Burning All the Carbon Will Burn Us All
Our Climate Future and the Doha Summit
The
annual United Nations climate summit has convened, this year in Doha,
the capital of the oil-rich emirate of Qatar, on the Arabian Peninsula.
Dubbed “COP 18,” an army of bureaucrats, business people and
environmentalists are gathered ostensibly to limit global greenhouse-gas
emissions to a level that scientists say will contain the global
temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit), and
perhaps stave off global climate catastrophe. If past meetings are any
indication, national self-interest on the part of the world’s largest
polluters, paramount among them the United States, will trump global
consensus.
“We want our children to live in an America
... that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming
planet,” President Barack Obama proclaimed in his victory speech on Nov.
6 this year, just over a week after Superstorm Sandy devastated New
York City and much of New Jersey, killing more than 100 people. These
are fine aspirations. The problem is, action is needed now to avert the
very scenario that President Obama has said he wants to avoid. The
United States, which remains the greatest polluter in world history,
stands as one of the biggest impediments to a rational global program to
stem global warming.
'There is no room
for doubt—absent remarkable action, these fossil fuels will burn, and
the temperature will climb, creating a chain reaction of climate related
natural disasters.' —Nnimmo Bassey, Bill McKibben, Pablo Solon
Latest findings suggest that the goal of
limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius may now be beyond
reach, and that we may now be locked into a 4- to 6-degree temperature
increase. “The only way to avoid the pessimistic scenarios will be
radical transformations in the way the global economy currently
functions: rapid uptake of renewable energy, sharp falls in fossil fuel
use or massive deployment of CCS [carbon capture and storage], removal
of industrial emissions and halting deforestation.” These are not the
words of some wild-eyed environmental activist, but from business
advisers at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) in their November 2012 Low
Carbon Economy Index.
The PwC advisers concur in many regards
with a consortium of environmentalists who issued an open letter as COP
18 convened. Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, Nigerian activist Nnimmo
Bassey and Ambassador Pablo Solon, who formerly led climate
negotiations for Bolivia, said in their letter to the COP 18
negotiators: “If we want a 50-50 chance of staying below two degrees, we
have to leave 2/3 of the known reserves of coal and oil and gas
underground. ... That’s not ‘environmentalist math’ or some radical
interpretation—that’s from the report of the International Energy Agency
last month. It means that—without dramatic global action to change our
path—the end of the climate story is already written. There is no room
for doubt—absent remarkable action, these fossil fuels will burn, and
the temperature will climb, creating a chain reaction of climate related
natural disasters.”
The World Meteorological Organization
released preliminary findings for 2012, highlighting extremes of
drought, heat waves, floods, and snow and extreme cold, as well as
above-average hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin for the third
consecutive year. Also speaking at the COP 18’s opening was Dr. R.K.
Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
comprising more than 1,800 scientists from around the globe, which
shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. In sober, scientific
language, Dr. Pachauri, pointed out potential catastrophes unless action
is taken, among them: “By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people [in
Africa] are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to
climate change. ... As global average temperature increase exceeds 3.5
(degrees) C, model projections suggest significant extinctions ranging
from 40 to 70 percent of species assessed around the globe."
President Obama loudly advocates for doing
away with subsidies to the oil and gas corporations, but, as pointed out
by Oil Change International, Greenpeace and other groups, he is
“supporting skyrocketing export subsidies for dirty fossil fuels through
the United States Export-Import Bank,” with at least $10.2 billion in
public financing for fossil-fuel projects in 2012 alone, dwarfing the
$2.3 billion the State Department claims it has disbursed to developing
countries to combat climate change.
Outside the air-conditioned plenary halls
and corridors of the UN climate summit in Doha, in the emirate of
Qatar—which, ironically, is the nation with the highest per capita
carbon emissions of any nation on the planet—there will be protests. The
newly formed Arab Youth Climate Movement, hundreds of grassroots
activists from across the region, including many involved in the Arab
Spring, are marching, calling for their nations to take the lead in
reducing emissions.
The Arab Spring activists toppled
dictators, but can they move the fossil-fuel corporations? With a
growing global movement intent on doing just that, prepare for a hot
summer, in more ways than one.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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