The state of Climate Change Oct. 2021

The state of climate change October 2021

“Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming” David Bowie

INTRODUCTION

The global crisis of Climate change is already with us. British South African Lewis Pugh swam 7.7km of the Ilulissat Icefjord in Greenland and documented the devastating effects of climate change on the melting icebergs. Maximum temperature records have recently been exceeded in the north west of the USA and Canada, with resultant horrendous fires. The altering of the Amazon rainforest to a net carbon exporter rather than a carbon sink is causing weather changes throughout South America.

The debate around climate change hinges on timing: by now, the world should have made major progress in treating the state of climate change as a global crisis. Governments have been promising for 30 years to raise money for initiatives to halt climate change, but the UN do not yet have the first instalment. At the Paris COP 21 conference in 2015, all the countries in the world committed themselves to raise US$100 billion a year to be spent on climate change initiatives to not only halt climate change, but to reverse the effects of climate change.

The money promised is funding pledged by governments: it still needs to be collected. Past history shows that much of the pledged funds for causes never becomes available. Shortly after the Paris COP 21 agreement, the USA under President Trump pulled out of the Paris agreement. Even with President Biden subsequently re-joining the Paris agreement, the first-year target of US$100 billion a year in financial commitments has not been reached, to say nothing of it being made available. Now governments have agreed to make it available by 2023 – but that could change.

The pressure on climate change mitigation initiatives has effectively been shifted to the private sector, which is now spending at least 3-4 times that amount, without leadership from governments. For instance, New York City has committed money and budgeted money to reach carbon neutral status by 2055. This is in spite of no assistance from central government.

Governments are still making nebulous promises on climate change mitigation initiatives, such as at the recent G5 summit. Despite the fanfare around the G5 climate discussions, no real plan of action has been put into place to reduce carbon emissions significantly.

A first suggested transformation was to promote gas in place of coal and oil. However, some oil and gas will remain as a source of energy for many decades yet, even with the most optimistic targets. This will be the case until new technology is developed to substitute them in certain industries or to capture the emissions effectively. Now there is much talk of using hydrogen as a major energy source especially for aviation. The production of energy from fossil fuels is still subsidised around the world and particularly the oil and gas companies are still resisting the imposition of carbon taxes. Carbon taxes are should increase steadily over time and allow fossil fuel industries to change to carbon neutral or involve themselves in using energy supplies that are carbon neutral such as wind, solar, geothermal or better developed nuclear energy sources. However, most of the world agrees that we have to proceed at pace to phase out oil, gas and especially coal (the use of which is at least reducing, but not fast enough).

Another initiative was to embark on wide-spread tree planting. It will, however, take many decades for the trees to grow big enough to be effective as a store of carbon. Now the debate has shifted to agriculture and food production. These are also long-term projects to both reduce emissions and to store more carbon in agricultural soils.

If the world has any hope of meeting the altered (2020) United Nations proposals for 2030 and 2050 climate change targets, as originally set out in Paris 2015, it has to use all possible ways forward. The latest UN report 2021 shows that the state of climate change globally may not be able to achieve the 2030 targets because the world has run out of time to make the necessary changes to halt climate change. Carbon levels are still increasing. The US$100 billion a year was reasonable when it was first proposed many years ago, but the latest estimates are that governments will need, starting now, about 5 to 10 times that amount annually. This amount is only possible if climate change is declared a global crisis with its attendant legal enforcements.

All the focus and pressure is now on COP 26 in Glasgow in November. COP 26 has to come up with a plan and enforceable commitments to head off the global crisis of climate change. However, the USA has not been able to get the pledge bills through Congress. President Biden’s bill in Congress is being stymied by democratic senators who have interests/investments within the coal, oil or gas industries. China’s Xi Jinping is unlikely to attend, although they will have a presence there, and some other small countries are still undecided. Even the protesters, who are protesting about the lack of action and more empty promises, are now being blamed for increasing the risks that COP 26 may be more empty promises.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are still rising. The world has to stop emitting CO2 and also develop ways to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere by capturing it in bulk. Without both approaches, 2030 climate change targets will be a seriously missed globally, mainly because initiatives started now will not be able to be brought to scale quickly enough. There is still hope that with major enforceable agreements, starting immediately and with greater acceleration, the world may still meet the 2050 climate change targets. Even if the 2050 nett zero targets are achieved, it will not guarantee that some of the effects of climate change can be brought back to normal standards that have existed for thousands of years.

So, what can we do as individuals, and what should we be pressuring our governments to do about the state of climate change?

Elect officials who at least have a climate agenda, from local to national level, ask them questions and hold them accountable.
Cut the use of plastics by buying non plastic packaged goods. Better still, grow your own vegetables and fruit and reduce your meat intake.
Recycle all you can, especially plastics glass and metal.
Research how you can minimise your carbon footprint one way is compost all you can and add it to your garden.