We will arrive at COP30 in Belém in Pará, Brazil, this November, with the planetary budget for greenhouse gas emissions rapidly reaching its limit in less than five years. We are rapidly the 2°C limit — a “very uncomfortable” scenario for human life and the survival of countless species. Tipping points are just around the corner, and adaptation, once secondary, has risen to the “A-side” of the climate crisis.

The cost of inaction and the urgency of adaptation

In 30 years of exhaustive COPs, nations have failed to do their mitigation homework. Now, climate adaptation needs to be addressed first, and this is happening in a context of renewed climate denialism, in favor of an economy still dependent on fossil fuels. The costs of neglecting mitigation, transition and adaptation have escalated dramatically.

In 2008, the renowned Stern Report estimated the need for just over $500 billion annually for mitigation and a few billion for adaptation. Almost 17 years later, the costs exceed $9 trillion per year, with $5.4 trillion for mitigation, $3.4 trillion for climate transition and “only” $300 billion for adaptation — a figure that, according to experts, will be $1.35 trillion annually by 2035.

We missed a historic opportunity to pay a “payable bill” 15 years ago. Today, climate costs, especially for adaptation, fall on governments. Who will invest in renovations and construction to accommodate billions of people in scorching temperatures? Who will pay for coastal fortifications against rising sea levels? Who will bear the exponentially increasing damage from “climate disasters”? How can we invest in infrastructure without a financial return?

The introduction of the Green Climate Fund () and other funds is commendable, but they fall far short of what is needed. If the oil industry, with its net worth of over $100 trillion in reserves, had contributed significantly in 2008, the drama of climate finance would be much less. We would be at COP30 celebrating a world below 1.5°C.

Brazil and COP30: a decisive moment

COP30 in Brazil emerges as a crucial turning point. Adaptation takes center stage in climate negotiations. Those who understand and work toward this idea will adapt more easily to the world that awaits us. We need to understand the interest-bearing nature of governments and appropriate the best knowledge from the risk industry and multilateral funds.

Capitalism, especially neoliberal capitalism, demands returns, even if they are patient and combined with philanthropy. The basic assumption is always profitability. So who will invest in retaining walls, rebuilding public roads and repairing flood damage? Governments. But financial markets demand austerity, and public debts, such as Brazil’s, already commit a large part of budgets to honoring financial commitments. 

We have a paradox: governments need to allocate more resources to adaptation, but their debts and climate costs continue to grow. There is no money today, much less tomorrow, for climate adaptation needs.

Given the scarcity of resources, climate financing must be structured with a view to risk avoidance, prioritizing costly and scarce public and private efforts over remediation in the future. Investments in prevention and the construction of resilient structures are much cheaper than paying the bill after the damage has been done. Insurance experts that prevention today costs five times less than repair. This ratio may soon be 15 times more expensive, given the exponential increase in climate events.

Modeling future scenarios can no longer be based solely on the past. The climate events ahead are unknown. Climate science has competently predicted a 1.5°C increase as a viable ceiling for a decent life, but it also warns that increases above 3°C will not allow human life on Earth, except perhaps for a billionaire elite.

The challenges of climate finance have become the main item in the negotiations. The viability of our life on the planet requires a commitment to remain between 1.5°C and 2°C at most. The deadline for this is eight years or less. If denialist governments and industries continue to generate high emissions and invest minimally in sustainable solutions, we will see an increase in inequality and unpredictable impacts on the living conditions of the majority.

In another fifteen years, we will have a world that is financially rich in the hands of a few, but poor in biodiversity, with nature and ecosystems devastated, under indebted governments incapable of caring for their people. This is not the climate adaptation scenario I hope for our home, Planet Earth.

I still believe that global rentier capital can understand that adaptation is for everyone. An environmentally and socially possible world is challenged in its resilience by every tenth of a degree increase in temperature. Adaptation must come first and foremost as a chance for future generations to live a possible life here on Earth.

The paths are still possible. They involve understanding the need to make investments now and forever, with less profitability and an unconditional love for the lives of all planetary beings. There can only be one side of life for everyone on Earth. It is “Side A” of climate adaptation.

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Since beginning his second term, Trump has reversed many climate regulations and clean-energy incentives, which has heavily shifted the nation’s energy policy to fossil fuel production. He has the US from the Paris Agreement for the second time, the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s environmental justice office. These moves will have serious consequences for the environment and public health.

“What this administration is doing is endangering all of our lives—ours, our children, our grandchildren,” Christine Todd Whitman, who served as President George W. Bush’s EPA chief, in March 2025 about the proposed rollback of more than 30 environmental rules. “We all deserve to have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. If there’s an endangerment finding to be found anywhere, it should be found on this administration because what they’re doing is so contrary to what the Environmental Protection Agency is about.”

Legal scholars have expressed concerns that several of the Trump administration’s actions may challenge the constitutional principle of states’ rights. A bipartisan group of over 950 law professors and teachers have a letter criticizing the administration’s executive orders as illegal and unconstitutional. “We believe we are in a constitutional crisis,” the signatories wrote.

Additionally, experts from UC Law San Francisco have discussed the of the administration’s sweeping executive order. They have emphasized that while presidents can issue orders within their delegated powers, they cannot override laws or dictate state and local government actions. Radhika Rao, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, noted the administration’s “coercive use of federal power to intrude into areas traditionally governed by state and local law.”

Key strategies for states

As the federal government rolls back environmental protections and loosens regulations on polluting industries, it is more crucial than ever for US states to protect the natural ecosystem and public health. They can do this by leveraging their legal authority, promoting local environmental policies and collaborating with other states to form strong coalitions.

“The way that our federalism works is [that] states have quite a lot of power to take action to both reduce carbon pollution and to protect residents from climate impacts,” Wade Crowfoot, head of California’s Natural Resources Agency, Mother Jones in January 2025. “So regardless of who is president, states like California have been driving forward and will continue to drive forward.”

Here are some key strategies that states can employ to maintain control:

1. Enact strong state-level environmental regulations: States can create and enforce environmental laws that exceed federal standards. One notable example is the state of California, which has stringent air and water quality regulations that go beyond federal requirements. For instance, the state can establish its own pesticide use limits and waste disposal regulations to protect natural resources.

In addition, California can seek waivers from the EPA to set its own vehicle emission standards through the Clean Air Act of 1967. In 2022, the state adopted the Advanced Clean Cars II regulation, which was implemented to the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035. The EPA a waiver for the program in December 2024.

Regardless, Trump has threatened to block California’s clean air initiatives. Whether he will succeed is questionable, as any reversal would likely face legal challenges. In fact, during his first term, Trump tried to dismantle several of California’s environmental laws. However, when contested in court, his administration lost of its cases.

States can also strengthen their authority to protect resources against federal actions by incorporating “” or “Environmental Rights Amendments” into their constitutions. These amendments grant citizens a constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment. As of 2025, three states have such amendments in their constitutions: , and .

2. Utilize state sovereignty and the Tenth Amendment: The grants US states powers not delegated to the federal government. States can use this to argue that specific federal actions infringing on local environmental protections are unconstitutional. When federal agencies attempt to supersede state regulations, states can assert their rights under the Tenth Amendment and file lawsuits to block federal overreach, claiming federal actions violate state sovereignty or overstep the limits of federal authority.

In September 2017, the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance published a outlining the collaborative power distribution between the federal government and the states, known as . It stated:

“As has long been the case, the overwhelming majority of EPA’s enforcement actions are taken in programs that are not delegable to the states or in states that have not sought authorization to implement a delegable program. In authorized states, EPA and states share enforcement responsibility with primary enforcement responsibility residing with the states, which often join with EPA in bringing cases. EPA generally takes the enforcement lead in authorized states only: 1) at the request of the state; 2) when the state is not well positioned to bring an action (e.g., federal and state facilities or in actions involving facilities in multiple states); 3) when the state ‘do[es] not provide the resources necessary to meet national regulatory minimum standards or ha[s] a documented history of failure to make progress toward meeting national standards;’ or 4) when EPA has a unique role, including emergency situations and national enforcement priority areas, and actions addressing violations across multiple state jurisdictions.”

3. Challenge federal decisions in court: States can file lawsuits against federal agencies if they believe actions, such as approving environmentally harmful projects or rolling back regulations, threaten local ecosystems. For example, multiple states have sued the federal government over detrimental changes it made to the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. These lawsuits can slow down or prevent federal initiatives that states view as exploitative, preserving local environments and resources.

For instance, in September 2019, a total of 17 US states — led by California, Massachusetts, and Maryland — the Trump administration over harmful changes it had made to the Endangered Species Act. The new rules ended protections for animals newly listed as threatened species and curtailed the preservation of critical habitat. In 2022, US District Judge Jon S. Tigar the rules, reinstating protections for hundreds of species.

4. Form state coalitions and interstate compacts: States can form coalitions to present a unified stance against federal policies that may harm the environment. They can also negotiate interstate compacts, which are agreements between two or more states to jointly address shared concerns, such as transportation, public safety and natural resources like rivers or forests. These agreements can set regional standards that limit federal intervention in these areas.

Here are some notable examples:

• The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) (1921): This between New York and New Jersey enables both states to manage and develop transportation infrastructure, including airports, bridges, tunnels and seaports, in the New York-Newark-Jersey City metropolitan area. The PANYNJ has adopted a series of environmental projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including the Net Zero , an extensive plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
• The Colorado River Compact (1922): This includes seven western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — and allocates water rights from the Colorado River. It provides a framework for managing and sharing this critical resource for agriculture, drinking water and energy.
• The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) (2009): The is a cooperative effort among northeastern and mid-Atlantic states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The states involved are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. Participating states have a cap-and-trade program that limits carbon emissions from power plants and encourages cleaner energy production.
• The Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) (1996): is a national compact that enables states to assist one another during natural or man-made disasters. States can send personnel, equipment and other resources to other states in times of crisis. This compact has been instrumental in coordinating responses to disasters like hurricanes and wildfires by providing legal and logistical frameworks for mutual aid.

These examples underscore the critical role of interstate compacts in environmental protection, public health, disaster management and economic regulation. By leveraging these agreements, states can effectively coordinate policies, safeguard resources and reinforce regional stability, security and sustainability.

5. Leverage public and local support: States can rally public opinion and involve local stakeholders — including tribal governments, environmental groups and local businesses — to oppose federal actions that might damage the environment. Public support can pressure the federal government to reconsider environmentally harmful policies.

Engaging communities can also bolster state-led environmental programs, as residents who are directly affected by potential exploitation will be more motivated to support protective measures. In fact, in 2024, several states voted to a number of state-led climate initiatives. Minnesota residents voted to the Environmental and Natural Resources Trust fund, which will preserve air, land, water and wildlife through 2050. Washington state residents voted to the state’s Climate Commitment Act and cap-and-invest program. Wisconsin residents an amendment that would have restricted the governor’s power to spend federal emergency funds, including for environmental disaster relief.

Democratic states challenge federal environmental policies

Democratic governors and senators have actively utilized state legal authority to counteract federal environmental protection rollbacks. In response to Trump’s policies, California Governor Gavin Newsom a state of emergency to expedite forest management, aiming to reduce wildfire risks and challenge federal criticisms of state environmental regulations.

Additionally, Newsom convened a special legislative to bolster the state’s Department of Justice funding, preparing for legal challenges against anticipated federal policies that could adversely affect environmental protections.

Similarly, Democratic senators have opposed attempts to weaken environmental regulations, such as a bill that would have loosened Clean Air Act mandates. This emphasized the importance of maintaining stringent air quality standards.

State legislators in Virginia, led by Democrats, bills that would have removed the state’s adherence to California’s vehicle emissions standards, underscoring their commitment to robust environmental policies. Together, these actions reflect a concerted effort by Democratic state leaders to leverage legal mechanisms in defense of environmental protections.

By implementing robust local policies, capitalizing on their constitutional rights and fostering multi-state cooperation, US states can establish substantial barriers against federal actions that threaten their environmental priorities. State governors and legislators must act quickly. Considering the fact that 2024 was the on record globally and the first calendar year in which the average global temperature exceeded 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels, there is precious little time to waste.

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penned a 20-year deal for power from the infamous Three Mile Plant in Pennsylvania, set to reopen in 2028. recently launched a request for proposals for nuclear power generation, after for another upon the discovery of a rare bee species on the proposed site. has signed at least three different nuclear power agreements, and recently with Kairos Power to purchase nuclear energy from a series of small modular reactors (SMRs). 

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman serves as the chairman of , a nuclear “microreactor” startup that recently site investigations in Idaho for a fast-fission nuclear plant. And Peter Thiel’s has invested in a startup seeking to create a novel production method for generating a powerful nuclear fuel typically used in advanced reactors.

This may seem surprising, until one sees the forecasted energy use for these companies’ data centers and the impending PR disaster that may ensue if they don’t find renewable energy sources soon. 

The of data centers at big tech companies already overwhelm that of numerous small countries, and according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the electricity needs of data centers, AI and crypto mining alone could by 2026. Consider that many of these same companies have pledged to become carbon neutral within the next decade or two, and this creates something of a problem. 

Enter nuclear power. 

It’s possible to view these investments in a number of ways. 

The optimistic case…

Big tech investments in nuclear energy may arguably increase the viability of nuclear power for the rest of society. 

Nuclear energy wind and solar power generation in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. And it lacks those sources’ “,” overcoming the challenges of storing power for later use when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind won’t blow. The fact of solar and wind intermittency is indeed frequently by critics of renewable energy when arguing for a continued reliance on fossil fuels like natural gas.

Additionally, there are strong reasons to push the common meltdown fears aside — nuclear power generation today is than ever before, and likely to become increasingly so with the rising investments. 

And it is likely that increased nuclear production will not only increase safety, but also bring down costs due to industry learning curves, as has occurred in the over the past several decades. One study that nuclear power today would cost 10% of what it does, had early production rates continued rather than tapering off under regulatory restraints following headline-commanding disasters like those at Three Mile, Chernobyl and Fukushima. 

While the US generates more nuclear energy than any other country — nearly twice that of China, the second-highest producer — many European countries today produce a much greater share of electricity via nuclear than does the US, indicating plenty of room for growth. 

…and the skeptical case 

There are several reasons to believe that this nuclear investment is merely — an eloquent push for solutions to a problem tech companies created themselves — a problem we never asked for. Even if additional nuclear power generation is an unalloyed good, this good serves to power data centers alone — in the near term at least. 

Importantly, any plans to expand nuclear energy must be combined with solutions to safely store an increasing cache of , which remains toxic for of years.

Much of nuclear energy’s allure lies in its ability to generate power populated regions, but some of the recent tech investments propose the creation of data centers immediately adjacent to nuclear generators. 

What does this remind you of?

All this may remind the tech-focused reader of the aspirations within the cryptocurrency community to harness wasted or so-called “” energy to fuel their vast electricity needs. 

Cryptocurrency mining — a process required to sustain the current value of Bitcoin and many other popular cryptocurrencies — today consumes than the state of Washington, as well as the entire nation of the with a standing population of eighteen million. 

Crypto advocates have begun exploring unique means of framing the energy-intensive demands of their industry. They argue that utilizing stranded energy, and using it for cryptocurrency mining rather than serving traditional industries and consumers, might in fact somehow green energy growth and benefit society overall. 

The more one reads into the “cryptocurrency mining meets green energy” literature, though, the more one feels they’re having the wool pulled, violently, over their eyes. Cryptocurrency miners are almost solely incentivized to translate energy into money, and it’s hard not to see the desire to frame this energy use as a positive externality for society as a baldfaced attempt at greenwashing a practice with questionable value. 

Therefore we must ask, with both cryptocurrency and AI generating demand for these vast increases in energy supply: cui bono? 

Nuclear energy and “stranded” fossil fuel consumption are solving someone’s problem. But whose? 

When we read of the next nuclear meltdown, or the next leak from improperly stored nuclear waste, or flee to high ground when the hits, or board and then flee our homes upon news of the , will we really care that we’ve found freedom from the constraints of fiat currency, or access to a chatbot that performs 10% better (a little less racist; a little more factual) than last years?

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We also address the potential of conscious tourism as a powerful tool for conservation efforts. While the industry can introduce hazards to the Antarctic ecosystem, it offers promising opportunities for scientific research and public awareness. These should be considered in the endeavor to save the continent.

We depart from Ushuaia, Argentina. Authors’ photo.

Navigating climate change in Antarctica’s warming waters

We found ourselves cruising in the Southern Ocean, also known as the Antarctic Ocean. We were eager to experience the pure beauty of Antarctica firsthand. These expeditions primarily take place during Antarctica’s summer season, from December to February, when the weather is warmest and ice sheets don’t block ships. As we braved the ocean, a dramatic shift occurred around 60° South latitude. This is the Drake Passage, a narrow stretch of water between Cape Horn, Chile and the Antarctic Peninsula. Here, we entered the area known as the Antarctic Convergence Zone, which functions as a natural boundary for wildlife. In this zone, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) meets the waters of the Pacific, Atlantic and Southern Oceans.

Rough seas in the Drake Passage batter the ship’s windows. Authors’ photo.

Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) diagram. Via Phys.org.

Amidst this natural spectacle lies a troubling reality. Each summer reveals rising temperatures in Antarctica, highlighting the urgent need to combat climate change. Antarctic research stations have recorded unprecedented temperature highs in recent years. In 2020, Argentina’s Esperanza station marked a record of 18.3° C (64.94° F). In 2022, the Concordia station, which is jointly operated by France and Italy, observed an alarming temperature of 47° C (116.6° F). These temperature fluctuations underscore the disturbing meteorological anomalies that are occurring in Antarctica.

The temperature peaks are disrupting the ACC, altering the of carbon dioxide between the oceans and the atmosphere. This amplifies the warming and changes oceanic patterns. Moreover, as temperatures continue to rise, ice sheets in Antarctica melt rapidly. Since 2023, a substantial of Antarctic ice — equivalent to the size of Greenland — has melted away.

Antarctica’s global warming mitigation is in jeopardy

The melting of ice sheets is primarily attributed to the warming of the ocean. This sets off a series of immediate consequences with significant cause-and-effect for the global weather. One effect is the decrease in the Earth’s overall — its surface reflectivity. Essentially, when sunlight hits ice sheets, a large portion of it is bounced back into space, contributing to cooling. However, as ice coverage in Antarctica decreases, the ice loses its ability to reflect solar radiation effectively. This results in less cooling and more solar energy being absorbed directly by the ocean, further warming it.

Ice sheets act as a protective barrier, insulating the cooler environment beneath and aiding in temperature regulation. Their presence enhances this reflective quality, fostering cooler temperatures and supporting crucial algae growth vital to the Antarctic ecosystem. The declining sea ice coverage diminishes the environment that supports algae development, resulting in a in algae growth. This decline negatively impacts the ocean’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gasses. Algae serves as a primary food source for krill, so its decrease reduces the krill population.

Beyond their significance to the Antarctic ecosystem, krill also play an invaluable role in mitigating climate change. After consuming algae that have absorbed atmospheric carbon dioxide at the sea surface, vast swarms of krill migrate to deeper waters. There they excrete waste, effectively sequestering tremendous amounts of carbon in the ocean depths. This process plays an essential in combating rising temperatures.

Another serious concern arising from climate change is ocean acidification, often referred to as the “stepchild of global warming.” Approximately of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere eventually enters the oceans, boosting acidity levels. The cold waters of the Southern Ocean facilitate this process by absorbing a vast amount of carbon dioxide, intensifying the acidification process. This gravely threatens krill, as it hampers their ability to complete their growth cycle.

Additionally, acidic oceans present challenges for corals and mollusks in constructing and maintaining their structures. This affects marine food webs, which impacts a variety of wildlife.

Our Zodiac boats float past Antarctic ice coverage. Authors’ photo.

The shifting landscape for Antarctica’s wildlife

The looming specter of climate change was impossible to ignore while sailing through the Southern Ocean. Though we took our journey during the Antarctic summer, the temperatures during our visit ranged from 0°-5° C (41° F). This is akin to any other autumn day in our native Netherlands. We could not help but ponder how this milder weather affects the inhabitants of this environment.

Two days after setting sail from Ushuaia, we made our first landfall at Brown Bluff beach, one of Antarctica’s northernmost points. Following a disinfectant bath that ensured no organic material from our clothes would reach the Antarctic Peninsula, we hopped on a Zodiac boat and rode to the beach. A fierce wind bit our skin, but we pressed on. Through the mist, we had our first penguin sightings.

Our arrival on the continent was immediately rewarding. We landed amidst a colony of Adélie penguins and ice rocks on the beach. The birds waddled past, seemingly indifferent to our presence. As we continued exploring the wonders of Antarctica, encounters with its unique wildlife, such as whales, seals and birds, punctuated our trip. Following the Adélie penguin colony discovery at Brown Bluff, we spotted elephant seals on President’s Head at Snow Island and witnessed a Gentoo penguin colony in Neko Harbor.

We land at Brown Bluff beach. Authors’ photo.

An Adélie penguin hops along the ice at Brown Bluff beach. Authors’ photo.

An Adélie penguin colony waddles past at Brown Bluff beach. Authors’ photo.

The scientific experts on our expedition explained to us the profound impact global warming has on these Antarctic species. Despite appearing indifferent to our presence at Brown Bluff, Adélie penguins are exceptionally vulnerable to these environmental shifts. Between 2012 and 2022, their population by 40%, highlighting the urgency of their situation. The warming temperatures that melt sea ice gravely endanger their survival.

Adélie penguins are not alone in facing these challenges. Emperor penguins, also adapted to colder climates, have encountered significant setbacks in recent years. With diminishing ice cover, penguins are forced to venture farther into the sea in search of prey, expending precious energy in the process. This leads to reduced food intake for themselves and their chicks, exacerbating the problem of hunger and chick mortality. Furthermore, warmer weather brings increased snowfall, burying penguin eggs and making chicks vulnerable to hypothermia. The loss of suitable nesting sites due to melting ice reduces their chance of successfully breeding.

Penguins rest on sea ice. Authors’ photo.

Penguins rest on sea ice near Brown Bluff. Authors’ photo.

Antarctic marine mammals are also challenged by climate change. As ocean temperatures rise, their food sources are impacted. For instance, whales, heavily reliant on krill for sustenance, are particularly vulnerable to these changes. Any disruptions in krill population or behavior cascades throughout the ecosystem, jeopardizing the entire Antarctic food chain.

Luciana Motta, a marine mammal expert and ecologist who joined our expedition cruise, shed light on the profound difficulties these animals encounter in adapting to shifting hunting grounds and habitats. Not only is global warming a factor, but increasing fishing activities and competition for food resources also threaten the broader marine ecosystem. This can potentially lead to the extinction of certain species.

With global warming increasing Antarctic temperatures, critical food sources such as krill are dwindling. This places species like the Weddell seal, leopard seal and minke whale at risk. Motta emphasized, “Effective communication of research findings is crucial to convey the urgency of conservation efforts and advocate for policy changes aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change on Antarctic biodiversity.”

A Weddell seal lounges on the rocks. Authors’ photo. 

Weddell seals play in the water. Authors’ photo.

Climate change’s reach from the southern continent to our doorstep

Changes unfolding in Antarctica hold severe implications for communities worldwide. Despite this, awareness of these realities remains limited. James McClintock, a senior researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) who has participated in over 30 Antarctic expedition cruises, described this disconnect: “People in the United States and elsewhere are often disconnected from the realities of Antarctica, resulting in a lack of interest. Consequently, there is widespread ignorance regarding the importance of this continent in maintaining the environmental balance for the rest of the planet. The general public is largely unaware that the developments in Antarctica today are already impacting the rest of the world.”

Low-lying island nations already grappling with limited resources are especially vulnerable to the consequences. Rising sea levels relentlessly encroach upon their shores, eroding land and menacing communities. Traditional practices like subsistence hunting, observed in regions such as Alaska and Greenland, are challenged as animals adapt to changing migration routes.

Coastal areas like Bangladesh experience intensified — water saltiness — levels due to rising sea levels, which impedes agricultural productivity. Erratic weather patterns influenced by the rising temperatures in the Southern Ocean include heavy rainfall, prolonged droughts and destructive floods. These present an obstacle for farmers and worsen food insecurity.

From Alaska to Alabama, communities confront the specter of famine, relocation and erosion precipitated by these changes.

Conscious tourists can advocate for Antarctica

The surge in tourism to Antarctica has sparked concerns about its environmental impact. According to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (), over 100,000 people Antarctica between December 2023 and March 2024. This comprised approximately 32,000 cruise tourists and 71,000 landing visitors. This number represents a 42% increase from the previous season of 2022-2023 and prompts scrutiny of its potential impacts on the Antarctic ecosystem.

IAATO stands as a beacon for responsible tourism in Antarctica. Founded in 1991 by a consortium of private tour operators, its mission is clear: to regulate and guide tourism activities in a manner that safeguards the continent’s fragile ecosystem. However, despite its noble intentions, IAATO’s guidelines remain voluntary rather than mandatory. While many adhere to its principles, some choose to operate independently. They could compromise the continent’s environment for commercial gain.

A 2022 study revealed alarming findings, indicating elevated of black carbon in the snow around popular tourist sites. This soot, originating from tourism activities, accelerates snow melting, worsening the effects of global warming. Additionally, the accidental introduction of non-native species and pathogens by tourists threatens Antarctica’s endemic flora and fauna. This occurred in 2023, when the continent experienced its first ever avian flu .

An A&K expedition cruise ship travels the ocean. Authors’ photo.

However, tourism could contribute to the conservation of Antarctica. When travelers experience the region’s breathtaking beauty and recognize its vulnerability firsthand, they become more acutely aware of the need to protect it. According to James McClintock, the experiences of passengers in expedition cruise ships serve as powerful catalysts for environmental activism; they could promote a drive for sustainable tourism practices.

Furthermore, collaboration between tourism companies and scientists amplifies the positive outcomes that the industry can have on conservation efforts. Cruise operators aid scientific research in their travels, as they enable scientists to inexpensively access remote locations that would otherwise be financially prohibitive. Additionally, the repetitive boat visits to certain sites enables them to collect longitudinal data, which offers valuable insights into the evolving state of Antarctica’s ecosystem over time.

By forming partnerships between tourism entities and researchers, Antarctica becomes more accessible for scientific study and conservation initiatives. Companies like exemplify this collaborative spirit, providing a platform for scientists to conduct groundbreaking research on the continent. For example, in February 2023, its scientific team the first paper following observations of the giant phantom jellyfish, a rarely encountered species during one of their journeys.

Expedition cruises, such as those offered by the Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic and A&K, host researchers aboard their vessels. These partnerships enable scientists to not only research fields like marine biology, climate science and oceanography, but to discuss their results with passengers. Similarly, companies like hold citizen science initiatives, engaging tourists in data collection and environmental monitoring. Passengers participate in ranging from tracking whale migrations to monitoring water quality, contributing valuable data to scientific understanding.

While tourism holds immense potential for assisting Antarctica’s conservation efforts, there is much work to be done. Tourism companies must prioritize plans for achieving net-zero carbon emissions to mitigate their environmental impact. They must also implement stringent controls on landings to prevent invasive species and diseases from infiltrating Antarctica.

It is imperative that tourist operators adhere to the regulations set forth by IAATO to ensure responsible and sustainable tourism practices. They must place limits on the number of tourists and landings permitted each day. Ultimately, no activity in Antarctica can be left unregulated if we are to preserve this environment for future generations.

Antarctica awaits tourists. Authors’ photo.

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Climate change catastrophically impacts every place on Earth. It exacerbates the degradation of ecosystems, natural catastrophes, harsh weather, rising sea levels, droughts, the spread of disease, land grabs, human displacement and climate conflict. These global effects jeopardize our complete enjoyment of many human rights, such as the rights to life, food, shelter, health care, safe drinking water, culture, employment and development.

We have reached a turning point in the history of DHD. Climate activists have launched several promising legal actions globally, including numerous requests for advisory opinions from international and regional courts and tribunals.

Understanding advisory opinions

The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights () and the International Court of Justice () have all been asked for their advisory judgments about states’ obligations in light of the climate emergency.

The three mechanisms are fully operational. On May 21, 2024, ITLOS an advisory opinion. It declared that because greenhouse gas emissions contaminate the seas, states have to take all necessary steps to avoid, reduce and limit them. In December 2023, as part of its advisory opinion process, the IACtHR held in-person public hearings and accepted hundreds of , and final took place on May 20. Finally, states and international have submitted written to the ICJ ahead of its June 24 .

These are historic initiatives. The world looks to these tribunals for direction on what states should do to address the climate disaster. Furthermore, these processes offer a critical chance to strengthen environmental defenders’ safeguards.

Climate protection activism: vital yet targeted

Climate rights activists defend our world from catastrophe in various ways. They peacefully oppose extractive industries, conventional agricultural methods, media, legislation, land management and other strategies. They help us adapt and mitigate climate change through their endeavors.

One reveals that activists who employ multiple strategies have a higher success rate of up to . Those who use only one tactic “[contribute] to halt environmentally destructive and socially conflictive projects, defending the environment and livelihoods” in of climate conflicts.

Climate rights activists defend human rights in addition to the Earth. “Human rights in environmental matters [strengthen] democracy, access rights and sustainable development,” acknowledged by the .

Unfortunately, this valuable service is often met with heinous opposition. These activists are the most frequently climate rights defenders. They suffer many attacks, which often go unreported. These include , criminalization, , forced and displacement, and judicial harassment. Opponents even employ strategic lawsuits against public participation to discourage their activism, or silence them through .

These threats inhibit climate rights activists from continuing their brave mission of addressing global warming. The hostile atmosphere opposes international legal norms on free speech and assembly rights. We need states to these people so they can uphold their commitments to climate change mitigation and human rights protection. Further, we need laws that require states to grant climate rights activists more protection.

To address the unique challenges experienced by climate activists who belong to marginalized groups — namely women, indigenous peoples, the African and Asian diasporas and rural agricultural communities — states should adopt an intersectional or “compartmentalized” approach to these laws. According to Michel Forst, the on Environmental Defenders of the , this entails “acknowledging that defenders are interconnected.”

Defending the defenders

Fortunately, some members of the international community are defending these activists and their civic space. Lawyers from Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights () group and several international organizations wrote a to the ICJ and an to the with the goal of advancing the protection and analysis of climate defenders. During the IACtHR in Manaus, Sofía Jaramillo, the senior staff attorney for , gave a presentation to emphasize the connection between environmental defenders and the states’ duties on human rights and the environment. The American legal team the IACtHR asking the Department of Justice to look into the 2023 of climate activist Manuel Esteban “Tortuguita” Páez Terán through legal representation.

RFKHR has co-hosted several events, including a virtual side event on the IACtHR advisory opinion procedure and a on climate defenders. On May 3, World Press Freedom Day, RFKHR highlighted climate journalists’ risks on social media and specific incidents involving climate defenders on the . The tracker has brought attention to the continuous of Ugandans who are participating in protests against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP).

The ICJ and IACtHR processes are still underway. The oral hearings are for late 2024 or early 2025. After concluding its public hearings on the advisory opinion, the IACtHR is anticipated to release its conclusion next year.

Through these actions, the tribunals and courts will have an unmatched opportunity to advance their jurisprudence in this area, fortify the safeguards for climate defenders and confront the global warming emergency. These rulings will do more than just elucidate the responsibility of states concerning climate change and human rights. The precedent they set will shape public policy and climate litigation for posterity.
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Older generations have already experienced the impact of climate change. In , devastating flooding occurred in Australia, Europe, Asia and the US Northeast. California burned and crippling icy temperatures paralyzed Texas. As the climate grows hotter, these events and their risks will only .

Previous generations contentedly burned more and more fossil fuels, and now future generations will experience hotter and longer heat waves, intensifying droughts and increasingly devastating flooding. While they enjoyed luxury, they’ve left their posterity with the burden.

Youth activism in the face of inaction

The younger generation cares a lot more about climate change than the older one. This is clear when you consider how younger people organize their family life. An increasing number of young adults have qualms about bringing children into a world experiencing intensifying disasters due to global warming. In 2018, the United States Census Bureau that 83.5% of adults aged 55 and older have children. On the other hand, a 2020 Morning Consult poll, with a majority of younger Gen-Z and millennial voters, found that a of childless adults cite climate change as a reason they did not have children.

Unlike thoughtless older generations, younger people do not have a choice in caring about climate change. It is their reality and their future.

Young people, realizing the climate burden left to them, have fought for change and organized mass youth climate strikes. In , more than 4 million young people in thousands of cities worldwide gathered to protest.��

However, adults and politicians have criticized the youth climate movement, often claiming youths are overreacting and would be better off going to school. The adults who are causing climate change will be dead when its consequences peak. The children they are deriding as dramatic are the very same children whose lives their actions will jeopardize. Activists from the younger generation are being shut out and mocked by an older generation living in denial.

For instance, Greta Thunberg, a prominent climate activist, passionately at the United Nations Climate Summit in 2019 at age 16. She denounced global leaders for their inaction and greed in the face of extreme suffering due to climate change. Numerous policymakers, including US President Donald Trump, mocked Thunberg. Trump to say she had an “anger management problem” and sarcastically described her as “a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

Trump demeaned Thunberg because her criticism personally attacked his presidential ability and high self-image. Thunberg and other young climate activists threaten the worldview and greedy interests of politicians who refuse to acknowledge the severity of the climate crisis. As Greta Thunberg puts it, “you [politicians] are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”

Climate anxiety and what young people can do

In the face of stubborn and selfish policymakers, young people can feel overwhelmed by hopelessness. In a published in 2022, the majority of youth and young adults expressed extreme worry about climate change. They agree that their worry has negatively affected their daily life. In order to combat this hopeless worry, young people must do something to give themselves agency and a localized sense of control.

Advocacy is an accessible way for young people to get in and take action on the climate struggle. It can mean simple things, such as signing petitions, participating in marches or educating friends and family.

Little actions, such as turning off unnecessary lights and water flow, are also easy ways to take action and tackle the crisis.

The most effective way to get rid of feelings of helplessness is to take the bull by the horns and do something. The older generation of policymakers has taken agency away from young people, and they must take it back.

With all the odds pushing against them, young people must continue to press the older generation for change. They must shout, not whisper — demand, not ask — for immediate action.
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Put another way, in some grim sense, all of us now live in Gaza. Most of us just don’t know it yet.

Yes, if you actually do live in Gaza, your life is now officially a living (or dying) Hell on Earth. Your home has been destroyed, your family members wounded or killed, the hospital you fled to decimated. And that story, sadly enough, has been leading the news day after day for weeks now. But in the process, in some sense even more sadly, the deepest hell of our time has largely disappeared from sight.

I’m thinking about the urge to turn our whole planet into a long-term, slow-motion version of Gaza, to almost literally set it ablaze and destroy it as a habitable place for humanity and so many other species.

Yes, in the midst of the ongoing Middle Eastern catastrophe, the by James Hanson, the scientist who first sounded the climate alarm to Congress back in the 1980s, appeared. In it, he suggested that, in this year of , our planet is heating even more rapidly than expected. The key temperature danger mark, set only eight years ago at the Paris Climate Agreement, above the pre-industrial level, could easily be reached not in 2050 or 2040, but by (or even before) 2030.

Meanwhile, another suggests that humanity’s “carbon budget”(the amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere while keeping the global temperature rise at or under that 1.5° C mark) is now officially to Hell in a handbasket. In fact, by October, a record one-third of the days in 2023 had that 1.5° C mark in what is undoubtedly going to prove another — and yes, I know how repetitive this is — record year for heat.

Oh, and when it comes to the globe’s two greatest greenhouse gas , China is still opening new coal mines at a remarkably rapid pace, while the US, the world’s biggest oil producer, is expected to have “a third of planned oil and gas expansion globally between now and 2050.” And the news isn’t much better for the rest of the planet, which, given the dangers involved, should be headline-making fare. No such luck, of course.

Setting the planet afire

In fact, I’ll bet you hardly noticed. And I’m not surprised. After all, the news could hardly be worse these days in a country that, however indirectly, seems distinctly bound for war. There’s Ukraine, turning into ever more of a disaster zone by the week; there’s Israel, Gaza and the West Bank promising yet more of the same, whether you’re listening to or Israeli Prime Minister (with American military activity in the region as well); and then there’s that “cold war” between the US and China. Yes, I know, I know, US President Joe Biden and Chinese President actually met and recently, including — but don’t hold your breath when it comes to truly improving relations.

And yet, if you were to look away from Gaza for a moment, you might notice that significant parts of the Middle East have been experiencing a historic megadrought since 1998 (yes, 1998!). The temperatures baking the region are to be “16 times as likely in Iran and 25 times as likely in Iraq and Syria” thanks to the warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, if you take a skip and a jump from the flaming Middle East to Greenland, you might notice that, in recent years, glaciers there have been melting at — yes, I know this sounds unbearably repetitious — rates ( times faster, in fact, in the last 20 years), helping add to sea level rise across the planet. And, mind you, that rise will only accelerate as the Arctic and melt ever more rapidly. And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Arctic is already four times faster than the global average.

If you have the urge to put all of this in context for 2023, you need to remind yourself that we’re now ending November, which means a final accounting of the devastation wrought by climate change this year isn’t quite in. Admittedly, it’s already been one of record heat and fires, floods, extreme drought and so on (and on and on). You’ve probably forgotten by now, but there were those record heat waves and fires — and no, I’m not thinking about the ones that swept or that broiled parts of amid record flooding. I’m thinking about the ones in Canada that hit so much closer to home for us Americans. The wildfires there in May and, by late June, had already set a typical seasonal record, only to burn on and on and on (adding up to nine times the normal seasonal total!) deep into October, sending billows of smoke across significant parts of the United States, while setting smoke pollution records.

Nor is the news exactly great when it comes to climate change and this country. Yes, heat records are still being set month by month this year in the US, even if the record highs are still to be fully tallied. Just consider those days in which our sixth largest city, Phoenix, suffered temperatures of 43.3° C (110° F) or more ( of them in a row), resulting in a heat version of Gazan casualties, a in the deaths mostly of seniors and the homeless to almost 600. A recent, congressionally mandated report by the Biden administration on global warming found that this country is actually heating up faster than the global average. “The climate crisis,” it reported, “is causing disruption to all regions of the US, from flooding via heavier rainfall in the northeast to prolonged drought in the southwest. A constant is heat — ‘across all regions of the US, people are experiencing warming temperatures and longer-lasting heat waves’ — with nighttime and winter temperatures rising faster than daytime and summer temperatures.”

A planetary Gaza?

For some global context, just consider that, in 2022, the planet’s greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere were the on record, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. So were the temperatures of ocean waters, while sea levels rose for the 11th straight year! There were also record-shattering heat waves across the planet and that was the way it all too disastrously went.

And yet none of that will hold water (or do I mean fire?), it seems, when it comes to 2023, which is clearly going to set another heat record. After all, we already know that, month by sweltering month from November 2022 to the end of October 2023, a major heat record was set that seemingly hadn’t been topped in the last . It’s a near certainty as well that this full year will prove similarly record-breaking. And given the way we humans are still burning fossil fuels, we won’t have to wait another 125,000 years for that to happen again. The odds are, in fact, that 2024 will indeed set global heat record.

So, tell me, how’s that for a planetary Gaza? And yet, strangely enough, while the nightmare in the Middle East is being covered daily in a dramatic fashion across the mainstream media, often by brave reporters like the PBS NewsHour��� , the burning of the planet is, at best, a distinctly secondary, or tertiary, or… well, you can fill in the possible numbers from there … reality.

The sad truth of it is that there aren’t enough reporters spending their time on the front lines of global warming, and nowhere do I see the staff members of up to 40 government agencies protesting over the weakness of climate-change policy the way so many of them over the Biden administration’s policies on Israel and Gaza. While every night we venture into the devastated Gaza Strip with reporters like Molana-Allen (not to speak of the who died in the first month of that conflict), rare is the night when we do the same in our overheating world. All too few journalists are focusing on the humans already being driven from their homes, experiencing (and even dying from) unprecedented heat, storms, flooding and drought.

Nor are there many reporters stepping directly into the flames. I’m thinking, in this case, of the coverage (or lack of it) of the drilling for or mining of fossil fuels, the companies making — absolute ongoing fortunes — off them, while their are pulling in yearly, even as the ferocious burning of their products continues to pour carbon into the atmosphere.

And mind you, fossil fuel emissions are still — a word that once again seems all too appropriate — hellishly high. Yes, the International Energy Agency does expect such emissions to , if not . Still, we humans are going to be burning coal, oil and natural gas for one hell (that again!) of a long time, and those fossil-fuel companies will continue making fortunes while damaging all our lives and those of our children and grandchildren into the distant future.

There’s no question that Gaza has truly been a Hell on Earth. Deaths in that small strip of land had already (many of them children) while I was writing this. Meanwhile, from hospitals to homes, Israeli bombs and missiles have turned staggering amounts of its living (or now dying) spaces into rubble. And that is indeed a horror that must be covered (just as the nightmarish initial Hamas attack on Israel was). But in the process of watching Gaza burn, it would be good to remember that we’re also turning the whole planet into a Gazan-style catastrophe. It’s just happening in relative slow motion.

World War II ended in September 1945, and since then — despite endless wars — there hasn’t been another “world” version of one. Gaza and Ukraine remain horrific but relatively localized, just as the Korean and Vietnam conflicts once were.

But while, whatever the horrors and damage done, there hasn’t been another world war, there has been and continues to be a war on the world, a slow-motion global Gaza that will only grow worse unless we put our energy into moving ever faster to transition from coal, natural gas and oil to alternative energy sources. In truth, that is the war we should all be fighting, not the ones that distract us from the worst dangers we face.

In fact, it’s past time to start talking about World War III, even if this time it’s a war on the planet itself.

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Iran-Afghanistan Tensions Now Rising Over Water

Climate Change Is Now a Defense Matter

Living On A Smoke Bomb: September 11th, Climate-Change-Style

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California’s attorney general takes the oil companies on

In both instances, state attorneys-general played an important role in seeking redress. Now, Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, has a 135-page lawsuit against five major oil companies — ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP — which could prove an inflection point in the battle against human-caused climate change.

On announcing the lawsuit, Bonta , “Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change — but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment. Enough is enough.”

Born in the Philippines to an American father and a Filipina mother, Bonta spent his early years near Keene, California, where the United Farm Workers had established its headquarters. There, both his father and his mother Cynthia helped organize Filipino American and Mexican American laborers. Bonta went on to get a Yale law degree and ultimately entered politics, winning election to the California State Assembly in 2012.

His background clearly impressed upon him the special vulnerability of working-class groups to climate change. “We will meet the moment and fight tirelessly on behalf of all Californians,” he pledged, “in particular those who live in environmental justice communities.” As he explained in a footnote in his for that lawsuit, “‘Frontline communities’ are those that are and will continue to be disproportionately impacted by climate change. In many cases, the most harmed are the same communities that have historically experienced racial, social, health, and economic inequities.”

The destructive impact of human-caused climate change on California has, in fact, unfolded before our eyes. largest California wildfires have taken place since 2018. Unusually frequent, wide-ranging and ever-fiercer wildfires have even chased some of the Golden State’s most famous celebrities from their homes, leaving behind just glowing cinders. The now-seemingly annual rampages of those increasingly massive conflagrations can cause us to forget how remarkable the damage has been in these years.

In 2018, pop singer Miley Cyrus that the Malibu home she shared with her then-fiancé Chris Hemsworth had been devoured by flames, writing on social media, “Completely devastated by the fires affecting my community. I am one of the lucky ones. My animals and LOVE OF MY LIFE made it out safely & that’s all that matters right now. My house no longer stands but the memories shared with family & friends stand strong … I love you more than ever, Miley.” That year, Orlando Bloom, Bella Hadid, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, and Gerard Butler suffered similar losses.

Well-heeled celebrities, however, have the resources to get through such crises. who must harvest crops while breathing soot-filled air risk adverse health effects, including respiratory and heart disease. Others have lost their jobs and incomes entirely when wildfires encroached on fields and orchards. Not getting paychecks thanks to raging fires at their worksites can, in turn, cause such workers to miss mortgage payments and lose their homes. And sometimes, of course, their own homes, like those of the stars, have been torched.

Connecting the dots

In 2021, wildfires almost entirely razed the town of Paradise, California. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg visited the aftermath. On hearing one man’s devastating account of how he and his family barely escaped their fiery, collapsing home, she , “We see all of these things repeating themselves over and over again. People die, and people suffer from it. But we completely fail to connect the dots.”

Her evident frustration at the time should be considered significantly more consequential than it might seem. A team of Norwegian researchers has that, of all the emotions provoked by human-caused climate change, the one most associated with activism against it is anger. Anger at politicians or CEOs who have played key roles in enabling the phenomenon that causes such destruction animates many climate protesters. As they suggested, Thunberg’s vivid speeches are but one example of the righteous anger provoked by those who could have but haven’t moved to mitigate the effects of global warming.

For his part, Attorney General Bonta isn’t in any doubt about where to lay the blame. As he , “With our lawsuit, California becomes the largest geographic area and the largest economy to take these giant oil companies to court. From extreme heat to drought and water shortages, the climate crisis they have caused is undeniable. It is time they pay to abate the harm they have caused.” By focusing on five major oil companies, he and California Governor Gavin Newsom have given the state’s environmentalists a target for their anger.

Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and Rhode Island are already similar legal actions. Small wonder why. When it comes to California, for instance, scientists have a fivefold increase in the summer burned areas in forests stretching from the middle of the state north during the past two and a half decades. And that devastatingly large burn area is anything but just the result of cyclical droughts. In fact, researchers this summer that almost all of it has been caused by the human production of carbon dioxide through the burning of gasoline, natural gas and coal. Worse yet, their projections suggest that ever larger and more devastating burn areas will be part of our landscape in the decades to come as humanity pumps out yet more carbon pollution.

The heat and long-term drought that’s gone with it have transformed California’s northern forests into so much tinder. After the state’s wildfires of 2020, leading climate scientist Michael Mann , “These are known as compound drought and heat wave (CDHW) events and refer to situations wherein a region experiences both prolonged hot temperatures and a shortage of water.” His team predicts that CDHW events will more than double in number and duration, while quadrupling in intensity, if carbon pollution continues to be produced at its current rate.

Atmospheric rivers

Worse yet, California now faces a double whammy — not just vastly increased wildfires and drought in some regions but major flooding in others. And in drought-stricken areas, sudden, massive rainfall simply runs off desiccated soil, adding to the risk of overflowing waters.

As it happens, human-made global warming hasn’t just heated up lands across the planet, but the oceans, too. In fact, this summer, ocean water temperatures all previous heat records, and that also puts more moisture into the atmosphere. Worse yet, climate change has heated the atmosphere itself, and warmer air holds more moisture. That change has, in turn, made the “” carrying moisture from the tropics to the temperate zone far more destructive.

Not surprisingly, then, on the last day of 2022, 5.5 inches of rain downtown San Francisco, while putting all six lanes of Highway 101 to its south under water. A week later, Governor Newsom watched as sheets of rainfall, driven by 70 mph winds, knocked out power to 345,000 people in the state capital, Sacramento.

This summer, the giant State Farm and Allstate insurance companies, ever more aware of the toll climate change was taking on their bottom lines in California, announced that they would no longer accept new customers there. As an explanation, State Farm “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.” Take a moment to let that sink in. The situation humanity has created is now so calamitous that insurance companies are no longer willing to take on the once-safe bet that most houses will continue standing unharmed for decades.

If California were an independent country, it would have the fifth-largest economy in the world. As Attorney General Bonta notes, it has the deep pockets to take on the oil companies. And significantly, that state’s government is already among the world’s most forward-looking in combating climate change. In 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order requiring that sold in California by 2035 be battery-electric or hybrid vehicles. The plan has spurred similar actions by six other states.

In the past five years, electric vehicles as a percentage of new vehicle registrations in the Golden State have indeed from 2% to 22%. No less impressive, around 60% of the state’s electricity is now by low-carbon sources like wind and solar. To smooth out the transitions between solar and wind generation, California has put in of battery power, the most of any state, to forestall blackouts and avoid the necessity of using natural gas to fill the gap.

“They Lied. They Deceived.”

The attorney general’s against the oil companies asserts their culpability: “Oil and gas company executives have known for decades that reliance on fossil fuels would cause these catastrophic results, but they suppressed that information from the public and policymakers by actively pushing out disinformation on the topic.” This duplicity, the suit argues, was itself grounds for seeking redress. “Their deception,” it continues, “caused a delayed societal response to global warming. And their misconduct has resulted in tremendous costs to people, property, and natural resources, which continue to unfold each day.”

In an with KCAL television, Bonta pulled no punches: “They must pay for their own actions … They lied. They deceived. They falsely advertised. They undermined the science and made claims that were counter to the truth. We’re holding them accountable for that.” When challenged by the interviewer, who warned the attorney general that he would need a “smoking gun” showing that the corporations were deceitful, Bonta didn’t hesitate: “We have smoking guns. Multiple. We have one from the 1960s. We have others in the decades that have followed. It is a very clear trend.”

His complaint is, in fact, festooned with damning pieces of internal evidence, including a 1982 by Exxon scientist Roger Cohen, which admitted “a clear scientific consensus” on the expected effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide on the climate and suggested that doubling greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere would result in roughly a 3° Celsius (5.4° Fahrenheit) average global temperature rise, bringing about “significant changes in the earth’s climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere.” 

In 1800, as the industrial revolution began, there were just 282 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Today, in part because of energy industry foot-dragging, there are about 420 ppm of CO2, and we’re speeding toward the 564 ppm that Cohen predicted would radically change our very biosphere. Climate scientist Michael Mann has pointed out in his new , Our Fragile Planet, that, during the Pliocene era (3.5 million years ago), that kind of ramp-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produced a tropical world with ocean waters 30 feet higher than they are now.

Despite the warnings of Cohen and others, in 1989, Exxon joined other oil companies in forming the Global Climate Coalition, which attempts to reduce fossil-fuel consumption, while assuring journalists and politicians that “the role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood.” Some of those companies like Exxon even climate denialism when they knew perfectly well that it was a lie. 

In the 1990s and thereafter, the oil companies, the California lawsuit alleges, went on to use organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council lobbying group to pressure Washington to do nothing about carbon pollution. At the same, they attempted to convince concerned Americans that climate change either wasn’t happening or, if it was, had nothing to do with burning fossil fuels.

In a distinctly overheating world, where heat records of all sorts are now regularly being , the denialism of Big Oil and its henchmen, including today most of the , is already a crime of the first order. The California suit is cleverly crafted. If there is one thing you can’t do in societies like ours, where property rights are so central, it’s damage someone’s property knowingly and under the cover of deception.

The internal memos of scientists that have surfaced in such abundance from the very bowels of the petroleum corporations could be their biggest Achilles heel. They demonstrate that the injuries they have inflicted on the Earth are not simply an unforeseen side effect of their product but, at least in part, the result of a deliberate cover-up.

At last, Greta Thunberg’s hope that someone, especially someone with the power to do something, would finally get mad and connect the dots is being fulfilled. Let’s hope that California succeeds in both setting a meaningful precedent and making those companies pay in a big way, ending impunity for the most dangerous and deceitful assault on our environment in human history.

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You couldn’t miss it—at least so you might think—if you were living in the , especially in broiling, with of temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit; or in or western China on the day the temperature hit degrees Fahrenheit or sweltering, blazing Algeria when the temperature reached an almost unimaginable ; not to speak of broiling Canada with its now burning (a figure that still seems to be rising by the week) and its already flamed out. Don’t forget Italy’s ; or Florida’s seawater, which recently hit an unheard-of . This past July has set the record for the hottest month in history. And don’t assume that record will stand for long, either.

Who even remembers that this June was the hottest since records have been kept or that July 6th was the in recorded history (and July 3rd through 6th, the hottest four days ever)? if 2023 ends up setting a record for the hottest year, and don’t assume that such a record will last long on a planet where the previous eight years were the warmest ever. And if I’m already boring you, then one thing is guaranteed: you’re going to be bored out of your mind in the years to come.

And with all that’s burning across significant parts of southern Europe, northern Africa, Canada and elsewhere, yet more carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere, preparing the way for a truly scorching world to come. Just keep in mind that, by the time this piece is published, I could undoubtedly produce a startling new paragraph or two of updated, overheated horrors to send your way.

Yes, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently put it, the era of “global warming” should be considered over, since we’re at the beginning of a time of “global boiling.” And as you sit there sweating and reading this, if that doesn’t strike you as extreme, consider something else: fossil-fuel companies are still bringing in (even if poor Shell’s second-quarter profits in 2023 were down to a mere $5.1 billion) as they—yes!— their oil and natural gas operations globally.

Can you blame them? After all, the companies whose executives have what their products would do to this planet and even sometimes responded by funding think tanks that promoted climate change denial have little choice but (if you’ll excuse the phrase) to cover their assets. Meanwhile, China, at the of the alternative energy boom now underway, also last year to build two new coal plants a week on average (while than the rest of the planet combined).

Environmental extremism

Now, tell me that you’re not sweating at least a little and that we don’t live on an increasingly extreme planet. And just to add a cheery note to that, check out blistering Texas. El Paso more than 41 days in a row of temperatures at or above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (just short of—yes, Ron!—Miami at 45 while I was writing this). However, Texas’s Republican-controlled legislature is now striving to that state’s remarkable advances in solar and wind power while raising their cost, even as many of its members push for public investment in the construction of new natural gas plants (which, as a recent study , could prove as greenhouse-gas dirty as coal).

Just remind me: What planet are they living on?

If, however, you truly want to see American extremism up close and personal, don’t even bother to check out Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who charmingly enough launched his now-faltering presidential campaign by the “politicization of the weather.” Under the circumstances, I know you won’t be faintly surprised to learn that he had previously rejected the very idea of climate change as “leftwing stuff.” (Of course, if the left turns out to be our future, then maybe he’ll prove to be … oh, my gosh, so sorry, but what other word can I use than “right”?)

No, skip Ron. After all, if you don’t happen to live in Florida, he couldn’t be more skippable. Look instead at Donald Trump. Yes, our ( and , as it is) former president and (“!”) aspiring autocrat, who shows of once again becoming the “Republican” candidate for president.

Were he indeed to become that and then—also —win the 2024 election and end up back in the White House, the extremeness of the world we could find ourselves in might be almost beyond imagining. We’re talking about the guy who claimed that, when it comes to climate change, its full effect —uh-oh!—that “the ocean will rise by 1/100th of an inch over the next 350 years.” (Actually, if global temperature rise is kept to 2 degrees Celsius, the sea level near Mar-a-Lago would be expected to rise three feet by 2150, a mere 3,500 times the former president’s estimate in half the time—and that’s if we don’t truly turn out to be on a climate-boiling planet.)

Of course, should Donald Trump win not just the Republican nomination but the 2024 election, this sweltering country will have put someone back in the White House who has spent his political career mocking the very idea of global warming and supporting to the hilt the production of fossil fuels. His administration reversed, rolled back or wiped out environmental rules and regulations, many related to climate change, including “Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and from cars and trucks,” according to the New York Times. Meanwhile, he appointed cabinet members who the very idea of global warming.

And, by the way, if you want to measure the mad extremism of Republicans today, try to recall a once-upon-a-time era when they had a outlook than Democrats. (It’s easy to forget that it was the otherwise lamentable Republican President Richard Nixon whose administration the Environmental Protection Agency.) If you want to measure the extremism of what can hardly be called the Republican—as opposed to Trumpublican—Party of 2023, the positions on climate change of most of its possible presidential candidates.

If, in fact, you want a gauge of how extreme this country has already become in this century, just stop and think for a moment about the fact that, as of now, few polling professionals believe a 2024 Biden-Trump election wouldn’t prove a . That should make you sweat a little more.

Be there, will be wild!

On this sweltering planet of ours, Donald Trump and his Trumpublicans should indeed be considered up-close-and-personal versions of American extremism. Yes, in 2016, Trump won the election by catching the mood of all too many voters with the slogan, “Make America Great Again!” or MAGA! (exclamation point included). As I at the time, “With that ‘again,’ Donald Trump crossed a line in American politics that, until his escalator moment, represented a kind of psychological taboo for politicians of any stripe, of either party.” And with his , he added another unforgettable slogan: “America First.” (“From this moment on, it’s going to be America First,” he insisted.)

But America first? Today, don’t make me laugh. Donald Trump is, of course, running for president as the potential leader of a party that now bears to the Republican Party of the not-so-distant past, and he’s doing so not on an America First but on a Me-First ticket against a crew of other candidates, most of whom have either rejected outright or simply ignored the very idea that there might be a climate crisis on planet Earth.

In such a state, Trump could become the Me-First candidate of all time and, for him, especially in climate terms, it’s undoubtedly America 19th. Or do I mean 29th or 129th or 1,029th?

Now, I hardly want to claim that President Joe Biden is the perfect anti-climate-broiling candidate. Still, give him credit. He and a Democratic Congress did , which represented significant climate legislation that, in the years to come, will put hundreds of billions of dollars into reducing American fossil-fuel use and so help cut US greenhouse gas emissions in significant ways. In addition, unlike the Trumpublicans, he at least about Americans living through a heat emergency (though the present Congress will let him do all too little about it).

Still, being the politician he is, despite pledging “no more drilling on federal lands, period, period, period” in his 2020 election campaign, he to say no when it came to the new ConocoPhillips Willow Project on federal land in Arctic Alaska (already among the fastest warming places on Earth). It’s slated to produce—hold your hats!—almost 600 million barrels of oil over the next three decades. Nor could he do so when it came to the completion of Senator Joe Manchin’s baby, the West Virginia Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline that (and only recently the as well) in what’s distinctly too much of a Me-First (or at least fossil-fuel-producing companies first) world even without Donald Trump.

But count on one thing: the Donald himself is no longer living on this planet of ours—you know, the one more than Americans were under heat advisory alerts and 250 million to 275 million of us faced heat indexes of at least (and do put the emphasis on that “at least”) 90 degrees Fahrenheit. He now exists on one that’s sprung directly from what passes for his imagination. Forget the extremist positions he and so many of his followers (not to speak of his Republican presidential opponents) hold on everything from abortion and what books school libraries can contain to what’s gender acceptable (not much) in this all-American world of ours.

The crucial thing here is that, in the Me-First world that’s him all the way—even one that could, in the end, leave this country in the dust of climate and history—one thing is guaranteed: were he to make it back into the White House, the future would be Me-First all the way to— well, either the bank or the outhouse. And he and his advisors are making no secret of that fact.

Thanks to by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, we already know that, were they to make it back into the White House, they would be intent on instantly enhancing the powers of his presidency by concentrating “far greater authority in his hands” and altering “the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” And they are already openly discussing all of this more than a year before the 2024 election.

In other words, Donald Trump is intent on winning the power to create, at best, a Hungarian version of “democracy” here in America that, make no mistake, would help add more than three feet of sea-level rise to the area of Florida near Mar-a-Lago. As for the rest of us, if you’re hot now, just wait for the return of the Donald’s Me-First World. Believe me, you don’t know nothin’ yet when it comes to heat. Be there, will be wild!

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After being a pariah for a long time, Assad was in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He is attending the summit of the Arab League. This is the first time Assad has participated in such a summit after the Arab League suspended Syria in 2011. 

Assad Is Back

The state-controlled Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) made full play of Assad’s political and public relations coup. SANA published images of Assad reading the letter of invitation from Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the president of the UAE and the ruler of Abu Dhabi,i with a UAE diplomat looking on approvingly. A statement from Dubai’s COP 28 organizers spoke of an “inclusive process that produces transformational solutions (which) can only happen if we have everyone in the room.”

Over the years, the UAE has led the efforts to bring Syria in from the cold. This latest effort can be viewed as politically useful both to the Emiratis and Assad. Yet it makes sense in having Syria attend regional summits. In the battle to mitigate the impact of climate change globally, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is on the with temperatures warming at nearly twice the global average. It is a region already profoundly threatened by extreme water scarcity. So, the involvement of all actors, including Syria, is a good idea.

Indeed, many experts say drought conditions were a significant causational contributor to the war in Syria. From 2006 to 2010, the country experienced a catastrophic, the third in a little more than two decades. The drought led to the collapse of the agricultural economy, driving millions into urban centers seeking work. These desperate people rose in rebellion during the 2011 Arab Spring movement.

Sadly for them, the Assad regime was prepared to use any amount of force to suppress what began as a series of peaceful protests. This wanton use of violence proved to be the perfect storm for a civil war that began in March 2011 and continues to this day.

Water Scarcity Woes

Water scarcity is also at the heart of the growing conflict between countries in the region hosting Syrian refugees and local populations. This is particularly the case in Jordan, the water deprived country in the world, and where water scarcity has been exacerbated by the ongoing political crisis.

The Gulf countries are better off. Their coffers are swollen because of surging oil prices. These countries are well placed to absorb the body blows inflicted upon them by climate change. Desalination projects in the Gulf continue apace. Saudi Arabia has its desalinated water output over the past decade and Riyadh-based has just announced a $667 million (2.5 billion Saudi riyals) Red Sea desalination project.

The derives nearly half of its water needs and almost all of its potable water requirements from 70 desalination plants. According to a UAE government website, the plants account for 14% of the world’s total production of desalinated water. Note that the UAE has less than 10 million people, suggesting that their water usage habits are wasteful in the extreme. Other Gulf countries are similarly wasteful.

Other Challenges Ahead and What Can be Done

Along with water scarcity, extreme climate events are dramatically increasing in MENA. The intensity and frequency of sand and dust storms (SDS) is wreaking havoc with food production and people’s health as well as damaging industrial equipment and vehicles. A by the Washington-based Arab Center last year noted:

“For all the disruption caused by this force majeure, much about SDS, including how to mitigate the phenomenon’s effects, remains poorly understood and has received relatively little scientific or policy attention. Considering the growing prevalence of SDS across the Middle East and North Africa, the storms’ impact on health, society, and the economy must surely be addressed, and policies need to be instituted to alleviate their effects.”

COP 28 faces daunting from water scarcity to SDS. Developing countries do not have the money to tackle them. Yet it is unclear if developed countries will fulfill commitments to assist developing states in transitioning to green alternatives. Developed countries were supposed to set up a $100 billion fund by 2020, which remains an unfulfilled obligation.

The world’s attempts to hold global warming to 1.5° Celsius is already slipping away in the MENA region. A recent from the World Resources Institute noted:

“Every fraction of a degree of warming will intensify these threats, and even limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degree C is not safe for all. At this level of warming, for example, 950 million people across the world’s drylands will experience water stress, heat stress and desertification, while the share of the global population exposed to flooding will rise by 24%.”

Sultan al-Jaber was appointed the boss of COP 28 in January. broke out. Jaber is the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), the UAE state-owned giant energy conglomerate. Climate activists have not liked his appointment. Jaber has a delicate balancing act ahead of him. Skeptics say he should be the last person to head COP 28. Supporters point out that Jaber has a as an advocate of renewable energy.

ADNOC and Saudi Aramco together could have a significant positive impact if they commit to renewables. Of course, they will want to protect their dominant fossil fuels market position while pursuing renewables. This is indeed a tricky balance. Yet if the Saudis and Emiratis buy into renewables, the $100 billion target might be achievable. 
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That same year, the United Nations held its first environment conference, which led to the creation of the UN Environment Program. Climate change was barely on the conference agenda, but it would increasingly focus the attention of scientists and policymakers over the next two decades with the introduction of the term “global warming” in 1975, the Montreal Protocol in 1987 that restricted ozone-destroying chemicals, and the creation in 1988 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

For half a century, in other words, the international community has issued warnings about the linked hazards of economic growth and climate change. Despite these warnings across five decades, very little has been done to engineer an alternative to unrestrained growth that can safeguard the planet and yet still secure a measure of prosperity for all humans.

Current doomsday scenarios of a future dominated by environmental disasters and economic deprivation are not the result of “sudden panicking,” points out Vedran Horvat, the director of the Institute for Political Ecology in Croatia and a panelist at on post-growth alternatives. “We had 50 years to realize what the Club of Rome said in the 1970s. Already at that time we knew there were limits and boundaries to our growth and that the planet does not have unlimited resources. Already we are too late. But I don’t see that as a reason not to act. Now it’s a question of how we act.”

Similarly, discussion of “peak oil”—of a falling off of oil production—has been around since 1956, when geophysicist Marion King Hubbert that the United States would hit peak production around 1970 while the rest of the world would top out in the early 2000s. Although Hubbert did not anticipate the discovery of new sources of oil, his predictions were only off by a couple decades. The COVID pandemic’s impact on global supply chains, the war in Ukraine, and the rapid transition to electric vehicles have combined to ensure that peak oil demand will arrive in if it hasn’t happened already.

As with the Club of Rome’s warnings, little has been done to prepare for the depletion of fossil fuels.

“For the last 14 years, we’ve talked about green transition,” observes Simon Michaux, an associate professor of geo-metallurgy at the Geological Survey of Finland. “But there’s been no feasibility study for macro-scale industrial reformation. We had some ideas, but we didn’t cost them out. We didn’t get to the point of determining what kind of power stations we would need, who would pay for them, and what kind of engineering we’d need to keep each one running. Here we are perhaps past peak oil, and we still don’t have a credible plan to phase out fossil fuels.”

The lack of a plan and the urgency of the crisis are two major obstacles. A third challenge is the absence of consensus on how to move forward. “For the last two decades, those of us who are more and more worried about these conditions and the fact that things aren’t changing are aware of just how far we are going down the road we shouldn’t be going down,” says Susan Krumdieck, professor and chair in Energy Transition at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. “We’ve put on our superhero capes to fight. Unfortunately, we’re pulling in different directions.”

One obvious difference in approach is between the richer countries of the Global North and the poorer countries of the Global South. “We’ve seen lots of initiatives like the Green New Deal in the United States which lack the perspective and participation of peripheral economies in the Global South,” notes Renata Nitta, a campaign strategist for Greenpeace International based in Brazil. “When you think of plans to decarbonize the economy and transition to electric vehicles, you have to ask where those raw materials come from. More than half of lithium resources, for instance, are based in Latin America in a very dry area where the mining takes a lot of energy and water and dispossesses traditional and indigenous communities.”

At this point, after a half century of study and debate, the international community has a good understanding of the challenges of economic growth and the urgent threat of climate change and resource depletion. Only recently, however, have scientists, engineers, policymakers, and movement leaders begun to identify the components of an action plan around post-growth alternatives. From “transition engineering” and “degrowth by design” to a new social contract and a new economic model built around the commons, visionary thinkers and activists are finally beginning to pull in the same direction.

Transition Engineering

In 1911, a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City. One of the exits was locked while a fire escape was too flimsy to hold all the fleeing workers. Because they could not get out of the building, 146 garment workers died in the flames. It was one of the deadliest industrial accidents in U.S. history. It also set in motion the transformation of working conditions in factories through the improvement of safety standards.

The Triangle fire is not the only example of a man-made disaster. “At that time, roughly 40 coal miners a day were dying on the job in the United States and that year 5,600 UK workers died on the job,” notes Susan Krumdieck. “That isn’t the case anymore. Maybe in Qatar a lot of people are still dying on the job but that’s because they’re not doing what we do, namely safety engineering. We see the emergence of corrective discipline time and again. After the Titanic went down, maritime safety emerged to ensure that that didn’t happen again. After toxic waste disasters like Love Canal, we saw the emergence of processes to prevent those man-made disasters.”

Climate change is also a man-made disaster. Like coal mining deaths and toxic waste dumps, it is a byproduct of the industrial era. Recognition of climate change—and the costs it has already exacted in human lives and environmental deterioration—has led to the creation of what Krumdieck calls “transition engineering,” namely an effort to “downshift fossil fuel production and consumption and then engineer the adaptation and resetting of the energy system and the economic behaviors in that context.”

Krumdieck was motivated to become a mechanical engineer as an undergraduate in 1981 “because of the energy crisis, the OPEC oil embargo, global warming, and the existential threat of biodiversity loss,” she remembers. “For nearly 20 years, I taught people how to put CO2 safely and efficiently into the air. Then in the late 1990s, many like me got distracted by carbon capture and storage and by biofuels because we are engineers and it was very exciting to work on these really impossible things.”

She has since transitioned to transition engineering. “That’s how impact happens: by developing standards, training, and professional organizations,” she points out. “Now is the time for people working on this all around the world to come together and create a discipline.”

She hopes that future historians will look at humanity’s predicament today much as we look back at the Triangle Fire. Transition engineering can potentially transform the way economics work much as safety engineering has radically minimized man-made hazards in the workplace.

“This year, in the UK, fewer than 150 will die on the job,” she concludes. “Not one of those is okay. But 100 years ago, all 5,600 worker lives lost were just the price of the progress of industrialization.”

Addressing Fossil Fuel Dependency

Despite considerable investments by China, the United States, and other countries into renewable energy systems like solar and wind, fossil fuels remain the dominant source of energy in the world. In 1966, oil, gas, and coal supplied of all electricity. By 2009, that number had dropped to a little above . But over the next decade, even as concern over climate change spiked, dependency on fossil fuels barely shifted, falling to just under 79% by 2020. The economic rebound from the COVID lockdowns, coupled with the initial energy shocks associated with the war in Ukraine, has encouraged a greater reliance on fossil fuels, , and generated for oil and gas companies.

But the war in Ukraine—and the near universal desire to achieve energy independence from external suppliers—has also inspired many countries to push harder to install renewable energy, forcing the International Energy Agency to revise its estimate of increased renewable capacity by 30%. , “renewables are set to account for over 90% of global electricity expansion over the next five years, overtaking coal to become the largest source of global electricity by early 2025.”

The desire for transition may be strong but the physical infrastructure is still lacking. “The task to get rid of fossil fuels is much larger than we thought, so large that we should have been taking it seriously 20 years ago,” reports Simon Michaux. “We need 586,000 non-fossil-fuel power stations to phase out fossil fuel, but there are only 46,000 in the existing system. We don’t have enough minerals to build these new stations.”

Further, those minerals are often in areas of the Global South where extraction poses serious risks to surrounding communities and the environment. “Half the world’s cobalt reserves are in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Renata Nitta points out, adding that such mines are often the locus of human rights abuses. “More than 14,000 children are working in cobalt mines.

The challenge is not just the insufficiency of mineral resources. “Wind and solar are highly intermittent,” Michaux continues. “To become viable, we need a power buffer. My calculations show that such a power buffer would be so large as to be impractical. Which means that wind and solar can’t be the foundational energy system we want it to be. So, we either need to change wind and solar or we need to change electrical engineering to deal with variable power supply.”

One strategy for gradually reducing dependency on fossil fuels is rationing. The United Kingdom, in supported by the Labour and Green parties, considered implementing Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) as a way to equitably reduce fossil fuel consumption. In , individuals are issued quotas of fossil fuel energy to use, the surplus of which they can sell. Institutions purchase TEQs at auction or buy as needed. The TEQs are linked to carbon reduction goals, and governments can progressively reduce them to meet national and international requirements.

“The system that does the rationing and why is a primary requirement,” Susan Krumdieck points out. “Seats at a Queen concert are rationed: there are only so many. If everyone who wanted to see the concert just showed up it would be a disaster. So, the system that lets us book and manage our expectations is essential. Does that system exist for fossil fuels? No, so let’s build it.”

Simon Michaux agrees that rationing would be sensible, but it would work only if there were sufficient trust in the system, which requires full transparency. “Everyone involved has to understand what’s happening and why,” he maintains.

Because of the war in Ukraine, rationing of energy has already happened throughout Europe. Vedran Horvat points to measures “related to air-conditioning temperatures in offices, the heating of swimming pools, and the lighting of public monuments. This broad range of measures to decrease energy consumption, in the context of the energy crisis in Europe due to the war in Ukraine, is well understood and easily accepted. It is also an issue of solidarity to understand that if we maintain our comfort at an unsustainably high level, it might have detrimental impact on people on the other side of the planet.”

Addressing Growth

Economic growth continues to push greater consumption of energy. The pandemic shutdowns led to a 4.5% decline in global energy consumption in 2020, but that was erased by a in 2021 during the economic rebounds. In the first half of 2022, energy consumption continued to %.

The war in Ukraine, however, has dampened growth prospects, not only for Russia and Ukraine but for Europe more generally. “At the moment, many European countries are facing zero-growth scenarios and some core European economies are not predicting any growth in the next few years,” Vedran Horvat points out. “Which means that we really need to address questions of how to organize our lives and ensure wellbeing for all in conditions of if not degrowth then at least zero growth. This sort of degrowth, which is imposed by geopolitics, is degrowth by disaster.” This kind of degrowth resembles austerity measures imposed during or after other kinds of disasters, like war or debt default.

A better approach, Horvat notes, would be “degrowth by design.” In this way, “we program our developmental scenarios to satisfy human needs and wellbeing but in ways that don’t lead necessarily to economic growth,” he explains. “This would involve fair and equal redistribution of resources through as much of a democratic process as possible. We should think of how to use the current crisis as an opportunity. A democratic transition to degrowth is necessary if we want to discuss viable alternatives rather than have degrowth imposed by disaster as is now the case.”

Such degrowth by design, argues Renata Nitta, must include a major shift in thinking. “We have to move from a very individualistic, profit-driven society to one that is more based on sharing, on the commons, on valuing care,” she notes. “In this sense, we have a lot to learn from what indigenous and traditional communities are doing and telling us. Their vision of the cosmos is embedded in a different ethic that respects the environment. Deforestation rates inside indigenous areas can be 26 percent lower than other areas. So, these communities are very effective in terms of protecting the environment. We have to ensure that they’re part of the decision-making and we surely have to respect their constitutional rights.”

Who Are the Changemakers?

All transitions need people who help engineer the pivot. These are the changemakers, like the revolutionaries in America and France in the eighteenth century or the Silicon Valley scientists and entrepreneurs who ushered in the computer age.

“When change happens, it’s not a shift in mass consciousness among people as such,” Simon Michaux points out. “It’s a relatively small number of people embedded in our civil service. They’re not necessarily elected officials, they’re people advising those officials. And when they decide to move on things, they can move quickly.” He notes that it’s difficult to work through official channels because the establishment is not interested in change: “They’re having a great time with growth and power and money.” But advisors, who aren’t themselves in charge, are a different matter. “If they decide that they’ve had enough, change happens,” he points out.

Scientists and engineers, too, can play a role. “A network of badly-behaved scientists and engineers who just do stuff without permission,” Michaux continues, can also spur forward a shift in consciousness by developing new ideas, approaches, and innovations and getting information about them into circulation. “Most of humanity is inured to the existing paradigm. So, you only need 4-5 percent of humanity” to understand the new approaches and decide to move on them.

Vedran Horvat looks to trade unions as key players in the process, particularly in Europe where the European Green Deal is decarbonizing economies from the top down and without sufficient attention paid to addressing inequality and injustice. Trade unions, he argues, are essential in forging a new social contract that creates the consensus necessary for degrowth scenarios to move from the fringe to mainstream acceptance.

“Trade unions are sometimes quite difficult but necessary partners to tackle the justice element of moving toward post-growth scenarios,” he concludes. “Post-growth scenarios are not politically represented in democracies, are not related to democratic power in a way to execute such scenarios. So, we must find other ways to have political representation of this shift in the political arena.”

Renata Nitta is skeptical about the notion that technology can solve all environmental and climate challenges. To advance zero-growth alternatives, she says, “we need to redefine the convergence points between state, trade union movements, and all those who might be left behind when adopting this new regime.”

Tipping Points

Change can happen when a critical mass of people abandons an old model in favor of something new. Sometimes that happens as a result of a particular event. For instance, the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 spurred an effort to ban the pesticide DDT. On the climate front, the approach of —the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, the complete thaw of northern permafrost—should have already prompted a reconsideration of the push factors behind global warming. Ideally, physical tipping points should translate into perceptual tipping points.

When it comes to economic growth, however, virtually all governments, international financial institutions, and economists—as well as significant majorities of the population—believe that either the status quo is working for them or that directing a larger share of a growing pie will remedy what’s wrong. Only when a critical mass of people understand that the pie can’t keep growing—that unlimited growth is not liberating but ultimately self-defeating— will a tipping point in public opinion be reached.

In April 2010, the largest oil spill in history happened when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Several months later, a massive fire at a ruptured gas pipeline south of San Francisco brought renewed scrutiny to the perils of the fracking industry. Also in 2010, “it was becoming quite clear that the Kyoto protocol was not going to make a blip of difference,” Susan Krumdieck reports. “Those were the galvanizing moments. And that’s when 100 engineers came together to create the Global Association for Transition Engineering. It was clear we were going down a very dangerous path and that we had to help end users adapt to a better way of doing things.”

Another way of discussing tipping points is the notion of sacrifice. When will a critical mass of people willingly accept sacrifices—of their SUVs, frequent air flights, cruise ship vacations, and so on—to save the planet from its multiple environmental threats? Or will sacrifice need to be imposed on an unwilling populace, as China did with its one-child policy beginning in 1980?

“In many countries, social majorities are not accepting that sacrifices need to be made,” Vedran Horvat points out. The stumbling block is not willingness to recycle but willingness to scale back on consumption. “The circular economy obviously has some positive environmental or climate impacts but it doesn’t teach us to consume less,” he adds. “Bringing some resources back into circulation to use again is all good and needed, but it doesn’t require us to consume less. We need to relearn what our lives look like if we consume less.”

Sacrifices can be imposed from above, or they can be agreed upon collectively through a democratic process. 

“Obviously governments, commissions, and transnational governance regimes are all engaged in delivering quick, top-down solutions without investing time into democratic processes,” Horvat continues. “That’s no reason not to bring this debate into society and, wherever possible, enable citizens to learn how to transform their lives. When we say that we don’t have enough resources, we are not asking what energy is being used for at this moment and whether we need that to maintain the system. Some things must be shrunk or calibrated to the new reality if we are to be more responsible toward future generations and for them to live in a just world.”

As Renata Nitta points out, the Global South has already made sacrifices for centuries through colonial appropriation and its aftermath. But now, the Global South urgently needs help in transitioning away from fossil fuels and addressing the current impacts of climate change. “It took 30 years to agree on financing for loss and damage,” she points out. “We can’t wait another 30 years to define the rules for financing the transition. At the national level, we need to move away from the lobbying of big corporations on governments to create processes that are more bottom up than top down: to include marginal groups and ensure that their rights are being respected. It takes a lot of time, but what other choices do we have? I don’t see any other way to create faster change.”

At the same time, Nitta stresses the importance of utopian alternatives. “We are constantly being bombarded by messages of doom,” she says. “These messages disempower people. For quite some time, the environmental movement was quite good at using “end-of-the-world” messages. But now is the time to change. People are building resilience in communities all over the world. Our job as researchers and environmentalists is to help amplify these ideas.”

Sacrifice won’t come easily to the affluent in the Global North. “We’ve been living a wonderful life in the last century, a golden era of getting whatever we want with a snap of our fingers,” notes Simon Michaux. “What happens if we are moving into a world without enough to go around, when we have to work very hard for less outcome? From a biological point of view—and I learned this from —energy determines the size and complexity of an organism. 

If energy is reduced, that organism has to shrink in size and become less complex. If we are stepping into a low-energy future, industry will likewise become simpler and smaller whether we like it or not. There will be a reorganizing of energy around new energy sources. Then people will reorganize themselves around those industrial hubs, and our food production will reorganize around those people.”

In other words, a major fork in the road approaches. “In this way, we’ll decide who we really are and what kind of world we want to live in,” Michaux concludes. “Do we turn against each other or work together?”

Role of the State

The economic trend of the last four decades has been in the direction of reducing the power of the state: privatization of state assets, reduction of regulatory apparatuses, weakening of government leverage over the economy. Some of the policies to address climate change fit into this pattern by emphasizing market-based solutions such as carbon trading. But as in renewable energy suggests, governments have enormous power to push through economic transitions.

“If a government can come up with a sensible plan that everyone gets behind, more government intervention might work,” notes Simon Michaux. “But if it’s like the Roman Empire, when the government wasn’t acting in the best interests of the majority of the population, then it won’t work. If that happens, there will be less government intervention and a parallel system of governance will emerge, and the social mandate to govern will transfer from one system to the other. We’ll need government in some form, but that government would have to implement a new system that doesn’t exist yet in a paradigm that doesn’t exist yet. My job going forward is to build the tools that try to understand what that paradigm might be and then hand those tools off to people who will go on past me.”

Governments also remain subject to considerable influence from the corporate sector, particularly fossil fuel companies that continue to lobby for subsidies and other favorable terms. “We see at every COP how weak governments are,” Vedran Horvat explains. “They are not able to make agreements that are immune from fossil fuel companies and the corporate sector more generally. The return of government is essential in abandoning fossil fuels for it is governments who ultimately have to operate in the public interest.”

Renata Nitta agrees: “The market won’t resolve the climate and biodiversity crisis. A market mechanism proposed by companies is often little more than greenwashing so that they can maintain business as usual. It’s important to pressure government to keep these corporations accountable and not accept false solutions.”

Time, all of the presenters agree, is of the essence. “Now that I’m a granny, I don’t have time to think about things I can’t do anything about, such as the way the market works or the way politicians work,” Susan Krumdieck reports. “I’m laser-focused on the changes that are required, on a change in a place or a system that can be scaled up.”

“Odrast is the Croatian word for degrowth,” points out Vedran Horvat. “The word doesn’t sound negative in Croatian. It means to grow up and be mature. So, we need to be mature enough to cooperate and identify a definite set of options to ensure the survival of future generations.”
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The Pentagon is required by law to provide Congress and the public with an annual report on “military and security developments involving the People’s Republic of China,” or PRC, over the next 20 years. The 2022 version, of detailed information published last November 29th, focused on its current and future military threat to the United States. In two decades, so we’re assured, China’s military — the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA — will be superbly equipped to counter Washington should a conflict arise over Taiwan or navigation rights in the South China Sea. But here’s the shocking thing: in those nearly 200 pages of analysis, there wasn’t a single word — not one — devoted to China’s role in what will pose the most pressing threat to our security in the years to come: runaway climate change.

The World This Week: Climate Change Matters and So Do Other Species

At a time when California has just been in a singular fashion by punishing winds and massive rain storms delivered by a moisture-laden “atmospheric river” flowing over large parts of the state while much of the rest of the country has from severe, often lethal floods, tornadoes, or snowstorms, it should be self-evident that climate change constitutes a vital threat to our security. But those storms, along with the rapacious wildfires and relentless heatwaves experienced in recent summers — not to speak of a 1,200-year record in the Southwest — represent a to what we can expect in the decades to come. By 2042, the nightly news — already saturated with storm-related disasters — could be devoted almost exclusively to such events.

All true, you might say, but what does China have to do with any of this? Why should climate change be included in a Department of Defense report on security developments in relation to the People’s Republic?

There are three reasons why it should not only have been included but given extensive coverage. First, China is now and will remain the world’s leading emitter of climate-altering carbon emissions, with the United States — though the greatest emitter — staying in second place. So, any effort to slow the pace of global warming and truly enhance this country’s “security” must involve a strong drive by Beijing to reduce its emissions as well as cooperation in energy decarbonization between the two greatest emitters on this planet. Second, China itself will be subjected to extreme climate-change harm in the years to come, which will severely limit the PRC’s ability to carry out ambitious military plans of the sort described in the 2022 Pentagon report. Finally, by 2042, count on one thing: the American and Chinese armed forces will be devoting most of their resources and attention to disaster relief and recovery, diminishing both their motives and their capacity to go to war with one another.

China’s Outsized Role in the Climate Change Equation

Global warming, scientists tell us, is caused by the accumulation of “anthropogenic” (human-produced) greenhouse gasses (GHGs) in the atmosphere that trap the reflected light from the sun’s radiation. of those GHGs are carbon and methane emitted during the production and combustion of fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas); additional GHGs are released through agricultural and industrial processes, especially steel and cement production. To prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era — the largest increase scientists believe the planet can absorb without catastrophic outcomes — such emissions will have to be sharply reduced.

Historically speaking, the United States and the European Union (EU) countries have been the largest GHG emitters, for 25% and 22% of cumulative CO2 emissions, respectively. But those countries, and other advanced industrial nations like Canada and Japan, have been taking significant steps to reduce their emissions, including phasing out the use of coal in electricity generation and providing incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles. As a result, their net CO2 emissions have in recent years and are expected to decline further in the decades to come (though they will need to do yet more to keep us below that 1.5-degree warming limit).

China, a relative latecomer to the industrial era, is historically responsible for “only” 13% of cumulative global CO2 emissions. However, in its drive to accelerate its economic growth in recent decades, it has vastly increased its reliance on coal to generate electricity, resulting in ever-greater CO2 emissions. China now accounts for an of total world coal consumption, which, in turn, largely explains its current dominance among the major carbon emitters. According to the 2022 edition of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, the PRC was responsible for 33% of global CO2 emissions in 2021, compared with 15% for the US and 11% for the EU.

What Climate Debt Does the North Owe the South?

Like most other countries, China has to abide by the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 and undertake the decarbonization of its economy as part of a worldwide drive to keep global warming within some bounds. As part of that agreement, however, China itself as a “developing” country with the option of increasing its fossil-fuel use for 15 years or so before achieving a peak in CO2 emissions in 2030. Barring some surprising set of developments then, the PRC will undoubtedly the world’s leading source of CO2 emissions for years to come, suffusing the atmosphere with colossal amounts of carbon dioxide and undergirding a continuing rise in global temperatures.   

Yes, the United States, Japan, and the EU countries should indeed do more to reduce their emissions, but they’re already on a downward trajectory and an even more rapid decline will not be enough to offset China’s colossal CO2 output. Put differently, those Chinese emissions — estimated by the IEA at 12 billion metric tons annually — represent at least as great a threat to US security as the multitude of tanks, planes, ships, and missiles enumerated in the Pentagon’s 2022 report on security developments in the PRC. That means they will require the close attention of American policymakers if we are to escape the most severe impacts of climate change.

China’s Vulnerability to Climate Change

Along with detailed information on China’s outsized contribution to the greenhouse effect, any thorough report on security developments involving the PRC should have included an assessment of that country’s vulnerability to climate change. It should have laid out just how global warming might, in the future, affect its ability to marshal resources for a demanding, high-cost military competition with the United States.

In the coming decades, like the US and other continental-scale countries, China will suffer severely from the multiple impacts of rising world temperatures, including extreme storm damage, prolonged droughts and heatwaves, catastrophic flooding, and rising seas. Worse yet, the PRC has several distinctive features that will leave it especially vulnerable to global warming, including a heavily-populated eastern seaboard rising sea levels and increasingly powerful typhoons; a vast interior, parts of which, already significantly dry, will be prone to full-scale ; and a vital river system that relies on unpredictable rainfall and increasingly imperiled . As warming advances and China experiences an ever-increasing climate assault, its social, economic, and political institutions, including the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), will be severely tested.

According to a recent from the Center for Climate and Security, “,” the threats to its vital institutions will take two major forms: hits to its critical infrastructure like port facilities, military bases, transportation hubs, and low-lying urban centers along China’s heavily populated coastline; and the danger of growing internal instability arising from ever-increasing economic dislocation, food scarcity, and governmental incapacitation.

China’s coastline already suffers heavy flooding during severe storms and significant parts of it could be entirely underwater by the second half of this century, requiring the possible relocation of hundreds of millions of people and the reconstruction of billions of dollars’ worth of vital facilities. Such tasks will surely require the full attention of Chinese authorities as well as the extensive homebound commitment of military resources, leaving little capacity for foreign adventures. Why, you might wonder, is there not a single sentence about this in the Pentagon’s assessment of future Chinese capabilities?

Even more worrisome, from Beijing’s perspective, is the possible effect of climate change on the country’s internal stability. “Climate change impacts are likely to threaten China’s economic growth, its food and water security, and its efforts at poverty eradication,” the climate center’s study suggests (but the Pentagon report doesn’t mention). Such developments will, in turn, “likely increase the country’s vulnerability to political instability, as climate change undermines the government’s ability to meet its citizens’ demands.”

Of particular concern, the report suggests, is global warming’s dire threat to food security. China, it notes, must feed approximately 20% of the world’s population while occupying only 12% of its arable land, much of which is vulnerable to drought, flooding, extreme heat, and other disastrous climate impacts. As food and water supplies dwindle, Beijing could face popular unrest, even revolt, in food-scarce areas of the country, especially if the government fails to respond adequately. This, no doubt, will compel the CCP to deploy its armed forces nationwide to maintain order, leaving ever fewer of them available for other military purposes — another possibility absent from the Pentagon’s assessment.

COP27 Flopped: the Rich Won’t Pay, the Poor Will Suffer

Of course, in the years to come, the US, too, will feel the ever more severe impacts of climate change and may itself no longer be in a position to fight wars in distant lands — a consideration also completely absent from the Pentagon report.

The Prospects for Climate Cooperation

Along with gauging China’s military capabilities, that annual report is required by law to consider “United States-China engagement and cooperation on security matters… including through United States-China military-to-military contacts.” And indeed, the 2022 version does note that Washington interprets such “engagement” as involving joint efforts to avert accidental or inadvertent conflict by participating in high-level Pentagon-PLA crisis-management arrangements, including what’s known as the Crisis Communications Working Group. “Recurring exchanges [like these],” the report , “serve as regularized mechanisms for dialogue to advance priorities related to crisis prevention and management.”

Any effort aimed at preventing conflict between the two countries is certainly a worthy endeavor. But the report also assumes that such military friction is now inevitable and the most that can be hoped for is to prevent World War III from being ignited. However, given all we’ve already learned about the climate threat to both China and the United States, isn’t it time to move beyond mere conflict avoidance to more collaborative efforts, military and otherwise, aimed at reducing our mutual climate vulnerabilities?

At the moment, sadly enough, such relations sound far-fetched indeed.  But it shouldn’t be so. After all, the Department of Defense has already designated climate change a vital threat to national security and has indeed called for cooperative efforts between American forces and those of other countries in overcoming climate-related dangers. “We will elevate climate as a national security priority,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in March 2021, “integrating climate considerations into the Department’s policies, strategies, and partner engagements.”

Cities Under Water
Where in the world is most at risk from sea-level rise?

The Pentagon provided further information on such “partner engagements” in a 2021 report on the military’s vulnerabilities to climate change. “There are many ways for the Department to integrate climate considerations into international partner engagements,” that report , “including supporting interagency diplomacy and development initiatives in partner nations [and] sharing best practices.” One such effort, it noted, is the Pacific Environmental Security Partnership, a network of climate specialists from that region who meet annually at the Pentagon-sponsored Pacific Environmental Security Forum.

At present, China is not among the nations involved in that or other Pentagon-sponsored climate initiatives. Yet, as both countries experience increasingly severe impacts from rising global temperatures and their militaries are forced to devote ever more time and resources to disaster relief, information-sharing on climate-response “best practices” will make so much more sense than girding for war over Taiwan or small uninhabited islands in the East and South China Seas (some of which will be completely underwater by century’s end). Indeed, the Pentagon and the PLA are more alike in facing the climate challenge than most of the world’s military forces and so it should be in both countries’ mutual interests to promote cooperation in the ultimate critical area for any country in this era of ours.Consider it a form of twenty-first-century madness, then, that a Pentagon report on the US and China can’t even conceive of such a possibility. Given China’s increasingly significant role in world affairs, Congress should require an annual Pentagon report on all relevant military and security developments involving the PRC. Count on one thing: in the future, one devoted exclusively to analyzing what still passes for “military” developments and lacking any discussion of climate change will seem like an all-too-grim joke. The world deserves better going forward if we are to survive the coming climate onslaught.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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There is also another important overlooked fact about wars of the 19^th century. They amplify the four horsemen of the apocalypse of the 21^st century: global warming, nuclear war, food insecurity and pandemics.

It is clear that we need a new definition of national security.  This new definition needs to focus on what actually makes individuals more secure in their daily lives. Competition between nations will continue in the realm of technologies, economics and trade but we need international cooperation to confront the four horsemen — this new phenomenon could be termed coopetition.  In a way, we have stumbled into this transition already with such organizations as the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, etc. 

However, we still think about national security in a 19^th century way. By changing our definition, we can hasten the transition to better policies both nationally and globally. The need for such a change is highlighted by the Russia-Ukraine war.  From a 19^th century point of view, Russian leaders feel they need a buffer zone to protect Russia. In turn, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) feels compelled to avoid appeasement of an aggressive dictator that in their view led to World War II. From a 21^st century national security point of view, the Russia-Ukraine war is making each of the horsemen more dangerous.

Global Warming

Greenhouse gases are released every time a gun is fired, a bomb goes off, a building catches fire, an armored vehicle burns and so on and so forth. The transportation systems that bring all the military personnel and equipment to the battlefield release more greenhouse gases. The manufacture of weapons releases greenhouse gases as well. Finally, when the war is over and reconstruction starts, there will be an increase in greenhouse gases because of reconstruction.

Now, it can be argued that the Russia-Ukraine war may hasten Europe’s move away from fossil fuels and lead to reliance on sustainable forms of energy.  It can also be argued that the rise in fossil fuel costs around the world will lead to a reduction in consumption. But, so far, we are not seeing that transpire. Instead, the fossil fuel industry is adapting to the new situation.

Nuclear War

We have two nuclear-armed groups separated by several hundred miles talking of tactical nuclear weapons. We have soldiers firing at nuclear power plants. Emotions are running high. Egos are involved. Casualty rates appear to be quite high. It appears that soldiers are taking drastic actions, either out of frustration or under direct orders or a mix of the two. There are reports on Russian-controlled media for national . Individual Russian civilians have called for the use of nuclear weapons. It doesn’t take much to imagine something going wrong: a nuclear accident, a rogue officer ordering a launch or even the top leadership ordering a tactical low-grade nuclear strike.

Since the end of World War II, nuclear weapons have not been used. Even the use of tactical nuclear weapons has been unthinkable. That is, unthinkable till now. Political leaders are talking about being prepared for such an eventuality. If tactical nuclear weapons become thinkable, what happens to strategic nuclear weapons? If tactical nuclear weapons are used a few miles on the other side of your border, what are the radiation effects on you? Does all this make the people in your nation more secure?

Food Insecurity

The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres,has , “We all see the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine. But beyond its borders, the war has launched a silent assault on the developing world. The crisis could plunge up to 1.7 billion people, more than a fifth of humanity, into poverty and hunger on a scale not seen in decades.”

If you are a well-off individual in a country where food prices go up, but there is plenty of supply. Would you care if 20% of humanity falls into poverty, hunger and despair? Even in a Hobbesian worldview, the answer has to be yes. Despair among 20% of the global population is bound to breed trouble for all. Desperate people do desperate things: crime, corruption, terrorism and illegal immigration are just the tip of the iceberg.

In short, if my neighbor’s house catches fire, my house is at risk as well. If I want to ensure my security, I need to make sure my neighbor’s house doesn’t catch fire. And right now 20% of humanity is soon going to have their house on fire. This isn’t good for my security or anybody’s security. 

Pandemics

We are still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, we might be entering a new era of pandemics. Some authors have been arguing that “environmental devastation threatens to unleash new zoonotic diseases as well as long-dormant bacteria and viruses to deadly effect.”

The Russia-Ukraine war is adding to the risk of pandemics. Refugees are now living in close proximity even as wartime conditions undermine their immune systems. We could do well to remember that the end of World War I led to an influenza pandemic. It killed more people than the war itself. That could happen again.

The Right Tools for the Right Problems

A screwdriver and a hammer are both good tools, but using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail is suboptimal, if not stupid. In the US, both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have been examining the four horsemen’s risks to national security. Intelligence and defense Institutions in other countries have been doing the same.

Yet there is an argument to be made that the DNA of these institutions equips them for 19^th century challenges. They are unable to really think through the risks of global warming, nuclear war, food insecurity and pandemics. They do not know how to manage the 21^st century horsemen of the apocalypse. These institutions were designed for conflict, not cooperation or coopetition. Yet they command top of mindshare and the lion’s share of funding.

The time has come to define national security differently. We must examine what enhances the security of an individual and work towards achieving it. This will require people, processes, organizations and technologies focused on cooperation rather than conflict. We will have to build upon previous attempts at cooperation and collaboration as well as engage in new thinking, new development and new research to tackle the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Cities Under Water (Interactive)

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“To cover the gap and manage catastrophic risk accumulation,” he adds, “the role of insurance and reinsurance pools is key, often drawn by traumatic events themselves.” This being said, the gap of uninsured damages is huge, which means not only a growing burden on public budgets but also on the most exposed and those directly hit. These situations will impact access and credit conditions for these populations.

Insurer concerns are no longer individual catastrophic events, but their global and systemic effects on human societies. Andrew Cornford, a counselor at the Observatoire de la Finance in Switzerland, explains: “The problems posed to insurers … will be due to the increased … scale of the actual occurrence of events associated with these risks, to their sometimes geographically uncertain incidence, and to increased correlations between them.”

In Cornford’s view, the problems can, to some extent, “be handled through better designed and increased capital requirements, public-sector reserves and precautionary arrangements suggested by stress testing — for which recent experience with COVID-19 may be helpful.” However, the underlying hypothesis is that the level of premiums will remain affordable to those seeking cover.

Nevertheless, increased property claims as a result of extreme weather events are forcing insurers to reevaluate underwriting strategies, including rebalancing their premiums and pricing strategies. Against this background, regulators have expressed concern that climate change could make it difficult for insurance companies to provide affordable financial protection. Rising premiums could make cover unaffordable, especially for disadvantaged communities that are more likely to live in regions prone to disaster.

Instead of burdening local populations with costs of damages that occur due to the impact of climate change — caused largely by the wealthy Global North — there is an urgent need to devise underwriting strategies to transfer a substantial portion of climate-related insurance costs from the South to the North. This would allow the international community to share the burden. Otherwise, the most exposed regions of the world may well become impossible to insure by market mechanisms, which would leave only the public guarantee option open, as stressed by the economist Etienne Perrot.

By Virgile Perret and Paul Dembinski

Note: From Virus to Vitamin invites experts to comment on issues relevant to finance and the economy in relation to society, ethics and the environment. Below, you will find views from a variety of perspectives, practical experiences and academic disciplines. The topic of this discussion is: Can private insurance alone mitigate climate change damages?

“…pass the cost to policyholders through increased insurance premiums… ”

Unlike randomness, which allows a probability calculation on a statistical basis, uncertainty arises from facts that are emerging — unique or too few to give rise to a stochastic calculation. Randomness is the basis of prevention and insurance systems. On the other hand, uncertainty can only be covered by contingency reserves — it’s a precaution. (The IPCC forecast [that] insurance’s prevention and precaution are the three forms of the virtue of prudence, which is the intelligence of concrete situations.)

Henri de Castries, therefore, hypothesizes that the damaging meteorological phenomena induced by a global warming of 4 degrees are phenomena, if not unique, at least too few to enter into an insurance system. This involves the states, either directly when they compensate for the damage by compulsory levies (in France, we have known ‘the drought tax’ in the 1980s) or by obliging the insurance companies to compensate the damage, which will pass the cost on to policyholders through increased insurance premiums.

Etienne Perrot — Jesuit, economist and editorial board member of the Choisir magazine (Geneva) and adviser to the journal Etudes (Paris)

“…public-private partnerships can be developed…”

According to Munich Re, global losses from natural disasters in 2020 came to $210 billion, of which $82 billion was insured. To cover the gap and manage catastrophic risk accumulation, the role of insurance and reinsurance pools is key, often drawn by traumatic events themselves. Public-private partnerships are nothing new (e.g., US National Flood Insurance or the Spanish Consorcio) and can be developed.

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Insurance plays an essential role toward mitigating damage from climate change through underwriting, prevention, disseminating knowledge and as investors. Large players have recently committed to the UN-convened net-zero insurance alliance. Artificial intelligence and big data analysis research, also supported by insurance, will increase natural disaster predictability. Insurance and reinsurance markets are efficient, though unpretentious.

Domingo Sugranyes — director of a seminar on ethics and technology at Pablo VI Foundation, former executive vice-chairman of MAPFRE international insurance group

“…capital requirements, public-sector reserves and precautionary arrangements… ”

Individually, most of the risks associated with a substantial rise in temperature due to climate change can be quantified, owing to past experience. The problems posed to insurers, other private financial institutions and the public sector will be due to the increased — and sometimes unpredictably increased — scale of the actual occurrence of events associated with these risks, to their sometimes geographically uncertain incidence and to increased correlations between them.

To some extent, the resulting problems can be handled through better designed and increased capital requirements, public-sector reserves and precautionary arrangements suggested by stress testing — for which recent experience with COVID-19 may be helpful. These arrangements will entail institutional innovations, training of people to handle the consequences of the new risks and enhanced multilateral cooperation — the absence of any of which will reduce the effectiveness of the potential contribution of finance to control of damages and mitigation of their effects.

Andrew Cornford — counselor at Observatoire de la Finance, former staff member of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), with special responsibility for financial regulation and international trade in financial services

*[An earlier version of this article was published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Water World: Is Climate Change Driving Our Future Out to Sea?  

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The question now is whether governments will respond adequately to the urgent threats to these rights.

Climate Justice

Despite grand at the COP26 summit, the updated climate pledges, if met, still put the world on track to hit of warming this century. The difference between the 1.5° target of the 2015 Paris Agreement and 2.4° Celsius would be measured in millions of lives — taken by natural disasters, food and water insecurity, displacement and climate-induced conflict.

To prevent this human rights catastrophe, global leaders must keep 1.5° alive with urgent action, not warm words. Wealthy countries with historic climate debt must immediately end fossil fuel , cut emissions every year to 2030, rapidly phase out fossil fuels and use public finance for ambitious transitions to renewable energy. This transition would be the greatest in human history.

However, leaders must also recognize that the climate crisis is already here now. Support must be provided for those most badly affected, who are often those doing the least to cause this crisis. In particular, climate refugees urgently need an international legal framework to allow them to move safely and with dignity. Despite more people being displaced by the changing climate than by war, they are falling through the , with no binding legal protections.

This year features the inaugural International Migration Review Forum at the United Nations. It’s time for action over climate refugees.

Ocean Emergency

Another essential resolution for world leaders in 2022 is to protect the blue beating heart of our planet. The ocean is our greatest carbon sink, home to extraordinary wildlife and directly depended upon by millions of people for livelihoods and food. However, we need to start supporting the ocean in return.

This means ending harmful fisheries subsidies at the World Trade Organization. These subsidies drive carbon emissions and ecosystem collapse and imperil human . This year must also see an end to bottom trawling in protected areas, greater transparency in global fisheries — our most essential tool in the fight against illegal fishing and human rights abuses at sea ­— and a true recognition of the vital role played by ocean wildlife in keeping our climate stable.

The 15^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) is one moment where the world’s eyes will be on wildlife and biodiversity. After all, the flagship Aichi targets on biodiversity were missed and world leaders must resolve this year to truly step up to protect and restore nature. We are in an age of mass with wildlife in precipitous decline.

This destruction of the complex web of life on Earth is inherently wrong, but it also directly threatens us. All our most basic human depend on a thriving natural world, and as we erode it, we also expose ourselves to more climate disasters, food insecurity, and devastating environmental injustice.

Taking Responsibility

As well as action, establishing accountability is going to be a key test of world leaders this year. Just 100 companies have been responsible for of greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. The biggest polluters have had plenty of opportunities to voluntarily cut their emissions and protect human rights and have failed to do so. Strong laws, alongside rigorous and consistent enforcement, are now needed to prevent environmental and human rights abuses from occurring in their supply chains.

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EU legislation on sustainable corporate governance was due to advance last year, in order to increase corporate accountability and promote environmental standards and human rights around the world. This has again been delayed. This legislation must now be pushed through quickly and not be watered down.

The planetary emergency is here, but there is still hope. We can still make 2022 the year we finally take serious action to protect people and the planet — the solutions already exist. The New Year’s resolutions of our leaders should be to speed up the transition to zero carbon emissions, protect and restore nature, establish accountability for those destroying it, and put human rights and environmental justice at the heart of their decision-making. If they can finally do this, we can have a world where people and nature thrive, supported by one another.

*[Steve Trent is the executive director and co-founder of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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How Will the UAE Cope With Growing Environmental Insecurity?

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Exposure to extreme heat can be fatal for those who have no access to air conditioning. Apart from being a direct threat to human life, the effects of climate change and high temperatures have the potential to spill over and impact all sectors of the economy.

It has been long understood that economic activity and climate conditions are related. This relationship between the climate and the economy has defined the magnitude and scope of markets in several countries, including in the Middle East. In 2020, the World Economic Forum concluded that climate change is ranked as the biggest risk to the global economy.

The Climate and the Economy

While greenhouse gases have no geographical boundaries, their impact differs significantly across the globe. A paper published in Nature that under current climate policies that are on course for an average temperature rise of 2.9˚C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, the world’s most vulnerable countries would suffer an average GDP loss of around 20% by 2050 and in excess of 60% by 2100. In the Middle East, Sudan is expected to suffer the most: Its GDP is projected to drop by around 32% by 2050 and by more than 80% by 2100 as a result of climate change.

One sector in the economy that would struggle the most is agriculture. Exposure to high temperatures could cause losses to agricultural production as heat stress negatively affects plant growth and animal productivity. Over time, heat stress is likely to increase vulnerability to disease and reduce dairy output. According to a 2018 UNDP report, crop production in the Middle East region is expected to drop by 30% in case of 1.5˚C-2˚C warming by 2025. Additionally, extremely high temperatures might aggravate an already bad situation in this sector.

On the one hand, agriculture is the largest consumer of water in the Middle East, using between 78% to 87% of all resources. Higher temperatures will add more stress to irrigation schedules in terms of both frequency and amount. On the other hand, farming activity and businesses could be wiped out as they do not contribute significantly to the regional economies, whether in terms of GDP or exports, in proportion to the amount of resources it uses. This translates into a potential risk of economic instability and disruptions in the food supply chain.

Similarly, the tourism sector in the Middle East would lose a significant share of the market due to climate change. In 2018, contributed $270 billion to the region’s GDP, or around 9% of the economy. In the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, as of 2020, the tourism sector had, on average, a 13% share of the GDP. Although the pandemic has slowed down travel, the sector is now attempting to recover.

The impact of climate change on the sector could be irreversible. In Jordan, the , which used to attract some 1.5 million visitors every year, now welcomes just a few thousand after it had shrunk by almost a third due to low rainfall and high temperatures. Alexandria, in Egypt, home of one of the Seven Wonders of the World as well as a , faces flooding, building collapse and loss of life as a result of sea-level rise.

Furthermore, some of the driest countries in the region suffered from flooding as a result of sudden heavy storms. For , Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, was hit by abrupt storms that killed 30 in November 2018. Long periods of dry weather increased fire risks in Algeria, which suffered devastating that took 90 lives in August.

The Impact on Energy Systems

Energy systems are no different than the tourism and agriculture sectors in terms of susceptibility to climate change. For example, energy demand for space cooling will rise due to average temperature increase. In 2015, it was estimated that 80% of total in the Middle East is used for cooling systems. These countries face challenges meeting growing energy demands, particularly during the summer months, and they could experience frequent grid failures and subsequent power blackouts.

Power shortages and blackouts would in turn cause negative societal and economic impacts. Cooling systems are necessary to sustain life during extremely high temperatures, and blackouts could significantly affect the everyday activities of the local populace.

Given the negative impact of high temperatures, in order to combat growing greenhouse gas emissions, GCC policymakers should consider an integrated climate change policy that helps enable decision-makers to allocate natural resources in a sustainable and integrated manner as well as achieve net-zero carbon emissions. The Middle East and other countries around the world must factor climate change into their strategic planning in order to secure economic development alongside a climate-resilient economy. Unfortunately, the concept of integrated climate policy is relatively new to Middle Eastern countries in particular.  

Lastly, and most importantly, GCC members and other countries in the region have launched climate change initiatives to reduce emissions and adapt to high temperatures. For instance, at the end of October, Sheikh Khalid bin Khalifa of Qatar unveiled the national environment and in an effort to mitigate climate change impact. Under the plan, the country hopes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% by 2030.

Other targets include reducing groundwater extraction by 60%, reducing daily household water consumption by a third and the doubling of desalination via reverse osmosis as well as prioritizing high yield and sustainable agriculture production by driving more than 50% improvement in farmland productivity.

The initiative emphasizes the importance of balancing the different goals and interests among resource consumers. This will improve security and accelerate the transition toward a climate-resilient economy as well as drive climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies for Qatar, the Middle East and the world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy or HBKU’s official stance.

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Fiji’s Women Are Living the Reality of Climate Change

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Climate change, as the skeptics like to remind us, does occur naturally. Analysis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  that temperatures during the last interglacial period, which began 130,000 years ago and lasted somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 years, were 0.5˚C and 1˚C warmer than in pre-industrial times and up to 2˚C or even 4˚C warmer during the mid-Pliocene Warm Period, around 3 million years ago. But while there are natural processes in place, the pace of climate change over the past century has demonstrated the devastating effect of anthropogenic activity on the delicate balance of life on Earth. 

The Seas Are Rising

What is significant about the IPCC assessment is that during the last interglacial period, sea levels were likely between 6 meters and 9 meters higher, possibly reaching 25 meters during the mid-Pliocene. That may sound farfetched, but modeling suggests a 2.3-meter rise per 1˚C of warming. Globally, the average sea level has already  by 0.2 meters since the late 19^th century, starting at a  of 1.4 millimeters a year from 1901 to 1990 and accelerating to 3.6 millimeters a year between 2006 and 2015.

This spells disaster for the coastal areas. A  published in Environmental Research Letters earlier this year suggests that, even with no net global emissions after 2020, “the carbon already in the atmosphere could sustain enough warming for global mean sea level to rise 1.9 (0–3.8) meters over the coming centuries,” meaning that currently, anywhere between 120 million and 650 million people — or a mean of 5.3% of the world’s population — live on land below the new tide lines. 

Even if warming is kept under the upper limit of the Paris Agreement of 2˚C above pre-industrial levels, multi-century sea level rise can reach 4.7 meters, threatening the livelihoods of double the number of people, the authors assess. In 2019, the IPCC estimated that this number could reach  by 2050. The panel predicts a rise of anywhere between 0.29 meters and 1.1 meters by 2100 relative to 1985-2005, depending on emission rates. A paper published in Nature concluded that if we stay on the current emissions course heading for 3˚C warming, we will reach a , with the Antarctic ice sheet alone adding 0.5 centimeters to global sea levels each year. 

According to the authors of a 2019 study on sea-level rise and migration, rising waters are  to be the “most expensive and irreversible future consequences of global climate change, costing up to 4.5% of global gross domestic product.” A 2018  by C40, a network of mayors of nearly 100 global cities, estimated that a 2˚C rise could affect 800 million people in 570 urban centers by mid-century. As the authors of a 2021 study , “Although there is large variability in future sea level projections, due, for instance, to the uncertainty in anthropogenic emissions, there is consensus on the potentially catastrophic worldwide impact of SLR.”

A 2˚C rise puts land that houses over half the population of Vietnam and Bangladesh and over 80% of those living in the island nations like Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Bahamas and the Marshall Islands . The , with 80% of its 1,200 atolls not even reaching 1 meter above sea level — the , with its highest elevation point of just 2.4 meters — is particularly at risk; there is literally nowhere to hide. In May, the minister for the environment, climate change and technology, Aminath Shauna,  CNBC that if current trends continue, the island nation “will not be here” by 2100. “We will not survive. … There’s no higher ground for us … it’s just us, it’s just our islands and the sea.”

Water, Water Everywhere

It is clear that Alisi Rabukawaqa, project liaison officer at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, she has given this a lot of thought. When I ask her about the reality of climate change in what many would consider to be a tropical paradise — her native Fiji — she doesn’t stop talking for nearly 10 minutes. She remembers a time when devastating cyclones were “lifetimes apart.” Now, category 5 storms are a regular, looming threat. 

“And if it’s not cyclones, it’s the drought. And if it’s not the drought, it’s the saltwater intrusion that’s impacting where people plant; and if it’s not that, it’s seeping into drinking sources and boreholes from outer islands,” she tells me from a Fiji so hot, everyone is bracing for another cyclone.

While for most communities affected by sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion relocation is still “further down the line,” traditional land ownership laws mean that you can’t just pack up and move anywhere you like, even if, unlike in the Maldives, there is higher ground. In 2017, the government’s  identified over 830 vulnerable communities, 48 of which were in urgent need of resettlement. The plan was developed a year after , which hit Fiji in February 2016, significantly affected around 350,000 people. That is a high number by any standard; here, it’s more than a third of the population. 

“Fiji is a small place relatively, so all those things combined, it’s made us more vulnerable,” Rabukawaqa says. “In the past, it was just the issue of development, thinking of proper development, like, How do we do this right? How do you ensure it’s sustainable? Reforestation. Those seem like simpler times.”

Saltwater intrusion is what is having a major impact on the coastal community of Barishal in Bangladesh, home to Kathak Biswas Joy, district coordinator with Youth Net for Climate Justice, member of the advisory team with Child Rights Connect and the founder of the non-profit Aranyak. It was his work on children’s rights that made him realize that “in Bangladesh, everything is related to climate change.” As it exacerbates existing inequalities,  from the countryside — where salinity and flooding are destroying farmland — to the coastal cities, child labor and child marriage become ever more commonplace. 

So does disease. Increased  has been linked to numerous problems during  and , hair loss and skin diseases, dysentery, hypertension, risk of miscarriage and changes in menstrual cycles as well as difficulty with maintaining hygiene. The deadly dengue fever, already the “fastest growing vector-borne viral disease in the world” as a result of a , has  Bangladesh alongside the COVID-19 pandemic. In a country where water is everywhere, it seems to bring as little relief as it did to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient .

Rabukawaqa echoes this sentiment. In a nation that depends almost entirely on the ocean, the traditional and cultural relationship with it is turning from “a beautiful, loving, caring one … into one where the ocean is suddenly becoming our enemy. And we don’t want it to be that way.”

On Your Doorstep

If you think that Alisi Rabukawaqa’s and Kathak Biswas Joy’s problems are far from your world, think again. While  out of 10 top large countries at risk from sea-level rise are located in Asia, no place is safe. Many of the world’s most vibrant cities already face a considerable threat from flooding by as early as 2030 — less than a decade from now. , a nonprofit, has used data from “peer-reviewed science in leading journals” to map areas most at risk over the coming century. While the creators warn that the mapping is bound to include errors, its scope of doom is frightening. 

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If global warming is not halted, cities as diverse as Bangkok, New Orleans, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, Hamburg, Yangon, Antwerp, Basra, Dhaka, New York and Dubai may see entire neighborhoods submerged. On average, coastal residents experience a sea-level rise of around 8 millimeters to 10 millimeters a year for every 3-millimeter rise in sea levels due to  — the slow sinking of land that occurs in river deltas that can be exacerbated by the extraction of resources like groundwater and oil. 

Tokyo, for example, sank by 4 meters over the course of last century, Shanghai, Bangkok and New Orleans by 2 meters. The Thai capital, built on what is known as “,” saw the water-logged areas it sits on drained to accommodate for agriculture and urban expansion, making flooding a recurring problem, exacerbated by a six-month-long rainy season. 

In Shanghai alone, China’s financial hub that sits in the Yangtze River estuary surrounded by lakes, nearly $1 trillion of assets are at risk as a result of rising waters, according to  by the Financial Times. The Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, which  20% of China’s GDP and 3.8% of global wealth, is one of the areas most at risk of sea-level rise. In May, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment  that its coastal waters were 73 millimeters above “normal” average for the period between 1993 and 2011, with temperatures 0.7˚C above the 1981-2010 range.

In Venice, the aqua alta, or “high water,” usually occurs between autumn and spring caused a combination of tide peaks, sirocco winds and the lunar cycle. The city that encompasses some 100 lagoon islands has been threatened by water for centuries, but according to , Venice had experienced as many inundations over 1.1-meters aqua alta levels in the last two decades alone as over the whole of the previous century. The 2019 flood that  80% of the city, killing two and causing devastating damage to historical landmarks and $1 billion of losses, saw the second-highest water level in its history.

Mozambique, with one of the longest coastlines in Africa that spans 2,470 kilometers and is home to 60% of the population, is in danger of losing an estimated 4,850 square kilometers of land surface by 2040, according to an  by USAID. With 45% already living below the poverty line, 70% currently depend on  living conditions. According to a 2021 study published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 20% of the population relies on fishing as the main income, contributing some 10% of the country’s GDP, alongside 5% brought in by tourism.

Coastal erosion and increasing extreme weather events like Cyclone Idai, the deadliest storm in the history of southern Africa, and Cyclone Kenneth, that hit Mozambique in 2019, threaten all of this — as well as the country’s fragile ecosystems like coral reefs. Idai and Kenneth caused ; at around 22% of the country’s GDP, that’s about half the annual budget. 

If the current projections are correct, 12 of  may be under 1 meter of water by the end of the century. Mumbai, the country’s economic capital, and Kolkata, India’s third-largest city built in the lower Ganges Delta, rely on drainage systems dating back to colonial times. Consequently, Mumbai experiences floods every year these days. According to IPCC assessment, Kolkata  more than any other studied city between 1950 and 2018, by 2.6˚C — ahead of  Tehran’s 2.3˚C and Moscow’s 1˚C — and may see its one-day maximum rainfall rise by 50% by 2100. 

While the United Kingdom is not exactly known for sunny climes, the Albion has been experiencing record-breaking rainfall, more frequent storms and flooding, at a cost of £1.4 billion a year in damages, or around £800 million per flood,  to government figures. With the temperature already a  than a century and a half ago, storms like Desmond, which caused £1.6 billion worth of devastation in 2015, may become . 

In the Thames floodplain,  like Tower Bridge, Hampton Court and the London Eye are at risk by 2050. Earlier this year, flooding in central London influenced Queen guitarist Brian May’s  to pack up and leave, one of the more high-profile climate refugees escaping the rising seas.

In its latest report published in September, the World Bank suggested that as many as 200 million people could be  as a result of climate change, an upgrade from its 2018 figure of 148 million. The Institute for Economics and Peace put the number of  at 1.2 billion. While it is difficult to predict how people will respond to the new circumstances over the coming decades,  by Brookings suggests that of the 68.5 million displaced in 2017, approximately one-third was on the move due to “’sudden onset’ weather events — flooding, forest fires after droughts, and intensified storms.” 

Conflicting studies on migration flows demonstrate just how difficult it is to model human behavior in the face of crisis. But we are highly adaptable and can move relatively freely (in the absence of border restrictions). In the animal kingdom faced with loss of vital habitats and fragile ecosystems, up to a third of all the world’s species can go  as a result of climate change by 2070, or more than half under a less optimistic emissions scenario. It is a tragedy the scope of which merits its own elegy. 

A Drop in the Ocean

To quite literally stem the tide, many countries are adopting new technology in the hope to secure their future. China launched its “” initiative in 2015, with the aim to absorb and reuse 70% of rainwater by 2030; some 30 cities are taking part in the scheme, including Shanghai. Egypt’s historical city of , where landmarks like Cleopatra’s palace and the famed lighthouse are in danger of submersion, has opted for widening its canals and rehousing people living alongside them. 

The Netherlands, a  of which already lies below sea level, has been building flood defenses for , and now prides itself on one of the most advanced systems in the world, including the giant sea gate of Maeslantkering that protects the harbor of Rotterdam. Last year, Venice managed to  the waters for the first time in 1,200 years with the help of the €7-billion  that have been under construction for nearly two decades. 

Farmers in Bangladesh are turning to the centuries-old practice of , while Mumbai has been working to conserve its  that can help absorb the impacts of cyclones and dissipate flooding. 

The Maldives is planning to start the construction of the Dutch-designed  in 2022, a first of its kind, to complement the artificial island of  and its City of Hope, a reclamation project that is currently home to around . Miami is set to spend at least  over the next four decades to fund storm pumps and 6-foot-tall sea walls to protect against a once-in-five-years storm surge. 

The Thames Estuary 2100 Plan has been developed to “protect 1.4 million people, £320 billion worth of property and critical infrastructure from increasing tidal flood risk” as well as “enhance and restore ecosystems and maximise benefits of natural floods” and enhance “the social, economic and commercial benefits the river provides.”

This is all good and well, but if we don’t halt the warming of the planet, all this effort will be but a mere drop in the ocean in the long run. 

I ask Rabukawaqa how she feels about all these high-tech, high-cost efforts to keep back the waters. As a scientist, she thinks technology has a place, but says that in this instance, it’s not enough: “If we are going to look for and promote new technology that only results in us mining and extracting more from our lands and, in our case, most likely our oceans through deep-sea mining, it makes absolutely zero sense.” Across Fiji, there is widespread extraction of materials like sand and gravel, as well as copper and bauxite ore, which is only compounding the existing problems. “Maybe it’s not profitable, the way we are living and moving on this planet,” she says. “We need to move slower in this world.”

The Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow — home to the Industrial Revolution — was  as the “’last, best chance’ to keep 1.5˚C alive.” With much fanfare and squabbling over minutiae, the summit closed with its president, Alok Sharma, reduced to tears by India’s last-minute watering down of commitments on phasing out fossil fuels. On the same day, India’s capital  experienced levels of pollution that forced it into lockdown. While it is already one of the world’s most polluted cities, the symbolism of the timing is hard to dismiss. 

Just as it is most at risk to sea-level rise, Asia — including Australia — is the world’s biggest  of coal, accounting for three-quarters of the global total. With India setting its net-zero commitment to 2070, China to 2060 and the US announcing that it is unlikely to bolster its COP26 pledges to reach net-zero by 2050 in the coming year, it feels like a losing battle for low-emitters like Fiji and Bangladesh. Biswas Joy is disappointed that world leaders ended up blaming each other instead of coming up with a concrete plan for climate financing for developing nations. “It is not a relief — it is our needs,” he says. “We are not begging.”

“We deserve to continue to exist. But our existence really depends on everyone in the world coming to agree,” echoes Rabukawaqa. Both feel that their futures have been traded for profit margins. With just  Pacific Island leaders present in Glasgow vis-à-vis over 500  representatives, it is an unsurprising sentiment.

According to  (CAT), the Glasgow agreement has left a major credibility gap, with the planet still on course to produce twice as many emissions by 2030 as are necessary to keep the temperature rise below 1.5˚C. Without long-term target amendments, CAT calculates that we are on course for a 2.4˚C increase by the end of the century based on pledges alone. Projected warming under current policies is 2.7˚C. The most optimistic scenario, if all pledges are implemented, still has us on course for 1.8˚C by 2100. 

Does all this mean that our future is out at sea? Both Biswas Joy and Rabukawaqa are hopeful. There were good things that came out of COP26, like the deforestation pledge and the fact that decades of activism by small island nations — or large ocean states, as they like to call themselves, Rabukawaqa jokes — have finally moved the needle on fossil fuels. Biswas Joy plans to continue his activism — and vote, when he is finally old enough. “Tomorrow, we come in, we try again,” says Rabukawaqa. “It’s big work.” But for her, “Optimism is not a choice. We have to do this.” She laughs, contagiously.   

*[Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that Cyclone Idai alone caused $3.2 billion worth of damage in Mozambique in 2019. This article was updated at 16:45 GMT on December 13, 2021.]

*[With thanks to  for his help with fact-checking the article.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Most Americans have gotten vaccinated because they simply want protection from COVID-19. A small number of citizens have gotten jabbed in order to go to restaurants, attend sporting events or qualify for lottery prizes.

When It Comes to Climate Change, Promises Matter

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You’d think that would be enough. An effective vaccine against a life-threatening disease, an opportunity to regain some semblance of normalcy, a coupon for 10% off your next purchase at the store where you got your shot: truly a no-brainer. And yet, there has been resistance.

COVID-19 Vaccines

Imagine an alternative ending to the film “I Am Legend” in which the two immune humans transport the anti-zombie vaccine to a compound of survivors only to be met with questions like, “How long did it take to develop this vaccine? Does it contain a microchip? Are you a shill for Big Pharma?” This is the same vaccine that Will Smith blew himself up to safeguard? For some people, every gift horse is a Trojan horse.

It would be one thing if the anti-vaxxers were a tiny minority living like hermits in the wilderness. Alas, they are very much among us, offering up their bodies on a daily basis to keep COVID-19 alive and circulating. Who’d have expected that a deadly virus would acquire such a rabid fan base?

Since carrots have gone only so far in breaking down the resistance of the hesitant, governments are now deploying sticks. In one country after another, the state is using various forms of economic coercion to break down resistance. These “mandates” require workers by sector, or in some cases all sectors, to comply or risk losing their jobs. As a result, all that anti-lockdown and anti-masking fervor is now getting funneled into opposing these government efforts to boost vaccination rates and prevent the next wave of infection from overwhelming hospitals and funeral homes.

Several hundred protesters with like “Mandate equals Communism” recently massed on the Golden Gate Bridge to protest the California measures. In Melbourne, anti-mandate protesters are comparing the Australian government to the Nazis. In Italy, the far-right Forza Nuova was  a violent street demonstration against the government’s vaccine mandate. Scattered  accompanied ���ܲ��ٰ�����’s recently imposed lockdown on the unvaccinated as COVID cases hit a daily  in that country.

This is all very troubling. What used to be common sense — let’s eradicate polio, let’s stamp out smallpox — has become a debatable proposition. Perhaps this is no surprise given the revival of flat-Earth .

But the really scary part is what comes next. I’m not talking about the upcoming upsilon (or whatever) wave of COVID-19, which is enough to give anyone pause. I’m worried about how the world will react to the inevitable green mandates that governments will impose in the near future. After all, voluntary commitments to cut carbon emissions are just not doing the trick. The recent climate confab in Glasgow may well prove to be the high-water mark in this doomed laissez-faire approach.

At some point, governments will start using more sticks than carrots to break our deadly dependence on fossil fuels. Call me a pessimist, but I’m not expecting a warm and fuzzy embrace of future climate mandates. At question here is not just the dubious state of humanity’s collective intelligence. It’s how we conceive of community, government, and our mutual obligations.

Understanding Pushback

In Italy, the “green pass” was initially required only to eat at restaurants, go to museums, and work out in gyms. Then you had to show proof of vaccination to travel by planes, trains, and ferries.

Last month, the government required all public and private workers to show their green passes to go to work. And that’s when the protests really got heated. Dockworkers went on  in Genoa and Trieste. A rally of 10,000 in Rome on the eve of the new regulation going into effect turned violent. In Udine, a city of about 100,000 people, more than 1,500  up with signs like, “Vaccinated and unvaccinated together for freedom.”

It’s not as if Italy is a vaccine-resistant country. Around  out of four Italians have been fully vaccinated. That’s not as good as Portugal (86% fully vaccinated), but it’s way better than the United States (which remains below 60%).

However, really noisy people can capture headlines regardless of how representative they might be. Consider the United States where protesters have argued that mandates for hospital workers, police and airline personnel will lead to mass resignations. As social psychologist Adam Galinsky points , New York’s largest police union “fought such mandates in court and argued that the police department would lose thousands of officers. In the end, out of a force of about 35,000 officers, fewer than three dozen refused the vaccine. Similarly, of the 67,000 employees at United Airlines facing a mandate, only 320 refused to get vaccinated.”

The numbers elsewhere have been equally low. In France, which experienced spirited anti-mandate protests, only 3,000 health workers were suspended because of their refusal to get vaccinated, which was but  of the total sector. The same percentage of health workers in New South Wales in Australia resigned in protest. For comparison’s sake, the turnover in the health sector in New South Wales was more than 9% in 2019.

These mandates, by the way, can be remarkably effective. In San Francisco, for instance, the vaccination rate among city workers  from 55% in June to a post-mandate 94% in October.

The success of mandates and the relative impotence of the protests notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to dismiss anti-vaccine sentiment. First of all, the stubbornly unvaccinated will continue to determine the future course of the pandemic. Second, the reluctantly vaccinated will still cling to their views, which will inevitably be expressed at later occasions.

And what are those views? Let’s not get distracted by the bizarre and the simply misinformed. What lies beneath is a basic mistrust of authorities, whether scientific, political or broadly civic. The predominant sentiment among anti-vaxxers is that these authorities shouldn’t be allowed to tell them what to do with their own bodies. “My body, my choice,”  the sign of a protesting nurse in Paris.

In some ways, the rhetoric is reminiscent of the mantra of the pro-choice movement: “keep your laws off my body.” But it’s a misleading resemblance. Anti-vaxxers do have a choice and it’s not comparable to a back-alley abortion. They can quit their jobs. In some cases, as in Italy, they can even keep their jobs if they submit to regular testing. And such testing has the added benefit of enabling the country to better track any potential outbreaks.

And let’s remember: abortion is not communicable. Mandates are necessary to safeguard public health. The same applies to vaccines for children in public school. In New York, health care workers  get vaccinated against measles and rubella while child-care workers in Rhode Island are required to get an annual flu shot.

Sure, I have a healthy skepticism of authority, but it doesn’t trump my commitment to the public good. To be blunt, anti-vaxxers just don’t care about the health of the community. That sentiment, which is also shared by plenty of people who get vaccinated for purely selfish reasons, does not bode well for efforts to address the climate crisis.

Future Green Mandates

The commitments that nations made in Paris five years ago to shrink their carbon footprints: voluntary. The promises made in Glasgow this month: voluntary. The choices that you will make this year about buying a car, heating your house, feeding your family: all voluntary.

In a perfect world, everyone cooperates voluntarily to preserve the planet. In reality, some people do so, others promise to do so and don’t, and the rest have all along been looking out for number one. This mix of responses to a public policy challenge falls into the category of a “collective action problem.”

Usually at some point in a collective action problem, some authority has to intervene to establish rules of the road to protect the common good. So far, the interventions to reduce carbon emissions have been largely non-coercive, except perhaps for workers in a handful of countries who have lost their jobs in fossil fuel industries. No one has been forced to go vegan, trade in their gas-guzzler for an electric car or take a solar-powered yacht across the Atlantic instead of flying out of Dulles.

Perhaps governments will continue to use markets to constrain individual choices. Everyone will have to buy electric cars because the old-fashioned combustion kind simply won’t be available. Air travel will become prohibitively expensive except for the elite. Locally grown tomatoes will crowd out ones shipped in from other parts of the world.

But “free” markets — and both corporate actors and individual consumers — are slow to respond to existential crises, are resistant to government interventions and prioritize prices above all else. Markets by themselves will not shift resources quickly enough from the still profitable but highly pollutant sectors to the less profitable except in the long term green sectors.

So, let’s imagine a future government mandate that all businesses with more than 100 employees have one year to become carbon-neutral. Or that all citizens are capped at a certain number of kilowatt hours per month in their household. Or everyone has a certain travel allowance measured in carbon emissions that covers their commute, their work trips and their vacations.

As with the vaccination mandate, the rationale will be that individuals have to change their behavior for the good of the whole. The green mandates will encounter similar resistance. Some people will continue to insist that climate change doesn’t exist, that the government is overreacting or overreaching, that liberty consists of the right to own an SUV and drive it anywhere one likes.

With climate change, however, the threats are not quite so immediate or palpable. People are dying from rising waters on the other side of the world. The casualties will mount up not next week but in 20 years. And what of the use of taxpayer dollars to fund a green transition in the Global South? It’s one thing to ask people to get vaccinated to save lives in their immediate community. Will people submit to mandates to save lives in the Maldives?

Much will depend on the level of trust citizens have in their governments. The skepticism that is concentrated among anti-vaxxers is, unfortunately, more widely shared. According to Pew, only  of Americans believe that government can be trusted to do what’s right (down from 77% in 1964). The average among all economically advanced countries is higher —  trust their national governments — but still not encouraging.

And that trust will also depend on the nature of the governments themselves. Where the far right is in charge, all bets are off. The same applies to the corrupt, the authoritarian and the simply incompetent.

All of which is to say: Governments have to prove that these vaccine mandates work in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. They have to ensure that these infrastructure and pandemic recovery funds make a concrete and sustainable difference in people’s lives. They have to demonstrate that government is committed to that old-fashioned principle of improving the public good.

If governments fail this test, here and now, then forget about meeting the challenge of climate change. Without effective government measures and sufficient public support for future green mandates, we might as well be living in houses of straw and sticks. We lazy little pigs will sing and dance and play with our electronic devices until the superstorms of tomorrow huff and puff and blow us all away.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Fiji’s Women Are Living the Reality of Climate Change

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When leaders of almost 200 countries get together regularly under the Conference of the Parties (COP) banner, bringing their diverse set of social, financial and environmental challenges to solve the climate change diabolical problem, words do matter. But then those words need to be followed by action. Urgent action!

And if the previous 25 COP summits have taught us anything, it is that the promises and pledges have missed the mark, and actions have left the global problem of climate change wanting — and wanting a lot more than it has received so far. By that, I mean the promises and subsequent actions have fallen short of ensuring with a level of certainty that global warming remains below 1.5°C by 2100.

Nevertheless, the more optimistic observers believe that the 1.5°C target is still alive. But in the of Alok Sharma, president of the recent COP26 summit in Glasgow, “its pulse is weak, and it will only survive if we keep our promises. If we translate commitments into rapid action.”

The Bad News

So, what has COP26 promised future generations? Or how long is a piece of elastic band? I don’t mean that to be a cynical question, because setting targets, making long-term promises in a rapidly changing world is indeed a very difficult task for any world leader. Ultimately, will the collective promises, even if implemented, be enough to keep global warming below 1.5°C?

Clearly, we won’t know what the resulting carbon abatement outcomes will be. And therein lies one of the problems of all COP26 outcomes: great uncertainty. That’s because there are many moving parts, many variables and unknowns, many players.

Depending on who one listens to, the likely outcome of COP26 could be anywhere between limiting global warming to within 2°C and 3.6°C. The analysis suggests widespread agreement between a number of assessments and that current policies will lead to a best estimate of around 2.6°C to 2.7°C warming by 2100 (with an uncertainty range of 2°C to 3.6°C). 

If countries meet both conditional and unconditional  (NDCs) for the near-term target of 2030, projected warming by 2100 falls to 2.4°C (with an uncertainty range of 1.8°C to 3.3°C). If countries meet their long-term net-zero emissions promises, global warming would be reduced to around 1.8°C (1.4°C to 2.6°C) by 2100, though temperatures would likely peak at around 1.9°C in the middle of the century before declining. But that’s if all the “ifs” do actually take place.

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And what happened to the 2015 Paris Agreement of limiting warming to 1.5°C? The reality is that to meet the Paris accord, coal must be phased out of the power sector in member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) by 2030 and globally by 2040. As there’s a lot of coal “in the pipeline” in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Australia, there’s little chance of that happening. And the best COP26 was able to deliver was a “” (not out) of fossil fuels.

The other main problem with COP agreements and pledges generally is that countries develop and express their own promises in isolation, which in aggregate are supposed to achieve the slowing of global warming. As such promises — expressed through NDCs — are not legally binding, the best pressure that can now be applied is a new cost (the penalty for exceedance). To date, only diplomatic pressure has been used, a name-and-shame form of influence on the international stage.

Was There Any Good News?

Not that there isn’t any good news — there is. The three main pillars of attention (adaptation, mitigation and finance) have been strengthened. And there’s evidence that emissions are being reduced. Let’s not forget that just seven years ago, it seemed quite plausible that the world was heading toward 4°C warming by 2100, and a number of factors have resulted in the warming curve being significantly flattened.

COP meetings involve numerous sessions, side events, different agendas and groups that explore, present and discuss the many aspects of climate change. So, what the general public receives is a summary and highlights of the parties’ promises and pledges, and the main decisions and outcomes. So, we don’t always hear about the minor achievements.

For example, a significant achievement was that more than 100 countries promised to end and reverse , which has in the recent past led to a significant reduction in much-needed carbon sinks.

The Paris Rulebook, the guidelines for how the Paris Agreement is to be delivered, was also , after six years of discussions. This will allow for the full delivery of the landmark accord, after agreement on a transparency process that will hold countries to account as they deliver on their targets. This includes a robust framework for countries to exchange carbon credits through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). 

To promote approaches that will assist governments in implementing their NDCs through voluntary international cooperation, the framework now allows a price on carbon, which countries exceeding their NDCs would bear.

As before, and necessarily, there has also been much emphasis put on adaptation programs and financial support from developed countries for developing countries already affected by the impacts of climate change.

Then there are other minor changes that will be taking place. The International Sustainability Standards Board will the new global standard next year to replace a confusing mixture of disclosure practices that some companies now use to assess the impact of climate change. The new standard will see companies provide a more complete view of enterprise value creation — showing the inter-connectivity between sustainability-related information and financial information. This should make the data on which investment decisions are made more reliable and comparable.

What Now?

So, what happens next? Leaders have been “encouraged” to go back to their desks and strengthen their emissions reductions and align their national climate action pledges with the Paris Agreement.

COP26, more than all previous COPs, has heightened the participating countries’ awareness of the severity of climate change and its impacts, particularly on developing countries. It has led to a much higher level of awareness of the urgency of actions required. There’s also now no doubt of the enormous tasks ahead to avert the anticipated global impacts.

Watch this space, while the universe looks on.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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What’s astonishing is that people outside the United States had a much better understanding of what was going on inside this country. By all objective standards, America was doing a terrible job back in 2020. We had the highest number of infections and the highest number of deaths. We had critical shortages of personal protective equipment, and hospitals in a number of cities and rural areas were completely overwhelmed. Contact tracing was sporadic and masking requirements inconsistent. The federal government was incoherent, to put it mildly, and states veered off in very different directions, some of them suicidal.

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So, how could nearly half of America give a thumb’s up to such a nightmare? Part of it was pure nationalism (whatever America does is by definition great), part ideological (whatever the Trump administration did was by definition great), and part of it simply ignorance (the pandemic was a hoax, the numbers were exaggerated, it’s bad all over).

This perception gap between outsiders and insiders does not bode well for the global response to the climate crisis. After all, the tendency has been to point fingers at others and rarely at one’s self. Everyone has criticized China for its expanding carbon footprint. The Global South has criticized the industrialized north for producing the lion’s share of carbon emissions over the last 150 years. The United States has been attacked for its devotion to fossil fuels, its radical swings in policy and its ungenerous arrogance. They are all correct. But rarely are such judgments balanced by self-criticism.

The domestic-international gap in perceptions is not quite as large on climate change as it was on the pandemic back in 2020. For instance, 39% of non-Americans surveyed by Pew in 2021  the US record on climate change as “good.” A much larger number of Americans, 49%, that opinion. More troubling is the ideological in the United States, with 67% of those on the right and only 26% on the left thinking that the US record is good.

At COP26 in Glasgow

Such gaps in perception were on full display at the big climate confab that’s taking place in Glasgow. Last week, leaders gathered to make declarations while critics mobilized in the streets to decry the insufficiency of those efforts. This week, the negotiators try to transform the declarations into numbers.

A couple of those declarations look promising. A deal on beginning to reverse deforestation by 2030 would be a great step forward (of course, a similar agreement in 2014 would also have been a great step forward). A pact to cut methane levels by 30% by 2030 is certainly welcome, but the biggest sinners in this regard (India, Russia and China) are not yet on board.

The assembled leaders agreed to what they have called the “Glasgow Breakthrough Agenda” five sectors that account for half of all carbon emissions: power, road transport, steel, hydrogen and agriculture. This collection of initiatives is meant to create 20 million jobs and increase global GDP by 4% over what it would otherwise be by 2030.

Deeply troubling in all of these declarations is the continued reliance on private finance to lead the way toward a carbon-neutral world, like the pledge from the captains of finance to push for cleaner technologies. Unfortunately, they are not making a comparable commitment to stop investing in fossil fuels.

Just as citizens of countries tend to view the climate policies of their own governments more favorably than outsiders do, the leaders of the international community generally have a self-congratulatory approach to their own efforts. Those on the outside of the Glasgow meetings, on the other hand, were harshly critical. “Blah, blah, blah,” said climate activist Greta Thunberg in one of her latest jeremiads against the insufficiency of response. Let’s be clear: it’s not nothing.

Going into the Glasgow meeting, the cumulative impact of all the pledges countries have made to reduce their carbon emissions would have led to the world heating up to 2.1 degrees Celsius (over pre-industrial levels) by 2100. Factoring in the pledges made at Glasgow, to the International Energy Agency (IEA), will bring down that number to 1.8 degrees.

It’s not the 1.5 degree level that represents the consensus of scientists and activists who want to avoid the worst effects of climate change. But it’s also the first time that the international community has managed to get below the 2-degree mark, which was the upper level established by the 2015 Paris Agreement. But wait, this analysis comes with a number of important asterisks.

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First, despite all the fine words surrounding the Paris accords, countries have largely not met the agreement’s voluntary limits. Five years after making those commitments, countries on track to reduce carbon emissions by a mere 5.5% by 2030 compared to the minimum requirement of 40-50%. That’s probably a generous estimate. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, meeting the Paris commitments would only result, by 2030, in a 1% reduction from 2010 levels.

Both estimates, in any case, are probably off because, as The Washington Post  this week, the data is incomplete and sometimes falsified outright. Algeria hasn’t reported since 2000, Qatar since 2007, Iran since 2010, China since 2014, Libya and Taiwan since, well, never. In all, 45 countries haven’t reported data since 2009. No country claims the carbon emissions from international travel and shipping (more than a billion tons a year). Countries like Russia and Malaysia have subtracted carbon emissions from their balance sheets based on their forests, and sometimes those estimates bear little relationship to reality. Even the emissions they do report don’t line up with the estimates of independent assessments. According to The Post, as much as 13.3 billion tons of carbon each year goes unreported.

Compounding this problem is the so-called brown recovery. The modest reductions in carbon emissions that took place during the COVID-19 economic shutdowns are being obliterated by the burst of post-pandemic economic activity. The world could have built back better in a sustainable manner. Instead, it is back brown.

So, let’s take another look at the IEA prediction of substantial progress after Glasgow. The UN’s own estimate,  this week, suggests that the combined reduction in global temperature as a result of the Glasgow pledges — given the failures to meet earlier commitments, the gaps in the data and the current upsurge in post-pandemic emissions — will be a mere .1 degrees, not .3 degrees. And the world is heading not toward a 2.1-degree Celsius increase by the turn of the next century but 2.5 degrees.

So, the gap between perception and reality has some very dangerous consequences indeed. To narrow that gap, activists will have to continue to push governments to do better. Individuals think they are doing enough, think that their governments are doing enough and, on the whole, consider climate change to be somebody else’s problem. They have to be persuaded otherwise.

Bridging the Gap

One of the great compromises — or grand delusions, if you prefer — at the heart of the Breakthrough Agenda is encapsulated in the phrase “green growth.” At Glasgow, the luminaries promise millions more jobs and a boost in global GDP. Political leaders are not in the business of taking things away from people, of promising belt-tightening, of Scrooging everyone’s Black Friday buying spree. At Glasgow, like pretty much everywhere else, politicians promised more jobs (green ones), more energy (the clean kind), more gadgets (like electric cars).

More, more, more has been humanity’s mantra for the last 150 years or so. It used to be only the watchword of the rich. The Industrial Revolution democratized the phrase. The problem, however, is that the planet can no longer accommodate our collective voracity. There just isn’t enough stuff to go around.

Oh, yes, of course, sunlight is unlimited and will be for the next umpteen million years. But the resources it takes to capture that sunlight — the materials for the solar panels, the energy to build those panels, the land to site solar farms — are not unlimited. The same applies to wind and waves and geothermal.

So, we’re going to have to have a serious sit-down about this problem of economic growth and our unexamined assumptions about more, more, more. That needs to be a global conversation, but the north continues to out-consume the south by an order of nine to one, if you  the per capita carbon footprint of the United States (15.53) with that of Indonesia (1.72). So, global equity has to be part of this conversation as well — transferring resources to the Global South on an unprecedented level to ensure an equitable green transition.

It’s not just a bill of reparations for what the industrialized world has extracted — often through outright theft — over the last few hundred years. It would also need to reverse the current outflow of resources from the Global South. As I wrote recently, “By one estimate, the Global North enjoys a $2.2 trillion annual benefit in the form of underpriced labor and commodities from there, an extraction that rivals the magnitude of the colonial era.” And that doesn’t even count the debt repayment outflow. Or the costs associated with ongoing climate change, which disproportionately affects the Global South.

Here, the gap in perceptions turns deadly. Consumers can believe that they are doing their part by buying electric cars. Americans can believe their government is going the extra mile with the clean energy provisions of the new infrastructure bill (all those charging stations) and perhaps one day the Build Back Better bill as well. Europeans can feel good about themselves by meeting the  of their new Fit for 55 provisions (which mandate a 55 percent reduction of carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2030). The international community is awash in self-congratulation after the meeting in Glasgow and all the promises made.

But all that good feeling will leave us thinking that we’ve done enough. In this case, the perfect needs to be the enemy of the merely good. As the waters continue to rise, good simply is no longer good enough.

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That’s not what happened. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Russia emerged from its wreckage as the largest successor state, government officials in the newly elected administration of Boris Yeltsin teamed up with a cadre of foreign experts to chart a path into a post-Soviet system of democracy and free markets. The West offered billions of dollars in loans while the Russians generated more funds through the privatization of state assets. With all those resources, Russia could have become an enormous Sweden of the east.

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Instead, much of that wealth disappeared into the pockets of newly minted oligarchs. During the 1990s, Russia suffered an economic catastrophe, with the equivalent of  leaving the country every year and the gross domestic product (GDP) falling nearly  between 1991 and 1998. The Soviet Union once had the second-largest economy on earth. Today, thanks only to a reliance on Soviet-era fossil-fuel and arms-export industries, Russia hovers just  the top 10 in total economic output, ranking  Italy and India, but still manages only 78^th place — that is  — in GDP per capita.

The failures of the Russian transition can be chalked up to the collapse of empire, decades of economic decay, the vengeful triumphalism of the West, the unchecked venality of local opportunists or all of the above. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss such a cautionary tale as a mere historic peculiarity.

If we’re not careful, the Russian past could well become humanity’s future: a transition bungled, a golden opportunity squandered. After all, the world is now poised to spend trillions of dollars for an even more massive transition, this time from a similarly dirty, inefficient and unjust economy based on fossil fuels to… what? If the international community somehow learns the lessons of past transitions, someday we will all live in a far more equitable, carbon-neutral world powered by renewable energy.

But don’t bet on it. The world is slowly replacing dirty energy with renewables but without addressing any of the industrial-strength problems of the current system. It should remind us of the way the Russians replaced state planning with free markets, only to end up with the shortcomings of capitalism as well as many of the ills of the previous order. And that’s not even the worst-case scenario. The transition might not happen at all or the decarbonization process could be so endlessly drawn out over decades as to be wholly ineffectual.

The proponents of Green New Deals promise win-win outcomes: solar panels and wind turbines will produce abundant energy cheaply, the climate crisis will abate, workers will leave dirty jobs for cleaner ones, and the Global North will help the Global South leapfrog into a gloriously Green future. In reality, however, transitions of such a scale and urgency have never been win-win. In the case of ��ܲ�������’s transition from communism, nearly everyone lost out, and the country is still suffering the consequences. Other large-scale transformations of the past — like the agrarian and industrial revolutions — were similarly catastrophic in their own ways.

In the end, perhaps a key part of the problem lies not just in the flawed status quo, but in the mechanism of transition itself.

Pyramids of Sacrifice

Transitions can have harsh, even genocidal consequences. Just ask the Neanderthals. Oh, sorry, you can’t. They were wiped out 40,000  in the great transition to modern homo sapiens. Those early hominids left behind some bones, a few tools and a small percentage of DNA in the contemporary human genome. Neanderthals might have died out because of  or  to climate change. More likely, they were  by our ancestors over thousands of years of conflict. Poor Neanderthals: they were among the eggs that had to be broken to make the omelet that’s us.

The fate of the Neanderthals is extreme, but not unique. Whenever humans take a great leap forward, they tend to do so over an enormous pile of bones.

Take the agrarian revolution, which spelled the end for hunter-gatherers, except for those who survived in isolated areas like the Amazon rainforest. On the plus side, humanity received the gift of civilization in the form of politics, trade and literacy. On the negative side, as anthropologist Jared Diamond argued in a famous 1999  article, the Neolithic transformation spawned disease, malnutrition and gross economic inequality. It was, Diamond concluded, “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

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Ten thousand years later, humanity might have committed the worst mistake in the history of the planet. Sure, the Industrial Revolution of the 19^th century eventually led to extended lifespans, food enough to feed the world and TikTok. But the application of modern science and engineering to economic affairs also set in motion a ruinous despoliation of the planet. More ominously, as everyone who has gazed at the “” graph of carbon emissions knows, the Industrial Revolution marked the first time that humans, perhaps irrevocably, began changing this planet’s climate by burning fossil fuels at an ever more staggering rate.  

The new religion of economic growth at any cost also exacted a human toll. Children were put to work in the “dark satanic mills” of the early factories; a new proletariat was consigned to lives nasty, brutish and short; and millions died as colonialism cut a huge swath of destruction through the Global South. The oligarchs of the time, enriched by plunder and exploitation, created a Gilded Age of astounding economic inequality that, despite the best efforts of trade unions and social democrats, has made a striking reappearance in our own .

Though critical of the cruelties of capitalism, communists turned out to worship the same god of economic growth. Leaders from Vladimir Lenin onward firmly believed that state-led modernization and coercive tactics would enable new communist states to out–produce any capitalist country. Yet, in telescoping decades of industrial modernization into a few short years, their efforts to surpass the West magnified the horrors visited upon local populations. The collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union in the 1930s led to around  deaths, while the similar Great Leap Forward in China that began in 1958 cost the lives of as many as 45 million . As the bodies piled up, the communist 1% — a new  of party officials and their cronies — orchestrated their own personal leap forward.

For sociologist Peter Berger, communism and capitalism both adopted a “sacrificial” conception of development in which myths of “progress” and “growth” claimed their share of victims, much as Aztec priests had once used ritual murder to propitiate the gods and save their civilization. In his book “,” Berger writes that the “elite almost invariably legitimates its privileged position in terms of alleged benefits it is bestowing or getting ready to bestow upon ‘the people.’” More often than not, however, these promised benefits accrue to the elite, not the masses.

This brings us again to the “great transitions” of the 1990s, in which countries that had gone down the road to communism doubled back to take the turn-off for capitalism. The losses for Russia in the 1990s were nothing like the horrors of collectivization. Still, aside from a small number of people who made out like bandits, virtually all other Russians took a step backward as the costs of transition fell disproportionately on pensioners, blue-collar workers and farmers.

As a result, in the early 1990s,  of Russians dropped below the poverty line. Due to a combination of alcoholism and unemployment, the life expectancy of Russian men suffered an  from 63 years in 1990 to 58 years in 2000. Disillusionment with liberalization helped to boost popular support for Vladimir Putin, a politician who has skillfully capitalized on those thwarted hopes. His still remain relatively high so many years later, even though only 27% of Russians  that their economic situation today is better than during Soviet times.

The rest of the former Soviet bloc suffered similar, though less severe, dislocations. In Poland, the first country to experiment with the “shock therapy” of an overnight transition to capitalism, the winners came to be known as , a younger, more well-educated, predominantly urban elite that successfully surfed the waves of change. Poland B — the older, less educated, more rural “losers” of that transition — would eventually exact their revenge at the ballot box by supporting the decidedly anti-liberal Law and Justice Party, which has ruled the country since 2015. Throughout the region, an Eastern Europe B has helped bring similar right-wing populists to power in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia and Slovenia.

Disenchantment with such liberal transitions notwithstanding, those countries benefited from something that wasn’t available to Russia: the European Union. A continuous flow of capital and the provision of technical assistance on governance and the rule of law eventually enabled Eastern European countries to outperform their Russian neighbor. A large gap  much of Eastern Europe from the wealthier West, but the average Russian can only dream of the life of a second-class EU citizen.

Both of these experiences of transition offer valuable lessons for what may come next.

The Green New Deal

If you take the statements of the world’s governments at face value, almost everyone is now treating climate change very seriously and nations globally are feeling the heat to declare carbon-neutrality by 2050 (or sooner). In August, articles about the  from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), emphasizing that global warming is “widespread, rapid, and intensifying,” were accompanied by terrifying photos of its real-world effects: the  in California and Siberia, the  in Germany and China, the  in Canada and Sicily, and that’s just to start down a list of climate disasters. Your head — or indeed, your entire body — would have had to be in the sand to ignore the emergency sirens going off all around you.

Nonetheless, despite such obvious warning signs of so much worse to come, the world has not, in fact, accelerated its pace of decarbonization. The next major climate change conference is scheduled for Glasgow at the beginning of November, but the globe’s leading economies are all still falling  of the commitments they made in Paris nearly six years ago.

More horrifying yet, the IPCC reports that, even if countries were meeting those commitments, they would, by 2030, result in a mere  in carbon emissions from 2010 levels. To avoid the worst-case scenarios of an overcooked planet, those emissions would have to be cut by nearly 50% within the next nine years. Only a couple of countries are preparing for such a dramatic transformation.

The time for modest reforms is long past. A radical cut in carbon emissions can’t be accomplished simply by banning drinking straws, ramping up the production of electric cars or even planting a billion trees. To meet the climate change challenge will require a transformation comparable to the agrarian or industrial revolutions. But if those earlier system changes are guideposts, the losers of this next great leap forward will be legion.

Various “just transition”  are designed, at least on paper, to avoid such an enormous human toll. For a start, a “fair-share”  would require the transfer of trillions of dollars to help the Global South keep fossil fuels in the ground while shifting to renewable energy. A similar approach within nations would provide the “losers of transition” — from coal miners to those on fixed incomes — with targeted assistance to “go green.”

Alas, such an approach runs counter to current practices. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, the international community did not implement a “fair share” approach. The wealthiest countries largely cornered the market on vaccines, and poorer countries have  on a trickle of handouts.

Moreover, despite the unprecedented opportunity provided by the COVID crisis to begin to act on the next coming disaster, climate change, governments have generally failed to allocate recovery funds to finance any kind of major economic transformation. In the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan of 2021, for example, a mere $50 million  to environmental justice grants, while $8 billion went to airports. Similarly,  of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill now making its way (or not) through Congress is devoted to improvements to roads and bridges, which will only reinforce America’s love affair with cars, SUVs and trucks.

And where is the necessary shift of resources to the Global South to help with its transition? Back in 2009, rich countries had already promised to mobilize $100 billion for such climate financing by 2020. They’re still  and the assistance has come mostly in the form of loans, not grants, only deepening the dependence and indebtedness of the Global South.

Worse yet, richer countries have been at least modestly reducing their own carbon footprints at the expense of poorer countries by relocating polluting industries to the Global South or substituting carbon-intensive imports for domestic production of the same. Although China continues to  of domestic renewable sources of energy, it’s been financing  of all coal-fired power plants built globally (though its leader, Xi Jinping,  to end this practice). The European Union is actually  coal power — which China is  — even as it continues to  high-carbon imports from coal-using countries like Russia, Turkey, Morocco and Egypt.

To combat such a shift of carbon emissions from north to south — and protect its own less carbon-intensive industries — the European Union has proposed a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which penalizes imports of cement, fertilizer, steel and the like based on the amount of carbon emitted in their production. Russia the hardest, this tariff would indeed push that country toward a “greener” manufacturing process for its Europe-bound products. However, countries in the Global South that don’t have the resources to upgrade their export industries would be left .

This lack of resources in the Global South is . The poorest nations are  nearly $3 billion a month to servicing their debts, diverting resources that could otherwise go into a transformation of energy and industrial infrastructure. Bridging this divide would require large-scale debt forgiveness, equitable debt-for-climate swaps or, more ambitiously, an “” that would marshal trillions of dollars in public financing to pay for the entire world to transition to clean energy.

Here, the experience of Eastern Europe is relevant. The European Union’s transfer of resources, training and technology from west to east helped cushion the transition that so devastated Russia. Although not enough to prevent the rise of Eastern Europe B, the EU’s modest generosity at least gestured toward the kind of solidarity economics that the Global North needs to adopt in any future climate negotiations with the Global South. If there is to be belt-tightening to shrink the global carbon footprint, those who can most afford to lose the weight should step forward.

Such schemes address the all-important question of equity. But there’s an elephant in the room that’s so far gone unmentioned. And that beast is only getting bigger.

A Rising Tide

All the major transformations of the past were predicated on rapid economic growth, whether the increasing food production of the agrarian revolution or the incorporation of the Soviet Union into the industrialized world through its five-year plans. Most versions of the Green New Deal adhere to the same growth paradigm, with electric cars filling the roads and more sustainably produced widgets circulating through the global economy.

Even as richer countries promise to shrink their carbon footprints, however, they still imagine that they can maintain their overall way of life and export that lifestyle to the rest of the world. But this high-energy lifestyle of computers, air conditioners and electric SUVs depends on the Global South. By one , the Global North enjoys a $2.2 trillion annual benefit in the form of underpriced labor and commodities from there, an extraction that rivals the magnitude of the colonial era. Moreover, the  necessary for batteries for electric cars, the gallium and tellurium in solar panels, the rare-earth elements needed for wind turbines are predominantly mined in the Global South and their extraction is likely to come at a huge environmental cost.

The high-growth assumptions of the current system reappear under the rubric of “green growth,” promulgated by old-style industrialists in new green clothing. During the transition from communism in the 1990s, “red capitalists” were well-placed in the old system to profit under the new dispensation. Today, a class of “green capitalists” have similarly emerged to  huge profits from the early days of a putatively post-carbon economy — Elon Musk in the world of electric cars, billionaires like Robin Zeng and Huang Shilin with lithium-ion batteries, and Aloys Wobben when it comes to wind turbines. Huge sums of money are now available for the sketchiest of projects, from  to the  of rare-earth minerals.

Big profits minus serious regulatory oversight equals the possibility of big-time malfeasance. Fraud was rampant in European  in the 1990s, while renewable energy companies in the Global North have been  in bribery schemes in the Global South. The additional bonanza of green funds through recovery, infrastructure or transition programs — like the one-time financial resources made available by Russian privatization — could easily disappear into dubious private ventures, bureaucratic black holes or the swamplands of corruption.

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A rising tide, it was once said, would lift all boats: economic growth would lead to general prosperity. But a “rising tide” now has a different meaning in a climate-changing world. The planet can no longer support that kind of growth, whatever its color.

The next transformation must be different from its precursors when it comes to both economic expansion and social equity. We can’t simply grow our way out of this predicament, nor should we sacrifice millions of human beings in the process. Despite the enormous economic and political gaps that separate people around the world, we have to somehow join hands across vast differences to leapfrog over the fossil-fuel economy. United we transform or united we fall.

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A case in point: For the first time in history, the 2019 IAAF World Athletics Championships held in Qatar was scheduled for late September to avoid the hot summer climate. Another major departure was to hold tournaments mainly in the late afternoon and evening, rather than following the traditional morning schedule of previous championships.

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Similarly, the next FIFA World Cup is scheduled to commence in Qatar in November 2022 to avoid extreme heat during the traditional summer schedule of the tournament. Even at the Tokyo Games, the Olympic women’s football gold-medal match between Canada and Sweden was switched from a morning start time to the evening to avoid the heat and its associated health impacts. Unsurprisingly, the International Olympic Committee has its plans to take into account “flexibility and adaptation to the consequences of climate change” in planning future events.

No Longer an Option

Addressing the impacts of climate change on the scheduling and planning of major sporting events is no longer an option but a necessity. Apart from climate-induced fatal heatwaves that may force changes to the schedule and timing of events, climate change could have wide-ranging effects on sporting infrastructure.

This includes the potential failure of facilities due to extreme weather, reduced lifespan of buildings, increased operational and maintenance expenditure of playing surfaces and tracks due to extreme temperatures, and the cancelation or abandonment of sporting games due to off-season rainfall, storms or heatwaves. Additionally, climate change could exacerbate injuries to players and athletes due to heat exhaustion.

From a risk mitigation perspective, addressing the impacts of climate change on major sporting events will have to go beyond moving the schedule to cooler months or hours. For example, while having events at midnight may be a good way of avoiding the extreme heat, such timing could negatively affect the level of fan attendance and active participation, which may detract from the overall recreational, educational, social and economic benefits of sporting events. Similarly, delaying tournaments until cooler or warmer months may not always be a solution, especially for sporting events such as skiing, beach soccer or volleyball.

Making Changes

So, how can countries and key stakeholders in sports cope with the cascading challenges of climate change for the sporting calendar?

Holistic risk mitigation strategies are required to effectively balance the social, environmental and economic aspects of planning major sporting events in a climate-constrained world. Addressing the health impacts alone, without addressing the social and economic impacts, could lower the overall sustainable development contributions of major sporting events, especially with respect to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1 on zero poverty, SDG 3 on good health and well-being, and SDG 8 on decent work and economic growth, among others. Further, holistic and high-leverage interventions can accentuate the role of sports as an enabler of sustainable development.

Enhancing the adaptive capacity of existing and emerging sporting infrastructure to the risks posed by climate change will require a strategic commitment by sporting stakeholders to integrate climate objectives in the design, approval, finance and implementation of sport infrastructure projects.

For example, Article 7 (5) of the 2015 Paris Agreement specifically encourages countries to integrate climate adaptation into relevant socioeconomic and environmental policies and actions, which include redesigning infrastructure and buildings to enhance their resilience and adaptive capacity. The United Nations Sports for Climate Action Initiative also the need for sporting stakeholders to systematically integrate climate mitigation and adaptation strategies into planning processes. 

A climate-smart approach to the planning and organization of major sporting events will place climate resilience objectives squarely at the heart of sporting decisions, including venue selection, infrastructure planning, kit design, marketing, branding and awareness creation among others.

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A starting point is for international sporting bodies to overhaul bidding requirements for major sporting events to include significant consideration of the level of available climate-smart infrastructure in host countries. Adopting holistic screening processes that integrate climate considerations, as part of sporting risk management frameworks, can help sporting bodies, host countries, suppliers and other relevant stakeholders to upgrade infrastructure design, operation and maintenance practices to prioritize climate resilience.

For example, the question will not only be whether a country has sporting venues, but how many of such venues are climate-smart in terms of the ability to withstand extreme weather events and advance global net-zero targets. At the same time, the extent to which associated infrastructure such as aviation and transportation, as well as digital infrastructure are climate-smart will be a key consideration.

By paying greater attention to climate due diligence, sporting events can serve as enablers of climate change mitigation and adaptation in host countries, which would in the long-term reduce the frequency of future disruptions to the traditional calendars and schedules of major sporting events.

Educational Institutions

Higher education institutions have crucial roles to play in developing innovative programs to train and equip sporting stakeholders with advanced skills needed to integrate climate resilience into their entire operations and value chain.

In Qatar, the College of Law at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) is already spearheading innovation in this area. Its Juris Doctor (JD) program, LLM in International Economic and Business Law, LLM in International Law and Foreign Affairs, Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD), as well as the online course “Navigating Legal and Commercial Aspects of Sports,” offered by HBKU through edX, provides students with exceptional opportunities to acquire comparative skills and knowledge on the key legal, commercial and sustainability aspects of major sporting events.

*[This article is submitted on behalf of the author by the Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) Communications Directorate. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the university’s official stance.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The article was written in anticipation of COP25, which was due to take place in Madrid later that month. In it, I likened the global dealings with climate change to being on a travelator walking backward while it gets faster.

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The next climate conference, which was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is COP26 and takes place in Glasgow in November.

Greta Thunberg Mocks World Leaders

In the meantime, Greta Thunberg, a prominent young climate activist, has been expressing similar sentiments. On September 28, at the Youth4Climate conference in Milan, the 18-year-old gave a speech in which she, in her inimitable manner, world leaders for their “blah, blah, blah” of empty words and little action.

Whatever your views about her message and whether, as some have suggested, she should be at school instead of giving speeches, Thunberg has become the global voice of youth.  Her voice is uncompromising — at times angry — and reverberating around the world. It’s no wonder, because one of the ironies of the climate debate is that the very group of people who will be most affected by climate change have the least sway and power to avert or abate it. 

Nevertheless, the voice of young people around the world pleading for more urgent and positive action against climate change is getting louder, and perhaps, just perhaps, leaders are slowly finding ways to address the issue. But it hasn’t been easy and will continue to create internal political difficulties for many leaders for years to come. 

As explained in my book “,” climate change is a wicked problem. Wicked problems are those that are multifaceted, changing and difficult to address because they are a complex mix of economic, financial, political, cultural and technical issues. For climate change, inter-generational factors and short-termism create additional challenges. Quite simply, to fully address the impact of climate change, we need to change the way we access, generate and utilize energy, the driver of all our activities on the planet.

Did I say simply? The entire world has to do this in concert — and equitably and urgently. Global agreement on any major issue has never been easy, quick or complete. Climate change is one of those. The Conference of the Parties involves almost 200 nations, all with their disparate issues, from the very poor to the highly-developed industrial giants.

But climate change gives current world leaders little choice but to find a way out of the quagmire. As I wrote in another opinion piece titled, “There’s a Rock Heading for Earth,” if there was a rock, half the size of our moon heading at great speed in our direction, how would we respond? Would leaders continue to meet once a year and discuss with platitudes and endless targets to deal with the threat?

COP26 in Glasgow

So, what should we expect from COP26? More of the same “blah, blah, blah,” as Thunberg says? Will we see leaders from developed countries justifying their positions by proudly espousing their achievements to date and promising to do more? Will leaders of developing nations cry for more action and support while they adapt to increasingly severe weather patterns?

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To help predict the outcome of COP26, let me summarize the meetings so far. The first meeting of the UNFCCC was held in 1995 and was known as COP1. Twenty-six years and 25 meetings later, greenhouse gases continue to rise and climate change remains a considerable and increasing risk to humanity. Is it any wonder that the voice of youth is one of disillusionment and frustration?

Don’t get me wrong, there has been considerable progress made all around the world on the installation of large, renewable energy generation systems. This has meant some improvement in balancing the economic development of countries that are still catching up with the highly industrialized nations. But, in reality, such progress hasn’t been adequate — nowhere near it.

Is the global community trying hard enough? Are leaders willing and able to courageously get over the politics and avert short-termism just this once? Rhetorical questions, I know.

So, back to my earlier analogy, while the travelator continues to take the world backward in terms of emissions reductions, global action appears to be limited to meetings, targets and pledges with little progress. Let’s hope COP26 leads to at least slowing the travelator down — and significantly. Otherwise, it’s all “blah, blah, blah.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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I remember Greenville as a wonderful little place that, all these years later, still brings back fond memories. I’m now on the other coast, but much of that small, historic community is no longer there. This season, California’s wildfires have already devastated  the territory burned in the same period in 2020’s record fire season. And that makes a point that couldn’t be more salient to our moment and our future.

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A heating planet is a danger, not in some distant time, but right now — yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Don’t just ask the inhabitants of Greenville, ask those in the village of , British Columbia, the  in that Canadian province to be gutted by flames in recent months in a region that normally — or perhaps I should just say once upon a time — was used to neither extreme heat and drought, nor the fires that accompany them.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re no longer just reading about the climate crisis; we’re living it in a startling fashion. At least for this old guy, that’s now a fact — not just of life but of all our lives — that simply couldn’t be more extreme and I don’t even need the latest harrowing  of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to tell me so.

Whether you’ve been sweating and swearing under the latest heat dome; fleeing fires somewhere in the West; broiling in a Siberia that’s  startling amounts of heat-producing methane into the atmosphere; being swept away by  in Germany; sweltering in an unprecedented heat-and-fire season in Greece (where even the suburbs  were being evacuated); baking in  or on the of Sardinia in a “disaster without precedent”;  in water in a Chinese subway car; or, after “,” wading through the subway systems of New York City or , you — all of us — are in a new world and we better damn well get used to it. 

Floods, megadrought, the fiercest of forest fires,  — you name it and it seems to be happening not in 2100 or even 2031, but now. A recent study suggests that, in 2020 (not 2040 or 2080), more than a quarter of Americans had  in some fashion from the effects of extreme heat, already the greatest weather-based killer of Americans and, given this blazing summer, 2021 is only likely to be worse.

By the way, don’t imagine that it’s just us humans who are suffering. Consider, for instance, the  billion or more — yes, 1 billion — mussels, barnacles and other small sea creatures that were estimated to have died off the coast of Vancouver, Canada, during the unprecedented heatwave there earlier in the summer.

A few weeks ago, watching the setting sun, an eerie blaze of orange-red in a hazy sky here on the East Coast was an unsettling experience once I realized what I was actually seeing: a haze of smoke from the megadrought-stricken West’s disastrous early fire season. It had blown thousands of miles east for the second year in a row, managing to turn the air of  and  into danger zones.

In a way, right now it hardly matters where you look on this planet of ours. Take , where a “massive melting event,” occurring after the temperature there hit double the normal this summer, made enough ice vanish “in a single day last week to cover the whole of Florida in two inches of water.” But there was also that record brush fire torching more than 62 square miles of . And while you’re at it, you can skip prime houseboat-vacation season at Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border, since that huge reservoir is now three-quarters empty (and, among Western reservoirs, anything but ).

It almost doesn’t matter which recent report you cite. When it comes to what the scientists are finding, it’s invariably worse than you (or often ) had previously imagined. It’s true, for instance, of the Amazon rainforest, one of the great carbon sinks on the planet. Parts of it are now starting to release carbon into the atmosphere, as a  in the journal Nature reported recently, partially thanks to climate change and partially to more direct forms of human intervention.

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It’s no less true of the Siberian permafrost in a region where, for the first time above the Arctic Circle, the temperature in one town  more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit on a summer day in 2020. And yes, when Siberia heats up in such a fashion,  (a far more powerful heat-trapping gas than CO2) is released into the atmosphere from that region’s melting permafrost wetlands, which had previously sealed it in. And recently, that’s not even the real news. What about the possibility, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that what’s being released now is actually a potential “” not from that permafrost itself, but from thawing rock formations within it?

In fact, when it comes to the climate crisis, as a recent study in the journal Bioscience , “some tracked planetary vital signs, including greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat content, and ice mass, set worrying new records.” Similarly, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide “have all set new year-to-date records for atmospheric concentrations in both 2020 and 2021.”

Mind you, just in case you hadn’t noticed, the last seven  have been the warmest in recorded history. And speaking of climate-change-style records in this era, last year,  natural disasters hit this country, including hurricanes, fires and floods, each causing more than $1 billion in damage, another instant record with — the safest prediction around — many more to come.

“It Looked Like an Atomic Bomb”

Lest you think that all of this represents an anomaly of some sort, simply a bad year or two on a planet that historically has gone from heat to ice and back again, think twice. A recent report published in Nature Climate Change, for instance, suggests that heat waves that could put the recent ones in the US West and British Columbia to shame are a and especially likely for “highly populated regions in North America, Europe, and China.” (Keep in mind that, a few years ago, there was already a suggesting that the North China plain with its 400 million inhabitants could essentially become by the end of this century due to heatwaves too powerful for human beings to survive.) Or as another recent study suggested, reports The Guardian, “heatwaves that smash previous records … would become two to seven times more likely in the next three decades and three to 21 times more likely from 2051-2080, unless carbon emissions are immediately slashed.”

It turns out that, even to describe the new world we already live in, we may need a new vocabulary. I mean, honestly, until the West Coast broiled and burned from Los Angeles to British Columbia this summer, had you ever heard of, no less used, the phrase “” before? I hadn’t, I can tell you that.

And by the way, there’s no question that climate change in its ever more evident forms has finally made the mainstream news in a major way. It’s no longer left to  or  and the  to highlight what’s happening to us on this planet. It’s taken years, but in 2021 it’s finally become genuine news, even if  with the truly fierce emphasis it deserves.

The New York Times, to give you an example, typically had a recent piece of reportage (not an op-ed) by Shawn Hubler , “Is This the End of Summer as We’ve Known It?” Hubler wrote: “The season Americans thought we understood — of playtime and ease, of a sun we could trust, air we could breathe and a natural world that was, at worst, indifferent — has become something else, something ominous and immense. This is the summer we saw climate change merge from the abstract to the now, the summer we realized that every summer from now on will be more like this than any quaint memory of past summers.” And the new IPCC report on how fast things are indeed proceeding was  and front-screen news everywhere, as well it should have been, given the research it was summing up.

My point here couldn’t be simpler: In heat and weather terms, our world is not just going to become extreme in 20 years or 50 years or as this century ends. It’s officially extreme right now. And here’s the sad thing: I have no doubt that, no matter what I write in this piece, no matter how up to date I am at this moment, by the time it appears it will already be missing key climate stories and revelations. Within months, it could look like ancient history.

Welcome, then, to our very own not-so-slow-motion apocalypse. A friend of mine recently commented to me that, for most of the first 30 years of his life, he always expected the world to go nuclear. That was, of course, at the height of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. And then, like so many others, he stopped . How could he have known that, in those very years, the world was indeed beginning to get nuked, or rather carbon-dioxided, methaned, greenhouse-gassed, even if in a ? As it happens, this time there’s going to be no pretense for any of us of truly ducking and covering. 

It’s true, of course, that ducking and covering was a fantasy of the Cold War era. After all, no matter where you might have ducked and covered then — even the Air Force’s command center dug into the heart of  in Colorado — you probably wouldn’t have been safe from a full-scale nuclear conflict between the two superpowers of that moment, or at least not from the world it would have left behind, a disaster barely avoided in the  of 1962. (Today, we know that, thanks to the possibility of “nuclear winter,” even a regional nuclear conflict — say, between India and Pakistan — could  of us, by starvation if nothing else.)

In that context, I wasn’t surprised when a homeowner, facing his house, his possessions, and his car burned to a crisp in Oregon’s devastating Bootleg Fire,  the carnage this way: “It looked like an atomic bomb.”

And, of course, so much worse is yet to come. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a planet on which the Amazon rainforest has already turned into a carbon emitter or one in which the Gulf Stream  in a way that’s likely to deprive various parts of the planet of key rainfall necessary to grow crops for billions of people, while rising sea levels disastrously on the East Coast of the United States. And that just begins to enumerate the dangers involved, including the bizarre possibility that much of Europe might be plunged into a — hold your hats (and earmuffs) for this one — !

World War III

If this were indeed the beginning of a world war (instead of a world warm), you know perfectly well that the United States like so many other nations would, in the style of World War II, instantly mobilize resources to fight it (or as a group of leading climate scientists  recently, we would “go big on climate” now). And yet in this country (as in too many others), so little has indeed been mobilized.

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Worse yet, here one of the two major parties, only recently in control of the White House,  the  of  (and so the mass creation of greenhouse gases) big time, as well as further for yet more of them. Many congressional Republicans are still in the equivalent of a state of  (not to say, stark raving mad) denial of what’s underway. They are ready to  and raise no money to shut down the production of greenhouse gases, no less create the genuinely green planet run on alternative energy sources that would actually rein in what’s happening.

And criminal as that may have been, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and crew were just aiding and abetting those that, years ago, I called “the biggest criminal enterprise in history.” I was speaking of the executives of major fossil-fuel companies who, as I said then, were and remain the true “terrarists” (and no, that’s not a misspelling) of history. After all, their goal in hijacking all our lives isn’t simply to destroy buildings like the World Trade Center, but to take down Earth (Terra) as we’ve known it. And don’t leave out the leaders of countries like  still so disastrously intent on, for instance, producing yet more coal-fired power. Those CEOs and their enablers have been remarkably intent on quite literally committing terracide and, sadly enough, in that — as has been made oh-so-clear in this disastrous summer — they’ve already been remarkably successful.

Companies like ExxonMobil knew long  most of the rest of us the sort of damage and chaos their products would someday cause and couldn’t have given less of a damn as long as the mega-profits continued to flow in. (They would, in fact, invest some of those profits in funding organizations that were promoting climate-change denial.) Worse yet, as revealing comments by a senior Exxon lobbyist recently made clear, they’re , working hard to undermine US President Joe Biden’s relatively modest green-energy plans in any way they can.

Thought about a certain way, even those of us who didn’t live in Greenville, California, are already in World War III. Many of us just don’t seem to know it yet. So, welcome to my (and your) extreme world, not next month or next year or next decade or next century, but right now. It’s a world of disaster worth mobilizing over if, that is, you care about the lives of all of us and particularly of the generations to come. 

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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As it happens, she’s slightly younger than me, but still getting up there, and we were chatting on the phone about our world, about the all-too-early first  near Los Angeles, the intensifying  across the West and Southwest, the increasing nightmare of  in the Atlantic and so on. We were talking about the way in which we humans — and we Americans, in particular (though you could  in the Chinese without a blink) — have been wreaking fossil-fuelized havoc on this planet and what was to come.

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And, oh yes, we were talking about our own deaths, also to come at some unknown future moment but one not as far away as either of us might wish. My friend then said to me abashedly, “I sometimes think it’s lucky I won’t be here to see what’s going to happen to the world.” And even as she began stumbling all over herself apologizing for saying such a thing, I understood exactly what she meant. I had had the very same thought and sense of shame and horror at even thinking it — at even thinking I would, in some strange sense, get off easy and leave a world from hell to my children and grandchildren. Nothing, in fact, could make me sadder.

And you know what’s the worst thing? Whether I’m thinking about that “destroyer” in the Strait of Taiwan or the destruction of planet Earth, one thing is clear enough: It wouldn’t have to be this way.

China on the Brain

Now, let’s focus on the Curtis Wilbur for a moment. And in case you hadn’t noticed, US President Joe Biden and his foreign-policy team have China on the . No surprise there, though, only history. Don’t you remember how, when Biden was still vice-president, President Barack Obama announced that, in foreign and especially military policy, the US was planning a “pivot to Asia”? His administration was, in other words, planning on leaving this country’s war-on-terror disasters in the greater Middle East behind (not that he would actually prove capable of doing so) and refocusing on this planet’s true rising power. Donald Trump would prove similarly eager to dump America’s greater Middle Eastern wars (though he, too, failed to do so) and refocus on Beijing —  first, but  not far behind.

Now, as the US  its last troops from Afghanistan, the Biden team finds itself deep in its own version of a pivot-to-Asia strategy, with its collective foreign-policy brain remarkably focused on challenging China (at least until Israel briefly got in the way).

Think of it as a kind of pandemic of anxiety, a fear that, without a major refocus, the US might indeed be heading for the imperial scrapheap of history. In a sense, this may prove to be the true Achilles’ heel of the Biden era. Or put another way, the president’s foreign-policy crew seems, at some visceral level, to fear deeply for the America they’ve known and valued so, the one that was expected to loom invincibly over the rest of the planet once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; the imperial power our politicians () had long hailed as the greatest, most “exceptional” nation on the planet; the with “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” (Obama), aka “the greatest force for freedom in the history of the world” (George W. Bush).

We’re talking, of course, about the same great power that, after almost 20 years of disastrous wars, drone strikes, and counterterror operations across vast stretches of the planet, looks like it is sinking fast, a country whose political parties can no longer agree on anything that matters. In such a context, let’s consider for a moment that flu-like China obsession, the one that leaves Washington’s politicians and military leaders with strikingly high temperatures and an irrational urge to send American warships into distant waters near the coast of China, while regularly upping the ante, militarily and politically.

In that context, here’s an obsessional fact of our moment: These days, it seems as if President Biden can hardly appear anywhere or talk to anyone without mentioning China or that sinking country he now heads and that sinking feeling he has about it. He did it the other week in an  with David Brooks when, with an obvious on-the-page shudder, he told The New York Times columnist, “We’re kind of at a place where the rest of the world is beginning to look to China.” Brrr… it’s cold in here (or maybe too hot to handle?) in an increasingly chaotic, still partly Trumpian, deeply divided Washington and in a country where, from  the vote to  the teaching of history to  the carrying of unlicensed weapons, democracy is looking ill indeed.

Oh, and that very same week when the president talked to Brooks, he went to the Coast Guard Academy to address its graduating class and promptly began  — yes! — that crucial, central subject for Washingtonians these days: freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. (“When nations try to game the system or tip the rules in their favor, it throws everything off balance,” Biden said. “That’s why we are so adamant that these areas of the world that are the arteries of trade and shipping remain peaceful — whether that’s the South China Sea, the Arabian Gulf, and, increasingly, the Arctic.”) You didn’t know, did you, that a guided-missile destroyer, not to speak of aircraft carrier battle groups, and other naval vessels had been anointed with the job of keeping “freedom of navigation” alive halfway across the planet or that the US Coast Guard simply guards our coastlines.

These days, it should really be called the Coasts Guard. After all, you can find its members “guarding” coasts ranging from  in the Persian Gulf to the. Evidently, even the coast of the island of Taiwan, which, since 1949, China has always claimed as its own and where a subtle dance between Beijing and Washington has long played out, has become just another coast for guarding in nothing less than a new “partnership.” (“Our new agreement for the Coast Guard to partner with Taiwan,” said the president, “will help ensure that we’re positioned to better respond to shared threats in the region and to conduct coordinated humanitarian and environmental missions.”) Consider that a clear challenge to the globe’s rising power in what’s become ever more of a showdown at the naval equivalent of the OK Corral, part of an  new cold war between the US and China.

And none of this is out of the ordinary. In his late April address to Congress, for instance, President Biden anxiously  the assembled senators and congressional representatives that “we’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21^st century. … China and other countries are closing in fast.” In his own strange way, Trump exhibited similar worries.

What Aren’t We Guarding?

Now, here’s the one thing that doesn’t seem to strike anyone in Congress, at the Coast Guard Academy or at The New York Times as particularly strange: that American ships should be protecting “maritime freedom” on the other side of the globe, or that the Coast Guard should be partnering for the same. Imagine, just for a second, that Chinese naval vessels and their Coast Guard equivalent were patrolling our coasts, or parts of the Caribbean, while edging ever closer to Florida. You know just what an uproar of shock and outrage, what cries of horror would result. But it’s assumed that the equivalent on the other side of the globe is a role too obvious even to bother to explain and that our leaders should indeed be crying out in horror at China’s challenges to it.

It’s increasingly clear that, from  to the Taiwan Strait to the South China Sea to the , Washington is pushing China hard, challenging its positions big time and often in a military fashion. And no, China itself, whether in the South China Sea or elsewhere, is no angel. Still, the US military, while trying to leave its failed terror wars in the dust, is visibly facing off against that economically rising power in an ever more threatening manner, one that already seems too close to a possible military conflict of some sort. And you don’t even want to know what sort of warfare this country’s military leaders are now imagining there as, in fact, they did so long ago. (Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame only recently  that, according to a still-classified document, in response to the Chinese shelling of Taiwan in 1958, US military leaders seriously considered launching nuclear strikes against mainland China.)

Indeed, as US Navy ships are eternally sent to challenge China, challenging words in Washington only escalate as well. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks  in March, while plugging for an ever-larger Pentagon budget, “Beijing is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system… Secretary [of Defense Lloyd] Austin and I believe that the [People’s Republic of China] is the pacing challenge for the United States ���������ٲ�����.”

And in that context, the US Navy, the Air Force and the Coast Guard are all “pacing” away. The latest proposed version of an always-rising Pentagon budget, for instance,  $5.1 billion for what’s called the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, “a fund created by Congress to counter China in the Indo-Pacific region.” In fact, the US Indo-Pacific Command is also  $27 billion in extra spending between 2022 and 2027 for “new missiles and air defenses, radar systems, staging areas, intelligence-sharing centers, supply depots and testing ranges throughout the region.” And so it goes in the pandemic world of 2021.

Though seldom asked, the real question, the saddest one I think, the one that brings us back to my conversation with my friend about the world we may leave behind us, is: What aren’t we guarding on this planet of ours?

A New Cold War on a Melting Planet?

Let’s start with this. The  of rising and falling empires should be seen as a thing of the past. It’s true that, in a traditional sense, China is now rising and the US seemingly falling, at least economically speaking. But something else is rising and something else is falling, too. I’m thinking, of course, about rising global temperatures that, sometime in the next five years, have a  of exceeding the 1.5 degree Celsius limit (above the pre-industrial era) set by the 2015 Paris climate accords and what that future heat may do to the very idea of a habitable planet.

Meanwhile, when it comes to the US, the Atlantic hurricane season is only expected to worsen, the mega-drought in the Southwest to intensify — as fires burn  in previously wetter mountainous elevations in that region — and so on. Within this century, major coastal cities in  US and China  New Orleans, Miami,  and Hong Kong could find themselves flooded out by rising sea levels, thanks in part to the melting of  and . As for a rising China, that supposedly ultimate power of the future, even its leadership must know that parts of the north China plain, now home to 400 million people, could become quite literally  by century’s end due to heat waves capable of killing the healthy within hours.

In such a context, on such a planet, ask yourself: Is there really a future for us in which the essential relationship between the US and China — the  greenhouse gas emitters of this moment — is a warlike one? Whether a literal war results or not, one thing should be clear enough: If the two greatest carbon emitters can’t figure out how to cooperate instead of picking endless fights with each other, the human future is likely to prove grim and dim indeed. “Containing” China is the foreign-policy focus of the moment, a throwback to another age in Washington. And yet this is the very time when what truly needs to be contained is the overheating of this planet. And in truth, given human ingenuity, climate change should indeed be containable.

And yet the foreign-policy wing of the Biden administration and Congress — where Democrats are successfully  into the economy under the rubric of a struggle with China, a rare subject the Republicans can go all in on — seems focused on creating a future of eternal Sino-American hostility and endless armed competition. In the already overheated world we inhabit, who could honestly claim that this is a formula for “national security”?

Returning to the conversation with my friend, I wonder why this approach to our planet doesn’t seem to more people like an obvious formula for disaster. Why aren’t more of us screaming at the top of our lungs about the dangers of Washington’s urge to return to a world in which a “cold war” is a formula for success? It leaves me ever more fearful for the planet that, one of these days, I will indeed be leaving to others who deserved so much better.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post What Planet Will Our Children and Grandchildren Inherit? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The Missing Pieces to Avoid a Climate Disaster

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This shared vision, forming a critical piece of the “” agenda and the UK’s post-Brexit foreign policy, is expected to lay out a framework for enhanced cooperation across a much broader set of policy pillars. One such area is climate action, which is a key part of economic growth strategies and the global green energy agenda for both countries.

As signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement — the international treaty on climate change — India and the UK have sizable ambitions to invest in creating cleaner and sustainable energy systems. This time last year, the United Kingdom experienced its longest coal-free run to date, a significant milestone for an economy that generated about 40% of its electricity from coal just a ago. While India’s green energy transition is comparatively nascent, it has made significant strides toward expanding its renewable energy capacity, especially in solar power, where it is emerging as a global leader.

Energy Sources

Although the two countries have vastly different energy sources and consumption patterns, this creates a unique opportunity for each economy to capitalize on its individual strengths. In offshore wind power, the UK is the largest global player, while India has only begun to scratch the surface of its wind potential. The United Kingdom’s technical prowess will play a crucial role in supporting the growth of India’s offshore wind energy — from the meteorological expertise required to evaluate wind patterns and energy production potential to joint research and development opportunities.

The growth of electric vehicles (EVs) is another area where each market has distinct strengths. India, for example, can rely on the UK’s experience as it undertakes the massive infrastructure exercise of deploying smart EV stations. The UK can draw on India’s success with battery-powered three-wheelers to develop sustainable last-mile connectivity solutions. Strengthened bilateral cooperation on these fronts will not only accelerate the EV revolution globally but can also serve to contain China’s dominance in this market.

The Indian and British governments are closely collaborating around climate action. This is evident from recent trips to India by the UK’s Alok Sharma, the president of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) that will take place in Glasgow, and Lord Tariq Ahmad, the minister for South Asia and the Commonwealth.

It is, however, important to expand the scope of these engagements to include small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which constitute a powerhouse of skill and experience. SMEs based in the UK can play a significant role in supporting India’s energy transition. British companies could adapt their innovations for the local market, while in turn benefiting from India’s strong manufacturing base and engineering skills. To tap into this market opportunity, governments could facilitate SME-focused trade delegations as well as joint-venture opportunities for cleantech startups.

Green financing would play an equally important role in truly unlocking the value of such partnerships. This would be through existing bilateral instruments like the  and  or the UK’s soon-to-be-launched mechanism that will mobilize private investment into carbon capture and hydrogen projects. This is especially important for India, which is looking at green hydrogen in a big way and is set to launch its first national roadmap this year. As the UK’s carbon capture market grows, this could support India’s plans to produce hydrogen from natural gas, creating new avenues for technology sharing.

If one thing is clear, it is that the opportunities are immense and the existing foundation is strong. With the stage set and the actors in place, Roadmap 2030 could certainly stand to benefit not just India and the UK, but the world at large in delivering a cleaner, more affordable and resilient energy future.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Outside of the foundation, he has become more about climate change and has founded and funded a number of ventures that address innovation challenges connected to climate change. His recently published , “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” continues this path. It summarizes what the last decades have taught him about the drivers of climate change and plots a path of necessary actions and innovations.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The book spends only a few initial pages making the argument for the anthropogenic nature of climate change, as it is clearly intended for readers who accept the scientific consensus for it. Early on, Gates asserts that the mere reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is not sufficient to avoid a climate disaster. The only real goal, according to Gates, must be achieving net-zero emissions, taking as much GHG out of the atmosphere as we put in, year by year. 

However, significant political, economic and infrastructural hurdles have to still be overcome to electrify personal transport. Decisions to exit or curtail carbon-free nuclear power production seem to largely be following  rather than . These examples demonstrate that scaling viable, existing carbon-neutral solutions is already hard. Finding and utilizing affordable green alternatives to problems where we currently have none is even harder.

Gates points to the fact that without finding scalable carbon-neutral ways of producing steel, cement or meat, we will not be able to arrive at a net-zero economy in the 21^st century. Even if humanity was able to produce all of its energy in carbon-neutral ways and cut carbon emissions from transport, agriculture and deforestation, as well as from heating and air conditioning by half, we would still be left with more than half of the GHG emissions we currently produce. This point is further exacerbated once we consider the growing global population and rising wealth and consumption in populous countries like China, India or Nigeria.

What’s More Important Than Innovation?

Innovation, for Gates, does not stop with technology. It is of little help if a revolutionary technological solution is developed, but there is no way or incentive for an individual person, company or city to use it. Innovation, to use Gates’ words, “is also coming up with new approaches to business models, supply chains, markets, and policies that will help new innovations come to life and reach a global scale.” Ideas like carbon taxation and regulation, which are often cited as crucial incentives for climate innovation, may trouble some free market enthusiasts, but, as Gates argues, it is important to realize that getting to net-zero is also a “huge economic opportunity: The countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades.”

Gates heavily utilizes the concept of a “Green Premium,” which he understands as the extra cost of a carbon-neutral alternative compared to today’s carbon-producing equivalent. For example, today, the Green Premium of an advanced biofuel is 106%, making biofuel 206% as expensive as gasoline. He stresses that innovation cannot only aim to develop carbon-neutral alternatives. It must also make them competitive and accessible, lowering green premiums as far as possible and driving infrastructural and political incentives.

It should not come as a surprise that Gates approaches the challenge of getting to net-zero as a capitalist and a technology optimist. He firmly believes that a dollar in the Global North is better spent on carbon innovation than on disincentivizing the utilization of carbon-intensive products and services — a doctrine that his own investments certainly follow. However, spending public climate funds on research and development in cement production or generation IV nuclear reactors, rather than on bike paths in Berlin, Paris or New York, will be a difficult sell. 

A Clear Roadmap

Bill Gates has received criticism of varying degrees of legitimacy for many of the stances he has taken, going back to the United States v. Microsoft antitrust litigation and beyond. With “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” however, he has achieved what many of our political leaders have not: clearly defining and communicating a holistic and evidence-based roadmap that leads us to a net-zero carbon future and mitigates the most horrific scenarios of runaway, anthropogenic climate change.

“Show me a problem, and I’ll look for a technology to fix it,” Gates proclaims. Being a believer not only in his own, but also humanity’s ability to innovate its way out of the gloomiest odds, he remains optimistic, whilst conceding the momentous nature of the challenge we face: “We have to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Where it was once a matter of the Knicks winning 109-92 or the Mets losing 4-2, it’s now those other, always rising, ever grimmer figures — say, 29,980,628 and 544,724. Those are the ever-updated numbers of reported American cases and deaths in what, until the arrival of the Biden administration, was a pathetically chaotic, horrifically mismanaged and politically depth-charged struggle with COVID-19.

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In certain Republican-run states now  to unmask and open anything and everything to the limit, in places where crowds gather as if nothing had truly happened in the past year (as at  this spring), we may face yet another future “wave” of disease — the , if it happens — in a country at least parts of which seem eternally eager to teeter at the edge of a health cliff. That it wouldn’t have had to be this way we know from the success of the city of Seattle, which faced the first major coronavirus outbreak in the US a year ago and now has, as The New York Times , “the lowest death rate of the 20 largest metropolitan regions in the country.”

Think of COVID-19-watching as the sport from hell. And when you look at those ever-changing figures — even knowing that vaccinations are now  on the rise in this country (but not everywhere on this beleaguered planet of ours) — they should remind you daily that we live in a deeply wounded land on a deeply wounded planet and that, no matter the fate of COVID-19, it’s only likely to get worse.

Here, for instance, is another figure to attend to, even though there’s no equivalent to that Johns Hopkins page when it comes to this subject: . That’s the percentage of the human population living in tropical lands where, as this planet continues to heat toward or even past the  mark set by the 2015 Paris climate accord, temperatures are going to soar beyond the limits of what a body (not carefully ensconced in air-conditioned surroundings) can actually tolerate. Climate change will, in other words, prove to be another kind of pandemic, even if, unlike COVID-19, it’s not potentially traceable to , but to us humans and specifically to the oil, gas and coal companies that have over all these years powered what still passes for civilization.

In other words, just to take the American version of climate change, from  to , increasing numbers of ever-more-powerful  to greater , rising sea levels (and disappearing ) to devastating heat waves (and even, as in Texas recently, climate-influenced ), not to speak of future migration surges guaranteed to make border crossing an even more fraught political issue, ahead lies a world that could someday make our present pandemic planet seem like a dreamscape. And here’s the problem: At least with COVID-19, in a miracle of modern scientific research, vaccines galore have been developed to deal with that devastating virus, but sadly there will be  for climate change.

The Wounding of Planet Earth

Keep in mind as well that our country, the United States, is not only an especially wounded one when it comes to the pandemic; it’s also a wounding one, both at home and abroad. The sports pages of death could easily be extended, for instance, to this country’s distant wars, something Brown University’s  has long tried to do. (That site is, , the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center for America’s grim, never-ending conflicts of the 21^st century.)

Choose whatever post-9/11 figures you care to when it comes to our forever wars and they’re all staggering: invasions and occupations of distant lands; global drone assassination campaigns; or the release of American airpower across the greater Middle East and parts of Africa (most recently, the strike President Joe Biden ordered in Syria that killed a mere “” of militants — 22, claim some  — a supposedly “proportionate” number that did not include any women or children, though it was a  until the president canceled a second strike). And don’t forget Washington’s endless arming of, and for, countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates engaged in their own orgies of death and destruction in Yemen. Pick whatever figures you want, but the wounding of this planet in this century by this country has been all too real and ongoing.

The numbers, in fact, remain staggering. As has been pointed out many times at TomDispatch, the  this country puts into its “defense” budget tops that of the  (China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and Brazil) combined. And when it comes to selling weaponry of the most advanced and destructive kind globally, the US leaves every other country in the . It’s the  of all arms dealers on planet Earth.

And if you happen to be in the mood to count up US military bases, which are on every continent except Antarctica, this country garrisons the planet in a way no previous power, not even imperial Britain, did. It has an estimated , while, just for the sake of comparison, China, that other fearsome rising power the US military is now so focused on, has… hmmm, at least one such , in Djibouti, Africa (remarkably close — you won’t be surprised to learn — to an American military  there). None of this really has much of anything to do with “national security,” but it certainly adds up to a global geography of wounding in a rather literal fashion. In this sense, on this planet in this century, the United States has truly — to use a word American politicians have long loved to apply to this country — proved “exceptional.”

America Unmasked

At home, too, until recently, American political leadership has been wounding indeed. Keep in mind that this was in a country in which one political party is now a vortex of conspiracy theories, bizarre beliefs, wild convictions and truths that are obvious lies, a  nearly a third of whose members view the QAnon conspiracy theory favorably, 75% of whose members believe that Biden lost the 2020 election and  of whose male members have no intention of being vaccinated for COVID-19 (potentially denying the country “herd immunity”).

And just to put all this in perspective,  Republican “statesman” offered a vote of support when Biden’s congressional radicals passed a (temporary) $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, parts of which were aimed at alleviating this country’s historic levels of inequality. After all, in the pandemic moment, while so many Americans found themselves jobless, homeless and hungry, the country’s billionaires made an  $1.3 trillion (a figure that should certainly fit somewhere on the sports pages of death). Never, not even in the Gilded Age, has inequality been quite so extreme or wounding in the country that still passes for the greatest on the planet.

For the first time in its history, in 2017, a self-proclaimed billionaire became president of the United States and, with the help of a Republican Congress, passed a  that left the rich and corporations flooded with yet more money. Admittedly, he was a billionaire who had repeatedly  his own businesses, always jumping ship just in time with other people’s money in hand (exactly as he would do after helping to pandemicize this country, once again with  of his followers’ money in his pocket).

As for me, shocking as the assault on the Capitol was on January 6, I never thought that the Senate should have convicted Donald Trump for that alone. My feeling was that the House should have impeached him and the Senate convicted him for the far more serious and direct crime of murder. After all, he was the one who played a crucial role in turning the pandemic into our very own set of mask wars (even as he called on his followers, long before January 6, to “” a state capitol building).

The half-baked,  way he would deal with the coronavirus, its importance and what should be done to protect us from it — even before he got a  of it, was hospitalized and returned to the White House, still , to  his mask in full public view — would functionally represent acts of murder. In effect, he unmasked himself as the killer he was. (A study in the International Journal of Health Services suggests that by July 2020, his personal decision to turn masks into a political issue had already  in between 4,000 and 12,000 deaths.)

Now, throw in other Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and  of Mississippi, who knowingly refused to declare mask mandates or canceled them early, and you have a whole crew of killers to add to those Johns Hopkins figures in a moment when the all-American sport is surely death.

A Genuinely Green Planet?

Admittedly, I don’t myself have any friends who have died of COVID-19, although I have at least two, even more ancient than I am, one 91 in fact, who have been hospitalized for it, devastated by it, and then have slowly and at least partially recovered from it. As for myself, since I had the foresight to be 75 when COVID-19 first hit and am now heading for 77, I’ve had my two vaccine shots in a world in which, thanks again at least in part to Trump and to a social-media universe filled with conspiracy theories and misinformation, far too many Americans —  of mostly young military personnel, for instance — are shying away from or refusing what could save us all.

So, we’ve been plunged into a nightmare comparable to those that have, in the past, been visited on humanity, including the  and the , made worse by leaders evidently intent on shuffling us directly into the graveyard. And yet, that could, in the end, prove the least of our problems. We could, as President Biden has only  more or less promised, be heading for a future in which COVID-19 will be truly under control or becomes, at worst, the equivalent of the yearly flu.

Let’s hope that’s the case. Now, consider this: The one favor COVID-19 seemed to be doing for humanity by shutting so many of us in, keeping airlines passengers on the ground, taking vehicles off the road and even, for a while, ships off the high seas was cutting down on the use of oil, coal and natural gas and so greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere. In the year of COVID-19, carbon emissions . In December 2020, however, as various global economies like China’s began to rev back up, those emissions were already reportedly a shocking  than they had been in December 2019 before the pandemic swept across the world.

In short, most of what might make it onto the sports pages of death these days may turn out to be the least of humanity’s problems. After all, according to a , thanks in significant part to human activities, even the Amazon rainforest, once one of the great carbon sinks on the planet, is now releasing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than it’s absorbing. And that should be a shock.

If you want to be further depressed, try this: On our planet, there are now two great greenhouse gas , the United States ( at the top of the charts) and China (number one at this moment). Given what lies ahead, here’s a simple enough formula: If China and the US can’t cooperate in a truly meaningful way when it comes to climate change, we’re in trouble deep. And yet the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, remains remarkably  hostility to China and a military response to that country, an approach that someday is guaranteed to seem so  as to be unbelievable.

Climate change will, over the coming decades, prove increasingly devastating to our lives. It could, in a sense, prove to be the pandemic of all the ages. And yet, here’s the sad and obvious thing: The world doesn’t have to be this way. It’s true that there are no vaccinations against climate change, but we humans already know perfectly well what has to be . We know that we need to create a genuinely  and green-powered planet to bring this version of a pandemic under control and we know as well that, over the next decades, it’s a perfectly doable task if only humanity truly sets its mind to it.

Otherwise, we’re going to find ourselves on an increasingly extreme planet, while the sports pages of death will only grow. If we’re not careful, human history could, in the end, turn out to be the ultimate ghost story.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The rich man promptly hired workers to cover everything in sight in green paint so that he could easily follow the peculiar prescription. Ten days later, when the wise man returned in his saffron robe, a worker hurried over to douse him in green paint as well.

The Nation-State vs. The Climate

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“You have wasted so much money through your monumental stupidity,” the paint-splattered sage upbraided the rich man. “If only you had purchased a pair of green spectacles, worth perhaps four rupees, you could have saved these walls and trees and pots and pans and chairs and sofas and also a pretty large share of your fortune.” The sage drew himself up to his full height to deliver his final message: “You cannot paint the world green!”

The moral of this  is simple. You cannot change the world. You can only change the way you look at the world. Perception is everything.

This cautionary tale is particularly ill-suited for these modern times. With the climate crisis pressing down upon the planet, humanity must change the world or face extinction. Figuratively speaking, we must indeed paint the world green — and ignore the so-called wise men who tell us just to put on green-colored glasses.

In the real world, this choice boils down to either shrinking the global carbon footprint or succumbing to a form of “greenwashing” that offers only an illusory environmental protection. The Biden administration faces this same choice. Will it spend a lot of money to help paint the world green or just hand out tinted lenses, whether green or rose, to make us all think that the planet has been saved?

How Green Is His Policy?

The first task for the Biden administration has been to clean up the toxic waste dump of the previous presidency. That has meant rejoining the 2015 Paris climate deal, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and restoring the many environmental regulations that former US President Donald Trump gutted. The new administration has put a pause on new oil and gas drilling on federal lands. It has reversed Trump’s effort to weaken the Clean Air Act. It has supported an international agreement to end the use of hydrofluorocarbons. In all, the administration is looking to roll back around 100 of Trump’s  to favor business over the environment.

These moves will bring the United States back to the status quo ante. The administration, however, has more ambitious plans. In his January 27 executive order on “tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad,” President Joe Biden laid out a detailed list of initiatives that runs over 7,500 . The very fact that the order addresses the “climate crisis” and not just “climate change” is an important signal of the seriousness with which the administration takes this issue.

The order begins with these words: “We have a narrow moment to pursue action at home and abroad in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of that crisis and to seize the opportunity that tackling climate change presents. Domestic action must go hand in hand with United States international leadership, aimed at significantly enhancing global action. Together, we must listen to science and meet the moment.”

To this end, the administration has declared that the United States will become carbon-neutral by 2050, which will require steep cuts in emissions. “We need to increase tree cover five times faster than we are,”  John Kerry, Biden’s special envoy for climate. “We need to ramp up renewable energy six times faster. And the transition to electric vehicles needs to take place at a rate 22 times faster.”

But like its initial promise to vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days against COVID-19, the administration is already being pushed to do better. Other countries are competing to become carbon-neutral faster: Sweden has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2045, Austria and Iceland have more set 2040 as their goal, Finland is looking at 2035, and both Norway and Uruguay expect to achieve the mark by 2030. ,  and  have all committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2030 as well. General Motors  at the end of January that it would sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2035.

A key component of the US race to carbon neutrality is the Biden administration’s version of a Green New Deal. This “clean energy ���𱹴DZ��ܳپ��Dz�”&�Բ�����; for investing $400 billion over 10 years into transforming the US economy along sustainable lines, creating 10 million good-paying jobs in the clean energy sector and putting environmental justice at the center of these efforts.

But the administration can do just so much with executive orders and through federal  like the Department of Energy. At some point, Congress must decide whether the next four years will be world-transforming or just greenwashing.

But Congress — especially the Senate — is a problem. It’s going to be difficult to persuade Republicans as well as Democrats like Joe Manchin, who represents the coal-mining state of West Virginia, to sign on to anything truly transformative. But tax credits for wind power and solar energy were included in the December 2020 stimulus package, which Republicans backed. And Manchin is already the American Jobs in Energy Manufacturing Act, which provides tax incentives to businesses that switch over to clean energy products. Also in the is a Civilian Climate Corps, modeled on a similar New Deal-era initiative, that would enlist the unemployed and underemployed to help with such tasks as reforestation and protecting biodiversity.

It will be hard to move Congress on this domestic agenda. The international component may be an even tougher sell.

Going Green Internationally

At least on paper, the Biden administration intends to make the climate crisis a way of reshaping much of US foreign policy. The January 27 order reads: “It will be a United States priority to press for enhanced climate ambition and integration of climate considerations across a wide range of international fora, including the Group of Seven (G7), the Group of Twenty (G20), and fora that address clean energy, aviation, shipping, the Arctic, the ocean, sustainable development, migration, and other relevant topics.”

The first challenge for the new administration will be to put its money where its mouth is, and one example of that is its contributions to the Green Climate Fund. Established in 2010 to assist poorer countries transition away from fossil fuels, the fund raised about $7 billion out of the $10 billion initially pledged. A major reason for the shortfall was the US, which  but delivered only $1 billion. At the end of 2019, the fund put out another call to replenish its coffers and received pledges of another $9.8 billion.

Kerry has already  that the United States will make good on its previous commitment by sending $2 billion to the fund. But he has made no mention of US support for the additional replenishment. Climate campaigners have  on the administration to double its original commitment, as a number of European countries plus South Korea and New Zealand have done, and top up its contributions to $9 billion total. Such a firm action by the US might not only persuade other countries to achieve this higher standard but also pressure outliers like Russia and Australia to join the effort in the first place.

The more immediate problem, however, will be the rising levels of debt, particularly in the Global South, that the COVID-19 pandemic has turned into an acute crisis. A number of — Zambia, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, Brazil — have either defaulted on their loans or are close to it. Meanwhile, the fiscal crisis of poorer countries has pushed several to consider abandoning climate and environment-friendly restrictions on such harmful sectors as industrial mining in order to make financial ends meet. International financial institutions have suspended debt repayments for the world’s poorest nations and are considering various remedies, including the provision of more Special Drawing Rights (SDR) to the worst-off countries through the International Monetary Fund.

It’s unclear where Biden stands on debt relief or cancellation. But the January 27 executive order on the climate crisis  the following provision: “[D]evelop a strategy for how the voice and vote of the United States can be used in international financial institutions, including the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund, to promote financing programs, economic stimulus packages, and debt relief initiatives that are aligned with and support the goals of the Paris Agreement.” It’s possible that the administration will, instead of debt cancellation, promote some form of  or  swaps, preferably in versions that include a greater range of stakeholders including indigenous groups, or perhaps back the  linked to performance on green indicators.

The climate crisis will also affect how the United States negotiates trade agreements. Biden’s appointments to key trade positions suggest that he will be  labor and environmental concerns at the center of US policy. As a presidential candidate, Biden urged making future trade deals contingent on countries meeting their commitments under the Paris agreement, and members of Congress are  the new president to change the US-Canada-Mexico trade deal to reflect this condition. Another potential option is a fossil fuel export ban, for which Biden has  some support.

The new president is planning to hold a Global Climate Summit on Earth Day next month, though it’s unclear how such a meeting would differ from the one held in December 2020 to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris agreement. Climate campaigners are  the administration to use this opportunity to focus on “super pollutants” such as methane, black carbon, and HFCs, which contribute disproportionately to global warming.

In the meantime, preparations for COP26 — the UN climate change conference — are beginning for November in Glasgow, UK. The hostility of the Trump administration and the divided attention span of the Biden team — not to mention the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic — may compromise the efficacy of the UN meeting. The Paris agreement came together because of 18 months of intensive preliminary . A similar effort to forge a pre-meeting consensus for COP26 has been slow to emerge.

The Biden administration has made commitments on other environmental issues. It has endorsed a “30 by 30” initiative: protecting 30% of US lands and coastal areas by 2030. This effort would require setting 440 million more acres of land for conservation. This pledge, part of a global campaign to preserve biodiversity, would require a significant scaling back of extraction activities on federal lands.

Cooperation between the US and China is critical for any global environmental effort to move forward. China is currently the leading emitter of carbon in the world, with nearly twice the rate of the United States at number two (though the US still  in terms of cumulative output over time and per-capita carbon footprint). During the Barack Obama years, the two countries created the Clean Energy Research Consortium (CERC), a public-private initiative that spurs research and development in several energy-related sectors. Renewing CERC would be a first step in boosting U.S.-China cooperation.

Greening national security can and should go well beyond superpower cooperation. The US currently  $81 billion a year to protect global oil supplies, according to one estimate. The bulk of that money should instead go toward ending reliance on fossil fuels. If access to oil becomes less dependable, that would be an even greater incentive for US allies to accelerate their own transitions to renewable energy.

An Administration in Search of a Doctrine

Presidential doctrines have always presented different ways of preserving US global power. The Nixon doctrine was about protecting allies. Jimmy Carter vowed to defend US national interests in the Persian Gulf. Ronald Reagan promised to push back against the Soviet Union worldwide. George W. Bush emphasized unilateral US military action. Donald Trump went on and on about “making America great again.”

Joe Biden has an opportunity to adopt an entirely different kind of doctrine. He should make explicit what is now implicit in his executive orders, that environmental sustainability will hereafter be the major litmus test for American foreign policy. If this happens, it will be the first time that a presidential doctrine focuses on the good of the planet and not just the good of the United States.

I’m sure that plenty of foot-draggers in Congress, industry and the media are just waiting for Biden to have his “sweater moment,” an updated version of the televised address when President Carter famously tried to elevate the energy crisis of the late 1970s into a larger discussion of morality and malaise. They will want to paint Biden as a green opponent of the working stiff, a clueless globalist, an America-laster. So, perhaps it’s best for Biden to avoid grand statements of doctrine for the moment and focus instead on painting US foreign policy green, issue by issue.

The fate of the United States has never been more linked — virally, environmentally, economically and existentially — to the fate of the rest of the world. As such, there hasn’t been a better moment for an American president not just to look at the planet differently, but to join hands with other countries to make it greener.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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Initially, the realization that our societies can continue to function in non-optimal conditions, even after the shutdown of a significant proportion of economic activity, led to speculation about how we may no longer really need to spend hours in traffic jams, submit to choking air pollution and jump from one plane to another to get our pressing business done. A change of lifestyle seemed in the works. The idea emerged that we could to some degree adapt to something less frenetic than what had become the high-tension consumer society obsessively committed to exponential growth.

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The confusion wrought by an accelerating — and a more devious than anticipated — pandemic, now accompanied by the increasingly ambiguous hope that the arrival of vaccines will bring closure, has left all those hopes of lifestyle change in a state of suspended animation. 

While no one can now predict what the economy will look like at the end of 2021 and whether the businesses forced to press the pause button for the better part of a year will function, most people are aware that the clock is still ticking on the climate crisis. The Guardian now that humanity is crying out for an answer: “The biggest ever opinion poll on climate change has found two-thirds of people think it is a “global emergency.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Global emergency:

1. For human beings, an existential threat.

2. For politicians, a minor annoyance that urgently needs to be sidelined.

Contextual Note

Most people will not be surprised by the results of this survey, for the simple reason that the numbers tell us what most people actually think. In contrast, if we polled the governments of the world to find out how many had begun acting to counter this global emergency, the answer would be zero or close to zero. Until January 20 of this year, the most powerful economy in the world had decided to not even think about the question.

To demonstrate that at least thinking was now possible, on January 27, newly elected US President Joe Biden to return to the Paris Climate Agreement and “signed a sweeping series of executive actions — ranging from pausing new federal oil leases to electrifying the government’s vast fleet of vehicles — while casting the moves as much about job creation as the climate crisis.”

For the moment, Biden’s plan is modest, to say the least. He has put more emphasis on purchasing emission-free vehicles (presumably made in the USA) with a view to creating jobs than on the work of transforming an economy built to deplete resources and deregulate the climate. One of his initiatives seeks to “identify new opportunities to spur innovation,” which is also more about economic growth and the creation of jobs than it is about economic paradigm shift.

The Times offers this : “Mr. Biden called on the campaign trail for overhauling tax breaks to oil companies — worth billions of dollars to the oil, coal and gas industries — to help pay for his $2 trillion climate change plan, although that plan is expected to face strong opposition in Congress.” Recent history tells us that Congress is extremely accomplished at engineering bailouts and tax cuts for oil companies, but singularly lacks experience in actually taxing them. In contrast to the predicted inaction of the new administration, The Guardian notes the eagerness and sense of self-sacrifice of the ordinary people polled: “Even when climate action required significant changes in their own country, majorities still backed the measures.”

Historical note

For five hundred years, the world has been organized around two concepts: the nation-state and a globalized economy. The development of a global economy required the existence of nation-states with effective central governments. The emerging nation-states rapidly evolved to become mature managers of their own increasingly industrialized economy. They did so precisely because of their ability to mobilize the resources of a global economy. That implied setting the rules permitting them to exploit, effectively and efficiently, other people and their resources. The model of the nation-state could not have taken its modern form without pursuing a policy of deliberate colonialism tending toward economic empire.

Along the way, modern nation-states, most of which began as monarchies, evolved into either democracies or people’s republics. This essentially meant offering a stake in the gains to the nation’s population to ensure its acceptance of a system that was built on exploiting other populations and resources. If many of the citizens of these democracies did not directly profit from the colonial system that defined the global economy, they at least had indirect access to some of the gains thanks to manufacturing and the gradual development of a consumer society. They could also feel privileged and culturally superior to those who were exploited overseas. This became a major psychological contributor to the stability of modern nation-states.

It has also led to a state of severe, endemic instability for the entire planet. All political power lies in the individual nation-states who compete for their maximum share of global resources. No state is willing to give ground to another or even to a well-organized group of nations. No effective global conscience, let alone global government, is possible. At the same time, the people of the earth, and especially the young whose lives will extend decades into the future, are beginning to understand that something must be done while realizing that their own nation-state is not likely to make it happen.

The United States has consistently preferred to defend the status quo of an economy. After all, it sets the economy’s rules — thanks to the dollar, its omnipresent military and its successful engineering of a global consumer economy. Republicans have built climate denial into their civic credo. Democrats have done what is necessary to appear more open than Republicans. But the party stalwarts, with Biden as the archetype, have shown no commitment to going further than seeming marginally more committed than the Republicans.

This poll demonstrates how the current global system based on the idea of competing democratic nation-states has betrayed the fundamental principle of democracy. When the ideology of democracy began to prevail in the late 18^th century, its stated intention was to ensure that the interests of the people would prevail. Because all political logic was confined within the boundaries of individual states, the shared interests of the people of the earth could be forgotten or dismissed as irrelevant.

That is what we are seeing today. Distancing himself from Donald Trump, Joe Biden promises to marginally reduce the massively disproportionate contribution of the US to global warming. To do so, he must emphasize job creation rather than seek a response to a global emergency. This solution implies more manufacturing, not less damage to the environment. With its global hegemonic position, the US is the only nation that can lead and set the tone for the rest of the world. The sad reality is that Biden and the Democrats cannot even lead at home. In all likelihood, the timid measures Biden is proposing will be blocked or watered down by the Republican opposition.

Two-thirds of humanity are crying out for a solution to two obvious crises. The nation-states have demonstrated their ineptness at addressing the pandemic. Populations, even in peaceful countries like the Netherlands, are already revolting. What the nation-states have failed to do for their own populations reveals how unlikely it is that they can respond to the needs of all of humanity. It may be time to rethink all of our institutions. Or rather, it may be too late.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Nation-State vs. The Climate appeared first on 51�Թ�.

COVID-19, now for nearly 2 million deaths worldwide, emerged because of habitat encroachment and destruction. Meanwhile, the last decade was the hottest on record, while events like hurricanes and raging wildfires increased in frequency and intensity because of climate change. Air pollution now 9 million people every year. The concrete, metal, plastic, bricks and asphalt we produce now weighs more than all on our planet. 

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In our oceans, two-thirds of commercially harvested fish species are overexploited. By 2030, there will be more plastic than fish in the sea. Coastlines are eroding, and cities are sinking as sea levels rise. Mangroves and reefs that ordinarily protect them are either being cut down or are dying from climate-induced changes like rising sea temperatures. Because of the greenhouse gasses pouring into the atmosphere every day, our planet is heading for a 3˚C to 5˚C rise in global temperatures that will wreak havoc on our health, wealth and world. 

Living out of balance with the environment is culminating in a pressing existential crisis. Instead, imagine waking up every morning in 2021 with the intention to make peace with the planet. Each of us can be the change we need by pushing our leaders in the public and private sectors to be better stewards of the Earth. With that in mind, here’s my New Year’s resolution. These are the four actions I will ardently advocate leaders take to help us all make peace.

Go Green

Investing in green infrastructure can solve our energy and infrastructure needs while restoring biodiversity, which has suffered over recent decades. Nature-based solutions such as using dunes and marshes to protect our coastlines shield us equally or better than sea walls. Simultaneously, these can help us meet Paris Climate Agreement targets by reducing global atmospheric carbon emissions by up to one-third. It is cheaper to build a renewable energy power plant than it is to operate an old coal one. We won’t just see benefits for our health and environment. Such investments come with substantial financial opportunities. The UN estimates that green technologies can create at least 18 million jobs worldwide.

Pay Your Fair Share

We need to connect global finance with climate risks. 2021 will be an excellent year for financial markets to finally start aligning investments with their actual costs and benefits to people and the planet. Companies across the globe will soon be required to disclose their climate risks to the public. It starts on the London Stock Exchange in January 2021. In March, the EU’s new disclosure regulations on sustainability come into force. The incoming US administration is heading in the same direction.

I say put the costs of planetary destruction and pollution where it belongs — on those who cause it. To get out ahead of what’s assuredly coming, companies should start the new year by investing in climate risk disclosures and environmental, social and corporate governance actions. For those who don’t proactively get on board with this movement, 2021 and 2022 could prove to be a tougher slog than it needs to be. 

Be Nicer to Your Neighbors

We share this planet with a rich tapestry of wildlife. But biodiversity is in crisis, and we need to help. We can do this by increasing the number and size of nature reserves, helping endangered species recover and by supporting sustainable nature-based livelihoods like fishing and forestry. The good news is that these kinds of investments do double duty by combating climate change while bolstering species. For instance, forest restoration helps reduce carbon emissions: A single tree can sequester 4 kilograms of carbon annually. 

Our human neighbors could use some similar kindness. Low-lying island nations are bearing the brunt of climate change, and some are sinking before our eyes. Yet less developed countries have few resources to meet these challenges, and adaptation funding only makes up 20% of all climate funding. Even in the most advanced nations, we choose to leave many communities behind. Social equity and environmental justice must be part of our New Year’s resolution.

Lose the Excess Carbon Weight

2021 is an ideal year to lose those atmospheric carbon dioxide love handles. To get on that diet, nations must agree on a timeframe and plan to become carbon neutral. The UK, China and several other countries have already made the pledge, but this has to be an all-in agreement. Our ability to create viable COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year should give us confidence that, once we put our minds to it, we can find workable solutions to our energy and societal needs that don’t require us to burden the planet with more CO2 pollution. 

There are many ways business leaders and governments can make peace with the planet in 2021. But there’s also plenty we can do as individuals. I intend to make peace with the planet by choosing wise and compassionate actions, from how I spend money to which places I visit and what leaders and causes I support. Aligning action with intent will build inner peace and a better world. Peace, after all, comes with choosing to do what is right.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post 2021 Is the Year to Make Peace With Our Planet appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The constantly accumulating evidence has overwhelmingly convinced the scientific community not only that the trend is real, but that the consequences will be particularly dramatic for human societies. Humans happen to be the only living species on Earth obsessed by the idea of controlling their environmental habitat for the sake of their own comfort and profit. The rest of the biosphere tries simply to get by with the hand it is dealt.

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But now the dual goals of comfort and profit appear to be dangerously at odds. Responding to the demand for comfort of those who can afford it provokes increasing levels of discomfort for those societies and individuals that cannot. That simple fact has become one of the contributing factors to the increasingly evident revolt against growing income and wealth inequality.

A report by the insurance company Swiss Re by The Guardian informs us that we are quickly approaching a point of no return. “One-fifth of the world’s countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing because of the destruction of wildlife and their habitats,” The Guardian reports. If 20% of the nations of the world succumb, it won’t be long before 30%, 40%, 50% and more are affected as well. It appears that Australia, Israel and South Africa are particularly exposed. The report also cites India, Spain and Belgium.

In other words, this time it won’t be only the forgotten and neglected developing nations (Donald Trump’s “”) that are the first to pay the cost. If people used to luxury and accustomed to thinking of themselves as sheltered from disaster are the ones who may suffer first, alarm bells will quickly start ringing.

The Guardian cites some worrying figures: “More than half of global GDP — $42tn (£32tn) — depends on high-functioning biodiversity, according to the report, but the risk of tipping points is growing.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Tipping point:

For capitalists, an abstract target to both aim for and avoid, since on the positive side it represents the maximum reward expected from any endeavor designed to exploit and eventually exhaust a market or a body of resources, while, on the negative side, it threatens to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The balancing act consists of finding the point of equilibrium between maximum exploitation and braking before reaching the tipping point.

Contextual Note

In the year 2000, which marks the beginning of the age of internet marketing and social media, tipping points became something to aim for rather than avoid. Malcolm Gladwell’s , “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” was released in that year. It reads like a recipe book encouraging the kind of viral development successful marketers manage to achieve for a new product or a new practice. 

Gladwell praised and encouraged business models aimed at creating “social epidemics.” Though it may seem absurd and even macabre today, as the world battles an incomprehensible and unpredictable pandemic, Gladwell’s book offers advice on how to go viral. He even formulates laws and rules that describe the process: the “Law of the Few,” the “Stickiness Factor” and the “Power of Context.”

The trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic may have put a serious dent in the prestige our culture allotted to tipping points two decades ago. In the era of Gordon Gekko’s “,” epidemic change represented seemed like a complementary and rather more respectable ideal. 

The year 2000 marked the summit of the dot.com craze that quickly turned into the dot.com crash. Venture capitalists were hurting, but that was only temporary. Social media hadn’t yet taken off, but Gladwell clearly sensed its imminent arrival and understood its deeper logic. Global warming, with its threat of disastrous tipping points, had become an issue but it was already being dismissed by climate change deniers, who preferred to focus on a rapidly rising stock market.

The rise and more recent fall of the image of tipping points raises a fascinating question about contemporary culture. If we admit that, in the year 2000, the idea of the tipping point promoted by Gladwell had mainly positive connotations and that, today, the prospect of a tipping point sets off alarm bells evoking the fear of imminent disaster, can we identify the tipping point that pushed us from the positive appreciation to the negative one? 

There seem to be two candidates for the tipping point about tipping points: the economic crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. If the dot.com crash of 2000 felt more like a thrilling roller-coaster ride than a traumatizing event, the 2008 crisis was an earthquake that leveled some institutions and seriously attacked the credibility of some of the previous decade’s ideals.

The Gladwell version of a tipping point was associated with the inebriation that accompanies sudden commercial success and the rapid achievement of a monopoly position. That had become the goal of every economic actor’s ambition for the 30 years between 1980 and 2010. The current perception of a tipping point, as cited in The Guardian’s article, is one of a risk to be anticipated and avoided. The sense of having a mission of conquest eventually gave way to a simple hope for stability and survival.

Historical Note

A tipping point indicates a critical threshold beyond which the return to a previous state of equilibrium becomes impossible. Before Europe’s scientific and Industrial Revolution, people regarded tipping points as fatalities, the result of uncontrollable forces or trends. Since the industrial age, developed countries have evolved a culture of control that supposes human societies will have the ingenuity and the technology capable of fending off catastrophes and avoiding catastrophic tipping points.

But that belief has recently been shaken by various uncontrollable events. And instead of ensuring mastery, the post-industrial culture of control has developed a perverse tendency to magnify its fear of tipping points. That is what’s behind the “science” of risk management and its method of contingency planning. Intended to increase our security, in the wrong hands it can become an irrational obsession. Instead of discovering solutions, it magnifies problems.

In 2004, The Guardian broke a about a secret Pentagon report warning “that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” The Pentagon’s pessimism — or would it be more accurate to call it paranoiac optimism? — seems laughable today. It tells us more about the psychological climate inside America’s war machine and the budgeting rituals of the military-industrial complex than it does about the reality of the threats the world is facing.

Today’s more realistic report by Swiss Re reveals that the trends the Pentagon identified are real and increasingly threatening, even if they don’t follow the logic of a Hollywood catastrophe movie that seemed to inspire the authors of the 2004 report. The threat is real, but the timeline was off by several decades. 

In 2004, the Pentagon recommended to a refractory Bush administration that climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern.” What better way to secure funding from Congress than to amplify their dread of unmanageable catastrophe? Alas, the Pentagon’s fearmongering had no effect on the Bush administration’s policy, though it probably did enable them to slightly pad their budget.

Swiss Re announced that its objective is “to help insurers assess ecosystem risks when setting premiums for businesses.” This is bound to be more realistic than the Pentagon’s speculation, but the motive similarly focuses on getting other people to pay for what they are told to fear. That principle seems to be baked into the mentality of control cultures. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated, understanding tipping points is all about getting richer.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post As Climate Change Worsens, How Far Will We Tip? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

As I explain in my , “A Climate for Denial,” the nonlinear characteristics of climate change mean that, over time, its impacts will not take place in a linear fashion. For example, heatwaves will not increase in frequency by, say, one every year. Likewise, the average global temperature will not rise by one degree each year. In addition, the effects will not be the same everywhere around the world, not even around the same region.

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Another problem in understanding climate change is that it is — and will be — difficult to predict accurately due to the many variables involved. Global greenhouse gas emissions will depend on things like economic growth, population growth, technological changes, solar activity and climate feedback loops. This is why highly-sophisticated predictive models that, in fact, include a huge array of variables provide an upper case, a lower case and the most likely case.

What we know with a high degree of certainty is that the planet is getting hotter. Given the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and our current emissions, it will continue to get hotter. But the increase in heat and intensity of heatwaves, as well as their frequency, will not occur equally and consistently throughout the year or around the globe. And to complicate the impact on our lives, some people will be more prepared and more resilient to the increased heat than others. 

Human populations, including the infrastructure and services that support them as well as the ecosystems, have inbuilt resilience and can, to varying degrees, adapt to climate change.  But those with less adaptive capacity may suffer dramatically.

We also know, with a great degree of certainty, that some areas of the world will experience more heatwaves and, in particular, intense ones with significantly higher temperatures. This could be exasperated with increased humidity due to more rainfall. 

So, for example, a region may have historically experienced an average of three consecutive days of temperatures above 95 F (35 C) each year. Now, assume that due to climate change, the same region experiences five consecutive days of temperatures above 100 F. The consecutive aspect in this example is significant because systems and our bodies are less able to recover from the stress of extreme heat over long periods.

How will this hypothetical scenario affect people and the essential services they receive?  Let’s take a simplistic look at a few groups of people in this hypothetical situation and how heatwaves will impact them and the infrastructure in their region:

a) White collar workers and students in air-conditioned offices and schools

b) House-bound people, including the elderly and dependent people, living in places without air conditioning

c) People who work outside in urban areas (council workers, gardeners and landscapers, builders, trades workers)

d) Farmers and workers in external rural areas

e) Health care workers

Group A

Office buildings and their mechanical services (air conditioning, elevators, security systems) will most likely cope with prolonged higher temperatures. But some air-conditioning units may struggle to attain comfort levels, some systems may stop operating completely and air conditioning will also consume significantly higher levels of energy.  

The regional area infrastructure will also probably cope with higher temperatures, although the electricity supply may struggle, depending on the level of peak energy supply availability. This is because the hotter temperatures will mean a higher demand for power and, therefore, put more stress on the power supply system. There may be blackouts when the supply of electricity is not able to cope.

In times of prolonged high temperatures, other infrastructures are known to suffer, including public transport. Rail lines have been known to buckle, resulting in prolonged delays in services and disruption to the national economy. Blackouts may also result in water supply and communication system failures, again disrupting the economy.

The workers will, therefore, cope depending on the likelihood of blackouts. In which case, they will have to work under conditions with no air conditioning and possible heat stress. 

Children in schools where there is no air conditioning may close due to the risks of heat stress on children. Outside activities for children may be stopped.

This scenario will increase the likelihood of wildfires. In turn, this will pose risks to lives and livelihoods and could result in property damage, and it will put more pressure on emergency services such as firefighting and health care.

Group B

This group is more vulnerable than Group A, mainly because those affected are less resilient and less able to cope with extreme conditions. If there is no air conditioning in a home or facility with physically or mentally disabled, dependent and elderly people, these individuals are particularly vulnerable to heat stress.

Less developed and remote communities who lack the support services and backup systems are also more vulnerable, particularly when they are unable to cope with extended hot days. Heat stress on the elderly and other vulnerable people may put additional stress on the health care system, which could struggle to keep up with the additional demand.

As with Group A, power, water and communication systems may also be affected. And there is an increased risk of wildfires breaking out, with added pressure on emergency services as well.

Group C

People who work in the field and in unprotected external areas are particularly vulnerable to extreme temperatures and prolonged heatwaves. Working conditions significantly affect those who work outside, and people may need to take additional measures and protective strategies against heatwaves. These include taking more breaks, working fewer hours and, in extreme cases, stopping work altogether.

Group D

Farmers are used to working outside and for long hours in the field. But heatwaves put pressure on their crop, their machinery and, of course, their own health and safety. Prolonged, extreme heat and heatwaves may significantly affect their production, livestock and crop yields. This is particularly the case in the event of coincident drought, which is another impact of climate change.

Group E

As heatwaves increase, more pressure is put on health services and workers due to increased admissions, particularly of elderly and vulnerable people who are less able to cope with heat stress. If remote areas are struck with heatwaves and this leads to increased demand for health services, depending on their capacity, these facilities may not be able to operate effectively. This situation is particularly the case in underdeveloped countries and regions of the world.

In sum, as the climate continues to change and extreme weather events such as heatwaves increase in frequency and severity, all the above conditions will worsen. Adaptive capacity and resilience are terms often used in climate change risk assessments. Infrastructure, essential services and our own bodies have inbuilt resilience and adaptive capacity. Yet these may be stretched to their limits when heatwaves occur, particularly in places and on populations that are less resilient, especially as heatwaves are expected to become more extreme and prolonged.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post When Is Hot Too Hot? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Australia is a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Yet its economy looks more like that of a developing country than an advanced, industrial one — more to Mali, Senegal and Zimbabwe than to Belgium, Italy or Finland. 

Developing countries often depend on exporting commodities. In the Australian case, that commodity is coal. In fact, Australia is the world’s biggest exporter of coal, which accounts for a large share of its export volume. Much of it goes to China. Although 60% of the country’s electricity is coal-generated, its domestic carbon emissions are relatively low. Its exports, however, account for a whopping 7% of world emissions, which means Australia not only exports coal but also . As a result, Australia has the dubious distinction of being among the major contributors to global warming.

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For the Australian government, none of this is cause for concern. In fact, upon his return, Morrison boldly defended his country’s reliance on the coal industry, charging that his government would not “engage in reckless, job destroying and economy crunching targets.” He vowed that he “write off the jobs of thousands of Australians by walking away from traditional industries.”

According to the deputy prime minister, , coal accounts for some 50,000 jobs in Australia. Much of the coal-mining community, however, is concentrated in Queensland, whose electorate proved decisive in the 2019 federal election. The Australian Labor party, once expected to win the election, suffered a crushing defeat, not least because its anti-coal campaign the coal-mining communities in Queensland, who defected en masse to the right. To add insult to injury, coal helped — Australia’s radical, right-wing, populist icon — secure a seat in the country’s Senate, where she has proved to be a staunch defender of Queensland’s coal industry. In short, electoral politics trumped environmental concerns. 

North America

This is nothing new. In 2016, US President Donald Trump carried West Virginia on the promise that he would boost “clean, beautiful coal” in the Appalachian state and elsewhere. (West Virginia’s coal mines provide roughly 30,000 jobs.) The coal-mining communities believed Trump and helped him win the US election.

In environmental terms, his presidency has been disastrous. For coal mining, however, it has been equally disastrous. Coal mines have been closing at an over the past several years, with Trump doing little to reverse the tide. This has nothing to do with environmental concerns. After all, the Trump administration does not “believe” in global warming, at least not in the notion that human behavior might have something to do with it. The reason for the slow decline of West Virginian coal is simple: Coal is no longer profitable, at least not in West Virginia.

The US — and Canada, for that matter, whose is as bad as that of Australia and America — has always stood out because of its addiction to cheap and plentiful energy. Europe, of course, is fundamentally different. Or is it? Take the case of Germany. 

Europe

Germany is not only Europe’s strongest economy, but it also boasts its most significant green party which, polls suggest, might soon hold government responsibilities at the federal level. In addition, Germany has been at the forefront with regard to renewable energy, particularly offshore wind. At the same time, the country has promoted its commitment to a comprehensive “energy transition” — away from traditional, carbon-intensive energy sources. 

The reality, however, looks quite different. In 2019, Germany ranked 17th with regard to energy transition — far behind, among others, the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, the UK and Uruguay. According to the World Economic Forum, Germany was particularly on fossil fuels, especially coal. This is hardly surprising, given Germany’s continued reliance on lignite (brown coal) which, environmentally, is the kind of coal.

In 2018, no less than one-quarter of Germany’s electricity was generated by lignite power plants. The continued use of lignite for the production of energy was, to a large degree, owed to the tenacious resistance of the and its employees. Altogether, the lignite sector accounted for roughly 70,000 jobs. Many of them are concentrated in the eastern part of the country (the former German Democratic Republic, which covered most of its energy requirements with lignite), where in recent years the radical, populist right has made spectacular gains.

Under the circumstances, therefore, it is hardly surprising that some eastern German regional governors have vehemently against a “premature” exit from lignite. The brown coal might be catastrophic for the environment — among other things, as a result of the destruction of natural habitats associated with — and noxious for human health, yet this seems to be less important than losing the next election.

These and similar examples provide graphic illustrations of the hurdles and obstacles in the way to a genuinely radical “energy U-turn” that goes beyond good intentions. They suggest that we should expect little to nothing from the political establishment, which will always find ways to hide behind the ultimate excuse: jobs. Funnily enough, the establishment showed little concern when thousands of jobs were lost as a result of ATM machines, to name just one prominent example. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of jobs that disappeared as a result of outsourcing and offshoring. 

One of the central tenets of trade theory is that trade openness only works if the inevitable losers of globalization are compensated via the welfare state. This explains, as Dani Rodrik decades ago, why more open economies — including relatively small countries like Austria, the Netherlands and the Nordic nations — tend to have bigger governments. It stands to reason that the same logic should apply to the energy transition. 

The Business Community

As so often today, the solution of the problem (if it is not yet too late) does not come from politics, but from the business community. Again, the Australian case is instructive. From what national media have reported — and Australia’s coal-aficionado prime minister has deplored — a growing number of major Australian businesses are no longer prepared to “provide banking, insurance and consulting services to an increasing number of firms in the coal sector.”  

This has not gone over well with Prime Minister Morrison. Kowtowing once again to the powerful coal lobby, he came up with a rather absurd proposition, namely to outlaw “indulgent and selfish” activist-driven campaigns against the coal industry. Obviously, Morrison, not unlike Trump, appears to lack even a minimal sense and appreciation of the irony involved. It is a sign of the times — and not a particularly encouraging one — when it is business that refuses to be blackmailed by a small, yet powerful “indulgent and selfish” minority.  

The Australian “model” might prove contagious. Just recently, Goldman Sachs announced it would no longer “invest in new thermal coal mines anywhere in the world.” Nor will it finance oil exploration in the Arctic. At the same time, institutional investors, such as pension funds, have started to put pressure on the mining industry in an against the coal lobby’s obstructive tactics. Under the circumstances, the days of the likes of Scott Morrison, Donald Trump and, for that matter, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro are hopefully numbered.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Countries Addicted to Coal appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Climate Change: A Clear and Present Danger

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This is the image I have of the last few Conferences of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations. To keep the analogy going, let’s think of the travellator as climate change, which seems unstoppable and is, in fact, getting faster. 

The COP Summits

At the COP summits, representatives of almost 200 countries get together over a week or so. They discuss the latest data on climate change, global greenhouse gas emissions and then negotiate on the required actions to address climate change — move forward on the travellator — and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, assist developing countries in achieving emissions reductions and adapt to a changing climate.

But it hasn’t been easy, and it never was going to be easy. As I explain in my , “A Climate for Denial,” climate change is classified as a wicked problem — one that is complex, ever-changing, difficult to define and involving multi-disciplinary aspects, constraints and solutions. But it is also one that must be addressed and solved. 

So, these COP summits are organized to see what, if anything, can be done. But these meetings and negotiations are often bogged down in detail and lack of agreement even on fundamental issues. These include how to account for greenhouse gas emissions and how to allow developing countries to develop economically without penalizing them, while developed countries defend their right to maintain their high dependency on energy usage and economic prosperity. 

Due to the huge discrepancies between developed, developing and underdeveloped countries in their emissions profiles, economic development, and technical and economic capabilities, negotiations can rarely get past first base. A fundamental roadblock preventing progress has been because of the complexities of allowing developing countries to catch up with developed countries while reducing global emissions of greenhouse gases.

That’s why the 2015 Paris accord relies on a vague agreement to keep global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. When that agreement was signed in 2016, every country was asked to determine its own target and pledge to meet it, which would supposedly achieve the overall 1.5-degree goal. The Paris accord is a vague agreement mainly because it’s not legally binding and, therefore, doesn’t guarantee its intended achievement. The end result speaks for itself: emissions continue to rise and global warming is not stopping.

The whole idea of voluntary action on an extremely complex issue such as the reduction of global emissions is therefore fraught with manipulation, loopholes and lack of urgency due to national priorities and interests ahead of global interests. A great example of this is Australia’s insistence to use the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s “left-over” credits to meet its Paris targets. This clearly is against the spirit of the Paris Agreement as it tried to be forward-looking, having drawn “a line in the sand” on where emissions were in 2015-16 and where they needed to be in the future. It’s equivalent to telling someone that they need to lose weight for their health, and then the person saying they’ve lost weight over the past few years.

One of the greatest challenges in these negotiations and agreements has been the huge discrepancies in the emissions profiles, energy requirements and economic development between countries. On the one hand, we have nations that have still to provide electricity to large areas of their population and, on the other, developed countries that rely primarily on fossil fuels and emit proportionally large amounts of greenhouse gases per capita.

COP25 in Madrid

So, what was COP25 meant to achieve — which took place in Madrid earlier this month — and what did it actually achieve? The main aims of the climate conference were to finalize the rules by which the Paris targets are achieved and begin the processes by which the commitments made in December 2015 could be systematically raised. There were also a host of technical matters related to carbon markets, as well as details on how poorer countries would be compensated for climate-related damage.

The achievements of the COP25 summit could only be classified as decisions, not achievements. They were mainly to do with initiatives to foster mitigation and adaptation relating to oceans and land; funding for the repair of damage and loss to help poor countries that are suffering from the effects of climate change — although there was no allocation of new funds to do so; periodic review of the long-term 2-degree target starting in 2020; and establishing a few rules to do with carbon markets.

But many questions and issues remained unanswered, unresolved and left for future meetings. The agenda for the next conference (COP26) in November 2020, to be hosted by the UK in partnership with Italy, will once again be filled with ambition and promise, and circular discussions.

I know this is going to sound somewhat cynical, maybe very cynical to some, but my summary of the COP processes, so far, can be summarized as follows:

Meeting 1: Let’s all get together and talk about this problem of global warming and climate change.

*many meetings later*

�ѱ��پ��Բ�…: Different countries seem to have different viewpoints and problems, so these meetings are really useful to get some consensus.

�ѱ��پ��Բ�…: Let’s agree to do something positive.

*a few meetings later*

Meeting…: We’re getting somewhere, why don’t developed countries help developing countries and get credit for doing this (Kyoto).

*a few meetings later*

Meeting…: Time is running out, this is getting serious, really serious!

Don’t get me wrong, there has been considerable progress made all around the world on the installation of large, renewable energy generation systems, and this has meant some improvement in balancing economic development of countries that are still catching up with the highly-industrialized nations. But, in reality, such progress hasn’t been adequate.

So, back to our analogy. While the travellator continues to take the world backward in terms of emissions reductions, global action is limited to meetings, targets and pledges.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Climate Change: One Step Forward, While Standing Still appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The Amazon rainforest, 60% of which is , has been hit by an excessive scale of destruction, potentially having permanent impacts on the land that many indigenous tribes call home. One reason as to why the destruction of the rainforest is perceived to be a necessity is linked to the fact that Brazil relies heavily on cattle ranching. It is the world’s largest exporter of beef: Roughly 1.63 million tons were , the highest number on record, totaling .

The Amazon Rainforest Fires Are Worse Than You Think

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These exports, driven by the global increase in demand for beef and soya from emerging markets like China, accounted for in 2018 — an 11% increase from 2017, projected to grow to $7.26 billion this year. The revenue generated from the sale of beef across the world contributes in raising the living standards of individuals through higher incomes, leading to greater increase in the marginal propensity to consume.

Local and Global

While wildfires are common in the Amazon during the dry season, the that has occurred earlier this year was to a large degree a result of fires started to clear land for farming. However, there is a limit to the size of land that can be allocated to cattle ranching, and there will come a point when Brazil will have to allocate its finite resources to producing other goods. 

Rising incomes in the developed world have led to an increase in the demand for higher quality furniture. This increase in demand has fueled the extreme levels of logging that take place in Brazil, but has contributed positively to increasing exports on the global financial market. Brazil’s contributes $53 billion, or 6.9%, to the country’s GDP. However, loss of these trees leads to soil erosion, which in turn leads to water pollution, which impacts those who rely on these for drinking water.

According to The Independent, deforestation levels in Brazil have risen to , with around 7,900 square kilometers of the Amazon cut down in the past 12 months. But over the last couple of years, the timber market has been shrinking due to a fall in export prices, consequently leading to falls in export revenue. Reliance on timber may be waning, which could lead to Brazil having to focus on other sectors in which it can gain a competitive advantage.

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest will inevitably lead to more extreme weather patterns across South America and the rest of the world. Rainforests are unique in the way that they can produce their own rainfall: Rainwater is extracted from the soil and travels to the canopy, where it is released back into the atmosphere as rain. This continuous cycle leads to a that helps keep temperatures at a moderate level. Consequently, the destruction of vast amounts of rainforest will lead to less rainfall due to diminishing levels of moisture that surrounds the forest.

The constant fluctuations in weather patterns could have a massive impact on the , potentially leading to inconsistent weather patterns across the various countries beyond South America. 

Each Tree

Each tree in the Amazon rainforest contain enormous levels of carbon, which, when burned, are released into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide — a gas contributing to the greenhouse effect that is causing global warming. The World Resources Institute indicates that burning wood generates more per unit of energy generated than fossil fuels. This statement shows the true extent of the problem caused by excessive deforestation and the severe impacts this is going to have on trying to stay within the Paris Climate Agreement of keeping temperatures below 2˚ Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The Amazon accounts for more than meaning that the continuous destruction will lead to the inevitable disappearance of these species. Many indigenous people in Brazil rely on the species and flora of the immense landscape to sustain their livelihoods. Many tribal communities are evicted from their lands, and even those whose lands are protected feel the adverse effects of that come along with the destruction of the rainforest.

On the one hand, the rapid destruction of the Brazilian Amazon may be seen as necessary to maintain future economic growth. But it also poses an existential threat to the world at large. If the current trends continue, they will eventually lead to the permanent destruction of the Amazon. Many climate scientists believe that this has already been passed.

World leaders must step in and take action in order to help reduce the lasting impacts of this impending catastrophe. Individuals can play a big part in protecting this vast landscape by being mindful of the products they consume. It is our responsibility to make a change and live with the lasting consequences that will pass on to our future generations. We have to stop abusing the availability of these vital resources. The life of the Amazon — our planet’s green lung that produces 20% of the oxygen the Earth breathes — is in our hands.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Destroying the Amazon Isn’t Worth the Profit It Generates appeared first on 51�Թ�.

We have just formed into a global human murmuration — the name given to the beautiful patterns that large flocks of birds make in the sky. For the first time we have the connectivity, the unity and the capacity to go wherever we want as a race. We are going to enter, successfully, the current void of global governance in order to uphold our greatest intergenerational obligation: to pass on a healthy, bio-abundant planet.

Our 21^st-century technology and our newfound connectivity mean we can now take the first action of global self-determination. The nearly four centuries of the Westphalian system of nation states as our highest level of organizational form is about to draw to a close. As human beings living on planet Earth at the start of the 21^st century, we now know that we must create a global governance mechanism capable of protecting and enhancing a biosphere — now and for the next 1,000 years. 

For the first time in our history as a race, we have become so powerful that we have joined Mother Nature in the driving seat of the biosphere. We have to internalize this fact and act on it. If we wanted, we could increase carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules in the troposphere to 600ppm and heat the planet by 3°C, 5°C or 7°C. We could use bromine for our refrigeration, which is 45 times more destructive for O3 molecules in the ozone layer, and zap ourselves with UV rays.

We could remove all rainforests, thereby wiping out vast opportunities for biomimicry and pharmacology, dam every river, suck dry every major aquifer, scrape away all topsoil and make extinct every animal species, a huge number of insect species and most plant species. We are currently undertaking most of these self-destructive actions. From this point on, the future of both the Earth and us humans is inextricably linked due to our size and power. 

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Against the global force of natural capital conversion that we have unleashed — going from 2.5 billion to 7.5 billion of us in just 75 years — our preferred operating system of capitalism and consumption ergo sum (with apologies to Descartes), the biosphere has not stood a chance. 

Half a century after the UN’s 1972 Stockholm declaration that decreed that the natural assets of the Earth must be safeguarded, we have witnessed the accelerating degradation of the biosphere. Something is structurally very wrong: The disparate fractured nation state system we have created is clearly not the right way to protect a biosphere. A global asset that knows no national boundaries must be given global protection. 

It is time to once again return to the tried and tested methodology of self-determination and allocate a part of our personal sovereignty to create a specialist global authority in charge of the biosphere, with power over the nation state and all human organizational forms — and you and me. This specialist authority needs to make decisions based on timeframes different from those used by any existing human organization.

A will deliver the function of utility we require. It would most likely set a global carbon price and prepare plans to safely remove CO2 molecules from the troposphere back to 280-320ppm. It would place all rainforest under global protection and pay for it. It would introduce hypothecated taxes on petroplastics worldwide and, and it would preserve topsoil. It would set targets of bio-abundance on both land and in the sea. Operating with clear biophysical boundaries will be more liberating than we can imagine. Our economy will adapt and accelerate, growing at much reduced levels of industrial metabolism. 

It is time for us to reimagine, to go somewhere we have never been before, to explore the virgin space that is global governance. We must succeed in upholding our greatest intergenerational obligation: maintaining and improving the Earth’s biophysical integrity so that life can be sustained on this planet. We must be brave, recognize our new-found unity and take this first bold step. History will prove that we were absolutely right to do so.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post It’s Time for a Global Planet Authority appeared first on 51�Թ�.

As reported by , the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded that extreme sea levels, often occurring once a century, will now strike annually on many coasts by 2050, despite efforts to curb carbon emissions. The IPCC that the international community urgently cuts fossil fuel emissions. Otherwise, an eventual sea-level rise by more than four meters would redraw geographical boundaries and affect billions of people. 

In this guest edition of The Interview, Vishal Manve talks to Harjeet Singh, the global lead on climate change at ActionAid, about the impact of the recent climate strikes and the urgency to phase out coal-fired power plants. 

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Vishal Manve: Climate strikes have occurred around the world in 150 countries. Can you explain the significance of such a youth-led movement in addressing the climate emergency?  

Harjeet Singh: After decades of ignoring climate warnings, the world is finally waking up to the reality of the climate crisis. Young people have played a key role in that awakening. After realizing that the world’s adults have not been taking the issue seriously enough, that they are likely to face a future of climate catastrophe, youth have taken to striking, organizing and marching to get the world to protect their future. In 2018, Greta Thunberg said: “You say that you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future.” Finally, the adults are listening. But the narrative that climate change will harm children’s future is still a perspective of the “privileged north.” 

In the “global south,” climate change is not something that is coming in the future. For many young people in the “global south,” the climate crisis is already here. Young people in rural communities see the struggles their parents face when growing food [amid a lack of] rainfall, floods and rising sea levels, and they see little future for themselves. Climate change is driving youth migration to urban areas, and urban youth unemployment is growing as a result. 

As the current generation of young people grows up, their future is frighteningly uncertain. Young people in the “global south” are already dealing with the impacts of climate change. But their energy, drive, innovation and solidarity are also the best chance we have to avert the climate crisis.

Manve: From Berlin to New York and New Delhi, hundreds of thousands of protesters were recently on the streets. Do you think politicians and governments will urgently act on the climate crisis, and do you expect policy-based action?  

Singh: Young people have taken the matter into their own hands. They will keep marching ahead, showing the way. At the UN Climate Summit, young people exposed the shameless lack of leadership from heads of state, who looked the other way for decades as the climate crisis escalated and the planet burned.

But the global climate strikes have raised awareness and expectations of what real climate action looks like. Leaders will find that the public will no longer be duped by tiny steps spun as huge milestones. If they want to stay on as leaders, they will need to be courageous and not cowardly. The global marches are creating the conditions for real and meaningful policy shifts. 

Manve: A warming planet is hurting millions and rising oceans are a grave threat. A recent UN report says over 40% of coastal regions will face the risk of flooding by 2100. What do you think communities and leaders should do to address these crucial issues?

Singh:  Rich countries must take a lead in dramatically reducing their emissions so that we don’t breach the crucial 1.5-degree threshold, after which the impacts would be devastating. Poor communities living in low-lying coastal areas and along riverbanks need urgent support in climate-proofing their homes, farms and livelihoods.

But the people whose homes and land are at the risk of being washed away or swallowed up will need to relocate to safer locations in a planned manner. Their governments must proactively enable this planned relocation in a participatory and just way, which will require financial and technological support from the international community.

Manve: India is a signatory to the climate accords but is investing in coal-fired plants and receiving investment in oil refineries. Do you think India needs to seriously phase out its coal dependency for energy sufficiency? 

Singh: India has an obligation to improve the quality of life for its citizens and scale up access to energy. But the country continues to rely on locally available coal, which brings huge environmental and human costs. We have reached a stage when the cost per unit of renewable energy is cheaper than energy sourced from coal. Rich countries should support India with the upfront costs of setting up renewable energy projects, as part of their international obligation. This will help India reject dirty fossil fuel-based energy and transition toward renewables at a much faster pace.

Manve: The big four, including China, India and the US, are responsible for major global emissions. While the US shut down its last coal-fired plant, India still is building them. How long before an emerging economy like India chooses renewable sources of energy?

Singh: India has made ambitious commitments to dramatically increase the share of non-fossil fuel-based energy, but it is yet to make a plan for phasing out its reliance on coal completely. On one hand, it needs to show courage, while on the other, the role of the international financial community to invest from a longer-term perspective in renewable energy projects is vital.

Manve: What key factors are stymying emerging economies from choosing sustainable methods of energy utility and switching to noncarbon sources of energy? 

Singh: What’s the solution? The emerging economies have a challenge of taking people out of poverty by creating jobs, alongside adopting greener sources of energy and helping people cope with climate impacts. They have limited resources that they cannot divert toward greener technologies, away from development needs such as education and health care.

The renewable energy infrastructure requires upfront investments that developing countries like India cannot mobilize on their own. The role of developed countries is crucial in providing finance and enabling the transition to faster adoption of greener technologies in developing countries like India. 

Manve: The global fund to fight climate change is still far off the mark. Do you think developed nations need to do more to help other countries catch up?  

Singh: The obligation of rich countries to provide climate finance to poorer countries suffering from climate impacts is a huge but poorly understood dimension of climate action. Vulnerable countries are already spending their scarce resources on recovering from the disaster that they have not caused or they are trying to improve preparedness for future climate events. They have little money left over for development, let alone transitioning to greener pathways.

It is, therefore, absolutely necessary for rich countries to step up and respond to the call for much more climate finance. Rich countries started the climate fire. It is their responsibility to put it out.

Manve: Recently, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced banning single-use plastic in an advisory manner. Following this, a few conglomerates announced their own measures. Do you think this will have an impact on how India produces and disposes of off its waste as landfills pile up with mountains of trash?  

Singh: It’s definitely a step in the right direction. However, these measures will not be enough to change the conversation and be a springboard for the necessary policy action that is required to make a change at a larger scale. The government must come up with a clear policy framework and implementation architecture to enable the change. It should also clamp down on companies, particularly from the e-commerce sector, that are generating huge quantities of non-biodegradable packaging material that adds to the waste.  

Manve: How crucial is climate justice and reparations to the entire global movement of tackling or addressing climate change?  

Singh: Climate justice cannot be achieved without the transfer of resources from the “global north” to developing countries as the former are responsible for causing the climate crisis. Communities who are vulnerable and had no role in causing the problem are now being affected by rising seas and extreme weather events. Vulnerable communities need financial support to safeguard their livelihoods and climate-proof their farming and homes.

Developing countries are fighting for a reliable international system that can ensure the flow of finance that will let them rebuild their economies and help people recover from the impacts of climate change. We will not be able to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees without scaled-up mitigation action in developing countries. The transition to a green economy in developing countries cannot be achieved without adequate financial support from rich nations.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Climate Financing Can Help Developing Countries Reject Fossil Fuels appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The post The Sound of a Dying Planet Is Silence appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Treason:

An act of betrayal against one’s homeland and its government, which, during a period of history dominated by individual nation-states that define themselves as the unique source of political and moral authority, excludes both the planet and humanity from consideration when they are being shamelessly betrayed

Contextual Note

Having reviewed Exxon’s internal documentation dating back to 1982, McKibben observes that “the company’s scientists concluded that heading off global warming would ‘require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion’ or risk ‘potentially catastrophic events.’” In other words, Exxon’s managers were faced with a choice between betraying the vocation of a powerful commercial company and the expectations of its shareholders and their presumed loyalty to the human race, to which they belong, and the integrity of the planet which they inhabit.

What did they choose? This might be the obvious question to ask, but it makes sense only if there is a choice to be made. But there is none for Exxon’s executives other than resolving to change jobs. They are paid to obey the supreme law under which humanity now lives and labors: a law that requires, under pain of exclusion, to promote growth, expansion and profit. Any director who dared to choose against those interests would immediately be replaced by someone willing to comply with the law.

But surely governments will be able to get something done and the experts have plenty of suggestions they could turn into policy. McKibben cleverly suggests that the West could imitate African countries that are successfully managing with mobile technology to compensate for their underdeveloped telecommunications infrastructure. Inspired by their example, the West could choose to banish the omnipresent and invasive “wires tethering us to an energy sector that’s killing us.” That would also seriously improve our urban and rural landscapes. 

McKibben criticizes many of the technological solutions presented as silver bullets, but he still believes humanity has the power to change things. “Every day,” Weisman writes, “some trending new gizmo or beguiling advance distracts us from the climate disaster by promising to make our lives easier, even as our future grows shorter.”

McKibben aptly “argues that neither artificial intelligence nor genetic engineering will improve our odds for survival,” but sees a possible solution by “acting together to do remarkable things.” That is the essential condition of any viable solution since the scale of the challenge is global. But achieving it will require making it feasible to “act together.” In the current historical context, that may turn out to be an exceedingly tall order.

Historical Note

History has played a perverse game against the interest of humanity over the past 500 years. It has provided the means for rapid and constantly accelerating technological progress and the creation of material wealth on an obscene scale, but in so doing it has paralyzed humanity’s ability to manage the progress and equitably share the wealth. 

Whereas throughout human history different groups of people have been able to organize themselves into communities — occasionally even growing into empires by connecting people and regions economically and politically for limited periods of time — the political authorities of past cultures and empires lacked the technology to control and seriously modify anything beyond local environments. They also lacked what might be somewhat abusively called today’s “scientific” focus on productivity (and profit) that has brought about economic concentration and led to the ever-riskier specialization of industrial and agricultural production, a phenomenon ultimately responsible for diminishing or destroying the capacity of localities and regions to balance the nature of their economic activities as a response to the needs of their populations.

For millennia, political empires rose and declined, giving way to a more local distribution of political power. The pattern changed, however, when the model of the European nation-state began to emerge, most clearly in 16th-century Europe. A series of political transformations led to the eventual acceptance across the globe of an idealized model of representative democracy. The abstraction of the search for profit replaced the dynastic ambition to control and tax to define the goal of empire. 

The nation-state came to represent the highest level of political authority, replacing religion and neutralizing the looser but very real force of moral philosophy. In a very real sense, Ayn Rand replaced Aristotle to create the modern world. As Bill McKibben, who holds Ayn Rand responsible for much of what’s wrong with the world today, remarks in an : “People who have made a whole lot of money and don’t want to be bothered in any way find her enormously appealing.” This isn’t just a change of philosophical style; it’s the banishment of moral consciousness and the well-financed triumph of the will.

In the 19th century, European governments completed their effort of subduing regional authorities, cultures and languages to arrive at a state of solid territorial control within fixed boundaries. The feudal notion of allegiance — which during the Middle Ages implied a possible choice or even sudden shift of fealty — now applied to the nation-state morphed into a simple requirement of all citizens to respect and obey the government of a nation whose boundaries stretched far beyond any citizen’s region. Americans even today formally “pledge allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands,” but not because they might — like some feudal lord — choose another authority to obey. Instead, it serves as a reminder that they have no choice. The “indivisible” nation-state doesn’t readily admit divided loyalties.

That is how nearly all governments now teach their people to think. At the same time, their very status as nation-states functioning in a global marketplace built on capital investment has created a culture of competition appropriate to capitalism, which means that the natural inclination of every nation is to suspect the intentions of any other authority — including supranational authority — and to some degree deny its reality. This applies to global authorities, such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court but also, as Brexit so aptly demonstrates, to regional alliances or more formal political structures such as the European Union.

Another significant historical factor contributes to the obstacle to solving the climate problem constituted by the nation-state. Let’s call it the prevailing financial culture, the same one that prevents oil companies from changing course and that underlies Ayn Rand’s thinking. Modern representative democracies constitute their authority through elections that require heavy financing, meaning that deep pockets, especially in the corporate world, have the most impact not just on the outcomes of elections, but also on the culture of “allegiance” of most of the elected officials who handle the reins of power.

The inevitable corruption of such a system derives less from direct transfers of funds than from the deep-seated belief that the corporations with the most clout can be counted on to supply not just money for electoral campaigns, but also jobs to political constituencies. Wall Street lives by: “greed is good.” Main Street has been lulled to sleep by the politicians’ conviction that jobs are good. This often means, not just that it doesn’t matter who creates the jobs and to what purpose, but also that the most wasteful, socially unproductive and environmentally destructive sources of jobs — those dedicated to military-related industries — are the ones politicians will typically favor, principally because they can be funded by the government. Call it . The oil industry is closely connected to it. Together their power over political decision-making is overwhelming.

That is how the rich nations of the world work today. They need to protect the largely invisible flow of money through a political economy always heavily focused on energy. In such a society, McKibben’s hope that the world may one day soon “act together” will require somehow instilling a notion of allegiance that goes beyond the current global capitalist system governed, at the highest level of authority, by the competing interests of nation-states. Only when that happens can the idea of treason against the planet become a viable — and enforceable — concept.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Planet Deserves a Pledge of Allegiance appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The baseline report prepared by the Climate Order Committee was submitted to the Global Chapter at The Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ), also known as the World Court, on December 1, 2050.

The international group of 50 experts (and their supporting teams of researchers), agreed upon by all nations, have carried out monitoring of every country’s performance to date and rated their achievements against agreed and stipulated targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions. The targets were determined on the basis of each country’s emissions since the Kyoto Protocol’s monitoring program began in 1997.

In summary, the baseline report concluded:

1) Following the mixed success of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), measures to effectively reduce greenhouse gas emission in the years following the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and subsequent agreements, including the 2015 Paris Agreement, the UNFCCC was disbanded and a new system of greenhouse gas management was established — the World Climate Order — under which all nations agreed to comply with targets set by the Climate Order Committee and the Global Agreement on Climate Change (GACC). This radical action followed revolt from citizens all around the world and which necessitated leaders of all nations to agree to act decisively.

2) The set greenhouse gas abatement targets are binding.

3) Under the GACC, countries that do not comply with their set targets can be prosecuted by the Climate Order Committee through the ICJ and fined harsh penalties. These penalties are deliberately set at levels that are higher than it would cost for the country to comply.

4) Collected funds from these penalties are then used to bring the particular country into compliance through the most cost-effective measures.

5) An additional tax is imposed by the World Climate Order on all fossil fuels manufactured and distributed. Taxes collected are added to the penalties collected to assist developing countries to meet their set targets. These taxes have effectively made fossil fuels a luxury item. As a result, the use of fossil fuels is now at a historic low, such that their exploration, manufacture and use are expected to continue to diminish at an increasing rate. Until an alternative fuel such as hydrogen is found, air travel is currently a highly-taxed and expensive option for most people.

6) These punitive measures have resulted in unprecedented global action to significantly reduce carbon emissions. Since 2025, reductions in global carbon emissions have averaged 10% per year and have overtaken the effect of population increases. Carbon reductions at these levels are expected to bring global levels to the desired ones within the next decade. The achievements just in the last two decades have included:

Health outcomes

There has been a shift in the assessment of climate change impacts more toward the social and health impact to communities of more frequent and severe occurrences of extreme weather conditions, but also in the impacts of air pollution resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels.

Transport

More than 60% of all road vehicles (private and commercial) sold were plug-in electric and, with all the solar power being generated in so many households and factories, can recharge their fifth-generation batteries in just 20 minutes using renewable energy. All countries have now implemented plans for public transport to be a priority over the construction of highways, which previously encouraged more cars on the road. In addition, 80% of all public transit buses are now either hydrogen or electric (battery) powered.

Renewable energy sources

All new centralized power generation is now sourced from renewable energy, including large and small hydro-electricity, pumped hydro-electricity, PV solar power, concentrated solar power, wind, geothermal — all supported by the latest technology battery and molten salt storage, tidal energy and nuclear power. No new coal-fired generation plants have been constructed since 2030.

Buildings, Urban Design and Active Transport

Cities are now designed to minimize car transport requirements and to encourage cycling and walking. Many cities now provide free public transport.

All new commercial buildings since 2030 are constructed using recycled materials, and all glass windows are solar power collectors. All roofs in most countries have mandatory solar power PV and hot water systems

All new private dwellings constructed in the past two decades have been required to have a combination of high-rating insulation, double or triple glazing, solar power with fifth-generation battery storage, solar roof tiles, solar windows, efficient lighting and reverse-cycle air conditioning.

Passive building design measures, intelligent houses and commercial properties have reduced consumption of energy by 25%, compared with early this century.

Work and Lifestyle Changes

A huge impact on decoupling consumption and economic prosperity has been the implementation of a number of changes in work and lifestyle balance. The general concept that has been adopted in various different forms around the world relies on people working fewer hours — therefore, earning but also spending less. This has resulted in significant reductions in the consumption of goods and services. Other benefits of this have been improved health outcomes and better life balance.

The tax base for most countries remained the same to provide the required high levels of public services and infrastructure. But while tax rates rose for all salary earners, the expenditure decreases meant that disposable income requirements of citizens were also less. As a result, the quality of life in most countries either remained the same or improved.

Agriculture

There have been dramatic changes to farming practices and the consumption of food around the world. The consumption of meat and other high-protein and high-carbon foods, including imported goods, is in decline due to the strict targets put on carbon emissions. Generally, meat prices have increased in all countries, with the consequent reduction of meat consumption and improvement in health, in addition to the benefits of active transport.

Industrial Activity

Manufacturing, utilities and commercial operations have dramatically reduced their carbon emissions due to energy efficiency, renewable energy usage and material recycling. Since 2030, all major appliance, vehicle and electronic gadget manufacturers have been required to take back their used goods for reuse and recycling. This has encouraged the rethinking and redesigning all such items.

The past few decades have been challenging and there have been encouraging achievements in decarbonizing the world through the initiatives of the World Climate Order. ��But according to the chair of the World Climate Order Committee, there is much more to be done. The next committee report will be issued in 2052.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The World After Climate Change appeared first on 51�Թ�.

But why? What are the redeeming qualities of human civilization that deserve “saving”? Why not let it die a natural death, fall on its own sword of pride, avarice and cruelty?

Either way — original sin or our original DNA — human life was destined to be precarious and end by its own hand. The very arrogance that keeps us silent before that reality is the principal reason behind its inevitability. As witnesses to mankind’s work in the 20th century, from the two world wars and nuclear conflagrations to cultural revolutions and ubiquitous civil wars, why would any parent bring progeny into that?

The answer is generally that not too many parents have thought about it. People were programmed to reproduce. Mostly, like all living organisms, for their own survival. For replenishment of their kind as producers (to carry on), especially after great global winnowings.

Pleasure being an added and natural inducement, mostly for males. But, to an increasing extent in the modern world, pleasure and procreation are being separated. Pleasure has become an end in itself. The burgeoning of the baby under the frayed cotton dress and the diapers being strung out on the clothesline off the gray back porch are history.

As for survival through the multiplication of human mind and muscle, well muscle is already vestigial as an engine for productive (or destructive) activity, and mind is fast becoming usurped by artificial intelligence. Meaning there are no a priori reasons for humans to multiply or even replace themselves. In the last half century, their “value added” as a progenitor of their species has begun to collapse.

Except perhaps for the incomparable love it allows many of us as we hold our newborn in our arms. The spitting image, if you will. The legacy of human persistence amidst the final curtain call. The “do not go gentle into that good night.”

Not sure? Study the science of it, the demographics of it. By the end of this century, most�� “science” will provide support for what we all feel. Women vote with their wombs, while men nowadays are more often compliant. The verdict: Children are not worth the trouble, not when their cost is measured against the rising plentitude of other human ambitions, both noble and mundane.

As of today, China, Japan, Europe and North America will not replace their people without immigration. By the end of the 21st century, only Africa will sustain its population, and that is only if it avoids depopulation from either manmade or natural forces — a long shot given the experience of other similar agglomerations.

Science is indivisible. We have been told this since the enlightenment. The science of human demographics is every bit as compelling as the science behind global warming.

In pure numbers, the greater threat to human civilization over the next 100 years is more likely to be our own self-induced extinction than a warmer planet. Unless, of course, we alter that course with radical genetically modified solutions.

Postscript

Yes, I am solar. I know by the feel of the sun as I farm, as the cold of the morning gives way to the warming sun on my face. I have written extensively about the abiding virtue of the sun and the importance of eliminating the intermediaries between us and it. But that has little to do with saving human civilization, which can only be done by so much DNA engineering that our humanness as recognizable men and women would be erased. You see, humans are, in the most part, malignant — notwithstanding glorious intercessions.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Climate Change: A Contrarian View appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The science is clear on climate change. Looking back at this past year, we’ve witnessed how climate change has manifested in more extreme weather, from record-breaking hurricanes, storms and flooding to heat waves, droughts and wildfires. Scientists have linked climate change to human activity and emphasized that the problem will not go away on its own. Instead, it will take a global, concerted effort to mitigate the impact of climate change today, while staving off its worst effects in the future.

In October 2018, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the planet would face “catastrophic” climate change if we do not dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The planet’s has risen about 0.9°C since the late 19th century. Most of that warming has taken place since 2010, registering five of the warmest years on record.

Global initiatives like the Paris Climate Agreement have sought to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C of pre-industrial levels, as even half a degree Celsius higher — which, if we continue emitting at our current rates, we’ll hit by 2030 — would have a devastating, irrevocable impact on the planet’s climate. has put together a graphic that depicts the difference between a 1.5°C and 2.0°C increase in temperature, which soberly describes as a weather forecast “from hell.”

Despite growing evidence backing man-made climate change, some people continue to reject the science, and political leaders lack the will to make substantive change in curbing carbon emissions. Leaders like US President Donald Trump have called climate change a hoax. During his annual Earth Day address in April, Trump managed to talk about environmental protection without once referring to climate change. And Donald Trump isn’t alone. Governments around the world have ignored, denied or understated the impact of climate change in favor of maintaining profitable production of fossil fuels — the most egregious culprit when it comes to global warming.

Nonetheless, climate anxiety is rightfully on the rise among the general public. This past year we’ve seen greater public participation in grassroots movements demanding more action against climate change, particularly among youth. In March, 1.5 million students in 123 countries walked out of their classrooms to participate in a global in what was the largest youth-led environmental protest in history. The movement, led by 16-year old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, called on political leaders to respond to climate change with greater urgency. In April, the Extinction Rebellion movement staged rallies, die-ins and acts of civil disobedience around the world to call for climate action.

In this edition of the Interview, 51�Թ� talks to Arek Sinanian, an expert on climate change and the author of , about what drives climate change skepticism, and the role that individuals and governments can play in halting global warming.

The text has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dina Yazdani: The IPCC reported last October that if we don’t make significant strides in curbing global warming by 2030, we could face catastrophic climate change. So what does catastrophic climate change look like?

Arek Sinanian: Yes, I think the word “catastrophic” is a big word — it means different things to different people — and it’s a very general term. As your question quite rightly asks, what does it actually mean? What catastrophic means is that it’s going to have significant impact on the climate of the world. It means more frequent and severe storms that have significant impact on the populations, societies, communities, infrastructure and people.

How many people are going to be involved in such catastrophes? It’s hard to say; you can’t put a number on it. You can’t say X number of people are going to die, or Y number of towns are going to be under water, etc. Predictions vary, and that’s another reason why the report can sometimes be a bit vague, because it depends on what happens between now and 2030.

There’s a lot of variables: economic growth, global economic activity, technological developments and how many new technologies we adopt in energy efficiency and renewables. So there’s a lot of uncertainty. But coming back to the question, What does “catastrophic” mean? If you look at the various aspects of climate change, what sort of impact are we talking about? Let’s run them through.

One is sea level rise. Now, how does sea level rise affect the world? Many towns, cities, countries are on the water, so to speak. An increase of sea level even by a few inches can have a huge impact, particularly if we then add the effects of more severe storms. A rise in sea levels will affect particularly low-lying countries. There are, for instance, Pacific islands that are literally only a few feet above sea level. The reality is that these people can’t go anywhere else. The only thing they can do is either build their houses further up the hill — but often there isn’t a hill — or raise their house somehow on stilts so that they remain above sea level.

On top of that, the other impact is more storms, and more severe storms. Yes, they have been happening for hundreds and thousands of years. They are likely more to be more severe. What does more severe mean? Stronger winds, stronger gusts — and all of this will affect infrastructure, power systems, roads, trains, coastal areas in particular but also in-land areas where there are weather patterns where you will have these tornadoes and hurricanes.

Just imagine instead of hurricanes happening once a year, now we’re going to have twice, three times, four times, five times a year. Is that “catastrophic”? Yes, it can be. Catastrophic in a sense that by the time you recover from one hurricane, you’ve got another one. So that’s what people mean by catastrophic.

That includes storms that might [bring] heavier rain. What does heavy rain mean? More floods, particularly in flood-prone areas in the cities and communities. Again, there have always been floods. We’ve learned to live with these floods. We’ve built systems that can somehow cope or recover from major floods. However, there are countries, communities that are not capable of coping with such events. Also, what if these floods occur more frequently and more severely? In other words, many parts of the world they measure the likelihood of flooding and say things like “one-in-100-years flood.” What if these start happening one every 10 years? One every 20 years? Again, it’s a matter of building resilience and being able to recover from such events. That’s where the problem is.

Just like we have more frequent and severe floods, we’ll also have, ironically and somewhat contradictory, more droughts. Again, more severe, longer droughts, longer periods of no rain, or very little rain, etc. Agriculture, communities and towns, cities rely heavily on water. So it will impact the production of food and sustaining cities and towns.

Then we have more severe heat waves. It has a huge impact on populations. Have we always had heat waves? Yes, we have, around the world there are high temperatures. What if these heat waves occur more regularly and more severely? In Australia, we have just had the hottest summer on record, ever —��at least since records began more than 100 years ago. This has an impact on all of the people. More vulnerable people are more prone to heat waves, and it can affect other things like infrastructure and the actual asphalt.

The road base is melting because of the heat. Railway lines are buckling because of the heat. It turns out that it’s not just the single maximum temperature but the prolonged maximum temperature. Instead of just say 100-120˚F peak, what if the 120˚ stayed there for two-three days? It turns out that has even a bigger impact because the system cannot recover.

So we have all of these impacts, and when people talk about “catastrophe,” what if all these things happened around the world more frequently, more severely, and had a huge impact on the economy, on sustaining communities, on the health of people and ecosystems? That’s what the report is referring to as “catastrophic,” and that’s why we need to act very quickly.

Yazdani: That really paints a pretty comprehensive picture of what we can expect if we do reach that tipping point in 2030. You’ve also written quite extensively on the distrust toward climate science and the psychological reasons behind why someone might reject it. When we think of climate change deniers, we often think of people who stand to lose from the adoption of clean energy��— like those that work for corporations, car manufacturers, coal producers, power plants, etc., and their lobbyists. What are some other reasons why people might refuse to believe in climate change?

Sinanian: You might be referring to the book I wrote called A Climate for Denial. The reason I mention it is that I did a lot of research into this very thing because I was genuinely intrigued as to why seemingly intelligent, educated people would accept other parts of science. They go to their doctor when they’re sick, they have surgery by a surgeon, who is basically a scientist. The same science goes into designing and flying an aircraft as predicting climate change or deciding how much greenhouse gasses are impacting climate change — the same science, the same rigorous methodologies. Why do these people reject the science of climate change when they in fact accept many others? Our daily lives almost depend entirely on science.

To answer your question, what I’ve found is that there are many factors that affect a person’s accepting or not accepting the science of climate change. It turns out that ideology is the biggest determinant: There have been many surveys and studies done by schools of psychology around many of these reputable universities around the world. So then the question arises, What is it about ideology that affects people’s acceptance of science? Let me just say outright that the science on climate change is absolutely clear. There is no doubt, no question mark. The only thing we can’t really put our finger on which I alluded to earlier is just how much the impact of climate change is going to be.

The way that climate scientists predict the impact of these greenhouse gasses that we’re putting into the atmosphere is that they have models and rely on very sophisticated, I want to emphasize this, very, very sophisticated models that almost include hundreds of different variables, including solar flares, volcanoes, cows and people doing what we do when we eat food. It includes all of that and historic data on everything you can imagine, and then it includes economic factors, technological factors, the use of energy, etc. It’s very sophisticated.

I say this because people say to me, “What about solar flares? Hm? You didn’t think of that, huh?” Of course they thought of that. Some of these deniers come to me with the most mundane, basic questions that an 8-year-old asks as if all these scientists that have spent their whole professional lives looking at this would not have thought of that.

Ideology is a big one. What does ideology have to do with accepting science? Well, my conclusion was that there are people whose ideology is such that there is a level of anti-authoritarianism in their way of looking into the world. They don’t want to be told to live their lives in a certain way. It’s kind of a reaction to being told that you have to use less energy, that you have to use a smaller car, you’re using too much fossil fuels, etc. On top of that, there is this notion that, particularly with ultra right-wing ideology — and I’m not having a go at anybody here, but just giving you what the research is telling me —��there is a feeling that instead of being told what to do, maybe the market should decide what is best for the economy and what is best for us.

The market decides how much tomatoes cost, how much your car is worth, etc. If, for instance, we run out of oil, then oil will become more expensive and less people will use oil. You get the point. As it turns out, very reputable economists whom I mention in my book have said that, in fact, climate change is possibly and probably the biggest failure in the marketplace. A failure because the decisions we have made since the industrial revolution started, the decisions we have made in deciding what kind of economy and what kind of power system we have, and transport systems — major decisions we’ve made have not incorporated the environmental damage and climate change.

If you believe in the market making decisions for us, then sometimes the market does not get it right. It does not always get the price of a tomato correct. And that’s when usually governments step in and provide subsidies and provide some sort of adjustment to these things to change the market.

That’s ideology. But wait, there’s more. It turns out that apart from ideology, theology or religion, has an impact. You might say, What does religion have to do with climate change? Well, I’ve been told by highly religious people, and again studies show this, if you truly believe that God, a god, is omnipotent, omniscient and is in control of this whole thing — of the existence of humans on earth, of the existence of the earth, how these things happen — then they say that God after all determines our climate and determines whether we survive or not.

I even asked a very religious person, “Wait a minute, you’re saying that you’re willing to leave all of this for God to decide?” And he said, “Yes, absolutely.” So if we’re going to be wiped off the face of this earth, he said to me, “Well, maybe this is part of God’s plan.” But I didn’t have the heart to say to him, What if you had a really, really almost fatal disease, but a curable one. Are you going to say, “Well, it’s God’s will, so I might as well die,” or are you going to go to the doctor and say, Please cure me, get rid of this damn thing? So again, it doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way it is.

But fortunately, the current pope has responded to this very question. A very important paper, Pope Francis’s Encyclical on the Environment, released about two years ago turns that argument completely upside down. What his paper basically says is, yes, God gave us this incredible gift — the gift of this earth, the gift of the beauty, our lives, on this earth — and we owe it to God to look after it for him (or for her).

So far, we have ideology, theology, the marketplace fallacy, and then it goes on and on. There’s fear, and it kind of addresses what you said about people who have a vested interest. People are afraid that if we change all of this — [if] we get renewable energy, rely more on renewable energy than on fossil fuels — then somehow our lives are going to be worse off, the economy is going to suffer, etc. There’s this fear of change. Humans, generally, do not like change. Nobody likes change, because change means uncertainty; we don’t know what’s going to come, we don’t know what’s ahead. We don’t want to change our way of life. I want to keep my car. I want to drive it everywhere I want. I want to put my air conditioning on. I want to stay cool. I want to stay comfortable. All of that.

But here is the counterargument to that fear: What if we had our entire energy provided by renewables? What if? It’s a big hypothetical, I know. Imagine that. All of our energy comes from renewable sources. Guess what? You won’t even have to turn your lights off. You won’t have to turn your air conditioning off. You’ll be able to run your electric car until it falls apart. What I’m saying is that if we have renewable energy instead of fossil fuels, none of these fears would happen. The only problem is, how we do get there? That’s the biggest issue we have.

Yazdani: You mentioned earlier the resistance to authority, God’s will, market shortfalls: How can we — or political leaders, religious leaders, people who have influence, scientists — more clearly communicate the reality of climate change?

Sinanian: It’s interesting that you say that, because the reason why I thought my research and book are important, is because I think communication needs to change. I’ll start with the scientists. The scientists have done themselves a disservice. It turns out that for a climate denier, the last thing you should give that person is more graphs, numbers and data. It’s more to do with ideology than figures, graphs and numbers. It’s convincing them that the fear is unjustified, the market is not going to work and these catastrophic things will affect us.

Really, the communication ought to be more positive than that. At the end of the day, it becomes a philosophical question rather than a scientific or political one. The question is, Do we really care about future generations? It’s as simple as that.

The scientists have to present the information, the data in such a way as not to talk down to people. They think they know everything. Well, between you and me, they do — they know a hell of a lot more than the average person on the street, and know a hell of a lot more than most politicians and corporate leaders. But it’s how you communicate. Instead of talking down to people and saying you’re ignorant and don’t know a thing, the way to communicate has to be more inclusive and understanding of these fears and denialist tendencies that I talked about earlier.

At the personal level — that’s you and me —��what can we do about it? Other than making our own small decisions in the way we live on this planet, I think we can also make decisions when we come to vote. Most people [live] in a democracy, and in a democracy we have ways of choosing our leaders. The people we choose to represent us agree with our values, morals and ethical standards, including climate change. When I vote, there is no way that I will vote for someone who doesn’t believe in climate change. Why? Because as I said, it’s going to lead to catastrophe for future generations and I will not be able to die in peace knowing that I gave power to that person.

Now, this doesn’t guarantee anything of course, but even if a leader is voted in who doesn’t agree with it, we can write to politicians, express our disappointments in their lack of climate change policy, because not doing something is as bad as doing something bad.

Yazdani: Earlier you mentioned that many people see climate change through a generational lens. Last month, youth from over 100 countries around the world walked out of their classrooms to participate in what they called a Climate Strike to demand leaders to respond with greater urgency to climate change and take more action. We have also seen a Green New Deal put forward in US Congress. Do you think leaders are feeling pressure from the public, particularly the youth, to do more to address climate change and make hard decisions?

Sinanian: Absolutely. I have contacts all over the world, and the response to [the student strikes] all over the world was fantastic. In a way, the strikes were the best way to tell leaders, particularly coming from the youth, because, as I said, this is an intergenerational problem. To be honest, my generation is probably not going to suffer anywhere nearly as much as future generations. The strikes were fundamentally important —��and I would say fundamentally successful.

You mentioned a tipping point earlier. I think we are reaching a tipping point in climate action, because there is a change in the mood around the world. In Europe, France, Germany, have been way ahead of America and Australia on this. They’re already there. There are now movements in the mood and in the feeling among politicians — and politics — around the world. The mood of the community and the action of what the young people are asking for is changing.

So how is this going to change policy? Because there are very young people that went on strike, if you’re a politician, you’re thinking, Those young people are going to vote in a few years’ time and going to put me, or my party or my congress out of [office]. There is now this feeling around the world that we better change our colors. We better change our policies, otherwise we’re going to be dinosaurs, so to speak.

Yazdani: Bringing it back to the US, last year the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that greenhouse gas emission had decreased by 2.7% from 2016 to 2017 during the first years of Donald Trump’s presidency. Andrew Wheeler, the head of the EPA, that “these achievements flow largely from technological breakthroughs in the private sector, not the heavy hand of government. The Trump administration has proved that federal regulations are not necessary to drive CO2 reductions.” What’s your reaction to this press release, and can we significantly stem greenhouse gas emissions without government regulations?

Sinanian: No. I totally disagree. I don’t feel capable or justified in what I’m about to say. I have a lot of respect for the EPA. However, I cannot help but feel that that statement was a political statement rather than a technical one. I’ll talk generally about agencies like EPAs around the world. They are absolutely fundamental to monitoring and measuring our emissions and what impacts policies are having on our emissions. They measure our fuel, energy usage per capita, sector, economy, city, state. The first thing about management of anything, not just science or climate, requires data and monitoring and reporting.

Now, EPAs of this world are in the best possible place to do these measurements and collation of data and then to report, because that then gives the decision-makers the tools and data they need to put the appropriate policy measures in place. Regulators such as the EPA also are involved with the actual implementation of policies and regulations. We need regulations to stop people polluting and doing unlawful acts according to the country or state’s regulatory framework. Otherwise, if we didn’t have EPAs of this world, I could put cyanide down the sink or put toxic chemicals down the river. They fill a very important function not only for climate change but also for regulating and policing environmental issues, and monitoring and reporting to politicians to advise them.

Yazdani: Regulations aside, what are other steps that the government can do to help foster investment in renewable energy and discouraging the use of fossil fuels?

Sinanian: There is a fear that somehow transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy is going to be painful, costly, a nuisance, [and will] degrade our quality of life. What can they do? As it turns out, investment in renewable energy is at the highest it has ever been. The US is not a bad guy here. On the contrary, after China, the US is the second biggest investor in renewable energy. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for what’s happening in the USA. A lot of this is happening because of the market. What’s happened, for instance, [is that] solar panels and wind, the cost of renewables, the installation and operation, have come down. The costs have come down significantly.

Not only that, but the technology has improved. Solar power is far more efficient than it has ever been. You add that to the cost reductions as well, and it’s got to the point that in many parts of the world solar energy and wind energy are challenging the cost of coal-powered electricity. In many parts of the world, coal-powered generation is by far the cheapest option. If that’s our baseline and what we’re aiming for, it turns out that solar and wind power is now challenging that economic argument.

What can the EPAs of this world do? They can mention that and show the success and the economic, as well as the environmental, benefits of renewables. Incidentally, economists are also saying — and have done the calculations — that not addressing climate change is going to be costlier than actually addressing it.

Yazdani: We talked about how climate change can look like at the individual level, at the national level, and what governments can do. To bring it to the global level, how effective are international agreements like the Paris Climate Agreement in compelling signatory countries to meeting their emission targets? So unlike the 1997 , the is not a legally binding treaty, therefore there are enforcement mechanisms for countries’ non-compliance with the agreement. Are pledges enough to ensure that warming does not surpass 2˚C above pre-industrial levels?

Sinanian: Unfortunately, no. The Paris Agreement is a compromise. It’s an agreement to agree. It’s like you and I agree that we’re going to do something. High five, we’ve agreed to do something. The reality is that the global agreements have always been extremely difficult, even more difficult than the national ones. I’ll tell you why. In all of these meetings that they have in the United Nations, just imagine almost 200 countries coming together to agree, as I said, to agree to change the way we live on this planet. That is an incredibly difficult thing to do. They can hardly agree to the time of day, let alone how we’re going to change.

There are many problems, but the main problem is this: There are around the world the haves and the haves not. There is the industrialized countries, USA, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, etc., and then there are the other countries that are still developing, including China. China is still predominantly an underdeveloped country. Don’t be fooled. Yes, they’re making everything we wear, use and buy. You’ve got India coming up and many other Asian, African, South American countries that are predominantly underdeveloped. How does one provide a bridge?

India is about a billion people, [and some ] don’t even have electricity yet. Here I am thinking about turning my air condition on and off. In many parts of India, they cook with little sticks of wood. So how are we going to [tell] these people, No you cannot have electricity, sorry — you could only if you have solar wind, but you can’t have electricity because that’s going to add to greenhouse gasses. You can’t do that to people. They have as much right to come to our level of affluence and quality of life as we have established for ourselves.

You’ve got a huge discrepancy between the developed and underdeveloped economies. How are we going to bridge that and let them develop, because development ultimately requires energy use. If they’re going to develop and require more energy, how can we make sure they do all of this without adding to greenhouse gasses? It’s a huge problem. That’s why global agreements have failed.

What [such agreements mandate] is for the developed countries to reduce emissions enough to allow the underdeveloped countries to come up mid-way. Kyoto did that, and I was personally involved in implementing the Kyoto Protocol for the United Nations. The way that Kyoto tried to do it was encourage cross-subsidization for developing countries to put in renewable energy and energy efficiency systems to that they could develop — transfer technology to them, teaching them how to do it better, but also at the same time to encourage them with economic assistance, to embed low carbon technologies and low carbon energy generation.

It’s a big problem. That’s why the Paris Climate Agreement is non-binding and just an agreement. Let’s meet for a few days, have lots of cups of teas and agree to do something. We don’t know what it is, and even if we know what it is, we’re not bound to it.

*[Updated: June 6, 2019.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post How Ideology Affects Our Acceptance of Climate Science appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Finland is a country of fascinating and stark contrasts — long and glittery summer nights and short, snowy winter days, the midnight sun and the winter darkness. The country earned its nickname, the Land of the Midnight Sun, because of the sun that doesn’t set at all in its northernmost parts during summer months. Finland is a land of islands, boasting some 187,888 , and is believed to be one of the most extensive and unspoiled natural environments in Europe.

However, Finland has been affected by global warming and climate change in its own ways. The Finnish Meteorological Institute has that in the near future, temperatures will rise, precipitation will surge, snow cover and soil frost will reduce, cloud cover will increase, sunshine will decrease and sea level in the Baltic Sea will rise. was the fourth warmest in 137 years.

In 2015, Finland’s national Climate Change Act into force, laying down provisions on climate policies and monitoring the implementation of climate objectives. The long-term greenhouse gas emission reduction target set by the legislation is aimed at 80% by 2050. The Ministry of the Environment is tasked with multiple responsibilities to mitigate the impacts of climate change on Finland.

In this edition of , 51�Թ� talks to Satu Hassi, Finland’s former environment minister, about the northern European nation’s fight against climate change and its government’s policies to tackle global warming.��

The interview was conducted at the end of 2018. The text has been lightly edited for clarity.

Kourosh Ziabari: How is Finland affected by global warming? Do you think it can win the fight against climate change?

Satu Hassi: In the north, including Finland, the warming rate is approximately double compared to the global average. Finland has warmed approximately two degrees Celsius after mid-19th century. For example, now almost all of Finland, including the northern part of the country, Lapland, is snow free, which we find extremely unusual in the second half of November. For example, a few weeks back, there was a World Cup winter sport event in Ruka, in northern Finland, but there was no snow. They had to produce snow artificially for the cross-country skiing lanes.

Ziabari: Finland is known as a forest-rich country, with forests considered to be “green gold” and part of its national identity. How does the government’s new climate and energy strategy unveiled in 2017, which is based on increasing logging by nearly 25%, undermine the potential use of these [woodlands] as a ?����

Hassi: I disagree strongly with our government on the plans to increase logging. This would reduce the carbon sink formed by our forests, which would be as bad for climate as increasing greenhouse gas emission. Reducing our forest carbon sinks in the way the government has planned would be irresponsible.

Ziabari: You once mentioned in one of your interviews that collection systems for plastic recycling are inadequate. Is it something specific to Finland, or is the whole of Europe suffering from this? Is there any significant investment underway to make up for the inadequacy?����

Hassi: The inadequacy is global. Recently I read that even fish caught from the Amazon River had pieces of plastic in their digestive system.��In Finland we have recently improved to some extent, and separate collection of plastic waste has increased. Now it is possible for normal families to bring their plastic waste to containers, which will be brought to a plastic recycling [plant], not incinerated.

Ziabari: Are the negative environmental impacts of aviation a serious challenge or concern for the European Union? An agreement to exclude international aviation from the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) for another four years was reached between the European Parliament and the Council of Europe in 2014. That period has expired now. How is the situation presently?��

Hassi: Originally, the EU directive which brought aviation to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme was written in such a way that after a transitional period of some years the ETS would cover all flights arriving to EU and departing from the EU. But China and the US threatened to start a trade war. The EU bowed to this pressure and amended the directive in such a way that only flights inside the EU are covered by the ETS. I very much hope the ETS could be developed to cover all flights between the EU and the rest of the world.

The ideal solution would be emissions trading covering all flights globally or a global carbon tax for all flights. The revenues could be used to support climate measures, both mitigation and adaptation, in developing countries.

Ziabari: How is the European Union, and Finland in particular, dealing with concerns over worldwide food insecurity? A by the Food and Agriculture Organization shows that the diversity of cultivated crops fell by 75% during the 20^th��century, and one third of today’s varieties could disappear by 2050. What are the implications of this decline in the diversity of nutrients for EU citizens?��

Hassi: It is very worrying. This has been an issue of political debate in the European Parliament. For example, the Greens have argued that the EU agricultural policy should encourage genetic diversity of crop species. But for global food security, I think climate mitigation is even more important. A warming climate will reduce crops, especially in the tropical and subtropical latitudes.

Ziabari: You once referred to air quality as one of the success stories of environmental policy. How is the situation with air pollution in Europe today? While 80% of Europeans are to particulate matter level above the limits stipulated by the World Health Organization, is air quality a major concern, or has it been tackled?

Hassi: The air quality in European cities is much better than it used to be, which you can see with your own eyes. For example, in Finnish cities the new snow stays white much longer than it did in the 1980s — but still there is a lot of work to be done. It is still estimated that 400,000 Europeans die prematurely because of air pollution. But emission standards for power stations, factories and cars have been tightened several times. The sulphur dioxide emissions are less than 10% compared to their peak value in the 1980s.

The most recent sector to reduce air pollution emissions is shipping. The maximum sulphur content of maritime fuel was reduced from 1% to 0.1 % on January 1, 2015, and on January 1, 2020 it will be reduced from 3.5% to 0.5% in all other sea areas. This is a major step forward for air quality, especially in coastal areas.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Finland Is Warming at Twice the Global Rate appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Droughts, wildfires, sea levels rising, storms and floods, ice caps melting, heat waves, cold snaps: Many people are asking whether these are being caused by climate change. This is the wrong question to ask, because obviously there have always been droughts, wildfires, heat waves, storms and floods. The question we need to consider is how global warming and climate change are affecting the weather around the world.

Not that this is an easy question to answer, but at least it’s an appropriate one. It’s appropriate because if climate change is indeed contributing to these events, we need to understand the extent of such impact, and then work out what resources and efforts we need to put into mitigating it. And then a more difficult question arises about how the responsibility of addressing this global problem can be fairly and equitably managed amongst the many nations and economies of the world.

Let’s answer the easy one first and leave the more difficult question for another time.

Knowing the Difference

Before I go any further, let me quickly remind us of the differences between global warming, climate change and the weather. As the saying goes, climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. In other words, climate is a long-term trend of events, while weather is what happens on a daily basis. For example, the weather can change in a few minutes, but the climate changes over much longer time frames. But they are linked, and we measure and record weather events which then give us an overall view of the long-term trends such as hotter days, more severe droughts, etc.

As for global warming, it is the increase in average global temperatures above what we would expect without the greenhouse effect, which is a result of increased levels of greenhouse gases —��mainly as a consequence of human activity.

As I have done in all of my previous articles and will continue to do, I’ll start with the facts we have available. Yes folks, facts — this currently illusive concept — and not opinion, and certainly not belief. To develop appropriate measures and policies, to act on them and to do this properly, we will need a rational and scientific approach, and not be driven by ideology. We have no other choice than to have to rely on the science we have, as imperfect as it may appear.

So, let me summarize a few of the facts about extreme weather we have in front of us. According to the , just this year, the UK has seen the warmest February day on record at 20.6°C (69.08°F) — the first time the country witnessed a temperature of over 20°C (69.08°F) in winter, breaking the February 1998 record of 19.7°C. On the other side of the globe, Australia’s Climate Council’s Weather Gone Wild: Climate Change Fuelled Extreme Weather in 2018 states:

“The increase in global average temperatures has increased the probability of hot extremes (including record-breaking hot temperatures) and decreased the probability of cold extremes. In Australia, the ratio of observed hot to cold temperature records was 12 to 1 between 2000 and 2014. The annual number of hot days (above 35°C) and very hot days (above 40°C) has also increased strongly over most areas since 1950. Heatwaves are also lasting longer, reaching higher maximum temperatures and occurring more frequently over many regions of Australia.”

In a report by , Australia recorded its hottest summer on record when average temperatures exceeded 2^oC (3.6^oF) above the long-term averages.

We Must Act

Are these isolated events, or do they indicate a trend that we must consider carefully? If we choose to ignore these trends, we risk the possibility of getting to a point in time when it will be too late to act effectively. At what point of being presented with evidential data that indicates a serious problem do we say that we must act.

The 2017 US National Climate Assessment , which consolidated key messages and supporting evidence from 16 national-level topic chapters, 10 regional chapters and two chapters that focus on societal response strategies, concludes that the impacts of climate change are already being felt across the country, with����more “frequent and intense extreme weather events and climate-related events, as well as changes in average climate conditions, are expected to continue to damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities.” Whereas not all regions will be affected equally, “Future climate change is expected to further disrupt many areas of life, exacerbating existing challenges to prosperity posed by aging and deteriorating infrastructure, stressed ecosystems, and economic inequality.”��The report predicts that “without significant global mitigation action and regional adaptation efforts, rising temperatures, sea level rise, and changes in extreme events are expected to increasingly disrupt and damage critical infrastructure and property, labor productivity, and the vitality of our communities.”

Numerous new studies are being presented around the world at a great rate and, increasingly, the data they provide on extreme weather events are unprecedented. As a US-led team in Nature Climate Change, the evidence of global warming attributed to human activity has reached what is termed “gold standard” or a “five-sigma” level, which provides a very high degree of certainty.

The Price Tag

The sector that knows more about this hard evidence than any other is the insurance industry. According to , a global insurance company, the overall losses from natural disasters in 2017 amounted to $330 billion worldwide, $215 billion of which was claimed by hurricanes. The five largest natural catastrophes relating to climate change in 2017 were Hurricane Harvey, which caused 88 fatalities and $85 billion in damaged in the US; Hurricane Irma, with 128 fatalities and a $67-billion loss across the US and Caribbean; Hurricane Maria, which devastated the Caribbean islands, causing108 fatalitiesand a loss of $63billion; the California wildfires, which claimed 25 lives and a loss of $10.5 billion; floods and landslides in China, with 56 fatalities and losses of $6 billion. As a whole, North America shouldered 83% of overall losses —��an increase from a of 32%.

So, back to our philosophical question: Now that the scientists have identified a certain link between fossil fuel burning and climate change, what are we to do with this information? What are the practical and sustainable options to decarbonize the world’s economies?

My answer to these vital and difficult questions is simple: Clearly, there needs to be a global solution.��Each of us must take full responsibility for our actions and, wherever and whenever possible, make decisions in our own lives to reduce our own carbon footprint and that of our community. But, more importantly, we must exercise our democratic power to select politicians and leaders —��political and corporate —��who have the will and the intent to make the hard decisions.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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