Is the Climate War Over on the Battle to Lower the Earth’s Temperature? Yep…
In the Climate War, we have set our sights on not allowing the earth’s temperature to exceed 2 degrees centigrade from pre-industrial days. We have lost, though not that many may have noticed.
While we were obsessed with our mid-term elections, 45,000 climate warriors descended in their greenhouse gas spewing jets on the Red Sea Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh for the 27th annual Conference of Parties (COP 27). I followed the results of these proceedings because, well, …so you don’t have to.
The Sharm el-Sheikh conference was just the latest in a 30+ year series of UN meetings to manage climate, but after examining the results of this 30 years’ war, we have to ask ourselves: is the war over, and will we know it?
Some experts have pinpointed the first shot in the Climate War to the testimony in June 1988 by James Hansen, NASA Climatologist, during one of warmest summers in US recorded history. Although Hansen did not believe that global warming was the cause of that particular 1988 heatwave, he used the event to foreshadow adverse climate effects should drastic action not be taken.
The proposed strategy to success in the war on Climate was to simply get the entire world to limit the amount of carbon emissions in the air such that the earth would not warm over 2 degrees centigrade from the pre-industrial period. (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit for you Anglophiles).
The first problem that arose was that we are living now, instead of 1750. The population of the earth was 814 million in 1750 and now we have just crept over 8 billion. The climate warriors quickly realized that they were not going to convince anyone to go back 1750. The plan then became that we only had to do away with fossil fuels that had been the basis for our prosperity for the last 120 years and create technology to provide us the same energy that had been generated by fossil fuels.
The initial UN conferences attempted to get developed countries to set non-binding voluntary goals for reduction of their carbon emissions; promises that they had no idea how they would keep. Of course, even the promises could not burden their populations too much. Conducting wars are usually very popular if there are no adverse consequences or costs.
The next problem that arose was that even if the developed industrial countries were willing to fight the Climate War by limiting fossil fuels, the developing countries that needed to cheap energy to pull their populations out of abject poverty were not. This cheap energy was coal and oil based. These countries and particularly China and India as the 2nd and the 3rd largest polluters were not willing to sentence their people to continued poverty in order to satisfy developed countries clean energy goals.
At the 2009 Copenhagen Conference, while the countries of the world continued to refuse to submit even voluntary emissions goals, they moved to that old standby, trying to buy their way out of the problem by agreeing to contribute a combined $100 billion/year to the developing countries. Unfortunately, the negotiators never agreed on precisely how to measure countries’ pledges. (whoops). The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental body made up mostly of rich countries, based its results on reports from the wealthy nations themselves. These countries although not even reaching the $100 billion promised threshold, claimed to have contributed $80 billion in climate finance in 2019, up from $78 billion in 2018.
But upon further review (as they say in football), even the OECD’s numbers were vastly inflated. It was estimated that instead of $80 billion, the payments only totaled $19 billion–$22.5 billion. This was because the rich countries counted loans which had to be paid back as contributions. Further, some countries just counted all of their foreign aid as going towards climate projects even if those projects were for things such as building roads.
Even the environmental cheerleaders, the United States, violated its commitments. Under the Obama administration, the U.S. delivered just $1 billion, which was about one third of what it pledged. When the Biden administration took office it said it would make good on past promises by contributing more than $11 billion per year to developing countries. Then, the Democrat controlled Congress allocated just $1 billion in international climate funding.
The issue of carbon emissions on a worldwide basis require massive worldwide solutions. A number of experts had opined that the costs for mitigation of carbon were so massive that they could never be realized. At that time, the number was estimated to be $1.6 trillion–$3.8 trillion per year. (Some estimates have reached as high as $6 trillion/year) The $100 billion was just an inconsequential drop in the bucket.
Trillion…yep, a trillion. There simply was not enough available money in the world to pay for the projects that the green warriors deemed necessary to accomplish their climate goals. They should have surrendered then.
A better policy approach was suggested that it would better for countries to adapt to life where the temperature was going to be warmer. The costs were substantially less and could be achievable on a country-by-country basis. They weren’t relying on the world to reduce the oceans’ sea levels. They started to build dikes to hold back the waters, create tougher building standards for hurricane areas, limit development in coastal areas where the sea is expected to rise, restore wetlands to reduce flooding or make changes to protect our health during heat events,
If some countries still actually believed that the world could reduce the carbon emissions to 1750 standards, that delusion was laid to rest as a result of the failure of the Paris Climate Accords in 2015. For the first time countries agreed to submit climate voluntary action plans that would keep the earth’s temperature to a 1.5 degree increase. These countries didn’t actually have to reduce emissions. They just had to come up with plans that they claimed would reduce emissions. The green warriors proclaimed the Paris Climate Accords as a game-changer in the war on climate. They were wrong. When Trump withdrew from the Accord in 2017 claiming it to be a fraud and a joke, he was roundly criticized for destroying the world. It turned out that the Accords were a fraud and a joke as the world was “all hat and no cattle”, (For you Easterners who don’t get my cowboy reference, email me).
By the end of 2021, none of the industrialized G-20 countries accounting for over 80% of the total emissions had even submitted plans that they probably weren’t going to comply with anyway to satisfy their Paris Climate Accord commitments. The only country to have kept its promise was unindustrialized Gambia.
Some countries didn’t get the message that the war was over. The European Union led the way in attempting to transition to a green economy by increasing its wind power and closing down coal and nuclear power plants. The United States as well had closed 360 coal fired power plants primarily transitioning them to cheap natural gas fuel which had been developed through fracking.
Meanwhile China and India had made a mockery of the western world’s efforts to reduce carbon by constructing 240 and 51 new power plants respectively each with a 50–70-year life cycle. Other developing countries had coal plants being constructed as well.
To make matters worse, the adverse effects of going green in the EU were felt in 2021 when wind speeds declined over Northern Europe requiring the Europeans to raise utility rates to buy coal and scarce natural gas. This gave the United States a preview of potential consequences for our own green policy initiatives.
Then in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The Russian energy supply was reduced to Europe, closing factories and threatening Europeans ability to heat their homes. Despite years of green policies by the EU, there simply was not enough electricity being generated by windmills or solar panels to handle the disruption of reliable fossil fuel energy supplies. While the Europeans ended up having stored enough gas to get through the 2022 winter, nuclear plants were placed back online and over 30 coal plants in Germany, Austria, France and the Netherlands were reopened.
The collapse of the green energy movement was not limited to the EU. As inflation surges, interest rates for government debt have risen to crisis levels particularly in third world countries that do not have the funds to feed their people much less build any kind of wind or solar projects. For a fraction of the cost to transition the world to clean energy, every person in the world could be provided with food, basic health care and education.
Even in the United States, California and Texas have suffered energy outages which caused the loss of 246 lives. Inventories of diesel fuel in the United States are the lowest they have been heading into winter in 70 years, where 1 in 5 homes are heated by diesel.
If there is anyone who still believes that the war on climate can be won with massively expensive transition costs, dangerous energy shortages, and with the third world and Europe returning to coal fired power plants, we now return to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt to see how the world responded to the 2022 worldwide energy crisis.
The Paris Climate Accord goals were voluntary, and there still was no agreement on mandatory carbon emissions. Now there was a step back. A proposal to agree to a phase out of oil and gas was defeated but power plants were allowed to use “low emission energy” which is code for increased gas fired power plants.
Finally, a climate reparations fund was agreed to where rich countries would purportedly create a fund for poor countries to pay for damages for the “effects” of climate change such as past floods, droughts and forest fires all of which would be presumed to be caused by prior rich country carbon emissions. No longer would there be any money to reduce carbon emissions. No longer would there be money for adaptation to protect against future climate disasters.
However, the devil was in the details as this initiative was sent to a place where all initiatives die, a committee, in this case comprised of 24 country representatives. This committee was tasked with 1) finding and 2) agreeing who would pay the money, 3) what countries would be eligible for funding, 4) what criteria would trigger a payout and 5) the bureaucracy of managing the system. In other words, all of the details had to be agreed to before one dollar or Euro would change hands. The committee was tasked with delivering a set of recommendations at COP28, which will take place next year in 2023 in Dubai.
Any reasonable analysis of the state of the war on climate is that it is over as the countries are merely fighting over getting as much money for themselves as possible. Power Shift Africa Director, Mohamed Adow exclaimed, that given the rich countries’ sketchy track record for keeping the promises they make at UN climate conferences, “what we have is an empty bucket. We need money to make it worthwhile.”
The other player in this drama is the climate lobby itself, represented by the 44,000 people at Sharm el-Sheikh. Like the military industrial complex, the climate lobby is populated by thousands of individuals and organizations (government, academia, non-profits, researchers, solar and wind interests) whose careers and fortunes are dependent on the continuation of this war on climate.
Finally, we can look to the progress that has been made so far to see if the war on climate is being won or if there is hope in the future. There isn’t. Since 1988 at the beginning of the War, with all the conferences, programs, research, subsidies and projects, global carbon dioxide emissions have risen 68%. At the time of Hansen’s speech in 1988, fossil fuels provided about 79 percent of the world’s energy needs. Now, despite every wind turbine and solar panel that has been installed since, it’s actually worse-- 81 percent.
We need to learn when to cut our losses. We need to stop transitioning our country to a fossil free economy which can only raise energy prices, and make life more miserable for our citizens without doing anything to reduce the temperature of the planet. The UKs former chief climate science advisor, the late David MacKay, once wrote of carbon-cutting efforts; “Don’t be distracted by the myth that every little bit helps. If everyone does a little, it will achieve only a little.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can still have an orderly transition to a less carbon dependent society, but it will take time. We shouldn’t waste resources transitioning to an inefficient unreliable wind and solar energy society while prematurely shutting down viable energy production. We should keep our power plants open until they come to the end of their useful lives. At that point, they can be converted to zero-carbon nuclear or by that time, perhaps, hydrogen fueled plants.
If humanity has a chance to move forward with a new energy culture, we have to learn from our mistakes and change course or we all will suffer the consequences.