Phase it down
The COP26 summit ended last week with something of a scandal. In the final version of the Glasgow Climate Pact, world leaders agreed to “phase down” coal use rather than phasing it out. Apparently, the last-minute word change made COP26 President Alok Sharma cry.
Such a change is indeed worthy of tears. It is a blatantly obvious proof that the world is not all on the same page when it comes to climate change and it may never be. But there was also something else that the summit delegates did not reach an agreement on and it just might have a lot to do with why they agreed to the “phase-down” compromise.
“On the thorny question of financing from developed countries in support of climate action in developing countries, the text emphasizes the need to mobilize climate finance “from all sources to reach the level needed to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, including significantly increasing support for developing country Parties, beyond $100 billion per year”, UN News reported.
This is the text that will ultimately decide whether or not all these efforts being put into moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy will end with success or failure. The reason is what India — the driver behind the phase-down stipulation — called climate justice.
One of the few facts that have remained unchallenged by politicians and newly minted researchers is the fact that most of the greenhouse gases emitted by human civilisation historically have come from developed countries. These emissions were, in fact, a side effect of their rise to a developed status.
But now there are many other countries trying to achieve this status by using precisely the same tools that developed nations used during their industrialised phase: fossil fuels. It appears that even the most climate-conscious European governments would not stoop so low in terms of hypocrisy as to deny them the ambition to grow economically and improve the lives of their peoples.
At the same time, the biggest historical emitters remain quite reluctant to finance the decarbonisation of these developing countries. Now this is a bit hypocritical seeing as it is the big emitters that are pushing for global decarbonisation. It makes sense that whoever wants a certain thing done should pay for it.
This is what India has been saying for a while now. Yet this line of argument does not stand a chance with the voters of those governments that are pushing for decarbonisation. Perhaps even the most environmentally conscious of voters would stop and think before signing up for higher taxes so people in India could switch from coal to solar. Unless, that is, they are wealthy enough to afford the higher taxes.
The truth — and it is the simplest of truths — is that the affordability of a good or service, or an ideology, is directly dependent on wealth. It is relative. For someone who makes half a million a year, buying a Tesla, putting in a solar roof and buying a battery pack would be affordable. For someone who makes a tenth of that it would be a challenge without going into debt.
Yet the above example uses two people with reasonable income. There are billions of people in the world, including millions in the EU itself, who do not make anything close to $50,000 a year. These people get their electricity from coal-fired power plants and drive 10-year-old VWs and Renaults.
These people cannot afford a brand new EV, even with government incentives. These people do not care about the lofty goal of keeping average global temperatures down because they have a lot more immediate concerns such as staying warm during the winter without going into more debt than they already are.
This is where the deepest divide between political discourse and reality gapes wide. This is also where it becomes clear that the climate change fight is a rich people’s game even if the players keep using the poor as example of the devastating effects of human-caused climate change. It’s standard practice really, using the poor to advertise some cause or another that would actually end up harming said poor, for their own good, no less.
I should perhaps hasten to note here that air pollution hurts everyone within its reach. I believe there is no argument about air pollution and its potential to kill. However, it is not air pollution that we are being told is the biggest problem for humanity today. It’s climate change, which, by the way, seems to have taken on a life of its own linguistically, very much similar to the life of a malignant formation. We now have a patient diagnosed with climate change and we have reports about certain activities damaging the climate as if the climate was some kind of a tree or a rare flower.
The climate change narrative is being led by rich countries — the same countries that got rich by emitting greenhouse gases. Perhaps there is an element of retribution in these countries’ efforts to enforce the energy transition agenda. Perhaps they genuinely want to clean up their act after decades of blowing noxious gases into the planet’s atmosphere. Yet they appear to be quite short-sighted about the means to their atonement.
Since I tend to become indelicate in my narrative at a certain point, I’ll quote IHS Markit’s Daniel Yergin, who put things quite delicately indeed this week. There is a disconnect between “the realities of the dynamics of the oil market,” Yergin told CNBC on Monday, and the energy policies that governments are implementing. He added that due to pressure from shareholders oil companies are cutting investments “pre-emptively”, which appears to not have been the smartest choice given current demand trends. Oh, and he also warned about more energy crunches.
In other words, energy policies are on a collision course with energy security because of the crusade on fossil fuels before — as another expert put it — alternative fuels are “amply available”. As usual, the collision is costing money and it is costing the most to those who can least afford it. Perhaps it might not be a bad idea to phase-down the alarmist language that has now gone on to include a call for a “war-like footing” from Prince Charles with regard to climate change and biodiversity loss.
Image courtesy: Ken Mull