s Myles Allen recently launched a website to popularize their argument that cumulative carbon emissions—not levels in any specific year or decade—matter most to the climate system.86 “To limit long-term carbon dioxide levels to 350 parts per million,” the scientists write, “we will need to limit cumulative carbon dioxide emissions to less than one trillion tonnes of carbon” in total throughout the whole Anthropocene.

In order to do this, the date when emissions peak becomes all-important: If global reductions start in 2015, for example, then the decarbonization rate need only be 3 percent per year to stay within the overall carbon budget.87 This is quite achievable, if ambitious. But if we postpone action to reduce global emissions until 2030, the required reduction will be 8 percent per year, unfeasibly expensive by any definition because it will mean throwing away a huge amount of energy infrastructure before it has reached the end of its lifetime. The nay-saying economists have it backwards, in other words. The longer we wait to deal with carbon, the more expensive that task is going to be—if we are serious about limiting temperature rises and getting back within the planetary boundary. There is no time to lose.

BOUNDARY THREE

NITROGEN

The story of carbon is the story of humans transcending one of the fundamental limits of the biosphere. Having previously been restricted to wood, water, and wind as energy sources, we discovered fossil fuels and used them to build a complex and advanced industrial civilization. The story of nitrogen is just as extraordinary. For all of history, this element has been the main limiting nutrient on plant growth—shortages of nitrogen in the soil meant that human agriculture would always struggle to support the population. Right up until the early twentieth century, this problem seemed insuperable. Not for nothing did Malthus predict a large-scale die-off of people in overpopulated Europe. But the problem was solved through the mass production of industrial crop fertilizers, and the story of how this happened—and its implications for the planet’s environment—holds lessons