Magic is necessary - but there have been wizards before

Jonathan Jeppsson  

Achieving the climate goals involves an incredible conjuring trick  

Published: Less than 3 hours ago 

Updated: Less than 2 hours ago  

This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer's. 

COLUMNISTS  

The government's climate policy is not unexpectedly seen by the Climate Policy Council.  

How the government will achieve the targets by 2030 is a mystery, when emissions will increase in the coming years. 

It requires extremely strong emission reductions towards the end of the decade – a conjuring trick that no one knows how to pull off.  

Last spring, an investigator with responsibility for climate issues at the Liberals' Riksdag office wrote the following on Twitter:  

"The reduction obligation is our tool to reach the climate goals in the transport sector. The alternative is banning and rationing or abandoning the climate goals.”  

The tweet was noticed a while ago by the magazine Aktuell svällätä: The investigator's name was Daniel Westlén - today he is state secretary to climate minister Romina Pourmokthari. Tasked with implementing the government's climate policy.  

For him, today's report from the Climate Policy Council should make for troubling reading. According to the Tidö agreement, the reduction obligation must be at "the EU's minimum level" (although no one knows where it is). The cards he thus has to play with are prohibition, rationing or – abandon. 

The coal-fired power plants in western Germany. Photo: Martin Meissner / AP  

Doubled pace  

In order to meet our long-term goal by 2045, it is stated in the Climate Policy Council's report, emissions must be reduced by two million tons every year until 2045.

On average, however, emissions have decreased by just under 0.8 million tonnes since 1990.  

The rate must therefore more than double.  

However, the policy that the current government has decided or announced so far is expected to contribute to greenhouse gas emissions increasing in the very next few years, the Climate Policy Council estimates that the scrapped reduction obligation will increase emissions by 1 million tons per year by 2030.  

This naturally makes it extremely difficult to reach the milestone for domestic transport by 2030. But it also affects the possibilities of reaching the overall national milestone for 2030.  

A wizard must enter 

The council notes: In order to compensate for the expected increase in emissions, the government will have to present very far-reaching new initiatives not least in the transport sector. At the same time, it is stated that the possibilities of retrieving this in other sectors are small. 

So it is not just a reduction that is needed, but an annual reduction so huge that it compensates for the discharge increase we will get.  

What is needed is close to magic.  

And there have certainly been wizards before. 

Norman Borlaug was the name of the agronomist who, through, among other things, plant breeding, managed to make the world's harvests increase somewhat enormously, and who put the 70s doomsday prophecies about overpopulation to shame. 

It is said that he saved a billion people from starvation. He is a portal figure for man's faith in progress, innovation and modernism, that we solve the predicaments we got ourselves into.  

The rain forest in Ghana. Photo: OLIVIER ASSELIN / AP 

"Inconvenient Truth"  

But the criticism of magical thinking in the climate debate comes from both the right and the left.  

"It is an inconvenient truth that imagined climate solutions often rely on magical thinking, which in practice will make them more expensive and less effective, in addition to giving people false hope through fancy talk about ambitious goals that we are not close to achieving" , writes, for example, the bourgeois leader writer Mattias Svensson in his book "The open climate policy and its enemies". 

After all, the Swedish climate goals are fixed - climate minister Romina Pourmokhtari has been lashing to that mast for a long time.  

The Minister of Finance, Elisabeth Svantesson , has glossed over the issue considerably more, first claiming that it was not certain that we would reach the targets, then saying that she had been misinterpreted and that the targets "of course" must be reached.  

In the background, the Sweden Democrats rattle their weapons and the constant threat of a government crisis. 

- Every single person who has voted for the Liberals should know that we are bleeding ourselves, Pourmokhtari said the other day in a DN interview.  

But when the government's action plan is presented this autumn, it remains to be seen whether it will be a ban, rationing or abandonment.  

Or simply pure magic.