by Jeanne Marcq, March 5, 2021 in ScienceClimatEnergie

Carbon neutrality aiming to limit the rise in global temperature is a lure from the economic points of view and humanity. It is also the weakness of environmentalists, vegans and the “green” provided people of the northern hemisphere advocating worldly decay.

However, the food and energy resources exist in sufficiency  on earth but are poorly dispatched (see FAO data). Developing countries cannot be selfishly prevented from using fossil fuels to build their own economies instead of being plundered by new colonizers. No political regime has ever managed to erase socio-economic inequalities in society. With a world population currently growing until 2050 (FAO), any limitation of food production and economic development would be damaging to humanity.

The increase in atmospheric CO₂ content 12,000 years ago coincides with the redevelopment of intertropical vegetation first, later at higher latitudes, following the primary warming of the southern hemisphere, linked to orbital forcing (solar-energy energy input). This CO₂ production accompanied the warming of the intertropical ocean (Indian, Pacific and Central Atlantic) and the successive increase in different gases interfering with the biosphere and whose content in the atmosphere is managed directly or indirectly by the climate: H₂O (water vapour) then CO₂  and finally methane.

Cultural, food and economic changes do not occur on the scale of the year, but rather on the scale of the fifties, or even of the century, as the current digital revolution began in the 1950s. The same was true for the paper printing and alphabetical writing. Our eating habits have been changing over the past 20 years, at least in Europe (e.g. lower meat consumption in favor of dairy and vegetables), and the most economically reasonable patterns (reducing production costs: time and inputs) will ultimately impose themselves.

With 9 billion people in the 2050s, food and the economy will increasingly turn to terrestrial plant production (vegetable proteins, lipids and carbohydrates; fuels and habitat (wood, bamboo and derivatives) and coastal (algae), with the industrialization of food production (hydroponics, processed foods). It is therefore, of vital importance for humanity not to reduce the primary factors of plant growth: precipitation, limiting global warming and also the atmospheric CO₂  content, this gas being the basis of the production of biomass. On the other hand, the ocean is the wheel that buffers a large part of the sewages of our societies, except plastics and that in addition releases CO₂  when it becomes warmer. Carbon neutrality as promoted against global warming is in this context, for this reason, very dangerous, unlike the highly justified management of renewable resources.

This is all the more important since we have entered since 2010 into a solar minimum period that will last at least until 2060 (see articles SCE 2018-2020), so a cooling of the climate. The great unknown is the rate of cooling of the intertropical ocean which is currently overheated and pro parte degassed of its CO₂  content (decrease in the solubility of the gas) as a result of the peak of solar activity at the end of the 20th century. The migrations of populations driven away by drought (climatic or anthropogenic) and therefore, poverty, will thus continue and enhance. The establishment of authoritarian regimes, religious or not, even dictatorial will be the corollary. The introduction of digital Big Brothers (e.g. facial recognition) will be coupled with a few global economic oligarchies (e.g. GAFSA) and the plundering of resources (e.g. minerals) of « poor » countries. Ecological, carbon-neutral totalitarianism will be short-lived, like other authoritarian regimes.