Climate change has its tipping points — thankfully, so does progress

Climate change, like Hemingway’s bankruptcy, happens slowly and then suddenly. The dangerous temperature and ecosystem changes are all around, are gradual and then sudden; once a disjunctive break or tipping point occurs, climate and systems shift from one state to another much more alarming one. Scientists warn us about this on an almost daily basis. 

So too, do economies and societies change slowly and resist regreening until suddenly, due to policy changes, markets react, businesses reorient and a new state is reached. 

Today, we are in a race of climate, policy, economic and market tipping points. Our survival depends on us reaching the latter scenario above before the former. Great danger looms if we fail.

We are being told that warmer undersea currents are melting the grounding point of the Thwaites Doomsday Glacier. We are warned that a huge iceberg that sheltered the Thwaites ice shelf has broken free, exposing the shelf and glacier to increased danger of collapse. Such a collapse may happen sooner than we thought, in as little as five years, not decades or centuries. A collapse would raise global sea levels from 65cm, or about two feet, to over three meters or beyond. The world’s great coastal metropolises would be inundated. 

Or take the damage and despoilment of the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of the earth. Activists have told us that in the vast forest being cut down, an area the size of Connecticut was felled in 12 months (between 2020-2021), the fastest rate in 15 years. Already researchers suggest that the forest is no longer a carbon sink. i.e., it has been damaged so severely that the forest emits more carbon than it retains. They also warn that the rainforest is nearing a tipping point and may become ecologically unstable, changing into a wide savannah if action is not taken urgently. 

These two examples (there are a great many more) illuminate the essence and true dangers of climate tipping points we are pushing up against and affecting with our polluting ways. We risk sudden jumps from one state to another with no going back and vast ongoing costs and risks to our ecosystems, economies and societies.  

Post-tipping point triggering, there is no reversal, at least on timescales relevant to human lives and our survival.  

Crucially, there is some reason for guarded optimism. For just as climate change happens slowly, then suddenly, so do policies and economies, until tipping points are reached and then shifts are sudden and shocking. So why am I more optimistic than, say, a year ago? 

President Biden’s massive historic infrastructure investments and the Inflation Reduction Act’s $371 billion investments in green incentives and tech are changing business calculus, plans and outcomes. Battery manufacturers are responding. Tens of billions in investment plans have been announced. 

Automakers are accelerating electric vehicle (EV) production and global EV sales now exceed $1 trillion. Manufacturers like GM and Hyundai, which are ramping up EVs, will win as this shift speeds up renewably. Those that lag will lose, and lose big, as internal combustion engine powertrains could very well be consigned to the scrap yard. 

As businesses and consumers become aware of the opportunities, network effects are already and will be increasingly seen.  

For instance, solar tax incentives of up to 30 percent running until 2033, and carbon credits are in place. Investments in the U.S. are leaping, whether consumer-driven or industrial in scale. Take my own condo development in D.C., which is regularly approached to install solar panels on a scale that would slash bills and feed back into the D.C. grid. The cost to owners is as low as zero dollars. 

Wind generation tax incentives from 30 to 22 percent for smaller users are in place until 2033. Incentives are also blowing through the power generation markets, large wind power facilities are benefiting and financing is flowing into capital investments. 

With this unprecedented raft of incentives and policy levers, the certainty that investments will pay off today, tomorrow and for years to come has fundamentally changed the game for industry, installers and owners.  

Taken together, this is not just tinkering at the margins. This is what effective industrial policy applied at scale can do. What is underway today across the country may prove to be President Biden’s most enduring legacy. Biden’s green industrial policy is transformational, creating a series of investment and technological tipping points.  

In 2023 the slim GOP House Majority may complain, but the historic bills have passed into law. These policy and market changes are underway and cannot be stopped. Some within the House GOP may try to slow the rate of change, but it will be hard and a destructive fool’s errand. Smarter members of Congress should be helping their constituents and businesses get access to and take advantage of this epochal shift in our economy and industries. 

When the history of this decade is written, we may see this policy and market nexus as the crucial tipping point when America’s climate response shifted suddenly in support of a sustainable net-zero future.

Stuart P.M. Mackintosh is the author of “Climate Crisis Economics.”