It seems that humankind is the victim of unnecessary catastrophes and the world is doomed to continuing this in the future. People like Bill Gates have been warning us about the possibility of pandemics during the last few years. When the epidemic started in China, it was kept a secret and most countries did not take the necessary preventive steps until the crisis worsened.
At the beginning there was no global effort to combat this epidemic; and even today the calls for a global approach is not being heeded. For example, “vaccine nationalism” is still the nationalist cry even in the richest countries as everyone scrambles to order some vaccines.
During this crisis, the world has set aside the concern for a much greater and longer lasting crisis. This is climate change. According to Gideon Rose, Executive Editor of Foreign Affairs Quarterly magazine: “Climate change is also a crisis. It is unfolding more slowly than its pandemic cousin but will have even vaster consequences. The world had a chance to tackle it early but blew that through decades of denial. Much future damage is baked in already. Yet wise public policy can still limit the scale of the eventual disaster – if everybody takes the challenge seriously across the board now…”
There have been many proposals to address the climate change crisis. International climate change agreements need to be reduced incentives for free riding. This means that industries like the fossil fuel and coal mining industries must also bear the burden of reducing future temperature increases and stop lobbying against efforts to combat climate change.
For the past three to four decades, policy makers and activists, like Greta Thurnberg, have kept calling for urgent action to address climate change. However, the climate has only grown worse.
In an article written by Michael Davidson, Jesse Jenkins, et al: “The benefit of climate change lies mostly in the future, and they will accrue above all to poor populations that do not have much voice in politics, whether in those countries that emit most of the world’s warming pollution or at the global level. The costs of climate action, on the other hand, are evident here and now and they fall on well organized groups with real political power. In a multipolar world without a responsible hegemon, any collective effort is difficult to organize. And the profound uncertainty about what lies ahead makes it hard to move decisively.”
The only good news in the battle against climate change is that while political obstacles are difficult to bring down, technological progress can make it easier by driving down the cost of action against global warming.
Electric power
Many articles have been written that the way to decarbonization is by shifting to electric power. For example, transportation accounts for 27 percent of global energy use and nearly all of it relies on oil. This is the reason there is so much interest in electric cars. In fact, with much improved batteries, heavy duty vehicles like trucks and buses could soon run also on electric power.
However, the use of electricity does not increase or reduce emissions on its own. It will still depend on whether the electricity that is the source of the energy may or may not be clean, depending on how it was generated. An electric car, for example, will not reduce global warming if all the electricity comes from conventional coal plants.
Once the world is able to convert the pollution-producing coal plants to clean energy plants, then it can focus on electrification of tasks that still rely on fossil fuels. Aside from transportation, heating is another process that can be electrified.
Davidson and Jenkins write: “Besides transportation, the most important electrification frontier is heating – not just in buildings but as part of industrial production, too. All told, heating consumes about half the energy that people and firms around the world use. Of that fraction some 50 percent goes into industrial processes that require very high temperatures such as the production of cement and steel, the refining of oil (including for plastics).”
Renewable energy will play the central role in the drive for clean energy. Thanks to the decreases in cost of wind and solar power equipment – together with a mature hydroelectric power industry – renewable energy already accounts for one quarter of global electricity production. In the US, the cost of electricity from large solar farms has gone down by 90 percent since 2009 and wind energy prices have fallen by nearly 70 percent. It is expected both will continue to drop.
Business sector
Most business leaders pay lip service to combating climate change, but there is still resistance to taking any steps that will negatively affect profit margins in the short term.
More than a third of global invested capital – about $19 trillion – is controlled by the world’s largest asset owners. These companies are now realizing the long-term risk of climate change to their investments. These investment companies are now starting to push companies, where they have significant ownership share, to address climate change.
For example, Unilever came under pressure to stop using palm oil, the cultivation of which contributes to deforestation. Paul Polman, the company’s CEO, was able to persuade many of his fellow consumer goods CEOs to purchase palm oil which is covered by sustainability agreements. A group of more than 300 investors who control nearly half of the world’s invested capital formed Climate Action 100+ whose goal is to persuade top private sector carbon emitters to take action to reduce gas emissions in their companies and suppliers.
Together, the public and private sectors can still save humankind’s future from the ravages of global warming.
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