COP 27 – the twenty-seventh Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – is over, and the thousands of delegates have returned to their home countries. The meeting, wherein 190 countries were represented, was held in Egypt, located in the Sahara Desert, which we know was once green and alive, pocked with lakes, rivers, grasslands, and even forests. Whatever might have caused that particular transformation, the delegates had gathered to prevent similarly cataclysmic changes to our present world because of the conceded Climate Change. This was brought about by our burning of fossil fuels to produce global warming beyond the 1.5degree Celsius mark that was determined to be the tipping point. They had heard that there is an 80% chance we have already passed that limit.
And the evidence of what is in store abounds: China experienced its most intense heatwave – up to 45 degrees Celsius – in six decades, and ironically, a drought disrupted a battery plant that was supposed to power electric cars with less fossil fuels. Droughts in Europe reduced river flows in Germany and France, which affected not only shipping of coal, but caused the shutdown of nuclear plants that could not be cooled. In Africa, hydroelectric power generation in some countries, like Malawi, was curtailed because of droughts, even as other countries were inundated by rain. One quarter of Pakistan was flooded.
Ironically, the much-lauded COP 27 fund that was launched to cover “loss and damage” caused by Climate Change merely confirmed that the world has implicitly moved from reversing its effects to dealing with what they evidently concede an inevitability. Against the background of the wealthy countries never satisfying their “commitment” to the US$100 billion annually to poorer countries to confront Climate Change, one has to wonder whether the sum eventually agreed on would ever be met.
At this time, all hopes are being placed on “renewables” to replace fossil fuels as the source of energy to power all the machines and devices that now are taken as basic for life in the modern world. But there are several challenges, not the least being that the production of renewables itself causes a certain amount of pollution, both in terms of the production of the materials – like lithium and copper – and in their recycling, which is being promoted. In the meantime, the costs of the inputs are rising as their demand heads north. The price of copper, for instance, has tripled in the last decade.
However, some – including in Guyana – are not even conceding that the renewable energy transition would take much longer than anticipated, and that their campaign to have us stop pumping oil is unrealistic. While renewable sources have undoubtedly increased massively, the human population continues to grow – we have just passed eight billion – and so would their energy needs. But even more pertinently, the example of China, which moved hundreds of millions out of poverty through the burning of coal, serves as a goad to leaders in Africa, India and elsewhere to do the same for their citizens. As we have seen in Guyana, very few will be moved by calls to “save the planet” while rich countries that caused the problem in the first place are continuing to set the standard for “the good life”.
The bottom line for success or failure in the fight to get a grip on global warming lies in whether the developed countries would abandon their dogmatic insistence on continued “economic growth”, when all this does is set ever higher levels of consumption for the rest of the world. For instance, with less than 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. consumes 17% of the world’s energy and accounts for 15% of world GDP. India, which has four times the population of the US but presently uses only one-third of its power consumption, would certainly not agree to keep its bottom 600 million in poverty while it changes over to renewables.
