Net Zero by 2070. Is that enough?
#19 Nineteenth Issue. On COP26, climate action, and some thoughts on the environmental thriller Dune.
Hey there! Welcome back! Here I return after a two week vacation. Hope all of you had a great Diwali! As the politicians leave Glasgow and bureaucrats start to negotiate the fine points of various climate agreements, let us review the commitments India has made and the challenges that lie in front of India and other lower-income countries trying to achieve environmental sustainability.
Hey! If you are new to the newsletter, thanks for being here. You can leave your email below to receive this every Sunday in your inbox. Thanks.
SURPRISE ANNOUNCEMENT: At the 26th iteration of the Conference of Parties, that is all the parties responsible for dealing with the effects of climate change, no one expected the Indian Prime Minister to make a pledge for carbon neutrality. The US and the EU have made plans to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. China has pinned down 2060.
But India, as the third largest emitter of green house gases, but also a country behind these regions economically, has shied away from making any net zero commitments, a trend the country broke at the COP26.
A commitment to net zero will require the country to cut emissions by switching from non-renewable (fossil fuels) to renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind, and to offset the remaining CO2 emissions by increasing forest coverage, which helps in absorbing carbon, and by probably investing in carbon capture and storage technologies, which currently cost a lot.
For the shift towards renewables, India made a promise to increase its non-fossil electricity capacity to 500 gigawatts (from some 134GWs today) and meet 50% of its energy requirements through renewable sources by 2030.
The PM also promised that by the same year India will reduce its total projected carbon emissions by one billion tonnes.
Though 2070, fifty years from now, doesn’t sound much ambitious (which it is not as India will have peak levels of carbon emissions between 2040 and 2050, later than the other countries), there are good reasons behind India’s this reluctance, among them the question of climate finance and per capita emissions, which we will discuss in the next section.
But at a time when the leader of China, world’s biggest emitter, doesn’t even make the effort to record a video message for the conference, and when leaders of fossil fuel rich countries like Russia (read here about how Russia stands to benefit from global warming) and Saudi Arabia choose to not attend the conference, I think, India’s decision to make public commitments which seem practical stands out as something worth our admiration.
THE DEAL THEY MADE: In 2009, at the climate summit in Copenhagen, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed that the developed countries will provide 100bn dollars a year to developing countries to help them deal with climate change. In 2015, the proposal was formalized in the Paris Climate accord. This money was meant to:
Help developing countries transition to low-carbon energy technologies, for building solar power systems, erecting wind turbines, and developing systems for sustainable transportation.
Pay for the these countries to mitigate the risks and to adapt to the hazardous effects of climate change, for relocating vulnerable communities, building infrastructure such as sea walls and disaster resistant housing.
But going into the COP26, developing countries were upset and angry because developed counties failed to deliver on their promise. The governments of the developed countries had planned to get the help of the private sector to finance this 100bn dollars a year.
But investors, banks, and pension funds, being profit-driven as they are, instead decided to pour their money into green projects in the higher-income countries, not developing countries where due to the poor infrastructure the returns to investment are not so tempting.
THE MORAL ARGUMENT: The principle of “differentiated responsibilities,” which advocates balance and fairness in the distribution of responsibilities among countries, is at the heart of global climate politics. The countries which currently enjoy higher standards of living with higher per capita income are the ones who were early to industrialize. Hence they are also the ones with greater historical contribution to the global reservoir of Carbon dioxide.
As it also happens these countries have higher per capita CO2 emissions (lifestyle!) than the lower income countries, which were late to industrialization (colonialism!), and are more vulnerable to the damning effects of climate change due to their geographic location.
So some people argue that it’s almost the case that rich countries owe it to the poor countries to facilitate their transition to green technologies. This money that rich countries are expected to pay is neither aid nor charity, it’s a compensation, something lower income countries are entitled to as developed countries contributed massively to the emission and now have the resources to enable this transition. And this time, at the COP, the amount of money proposed in in trillions, not billions.
For climate finance, PM Modi has made a demand of an one trillion dollar commitment from the developed countries.
Similarly South Africa, a significant emitter of green house gases and a vulnerable country, has proposed a package of $750billions a year, with African nations suggesting $1.3 trillion.
You can read here the brilliant climate journalist David Wallace-Wells make the case for climate reparations. Also the Financial Times did a deep dive on the sourcing and distribution of the money aggregated for this climate finance.
THE CURRENT LIMITATIONS: If you look at the history of action against climate change, you’ll notice that we have come a long way from the days of ignorance, indifference, and denial in the last three decades.
At first you had the activists and scientists on the one side arguing that climate change is real while on the other side politicians and their friends from the fossil fuel industry cultivated doubt against those arguments and acted in tandem to slow the progress towards a cleaner and greener society.
Now, at least on the surface, every major politician supports climate action and leaders of the industries are more eager than ever to portray themselves as the friends of the environment, with their own net zero targets.
But for all the progress, we are still limited by our capacity to collaborate and act together. Climate change is a classic collective action problem, you need the all the parties, governments and corporations across the globe, to coordinate and come to a consensus regarding a common action plan (OR a governance framework like the Kyoto Protocol and the United Nations Framework on Climate Change.)
Even after you have an action plan, with commitments from individual countries, you are still limited by the ways you can ensure that these countries deliver on their promises.
Currently, our dominant way of holding countries accountable, the so called enforcement mechanism, is peer pressure, the practice of calling out countries who avoid responsibility (like President Biden called out China at the COP26) and walk back on their promises.
THE CHALLENGES: A Brookings report in 2019 said that for the current generation of climate activists things are tougher than they were for the generation of the activists that came before them, because the later “had an easier time making the connection between cause and effect.”
“Unlike an earlier generation of environmental problems, it is hard to see the connections between coal plants in one part of the world and hurricanes in another,” the report said in order to make the point that as the crisis transcends national boundaries, when the impacts are not so direct and apparent, it is harder to mobilize public opinion across borders and convince politicians to take action.
So when activists protest in Glasgow, I think they are justified to be outraged at our current climate politics. If by the end of this century we wish to limit the rise in temperature to below that of 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial level (which seems unattainable with current practices), we need to be more ambitious and more aggressive in the coming climate summits.
I suggest you read this Washington Post report for a more detailed discussion of the challenges specific to India—such as rising demand for electricity and the need for power storage in case of solar energy—and the general difficulties of balancing growth with climate action.
Something to read 🦉
1) An interview with the economist Partha Dasgupta, on how to introduce nature into economics. Read here (Financial Times).
“Macroeconomic forecasting is misguided because nature is absent from the models on which forecasts are made. The “evidence-based policies” that emanate from them are therefore misguided: the evidence is misleading when the model on which it is gathered is spurious.”
2) How the experiences of a Native American tribe influenced Dune author Frank Herbert’s vision of environmental catastrophe? Read here (NYT).
“Native peoples were at the cutting edge of environmentalism in Mr. Herbert’s day, and they still are. And, as Howard Hansen predicted, the scale has enlarged. It’s no longer only wilderness that needs defending, but also the delicate balance of gases in our shared atmosphere.”
3) How has Amazon affected the form and the style of the novel by revolutionizing the dynamics of book publishing? Read here (New Yorker).
“As book historians like Ted Striphas and Leah Price have written, there is nothing new in the notion of the book as a commodity; books were the first objects to be sold on credit. They were early to be bar-coded, allowing for inventory to be tracked electronically, which made them well suited to online retail.”
4) How Denis Villeneuve made the Dune that fans love? A profile of the auteur. Read here (NYT).
“When Paul is for the first time in contact with the desert,” Villeneuve explained, it “feels strangely familiar. That for me is the moment that deeply moves me. The fact that he is in a totally alien landscape, but he feels at home.”
Recommended 🍿
As we are on the issue of climate, the fitting recommendation for this week will be the movie Dune, the new one, you know the one with that Chalamet guy, directed by the Canadian-American filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, whose works include such greats as the thriller Sicario and innovative sci-fi films like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049.
Dune is simply great, as a film but also as a metaphor. The cast is superb. The background score, created by the phenomenal Hans Zimmer, is captivating. The composition of frames, the scale of objects on screen, the cinematography, everything is perfect and finely executed. So go give it watch. The bigger the screen, the better the viewing experience. And for the uninitiated, keep in mind that it’s the first film, the second one most likely to come to theaters by the end of 2022.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. You can share suggestions, opinions and criticism by commenting below or by sending an email to prasadforpublish21@gmail.com. Good luck. See you next Sunday.
