Climate’s local call and the denier
Like protests, record-breaching disasters or weather development are also the new normals. Sometimes, I find myself more engaged with the weather departments in my day-to-day life. In the newsroom of the magazine I edit — Down To Earth — reporters are struggling with a psychic trap on the contrast they have to report in disasters, not just from India but also from elsewhere. In 2018, it was Kerala’s term. It became the mascot of the ‘Incredible India’ tourism campaign; it bountiful and beautiful to be called the God’s own country. It is a land of mountains, rivers, paddy fields and oceans.
Now, think of the same country in a world that is malignantly unsustainable, and menacingly climate risked. In August 2018 swollen rivers drowned Kerala. The floods were termed once-in-a-century event in term of severity. The cost of recovery was so enormous that it was like re-building the entire state from scratch. And all this happened because people didn’t care to protect the environment, aggravating the situation in the time of changing climate.
Kerala was a sitting duck waiting for the disaster to happen. It has some 44 rivers that gush down the Western Ghats traversing short distances–less than 100 kilometres in most cases–before they reach the ocean. It is also located in a high rainfall region. The state is thus one big drainage system. The 61 dams, located in the forested Western Ghats, are one part of this drainage system.
The dams, largely meant for generating electricity, also impound the rainwater. That year it rained so incessantly that the term ‘extreme’ had to be re-defined. Kerala received some 771 mm of rainfall just in 20 days; 75 per cent of it was received in eight days. Worse, rainfall was highest in the forested regions of the state; not in the coasts where high rainfall is usually recorded. As a result, the mountains collapsed triggering landslides and claiming lives. But much worse, gates of 29 dams, filled to the brim and threatening to break, were opened. After 26 years and only the third time ever, the gates of one of the largest dams, the Idukki dam, were opened. This compounded the disaster many times over.
What has happened in Kerala is also happening across the world. It is an uncomfortable fact that we do not have a semblance of the plan to deal with this changing weather system. We are totally unprepared for what is today understood to be the extreme and variable nature of the monsoon. It is a result of our combined and abject inability to mitigate global emissions, which is leading to such weird weather events. It is also the result of our mismanagement of resources. For example, Kerala has decimated its drainage systems, from forests to paddy fields to ponds and streams that would carry excess water or store and recharge it. It is also the result of the sheer incompetence of our technical agencies to plan for flood control and dam management. It is, therefore, ‘human made’. It is ‘human made’ because we refuse to accept that this is the new normal. We want to believe that this is just another freak event; another one in a 100-year event that we cannot plan for or do anything about.
This is where the reality must sink in–not just in words, but in practice. Kerala had to spend millions to re-construct, literally. It can’t afford to repeat the mistake. It must rebuild keeping in mind the new normal, where rainfall would be variable and extreme. It must therefore, plan deliberately for drainage–every river, stream, pond and paddy field should be mapped and protected at all costs. Every home, institution, village and city must harvest rainwater so that rain can be channelised and recharged. The forest ecosystem must be managed through deliberate policies that benefit people. Plantation areas must be managed to conserve soil. Above all, it must recognise that all these measures may not be enough in this age of climate change. So, the governments must plan for variability. This will require improving technical capacities to predict and inform. Kerala could have averted this deluge if prior to July it had better information of the rainfall expected in the coming months. The dams could then have released water intermittently and make space for storing excess water during the extreme rain events.
The question is what it will take in future for avoiding such a deluge. The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) consists of scientists who can by no stretch of the imagination be called radical or activists. These are conventional scientists working in conventional research institutions — mostly from the rich world. When they issue an urgent warning about the dire and catastrophic impacts of climate change if the global temperatures exceed 2°C above pre-industrial levels, then we must take it very seriously. Also, because, what IPCC says in its 2018 report on 1.5°C is probably an underestimate of the kind of dangers that await a warmed world — many scientists say the report has not taken into account the spiral of events, called tipping points, which will be unleashed as temperatures rise. The news is not good. It’s time we understood this and stopped questioning the science of climate change. The world–particularly the poor world–is already seeing devastating impacts when the temperature increase is 1.2°C. Climate change is in our face. We don’t need science to tell us anymore that it will happen.
The question then is only one: What can, and must the world do to keep the temperature rise to below 1.5°C? IPCC estimates that to stay below this temperature guardrail, the world has to cut net anthropogenic CO2 emissions by 45 per cent over the 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. Let’s unpack this statement. Roughly half of the CO2 emissions generated through activities of humans need to be cut by 2030. But as these are ‘net’ emissions, it means that the world can emit more but the emissions must be ‘removed’ to achieve the targets. The ‘removal’ of emissions happens through ‘natural sinks’–oceans, for instance, absorb emissions and are part of the world’s natural cleansing systems. Then forests are important ‘sinks’ — they sequester carbon. But the report is also pointing towards technology-induced removal through carbon capture and storage (CCS), where emissions of CO2 are harvested and then pushed back to store deep under the earth’s surface.
This brings into what we are dealing with in this book: the intense inequality in consumption of energy and emissions in a globalised world. This opens up another front for battle between the rich and poor countries; consequently, it also pits the locals against the globalist. The challenge is to reduce and yet, at the same time, increase the use of energy by the poorest in the world. According to IPCC, the remaining global CO2 budget — how much can be emitted for the world to stay below 1.5°C — is somewhere between 420 gigatonnes of CO2 (Gtco2) to 580 Gtco2. At the current rate of emissions, this budget will be exhausted by 2030. Remember also that the bulk of the carbon budget has already been appropriated by the already-rich countries. By 2030, when the budget is over and if the world wants to stay below 1.5°C, then it must be in negative emissions. That is, it must emit less than what the world sinks can cleans up. What will then happen to the developing world? Now that the cake is all eaten, even the crumbs have been gobbled up, what happens to the development needs of millions who do not have access to energy and the millions who still need growth.
Does this mean the world stops talking about equity in climate change? This is what USA has wanted for long. Its former President Donald Trump stretched it to the extreme — countries like India who want the right to development are the problem, he said. ‘USA must be allowed to pollute more because it is its birthright.’ This is what Trump meant. There is no doubt that equity is now passé in many ways.
Countries like India, as is reiterated in the IPCC 1.5°C report, will be the worst impacted by climate change. This is not the time to gripe about who has created the problem and who must solve it. That time is gone. Also, there is no point in crying over spilt milk — the carbon budget is gone. Countries have emitted and filled up the available space. Now what is this talk of ‘equity’? What does it mean?
The fact is we have to operationalise ‘equity’ in this changed scenario. This requires all countries, including India, to act. But it also requires much deeper cuts from the already developed world and financial and technology support to the energy poor to increase their emissions, if possible, differently and with lower carbon emissions. This is not the time to point fingers at the victims of climate change — at countries like India for needing space to develop. This calls for enormous sagacity and leadership so that the world can jointly and collaboratively find ways of reducing emissions and providing growth. Dismissing the need for climate justice will not get us anywhere.
IPCC looks at the rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure — including transport and building sectors. These are big contributors to emissions. So, what will it take to build a more secure future? Firstly, it means that renewable energy must supply 70-85 per cent of the global electricity by 2050. Currently renewables supply some 20 per cent of the electricity, with the bulk coming from hydropower plants. The share of natural gas can be roughly 8 per cent in this mix. Coal use must be close to zero per cent by 2050. This is a huge ambition–the world is still addicted to coal for producing electricity, in the rich as well as the poor parts. The developing world needs to provide affordable energy to large numbers of its people. How can it replace coal and yet provide this energy security? How? This is the question. But it is equally a question, how the rich world will completely de-carbonise its electricity?
Trump withdrew USA from the Paris Climate Agreement (on January 20, 2021 President Joe Biden brought the country back into the Paris Agreement). But Trump is not the only climate denier in USA. All Republican nominees and even Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton against Trump avoided using the ‘c’ word during the election campaign. Trump insisted that USA needed to dig more coal, build more power plants and do everything to ramp up production, which will increase greenhouse gas emissions. But this is not new. USA has invariably made the multilateral world change rules; reconfigure agreements, mostly to reduce it to the lowest common denominator, all to get its participation. Then when the world has a weak, worthless and meaningless deal, it will walk out of it. All this while, its powerful civil society and media will hammer in the point that the world needs to be accommodating and pragmatic. ‘Our Congress will not accept’ is the refrain, essentially arguing that theirs is the only democracy in the world or certainly the only one that matters.
This happened in 1992, when in Rio, after much ‘accommodation’ the agreement to combat climate change was whittled down, targets were removed and there was no agreed action. All this was done to bring USA on board. But it walked out. Then came the Kyoto Protocol, the first and only framework for action to reduce emissions. Here again, in December 1997, when climate change proponents Bill Clinton and Al Gore were in office, the agreement was reduced to nothingness — the compliance clause was removed, cheap emission reduction and loopholes were included. Again, all these to bring USA on board. Once again, they rejected it. Then came Barack Obama and his welcome commitment to climate change actions. But what did USA do? It made the world completely rewrite the climate agreement so that the targets, instead of being based on science and contribution of each country, are based on voluntary action. Each country is allowed to set targets, based on what they can do and by when. It has led to weak action, which will not keep the Planet’s temperature rise below 2°C, forget the guardrail of 1.5°C. This was done to please the Americans who said they would never sign a global agreement that binds them to actions or targets. The Paris Agreement fatally and fundamentally erased historical responsibility of countries and reduced equity to insignificance. This was done because USA said this was the redline — nothing on equitable rights to the common atmospheric space could be acceptable.
Now that the rich are also being hit by climate change and the ‘attribution’ is clear, the gloves will be off — the targets for the world’s derision and anger will be the emerging rich in emerging countries like India. The Economist in an article talked about how even as Britain enjoyed its first coal-free day since the 1800s, India burnt more coal — and it of course put this down to the fact that end of coal would destroy the banking system and the railways in the country. The fact is that India and China are aware of emissions from coal burning because of horrendous air pollution. Both the countries need a massive move to cleaner fuels like renewables or natural gas. This is essential not just for climate change reasons but also for combating air pollution.
We owe clean air and a normal planet to our own children and to the victims of climate change — the poor and the marginalised in our world. The shoe will be on the other foot. We will have the boot. The problem also is that the world is still not anywhere close to giving up its fossil addiction. For all the talk of renewable energy — other than in Germany where it has been scaled up — it is still at the edge of supply. In fact, demand for coal is rising; investment in oil and gas is up and all of the climate change solutions are fighting to survive. It is not working. But what is really not working is our government. The fact is that countries like India must take the lead to putting forward our vulnerability; the economic and human cost of the climate change ‘attributed’ disasters to the global stage. We must demand that the world acts — at speed and scale. And even as we push for the world to take climate change seriously, we must put forward our own plan — and must have something to show. We need to be decisive in our words and our actions. This whimpering and simpering will not work in our climate-risked world.
This excerpt is taken from The rise of the neo-locals: A generational reversal of globalisation, published in August 2024
