It’s all bleak on the climate front

Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), which is the United Nation’s scientific body meant to look at and report on climate change, had (as usual) some dreadful news for the world.

The basic message of the second and final draft, a report that IPCC would soon release, is that the world is not doing enough to keep the planet from heating up excessively. The consequences will be terrible.

The Panel was asked by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2015, to prepare a special report by 2018, on what would be the impact on the world if the planet grew hotter by 1.5 degrees Celsius, over the global average surface temperatures that existed between 1850 and 1900.

The draft, released for public comments, says that if the emissions continue at their present rate, global warming will exceed by 1.5 degrees C over the reference period by around 2040.

Greenhouse gases

First a little background. ‘Greenhouse gases’ (like carbon dioxide and methane), largely spewed by human activity, form a shield in the upper atmosphere, preventing the planet’s heat from dissipating, causing ‘global warming’. At Paris in December 2015, all countries agreed on an aim: by the turn of this century, the planet should not get hotter by two degrees Celsius than the average temperature during the reference period — 1850-1900. While ‘2 degrees’ was the Lakshman Rekha , they also agreed on an “ambition” to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.

Now, IPCC is saying that the ‘1.5 degrees’ ambition will be fed to the fires as early as 2040.

This syncs well with what another UN body, the UNEP, has been saying consistently in its annual Emission Gap Reports. In the report of 2016, it said that even if all the countries did exactly what they promised to do in Paris, the two-degree aim would not be met; last year’s report said that unless emissions are reduced urgently, it is “extremely unlikely” that the target would be met.

Clearly, measures that are visible, such as rise of renewable energy and electric vehicles, are just not enough. The inevitable consequences will be more floods and droughts, forest fires, islands losing ground to rising sea waters, water scarcity, and vector-borne diseases — to name just a few.

The situation calls for rapid action. What we are seeing is rapid action — in the opposite direction.

Trump’s coal push

As it is, there is nothing in the Paris Agreement that justifies the euphoria around it. It is loosely-worded, leaves everything to voluntary action with no penal provisions. The UNEP says if all countries kept their word, the world would still keep its nose just under the water surface. And then came Donald Trump.

After pulling out of the Paris accord, the US administration has begun to support coal, a fuel chiefly responsible for the climate mess. Last September, Rick Perry, the US Energy Secretary, wanted the country’s electricity regulator to allow billions of dollars of subsidy to the coal industry, on the grounds that coal supported “national security”. The regulator refused. And now, Trump is asking the utilities to buy power from unprofitable coal plants so as to let them live.

Further, the US has slashed its contribution to the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a big funder of climate projects in developing countries, to $273 million in 2018 from $546 million, for GEF’s four-year budget. As a result, developed countries’ funding to GEF has come down by $300 million, to $4.1 billion.

Unfortunately, Australia is following the US’s terrible example. Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull said in Parliament that coal would have an important role in the country’s energy mix, “possibly forever”.

When the US and Australia back coal, what to speak of poor countries like Indonesia? Having tasted money in exporting coal over the last decade, the country wants to do more and, in the process, is mucking up things for the world.

According to the Stockholm Environment Institute, mining permits cover 6.3 million hectares of Conservation Forest and Protected Forest areas, despite laws.

The Institute notes that the situation is likely to worsen with the development of a new, Russia-funded railway that will open up new areas of Kalimantan for coal. By the way, in 2017, the tropics lost 15.9 million hectares, the size of Bangladesh, to deforestation — 40 football fields of trees every minute for the entire year.

Banks are not doing enough to resile from funding coal projects. An analysis by the Rainforest Action Network shows that Chinese banks in particular (notably, China Construction Bank, ICBC, Bank of China and Agricultural Bank of China) have been unrelenting in their support to coal.

American banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, stand not far behind their Chinese counterparts. Little wonder that with such support to coal, global emissions of CO2 increased in 2017 by 1.4 per cent, after remaining flat for three years. Even apart from coal, the world seems to be doing little right by climate. A recent report of the International Energy Agency looked at 35 areas that require action to be consistent with the “2 degrees” goal, under the five major heads — renewable energy, building, transport, industry and energy integration.

It found that of the 35, only four were on track — solar PV, LED, e-vehicles and data centres. In others, for example, energy storage, smart grids, aviation and shipping, building envelopes and heating and other forms of green energy such as geothermal, the progress is zilch.

All this is asking for trouble. If you court carbon, you should expect the future to be black. India is particularly vulnerable to climate change effects. Melting of Himalayan glaciers would devastate north India, while the peninsula, which is highly dependent on the monsoons, will be affected by uncertain rains. Most other developing countries will face similar problems.

The world is on a trajectory that will take it way past the Lakshman Rekha . Why are we being so callous? The answer perhaps lies in the reasoning outlined by Indian economist, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who in a recent interview to the World Resources Institute said: “Doing something (right) hurts right now, but the benefits are going to be some negative thing avoided in the long term.”

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