November 21, 2022 3:40 pm
As after any climate summit, the air is filled with cries of anger and despair. What has been agreed upon is unclear and insufficient, and what has not been decided or has simply been ignored is massive and terrifying. For example, they still haven’t been able to agree that the world should stop burning fossil fuels.
But how? Isn’t that the goal of this big sideshow? The climate is warming because we burn fossil fuels for energy, soon people will die in bunches, in twenty or thirty years whole countries will become uninhabitable, it’s time to say stop! Alternative energy sources are available! Act now, or a global disaster will strike!
Yes, that’s what it’s all about, and every year tens of thousands of politicians, pundits, activists and lobbyists travel to a different location – Glasgow last year, Sharm el Sheikh this year, the UAE this year next – to discuss and decide how to deal with a risk that literally threatens our existence.
Taboo words
And in all these 27 years they have never managed to mention the name of the threat? No, they didn’t. In 2021, for the first time, they included the word “coal” in the final report – “we will gradually reduce it” (and not “eliminate it”), they said. But the words “gas” and “oil” have remained taboo.
This is what is achieved when a global institution is governed by consensus. Everyone has the right to veto, including countries dependent on coal, gas and oil, and the short-term interests of some (money and rapid economic growth fueled by fossil fuels) collide with the long-term interest of the community , i.e. not suffer a huge population die-off and a collapse of our civilization.
Well. This is the price to pay for belonging to a species that is still emerging from a long tribal past and has developed a high-tech, high-energy civilization before it is even culturally equipped to run it. You do your best and hopefully it will be enough.
But let’s stop with the philosophical reflections. What really happened in Sharm el Sheikh? After the inevitable night-time negotiations (two sleepless nights, to tell the truth), those present managed to agree on the creation of a new fund to compensate poor countries for “losses and damages” suffered due to extreme climatic events. The money will come from developed countries whose past and current emissions are causing the damage.
It should take another two or three years to set up the new “loss and damage” agency
Pakistan’s catastrophic floods have become the poster child for this year. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the conference: “Despite the south experiencing an average of seven times the previous extreme rainfall, we kept going as raging torrents erased eight thousand kilometers of roads. [asfaltate]damaged more than three thousand kilometers of railroad tracks and wiped out crops over an area of sixteen thousand square kilometers”.
“We became victims of something we had nothing to do with, and of course it was a man-made disaster…How can you think we’re going to undertake this gigantic task alone?”.
“Loss and damage is not a matter of charity, but of climate justice,” Pakistan’s climate envoy Nabeel Munir said, and this time the message got through. It is a normal fact: if every year, for more than a decade, the same blatant injustice is denounced at climate summits, in the end those who have done the damage and should pay the price will admit that the case is well founded.
What is a poor country?
It should take another two or three years to set up the new “Loss and Damage” agency and agree on the rules for who pays each year and how much, and what exactly is considered recoverable climate damage.
The main unanswered question is: what will become of China? The country is still considered developing and therefore automatically a victim, but in reality it is middle-income and the world‘s largest carbon emitter. It is larger than all other developed countries combined and nearly three times the size of the United States.
Should he pay money to the “loss and damage” fund instead of asking to be a beneficiary? What about India? It is currently only third in total emissions, after the United States, but will likely surpass them in the next ten years.
And so the titanic struggle over who will pay for the climate losses and damage inflicted on the poorest countries will continue, but at least the next climate summit can focus on other things. Rightly so, because the ambitious goal of limiting the increase in global average temperature to 1.5 degrees is now probably a lost cause.
The “never-to-be-exceeded” target is to stay within a two-degree rise, beyond which the situation would spiral out of control. The heat buildup we’ve already caused would trigger warming “feedback” that we couldn’t undo, and from there it would be a nightmarish future.
So it’s good to see climate summits getting a little more reasonable every year. There is still a long way to go, but at least we are going in the right direction.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)