A polio vaccine was first made available to the public in 1955, and by the early 1960s the epidemics were 97 percent contained.We are back with another week of cost of living news, analysis and advice - after a week of significant developments that could impact the time it takes for the UK to emerge from this crisis. Jonas Salk’s vaccine was the culmination of a worldwide race among scientists to find a way of ending the annually recurring epidemics. In the early 1950s, polio, which had been literally plaguing America for decades, was still paralyzing and killing tens of thousands of Americans, including thousands of children, each year. After that feeling of temporary paralysis subsides, human beings are actually quite good at rising to the occasion-tapping into hidden reservoirs of energy, ingenuity, and resolve and doing whatever it takes to solve a problem or even to bend the arc of history. We can’t possibly hope to win.īut history says otherwise. With everything else the world’s governments are currently dealing with, could we ever really come together so quickly and collectively embark on this singular act of civilizational self-defense? There’s just not enough time, some say. To help pay this tremendously large bill, the authors propose a worldwide carbon tax of as much as $27,000 per ton. The cost of all this, the IPCC soberly estimates, will be nothing less than 2.5 percent of global GDP. Also essential will be global efforts to electrify our vehicle fleets, exponentially ramp up energy efficiency in our buildings, and-crucially-preserve our carbon-trapping forests. The details might vary around the edges, but fundamental to any escape plan will be energy policies that phase out coal entirely and replace it with renewables. Many of us are now trying to wrap our heads around what these changes might look like and how we might achieve them given our current political and economic realities. They state unequivocally that governments must make “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” if we’re to beat the clock and save the planet. The authors aren’t just telling us what could happen if we don’t mend our ways and limit warming to less than 1.5 ☌-the droughts, the wildfires, the melting permafrost, the coastal flooding, and so on. In the three decades since it was founded, the IPCC has released many reports, each one coming with its own unique warnings. The “far-off” generation is no farther off than the next one. But children who entered kindergarten last month will be high school sophomores in 2030. Despite all the evidence at our feet showing that climate change is an indelible part of our present-day lives, there are still some people who think of it as something far-off-a problem primarily for future generations to solve. To avoid global catastrophe, according to the report, we’ll need to reduce global carbon emissions by as much as 40 percent by 2030. If such imagery shocks, the time line stuns. The extreme droughts, devastating wildfires, massive floods, deadly hurricanes, and widespread famines that we’re seeing more and more of these days will cease to be statistical anomalies and instead be more like seasonal markers, as regular as the changing of the leaves. With so much heat-trapping carbon in the atmosphere, there will be, in effect, no turning back. In it, some 90 climate scientists from 40 countries conclude that if humans don’t take immediate, collective action to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040, the consequences will effectively be baked into the natural systems of the planet. No matter how much time you have, it never feels like enough.Įarlier this week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a chilling report that has sent most people (with the notable exception of the current president of the United States) into a deep funk. Obstacles never seem more insurmountable-and foes never seem more invincible-than they do at the moment you finally realize what you’re up against: the scale of the battle that awaits you, the consequences of losing it, the amount of time you’ve been given to organize and rally. It’s normal to feel temporarily paralyzed in the face of terrifying news. “For our economic and national security, and for the future of all life on earth, lawmakers must act without delay.” “The good news is that we have the climate solutions needed, and they work,” says NRDC president Manish Bapna. The report describes how, despite gains in the clean energy revolution, nations are falling far too short of reducing climate pollution quickly enough to avoid severe damage, cost, and upheaval. UPDATE: On April 4, 2022, the IPCC released the Working Group III Sixth Assessment report on climate change mitigation.
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