What is done about climate change
“Some oil giants sold the big lie, and like the tobacco industry once upon a time, those responsible will be held accountable.”
“We are approaching the edge of the abyss. We risk crossing the threshold at which we can avoid runaway climate change. There would be disastrous consequences for human beings and all the natural systems that support us.”
“We’re driving down a road to climate hell and what we’re doing is putting our foot down on the accelerator.”
“I am here to sound an alarm: the world must wake up. We are on the brink of an abyss and we are moving in the wrong direction.”
“Fossil fuel producers and those who support them continue to increase production, knowing that their economic model is incompatible with the survival of humanity.”
The preceding sentences did not come from the speech of an environmental extremist or an apocalyptic prophet. They have been pronounced by Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, since he assumed the highest investiture of that organization.
The “nice inoperative”. In a Mafalda strip that is now fifty years old, Miguelito defined the UN as “the nice inoperative ones.” Quino’s acute perception thus captured the essence of that supranational construction, anticipated by Kant in Perpetual Peace, but at a stark distance from the expectations of the critical philosopher.
Of the ten general secretaries that the UN has had, Antonio Guterres is the one who has been most determined to reverse the Mafaldian definition. Perhaps he does not call it “inoperative”, since the organization’s bureaucratic machinery has close to zero power in relation to the decisions of the ruling classes of the central countries. But yes in the “nice” thing, the only consequence of the energy that Guterres puts into the environmental issue. At least for the powerful, Guterres is increasingly unsympathetic. But the truths he tells don’t matter to (almost) anyone.
The worst scenarios. Four years ago, Guterres had said: “The alarming thing is that they warned us. Scientists have been telling us for decades. And again. Too many leaders have refused to listen. Very few have acted with the approach that scientists demand. We are seeing the results. We are approaching the worst-case scenarios that scientists predicted.”
Guterres refers to the GEO-6 reports, which speak of the imminence of an environmental collapse. GEO reports are reports published periodically by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The first is from 1997 and each new report updates warnings and sets off alarms. The sixth GEO, in 2019, included the work of 250 specialists from more than seventy countries, and its terms were unusually harsh: they will detect that global transformations of enormous impact will take place in the coming decades, which will deepen the destruction of ecosystems and species and they will produce a food collapse for humanity, which will lead to the certain death of millions of people on different continents, but especially in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
This catastrophic panorama requires urgent and drastic measures, and Guterres refers to it when he points out that science “has been telling us for decades.”
Threshold. Crossing the threshold of irreversibility does not mean that these scenarios will occur next week, but rather that we can no longer do much to prevent them in the immediate future. In fact, the accumulation of extreme weather events is heralding it almost every day.
The head of the UN insists that it is possible to curb carbon emissions, which he described as “suicidal.” For that, it is necessary to replace energy production with clean hydroelectric, solar and wind energy. Almost nothing: all energy production is at stake. “We will have to rethink how we heat, cool and light our buildings so that we waste less energy,” Guterres said. To favor the transition, the Secretary General of the United Nations proposes to end subsidies for energy from fossil fuels and tax them, while incentives for renewables and taxes for those who produce emissions are implemented.
But no one in the world, among those who decide, gives it the slightest importance: that is the hard and impassive reality. Each State does what it can to produce more energy in the traditional way and the discovery of oil, gas and coal deposits continues to be seen as an enormous opportunity for wealth, contrary to what environmental rationality suggests (that is, as a condemnation of death).
Our country is not exempt from the rule. When we leave aside the irrelevant discussions that are proposed by both sides of the rift, from both it is heard as a mantra, an appeal to “salvation”, the name of Vaca Muerta.
Problems of others. The question is inevitable: how to stop the world machine that depends on oil, gas and coal? It seems impossible. However, several countries began to do so several years ago. In certain cases out of necessity: some of these nations are poor in gas, oil or coal and that is why they gambled long ago on replacing their energy matrix. The pandemic first and Putin’s imperial restoration adventure in Ukraine after changing the scenery. Countries like Germany, which had bet on renewable energies, are retracing their steps, although they argue that it is only temporarily: in the middle of last year they resumed operating power plants based on coal and oil.
With the war as a pretext or not, the problem only gets worse, because time is not in excess: in order to reduce CO2 emissions by half by 2030, they would have to start right away to replace the production matrix of energy based on hydrocarbons, the main cause of the problem. Nobody believes that this is possible, except that there will be some kind of global citizen rebellion, which – as Guterres has also hinted at – will force the political, and especially economic, elites to change course. Perhaps that is why he has received and fostered Greta Thunberg and her peers, her activists, who a few days ago were in Davos to accuse the faces present of being the cause of the drama’s continuity.
Fossil, but more than valid. All contemporary human civilization is based on that energy matrix: fossil fuels. And while the technologies to replace it have been available for a long time (the first solar power plants were manufactured more than a century ago) and have spread widely, advances are almost negligible on a global scale. There are still a handful of countries that partially or totally replace their energy matrix: Iceland, Norway, Ecuador, Sweden, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Denmark…
Europe is at the same time the main cause of the problem, by discovering and promoting the form of energy production that all humanity uses, and the way of life that generates the waste of resources. And at the same time, it is the continent with the greatest progress in renewable energy, although the concrete facts remain very modest: in 2020 (last year with data) they totaled 22.1% of the energy consumed.
It is true that renewable energies have grown in recent years throughout the planet. But the rate of growth is slow, and also, at the same time efforts are increasing to continue producing energy using fossil fuels: that’s what fracking is all about. The leaders do not seem to understand the seriousness of the matter: like predators without a conscience, they continue betting on squeezing the subsoil until we reach the abyss of which Guterres speaks. For more than a hundred Nobel Prize winners, they have publicly asked to “leave oil, gas and coal where they are”, that is, stop all new extractive projects, and replace existing ones. Only that can avoid the abyss, which also (they warn) will begin to occur long before the fossil fuel reserves are exhausted.
And in your house, how are them? Again, it is not the problem of others: in Argentina, almost all of the political, social and economic leadership fills their mouths talking about Vaca Muerta – the great reservoir of oil and gas that both the previous government and the previous one bet on. to him and the current one–, which they see as future salvation, without understanding that the question lies right there. It is celebrated that there are reserves for around two hundred years, and it is not recorded that much sooner we will be facing problems of a severity that they do not seem to understand.
In 2021, renewable sources generated 13% of the energy demanded by the Argentine electricity system, three points below the 16% established by Law 27,191 for that year. At the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP26), last November, Argentina promised to “develop 30% of the national energy matrix with renewable energy.” It is something, but it is still very little in relation to the drama of the situation. And (seen Kantianly), with what face do we ask the rest of the world for something different from what we do?
Petro’s claim. A few days ago, Colombian President Gustavo Petro told the World Economic Forum in Davos that the decisions of the annual UN conferences or summits on climate change are binding and not just suggestions.
“The COPs will have binding power, that is to say that their decisions are orders. The World Trade Organization (WTO) Treaty, if it is evaded for any reason, has a sanction; instead, what the COP decides are suggestions that a ruler may or may not take into account, they are just advice. Why is an FTA binding and decisions to save the planet not? ”, She declared with unquestionable logic, but with zero results.
The latest IPCC report (from 2019) ensures that governments around the world must make “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to avoid disaster. According to Joyce Msuya, Executive Director of UN Environment: “We are at a crossroads. Do we continue on our current path, which will lead us to a bleak future, or do we choose the path of sustainable development? That is the choice our political leaders must make, now.”
“Time is running out to prevent the irreversible and dangerous effects of climate change. Unless greenhouse gas emissions are radically reduced, the world is on track to exceed the temperature threshold established in the Paris Agreement (…). This causes climate change to have global environmental, social, health and economic effects”, see read on page 10 of the GEO-6 report.
It’s here. The fact is that in order to dramatize less, we talk about “climate change”, and not about collapse. And it is supposed to be here and unstoppable: numerous countries have already created bureaucratic structures designed to “adapt” or “mitigate” climate change. Stopping it, it seems, is a utopia. Impossible not to remember Frederic Jameson: the single thought discourse has penetrated so much that it is easier for ordinary mortals to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
In Argentina, since 2019 there is a National Plan for Adaptation and Mitigation to Climate Change by 2030, which aims to “generate coordinated responses that adapt the territories, ecosystems, sectors and communities vulnerable to the impacts of climate change”. And it is the same government that bet everything on Vaca Muerta. Of course, according to the Law for the Promotion of Hydrocarbon Investments promoted by the Ministry of Economy of Argentina, 1% of export duties will be used to create a fund with a specific request to reward projects with less environmental impact, which will facilitate the path to the energy transition.
That is to say: we are going to produce more contamination by hydrocarbons, but we are going to use 1% of the income that it will produce to see if one day we replace hydrocarbons. A clear example of the irrationality of the economy that is intended to be presented to us as the only possible rationality. It seems the product of the imagination of some Peter Capusotto of environmental science fiction.
*Journalist.
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