There are no real climate leaders yet – who will
step up at Cop26?
Greta
Thunberg
Like other rich nations, the UK is more talk than
action on the climate crisis. Something needs to change in Glasgow
Greta Thunberg
accuses world leaders of being in denial over climate crisis
Thu 21 Oct
2021 11.30 BST
The UN
secretary general, António Guterres, called the recent IPCC report on the
climate crisis a “code red” for humanity. “We are at the verge of the abyss,”
he said.
You might
think those words would sound some kind of alarm in our society. But, like so
many times before, this didn’t happen. The denial of the climate and ecological
crisis runs so deep that hardly anyone takes real notice any more. Since no one
treats the crisis like a crisis, the existential warnings keep on drowning in a
steady tide of greenwash and everyday media news flow.
And yet
there is still hope, but hope all starts with honesty.
Because
science doesn’t lie. The facts are crystal clear, but we just refuse to accept
them. We refuse to acknowledge that we now have to choose between saving the
living planet or saving our unsustainable way of life. Because we want both. We
demand both.
But the
undeniable truth is that we have left it too late for that. And no matter how
uncomfortable that reality may seem, this is exactly what our leaders have
chosen for us with their decades of inaction. Their decades of blah, blah,
blah.
Science
doesn’t lie. If we are to stay below the targets set in the 2015 Paris
agreement – and thereby minimise the risks of setting off irreversible chain
reactions beyond human control – we need immediate, drastic, annual emission
reductions unlike anything the world has ever seen. And since we don’t have the
technological solutions which alone will do anything close to that in the
foreseeable future, it means we have to make fundamental changes to our
society.
We are
currently on track for at least a 2.7C hotter world by the end of the century –
and that’s only if countries meet all the pledges that they have made.
Currently they are nowhere near doing that. We are “seemingly light years away
from reaching our climate action targets”, to once again quote Guterres.
In fact, we
are speeding in the wrong direction. 2021 is currently projected to experience
the second-biggest emission rise ever recorded, and global emissions are
expected to increase by 16% by 2030 compared with 2010 levels. According to the
International Energy Agency, only 2% of governments’ “build back better”
recovery spending has been invested in clean energy, while at same time the
production and burning of coal, oil and gas was subsidised by $5.9tn in 2020
alone. The world’s planned fossil fuel production by the year 2030 accounts for
more than twice the amount than would be consistent with the 1.5C target. This
is science’s way of telling us that we can no longer reach our targets without
a system change. Because doing so would require tearing up contracts and
abandoning deals and agreements on an unimaginable scale – something that is
simply not possible in the current system.
In short,
we are totally failing to even reach targets that are completely insufficient
in the first place. And that’s not the worst part. In my own country, Sweden, a
news investigation recently concluded that once you include all of Sweden’s
actual emissions (territorial, biogenic, consumption of imported goods, burning
of biomass, pension fund investments and so on), only one-third of the net
total is accounted for in the country’s climate targets. It is reasonable to
assume that this is not just a Swedish phenomenon.
Surely the
first step to address the climate crisis should be to include all of our actual
emissions into the statistics in order to obtain a holistic overview. This
would allow us to evaluate the situation and start making the necessary
changes. But this approach has not been adopted – or even proposed – by any
world leaders. Instead they all turn to communication tactics and PR in order
to make it seem as if they are taking action.
One
textbook example is the UK – a nation that is currently producing 570m barrels
of oil and gas each year. A nation with a further 4.4bn barrels of oil and gas
reserves to be extracted from the continental shelf. A nation that is also
among the 10 biggest emitters in history. Our emissions stay in the atmosphere
for up to a thousand years and we have already emitted about 89% of the CO2
budget that gives us a 66% chance of staying below 1.5C. This is why historical
emissions and the aspect of equity not only count – they basically make up 90%
of the entire crisis
Between
1990 and 2016, the UK lowered its territorial emissions by 41%. However, once
you include the full scale of UK emissions – such as consumption of imported
goods, international aviation and shipping – the reduction is more like 15%.
And this is excluding burning of biomass, like at Drax’s Selby plant – a
heavily subsidised so-called “renewable” power plant that is, according to
analysis, the UK’s biggest single emitter of CO2 and the third biggest in all
of Europe. And yet the government still considers the UK to be a global climate
leader.
The UK is,
of course, far from the only country relying on such creative carbon
accounting. This is the norm. China, currently by far the world’s biggest
emitter of CO2, is planning to build 43 new coal power plants on top of the
1,000 plants already in operation – while also claiming to be an ecological
“trailblazer” committed to leaving “a clean and beautiful world to future
generations”. Or take the new US administration, claiming to “listen to …
science” even though it – among many other reckless decisions – recently
announced plans to open millions of acres for oil and gas that could ultimately
result in production of up to 1.1bn barrels of crude oil and 4.4tn cubic feet
of fossil gas. Being by far the biggest emitter in history, as well as the
world’s number one oil producer, doesn’t seem to embarrass the US while it
claims to be a climate leader.
The truth
is there are no climate leaders. Not yet. At least not among high-income
nations. The level of public awareness and the unprecedented pressure from the
media that would be required for any real leadership to appear is still
basically nonexistent.
Science
doesn’t lie, nor does it tell us what to do. But it does give us a picture of
what needs to be done. We are of course free to ignore that picture and remain
in denial. Or to go on hiding behind clever accounting, loopholes and
incomplete statistics. As if the atmosphere would care about our frameworks. As
if we could argue with the laws of physics.
As Jim
Skea, a leading IPCC scientist, put it: “Limiting warming to 1.5C is possible
within the laws of chemistry and physics, but doing so would require
unprecedented changes.” For the Cop26 in Glasgow to be a success it will take
many things. But above all it will take honesty, solidarity and courage.
The climate
and ecological emergency is, of course, only a symptom of a much larger
sustainability crisis. A social crisis. A crisis of inequality that dates back
to colonialism and beyond. A crisis based on the idea that some people are
worth more than others and, therefore have the right to exploit and steal other
people’s land and resources. It’s all interconnected. It’s a sustainability
crisis that everyone would benefit from tackling. But it’s naive to think that
we could solve this crisis without confronting the roots of it.
Things may
look very dark and hopeless, and given the torrent of reports and escalating
incidents, the feeling of despair is more than understandable. But we need to
remind ourselves that we can still turn this around. It’s entirely possible if
we are prepared to change.
Hope is all
around us. Because all it would really take is one – one world leader or one
high-income nation or one major TV station or leading newspaper who decides to
be honest, to truly treat the climate crisis as the crisis that it is. One
leader who counts all the numbers – and then takes brave action to reduce
emissions at the pace and scale the science demands. Then everything could be
set in motion towards action, hope, purpose and meaning.
The clock
is ticking. Summits keep happening. Emissions keep growing. Who will that
leader be?
Greta
Thunberg is a Swedish activist who inspired a movement of school strikes
against government climate inaction
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