Latest IPCC report reeks of northern agenda

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group Report III suggests historical emissions are a thing of the past; it endorses carbon removal options, allowing the fossil fuel industry to continue its polluting operations

Two weeks after the Working Group 2 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released, IPCC released the Working Group 3 (WG3) “Summary for Policymakers” on April 13. While the report from WG2 gave a dire sense of impacts such as extreme weather events the world was set to face from climate change, the latest one focuses on how climate emissions can be reduced and it assesses mitigation options in different economic sectors. 

Yet another warning...

Without additional mitigation, the report says that the world may be headed to a 3.7-4.8°C temperature increase by the end of the century, and that in spite of growing number of climate change mitigation policies worldwide, the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions grew on average 1 Gigatonne CO2eq (or 1.0 billion tonne of GHG) per year from 2000 to 2010.

...but biased politics
The report stresses that about half of cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions between 1750 and 2010 have occurred in the past 40 years. This overemphasizes emissions from developing countries. It is during the last 40 years (in fact 25 years) that developing countries like China, India and South East Asian countries have started to grow and feed their population.  On the other hand, the report conveniently forgets to emphasise, let alone acknowledge, that between 1750 and 1970, most of the emissions happened in the developed countries to meet the consumption needs of just 20 per cent of the global population. It also fails to mention that during 1750-2010, 6.5 out of every 10 tonnes of CO2 has been emitted by rich countries.

The inequality in emissions and contributions to causing climate change is even more glaring if we consider the per capita emissions of the developed and the developing countries. The cumulative of per capita CO2 emissions from 1750-2010 amount to about 1,120 tonnes for the UK and the US, compared with about 100 tonnes for China and 35 tonnes for India. The report fails to mention per capita emissions and the high contributions of developed countries even once¸ opting to be evasive instead: “Countries’ past and future contributions to the accumulation of GHGs in the atmosphere are different,” it says. Even while it alludes to different “circumstances” and “challenges” of countries, it makes no differentiation between developed and developing countries, bearing an uncanny resemblance to an oft-repeated demand of northern countries.

Furthermore, the emissions from the developed countries have been very high, even in the past 25 years. Between 1980 and 2005, the total emissions of the US were almost double that of China and more than seven times that of India. During this period, with just 15 per cent of the world population, rich developed countries accounted for 50 per cent of CO2 emissions.