8-1-24
Dear Partners in Thought,
As we went through the challenging COP28, the latest annual episode of the global grand mass of climate change fighting, hosted by leading oil producer Dubai (creating much early controversy), I thought it would be useful to recap key features of what we know as climate change or global warming and ways to fight it. This Interlude will be thus focused on basic facts and thoughts about where we are on this key matter for human civilization and how to fight it best. While geopolitical unrest and wars we know matter, there are issues that also need our focus, this for future generations and indeed human civilization.
While I am keen on the world doing its best to alleviate the causes of global warming, it is admittedly a new field for me. I was born the year of JFK’s presidential win, a time when we were rightly focused on economic growth, while gradually adjusting to a post-WW2 Cold War that would last for another 30 years. It would also lead to a growing globalization that many of us start regretting today, given its key peaceful features. Very few of us thought about the impact of carbon dioxide in our lives, being very happy to drive great cars and enjoy flying the world over.
Here are a few key points focused on global warming and some of its contributors. I hope that all my scientific friends and experts will forgive me for excessively summarizing matters.
- Climate change is unequivocal since 2007 with thousands of research studies clearly making the case, together with its human involvement, since the Industrial Revolution. Climate change worsened in a much warmer way as economic growth was the clear focus, also fueled by consumer demand that industries naturally responded to at a time when climate did not matter.
- While the climate was warmer millions of years ago (by ten degrees), global warming accelerated much faster over the last 10,000 years due to human impact and, again, the need for economic development since the mid-19th century. That development itself had a faster path in the 20th and fast-globalized (until now) 21st centuries.
- The concentration of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has risen by 42% since 1850. Today and as Saudi Arabia and Russia know only too well 40bn tons of CO2 are released every year by the fossil fuel industry globally.
- While CO2 in small doses is helpful to avoid the planet freezing, its human-produced quantities have massively contributed to global warming (even more than other natural culprits, like volcanoes). As the Earth needs to adjust its temperature by evacuating excess CO2, decarbonization has become a key strategic matter for industries well beyond profit-making.
- CO2 also clearly stimulates the growth of plants, through what is known as “greening” which is a positive development even though it consumes more water. This has resulted in a more intensive agriculture in China and India, though without compensating for the tropical deforestation we saw in Brazil in recent years and its associated biodiversity loss. Forests also play a key role in reducing carbon dioxide as they are living direct air capture machines.
- Humankind is often slow moving to do the right thing, all the more when economic interests are at stake (and some countries are understandably highly dependent on oil and gas production). At COP28 the heads of the IMF, European Commission and WTO stressed the challenging “trade off of short-term financial health versus the long-term health of the planet”. As such the best way to reduce CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions would be to engage globally in “carbon pricing”, making polluters pay for what they emit under the form of tax (some revenues – the IMF estimates 20% – that would be reallocated to poor households who may suffer from the needed transition) and emissions trading schemes. Such a way forward would create an incentive to shift to cleaner energy sources, while being cost-efficiently revenue-generating for countries for public investment or other tax cutting and would fairly target those producers and consumers that are the most responsible for carbon emissions. Fifty countries have already followed that approach, but more are needed, as well as international cooperation through framework agreements, to lower trade distortions and ensure reduced competitiveness. This approach naturally has many facets at the global level beyond the scope of this short Interlude.
- While the purpose of this Interlude is to address the reality of climate change, and what is behind global warming, while seeing what humankind could do to reduce it by focusing on CO2, the affected areas and thus battlefields are plentiful. Climate change massively impacts glaciers, sea levels, hurricanes, the acidification of oceans, droughts, heat waves, floods, mega-fires, biodiversity and even polar bears and many other species beyond man. Global warming is a lethal game-changer that impacts the future of human civilization like no other threats before.
Climate change deniers find it very challenging to make their case today, even if social media and the like provide them with tools to argue their point on a non-scientific, not to say crazy basis. In our strange times, many people do not need evidence, less so scientific evidence, to support themes that make little sense. This denier group, however, finds it hard to resonate among the “thinking” crowd today – even if they reach many gullible and passionate followers looking for outlets for their existential and societal anger.
Hard right parties in Europe have seized on the perceived financial impact on living standards of fighting climate change (exacerbated by post-Covid austerity-driven public spending cuts and the energy constraints felt with the Ukraine war) to add this matter to their usual migration and national identity programs. On a side note, the latter two matters, largely and mistakenly neglected by liberal democrats as being too sensitive, opened a vote-grabbing avenue to extremists even if they all tend to practically moderate their positions once having won elections as seen with Georgia Meloni in Italy or recently Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. On the same basis, Donald Trump, now the US climate change denier supremo, clearly stated his “drill, drill, drill” support of fossil fuels (many producers being his backers) if winning the US presidency in 2024, again adding this new hard right theme to his old US-China Cold War focus, a hard to go away Putin-friendly lack of interest in Ukraine and NATO, increased protectionism and unprecedented isolationism at many levels, and his case (which, in all fairness, could be understood better if one lived there) for “more walls” at the Mexican border today.
The good news since the game-changing COP20 in Paris in 2015 is that a vast majority of countries across the various global geopolitical divides now supports global warming resolutions to decrease its increasing trend. One of the last economic sectors COP28 members focused on was food production, which was not an obvious candidate versus oil and gas producers, but shows the global warming footprint to be gradually dealt with as the key issue it is. In spite of such positive COP28 developments and the hard-negotiated final wording stressing a commitment to transition away from fossil fuels, it is clear that vested interests, often national in nature, make it hard to get tangible results as seen with the resolution to decrease coal consumption two years ago which led to no change as of today.
While fighting for liberal democratic values, all the more as Europe and the Middle East go back to more uncertain times and a number of key elections are on the horizon, it is also our moral duty combined with vested interests to fight climate change and ensure our world keeps growing as it should even if financial and restructuring costs may be high on the way.
Warmest regards,
Serge
Desperate Measures 