As the world prepares to turn the page on yet another year in which it almost entirely failed to make any progress on the uphill battle to curb global warming and cut back greenhouse gas emissions, it is rather easy to dismiss 2022 as another year of missed opportunities and a lot of talk for practically no walk.
At first glance, the summary dismissal of 2022 in terms of setting things right to protect the planet from climate change and its disastrous impacts would not be unfair or out of place. After all, the world has solidly slipped back into its old, bad habits of using more fossil fuels, especially coal, which is the most polluting of the lot. The dependence on coal and other dirty fuels has risen this year mainly due to the Russia-Ukraine war, which sent gas and crude oil prices soaring to their highest levels in years.
All the talk about the pandemic having taught the world to turn to nature and protect it through green practices seems to have been thrown into the dustbin of history. After a sharp fall in oil and energy consumption in 2020, many experts put forth arguments that the world had turned green. However, in 2021, the consumption and production of fossil fuels rose sharply, as did carbon dioxide emissions.
The situation got far worse this year as, not only has the consumption of fossil fuels increased, but so has the level of global greenhouse gas emissions, mainly due to energy generation. According to the US Energy Information Administration, America’s carbon dioxide emissions due to energy generation collapsed to a 40-year-low of 4.6 billion tons in 2020, down 11 percent on the previous year, due to pandemic-related lockdowns and the near-total disruption of business activity.
However, in 2021, the pre-pandemic situation began to return, not just in terms of energy consumption but also greenhouse gas emissions, which rose 6 percent to 4.9 billion tons. This year, the rise continues, as the amount of carbon dioxide emitted due to energy generation in the US is expected to reach almost 5 billion tons, surpassing the pre-pandemic level.
The situation is little different in most other countries and the world is firmly on course to reach a record 37.5 billion tons. This rise has come at a time when the world is faced with a question of survival, as almost every single report on climate change has warned that the world is not moving fast enough to cut emissions. Just days before the COP27 climate summit was held in the Egyptian Red Sea resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh last month, the UN Environment Program said that the world must cut its emissions by 45 percent from 2022 levels before the year 2030 to have any hope of limiting the global temperature rise to the ideal situation of 1.5 degrees Celsius, as sought by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
For the temperature rise to stay under 2 C, global emissions must fall by 30 percent in the next seven years, the UN added. However, as the data from the last two years shows, emissions have continued to rise, almost entirely closing the miniscule window of opportunity that the world may have had to escape the catastrophe brought about by climate change.
The responsibility of cutting emissions may be a shared one, with every country having to do its fair share of heavy lifting, but obviously those countries that have historically been responsible for most of the emissions — i.e., the US and the EU — need to do most of the cleaning up. However, while the EU has made a patchy move toward cutting emissions, it remains far from meeting its targets. And the US has only just begun to acknowledge that climate change even poses a challenge for the world as, during the four years of climate skeptic Donald Trump’s presidency, the American economy vastly expanded its access to and reliance on fossil fuels.
For more than a decade, it was believed that the issue of historical responsibility for climate change had been settled, with the developed world time and again promising to step up with the cash and other resources needed by developing countries. This is to not only to help them limit their own emissions, but also to help prepare themselves and their people for the onslaught of extreme weather events, which have become a common occurrence, leading to hundreds of billions of dollars of damages and tens of thousands of lives lost each year.
However, ever since the onset of the pandemic, the rich world has been dragging its feet on the question of payment. It has tried to pitch that the responsibility for cutting emissions should also fall on the shoulders of large developing countries like China and India. No matter how cynical they may be, even the rich country negotiators cannot dispute the fact that an overwhelming number of developed countries are responsible for far higher emissions per capita than the developing economies. On average, every citizen of the rich world is responsible for five to eight times more greenhouse gas emissions than those in the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
It is also a fact that poorer countries have been hit the hardest by climate change and the impact is showing up not just in economic data, but also in the social well-being of these countries as they face greater challenges of food security and death and destruction. Like every year before it, 2022 has seen a rise in occurrences of extreme weather events, such as flash floods, cyclones, heat waves and prolonged and widespread droughts. Though nature does not play favorites, the poor countries are hit harder and they take longer to recover due to their inherent economic weakness.
And hence the focus on money, which has been the area where global talks — notably at the various COP summits — have frayed consistently. In many ways, the Sharm El-Sheikh agreement on the creation of a loss and damage fund is a very heartening one and could mark the first step toward the world pulling itself away from the brink of climate catastrophe, instead of hurtling toward it, which it has been for several years now.
The fund, which — in principle at least — will be funded entirely by the rich countries, is one of the best opportunities for the global community to join hands in the fight against climate change, since it will arm the most vulnerable nations, at least to some extent, to withstand nature’s onslaught.
It would be foolish, or rather foolhardy, for global leaders to miss out on the golden opportunity that the loss and damage fund provides. They can build rapidly on this foundation and reach other critical agreements in order to tackle the issue of soaring global carbon dioxide emissions. In the desperate situation the world finds itself in, even a small step like slowing down the rise in emissions could be a much-needed straw for the world to clutch.
However, the window of opportunity, which was already very small, has narrowed even further. If, by the next COP in Dubai next November, a proper and well-defined framework is not in place and being implemented, then one can disband the future meetings and endless negotiations that have come to symbolize the current climate change scenario.
• Ranvir S. Nayar is managing editor of Media India Group.
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