Peter Carter of the Climate Emergency Institute says "net zero" carbon emissions by 2050 and targeting 2 degrees warming are a recipe for runaway climate catastrophe. On theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay. Transcript Paul Jay Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. Please don't fo

Peter Carter of the Climate Emergency Institute says "net zero" carbon emissions by 2050 and targeting 2 degrees warming are a recipe for runaway climate catastrophe. On theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. Please don't forget we are doing a fundraising campaign. One of our members has put up a $10,000 matching grant: for every dollar we raise, he'll match it. If you give a one-time donation, he'll match that. If you initiate a monthly donation, he'll match that amount for the year. If you're already doing a monthly donation and increase it, he'll match the increase for a year. And I hope you do.

President-elect Biden has announced that John Kerry will be his climate czar to lead what Biden calls an aggressive plan. Kerry says he'll do what's necessary. The plan will commit to what scientists say is the urgency of the situation. In Canada, The Toronto Star reports that the Trudeau government is introducing what's being called climate accountability legislation. This creates a legal framework that requires the federal government to prepare plans to slash emission targets set every five years beginning in 2030. The ultimate goal is to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, whether they are eliminated or offset by nature or carbon-capture technology.

Well, neither the Biden nor Trudeau climate plans reach the targets scientists say are necessary. Let's start with just how urgent it is, because as devastating as the Covid pandemic is, we will get past it. We won't get past catastrophic climate crisis. And that's where we are headed at a speed that keep surprising many scientists.

Now joining us is Peter Carter. He's a retired family physician who practiced medicine in England and then on both coasts of Canada -- Newfoundland and British Columbia -- for almost 40 years. He's founding director of CAPE, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and, more recently, a founder of the Climate Emergency Institute. Peter has been following global warming and climate change research since 1988. He was an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- that's the IPCC -- for both their fifth climate change assessment in 2014 and its 2018 special report, Global Warming of 1.5C. Also, in 2018, Peter published Unprecedented Crime: Climate Change Denial and Game Changers for Survival, which he co-authored with Elizabeth Woodsworth.

Thanks for joining us, Peter.

Peter Carter

Thank you very much. Thank you, Paul. It's good to be here with you.

Paul Jay

So, there's an economist named Nordhaus whom I mentioned on a previous interview I did with Bob Pollin. He won the Nobel Prize in 2018. And he says, yes, the climate crisis is real, but we can hit four degrees above the preindustrial average sometime this century, at which we can then stabilize. That's somewhat less than urgent. Now, this guy got the Nobel Prize in economics specifically for the work he does on climate. Now, if this guy is influential and if he's informing Biden, Trudeau, and the various elites that have real power in our society, then they think Nordhaus is right and we've got lots of time to figure this out. They probably they think that there'll be some magical technology that's...