To save the planet, fossil fuels need to stay underground

Fiona Harvey is surely right when she says “adaptation alone won’t save us from climate disaster” (Journal, 12 September). She gives an apt metaphor that adaptation “while continuing to burn fossil fuels is like trying to mop up an overflowing sink while the taps are still running”, but she still talks of mechanisms for “better economic growth”.

Political leaders worldwide need to recognise the causal connection between economic growth and global heating, manifest in fossil fuel consumption. To save the planet, fossil fuels need to stay underground – unused by the greed of humankind. Our energy must come from wind, wave, hydraulic and solar sources, but this will be insufficient to maintain many of our industries and, consequently, many jobs will be lost.

Societies need to adapt so that acquisitive individualism is replaced by cooperative community life. Partly self-sustaining communities need to be created where home workers (ie, non-wage workers) can find worthwhile activity in home care, environment care, vegetable gardens, allotments, orchards, community social activities and other unpaid pursuits. To alleviate the potential poverty of those losing jobs, universal citizen’s income will be needed – recovered in taxation from those in wage-paying work.

Come the next general election, would-be MPs should tell us how they propose to tackle climate change and how they intend to engage in worldwide discussion of necessary measures.
Michael Bassey
Newark, Nottinghamshire

• Does Fiona Harvey go far enough in her judgment that emissions reduction, adaptation and coastal protection constitute the main “tools in the box” for averting such a disaster? An analysis of the stress exerted on our climate and ocean system by the growing excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere suggests an aim which is fundamentally more appropriate: the retrieval of this overload, with the goal of returning carbon dioxide’s concentration to its stable and pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million, from the present, and growing, 408ppm. Ultimately, taking care of the stressor would take care of the raised temperatures which we so rightly fear. Such a policy would demand a great deal of money, more perhaps than the public and financial institutions are currently willing to part with. And it would necessitate the worldwide adoption of technologies in which fossil fuels would no longer play a part.

These technologies are known to many, and are already developing fast. We need to displace fossil fuels and embrace all that solar energy has to offer in the forms of electricity, heat and hydrogen derived from solar-electrolysed water. And we need to develop forms of enhanced photosynthetic growth, in expanding forests and in harvesting specially planted grasses, ensuring that the carbon thus embedded in their tissues is never returned to the atmosphere.
Mike Koefman
Director, Planet Hydrogen, Manchester

• Fiona Harvey stated two profound truths. The first in the title; the second in the words: “As long as we continue to pump CO₂ into the air, we are fuelling rises in temperature.” But it is the second truth that identifies the fundamental solution – to pump CO₂ out of the air faster than the rate at which it is being pumped in.

This is known as greenhouse gas removal, the subject of a 2018 report from the Royal Society, in which we read that “reducing emissions is not enough – we must also actively remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere”. So perhaps Fiona Harvey should be less dismissive of geoengineering. Funding a major project to develop large-scale ways to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere will save the planet.
Dennis Sherwood
Rutland, East Midlands

• Fiona Harvey says: “Melting permafrost releases methane, a greenhouse gas many times more powerful than CO₂.” While the levels of methane gas should certainly be reduced, that phrase demonises methane over CO₂. According to Simon Fairlie in his Meat: A Benign Extravagance, methane doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for longer than 12 years, while the same value of CO₂ has its effect spread out over two centuries. By demonising methane, it will be more likely that rural communities whose modest lifestyles include a few ruminants and timber-fuelled sources of energy would be penalised over industrial-scale CO₂ producers and users. This would be patently unfair.
Ann Spencer
Harefield, Middlesex

• Fiona Harvey is absolutely right that there is going to be no wall high enough to keep out the consequences of inaction on greenhouse gas emissions. All the more disappointing therefore that she seems to buy into the Global Commission on Adaptation’s assumption that investment now is about buying us “trillions of dollars in potential growth”. That’s a priority one might expect from Bill Gates, but the work of thinkers from sociologists like Jem Bendell to economists like Tim Jackson now suggests that we won’t really get started on adapting and building resilience until we accept that growth of any kind is over. The planet simply cannot cope with any more of it. The vitally urgent need now is to find a just and viable post-growth way of life.
John Foster
Department of politics, philosophy and religion, Lancaster University

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