How we saved the planet (a 2038 fantasy)

The outlook for the planet may look grim now, in 2038, but there’s still hope while engineers are around. After all, we wrote the world’s carbon route map three decades ago when we eventually realised no one else could do it. It may prove to be mankind’s greatest achievement: a way to save itself.

It was a massive ambition, involving most of the world’s engineering institutions agreeing national carbon trajectories and then developing separately their countries’ paths to achieve them. It took only three years to set down the recommendations, using the commercially non-aligned resource of retired experts. But the five years taken by world governments to argue and tweak the findings was too long.

Most of the route map is obvious in hindsight – a lot of the work was already done and just needed assembly. Assigning each nation’s carbon-using sectors a budget and a proportionate reduction trajectory was not rocket science. But we should remember how things stood 30 years ago. For example, even though there was good evidence that the growth in the UK’s shipping and aviation CO2 emissions would use up the entire national carbon budget by 2035, we still ruminated on the economic imperatives of aviation expansion.

There was, of course, a happy ending – with aircraft manufacturers making huge gains in fuel efficiency to preserve essential travel, by creating a fuel crop that gave the developing world a reliable income without losing local food crops, and with the airport sector redeploying key expertise into rail and local transport sectors. Public transport systems also became viable when new urban development densities were set at 100 households/ha to minimise transport and community emissions. People moved to enjoy new levels of mobility and amenity, happily forgoing routine car travel.

The greatest achievement was explaining the full picture to the world. People finally understood what was asked of them

In the UK, a great achievement was reconciling the building energy supply and demand sectors. Previously, each looked to the other to do the needful. By setting frameworks for each and showing how to do it with competitive advantage, the route map buried the dafter low-carbon plans of government without compromising its targets. Developers willingly put a smaller share of the implicit costs of upcoming code compliance into local low-carbon pools and enabled quick wins that vastly exceeded the marginal benefits had the codes held sway. These pools funded local needs, from sustainable transport to fixing old housing. And by making development viable again, government was able to meet its goal of new housing. It also resolved the elephant in the room – fuel poverty. All this was achieved without much taxpayer money. Early reformation of energy tariffs was critical – making high, peak-time energy use very expensive and base loads more affordable. Demand-control technology flowed and emission savings came quickly. This, more than anything, enabled the UK to return to its CO2 trajectory in only a few years.

But the greatest achievement of this alliance of engineering institutions was to give the first simple explanation of the full picture to the world. People finally understood how the pieces fitted and what was asked of them. A cynical media, confounded by non-aligned and consistent international expertise, capitulated and became prime proponents of the route map. Politicians were forced to agree cross-party agendas. Governments could make brave decisions, turning the thrust of the vested interest against itself.

It’s tragic that the human losses we’ve seen since then, through starvation, dramatic weather change and related wars, would have been less if we had done this sooner.

Our problems are not over. The great forests are dying, decomposing to methane, and the permafrosts are melting. The climate effects will be lethal unless checked quickly. We engineers must keep to our mission and help resolve the problems we face now, in 2038.