Monday 5 June 2017

The Climate Conundrum or whose Climate is it anyway....or Nero fiddling as Rome was burning….





The world is aghast at Trump withdrawing from Paris Accord...as if he has driven the last nail on the climate coffin....whether trump would have joined Paris or not....humanity is at crossroads in any case...the moot point is whether we are admitting to the root causes of climate change and whether we are ready to eschew our energy intensive lifestyles and adopt a pastoral one in order to immediately reach zero carbon on a current basis....and possibly avert a CLIMOCALYPSE ....or postpone the extinction of life on Earth beyond Hawking's prediction of 100 years...

The Paris accord was hammered out after almost two decades of climate meets and negotiations since the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 ...the accord was a great achievement because it finally arrived at a broad agreement between almost two hundred countries...In the Paris Agreement, each country determines its own contribution it should make in order to mitigate global warming. There is no mechanism to force a country to set a specific target by a specific date.

The participating 195 countries agreed, by consensus, to reduce emissions as part of the method for reducing greenhouse gas. In the 12-page document, the members agreed to reduce their carbon output "as soon as possible" and to do their best to keep global warming "to well below two degrees C".  (Source Wikipedia)

There could not have been a vaguer and wishy-washy document. This just shows how difficult it must have been even after about 18 years of meets and negotiations to hammer out a consensus which was at best a masterpiece of obfuscation. I wonder whether it really matters that a 140-character attention span surreality star like Trump who revels in the absurd, mentored by a diehard anti establishmentarian the fanatical Steve Bannon, says he does not want to join Paris. 

In any case the Paris accord had an impossible requirement that the developed nations will contribute $ 100 bn per year from 2020 to developing ecos for implementing carbon reduction strategies. This is indeed a tall task since most of the developed ecos are mired in economic stagnation or low growth, aging demographics, crippling debt, weak banking systems, rising unemployment, violence, migrants’ crises, crumbling infrastructure, terror, extreme climate events ...

Against this background, none of them, except perhaps with the lone exception of Germany, can really contribute anything significant to the Green Fund....maybe most thought the perhaps USA would be the major contributor like in many other funds, projects, alliances...in fact US is cribbing that most NATO members are not contributing their shares...and some signatories like India had made it clear that without external financial impetus they cannot go whole hog on changing over to clean energy which requires heavy investments.. currently the world’s total foreign aid per annum is about $130 bn ...leading contributors being USA $30 bn, Germany and the U.K. $20 bn each...most of this are to existing projects. May not be easy for them to divert much from these existing commitments...expecting the rich nations to cough up an additional $100 bn may not be at all realistic…

Ironically the highest cumulative co2 emitter since 1850 is USA… and it wants to abandon its commitments under paris with 27%…next come the EURO nations…the top 10 nations / groups constitute 83% of cumulative co2 emissions…

Anyway we want to analyse the top emitters (https://wri.org/blog/2014/11/6-graphs-explain-world%E2%80%99s-top-10-emitters), whether nation wise, per capita wise, carbon consumption to GDP-wise…we will arrive at various statistics…which still does not help us to arrive at how to reduce emissions asap, which countries should reduce more, whether rich nations should pay poor and poorer nations for their efforts, if so how much, whether carbon tax will help, what should be tax rates, whether we should calculate on the basis of carbon or greenhouse gas emissions, countries which consume high carbon products manufactured elsewhere should also pay for emissions…..and so on…the climate conundrum goes on….there can be no path acceptable to all which is fair….

But few facets of this contentious climate issue are irrefutable…
·         The cities which occupy about 1% of the land mass, emit 60% of carbon
·         Richest economies are among top emitters
·         The top 5/10% of the world’s population according to wealth are the top emitters since they own overwhelming majority of carbon intensive contraptions…
·         Top fossil fuel users and producers contribute most to total emissions…
·         Over an estimated 60% of global emissions, environmental pollution and degradation has taken place since 1960s with the explosion of technological advances, consumerism, cars, air conditioning, consumer durables, air travel, urbanisation, rampant capitalism….

Hence any strategy to contain the root causes of climate change must start with proactive steps by the above group of nations / cities / factors….if they can drastically bring down and stop their contributions to climate change …. Then there could be a glimmer of hope that our planet may survive the onslaught of climate change and avoid the dystopian future which could be as close as 20 years away…. a very good analogy is lung cancer in a human where doctors unequivocally advise to stop smoking immediately upon diagnosis….similarly here there is an immediate need to STOP CARBON EMISSIONS right away….


Another way of interpreting this imbroglio is that the rich are the main culprits in terms of being the main sources of the damaging carbon whereas it’s the poor who will have face the brunt of the downside of climate change without the wherewithal to equip themselves adequately to cope with the climate ravages – hence the rich enjoy the thrills of high carbon cars while the poor not only suffer the flooding from excessive precipitation but also the pain of homes damaged homes since they generally stay in the cheaper low lying land and lack of funds to repair damage to homes or build new houses….well that is how all societies work…..hence within a Marxian framework again the poor are at the receiving end of climate change…ironically the world’s biggest polluter and emitter has the temerity to say climate change is a hoax…..this can be beautifully summarised by an appropriate adage Nero fiddling while Rome was burning!!!…….though of course the enlightened driving forces of American innovation and industry are trying to reduce their carbon print…sadly these incremental measures maybe be too little too late….urgent need for radical solutions….now or never…

Swami Sarvapriyanda

https://youtu.be/Fi-XTOIxSPo