MIT Technology Review - James Temple
When the pandemic wanes, a poorer, more divided world will still face the rapidly rising threat of global warming.
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Miguel Porlan
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On the early afternoon of December 15, the gavel fell at the UN COP25
conference in Madrid. The weeks of negotiations over crucial pieces of
the Paris climate agreement reached four years earlier had ended in
failure. Despite spending nearly two days longer than scheduled,
thousands of delegates departed the convention halls deadlocked on the
basic rules required to move forward.There’s plenty of blame to go
around.
But by most accounts, Australia, Brazil, and the US—each now run
by nationalist leaders who rose to power in part on promises to defy
global demands for greater climate action—took special pains to thwart
progress. Brazil immediately backed out of hosting the convention after
the election of Jair Bolsonaro, and its delegates spent their time in
Madrid arguing for the need to open up the Amazon for farming and
mining. The US, on track to exit the accords altogether under President
Donald Trump, stonewalled efforts to establish a process for providing
funding and support to poor nations hit by climate disasters.
In the
end, nearly every major decision at COP25 was punted to the next
conference, originally scheduled for this November in Glasgow. “The
can-do spirit that birthed the Paris agreement feels like a distant
memory today,” Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics
at the World Resources Institute,
said at the close of the talks.
Two
weeks later, researchers in China identified a deadly new coronavirus
strain that had infected dozens of people, marking the start of the
global pandemic. Borders slammed shut. Global trade stalled and markets
crashed. Countries traded accusations and insults. In a matter of weeks,
any lingering momentum behind efforts to jointly confront climate
change essentially vanished.
As the worldwide death toll
accelerated, countries locked down cities, banned international travel,
and all but shut down their economies in a desperate effort to slow the
outbreak. Under the demands of social distancing, the teenage activist
Greta Thunberg shifted her swelling climate movement online—where it
effectively dropped out of public sight. The UN ultimately canceled this
year’s COP, killing any last hopes that nations would, as originally
intended, adopt more ambitious emissions targets on the fifth
anniversary of the deal.
The Paris accords had lifted hopes that
after decades of dithering, the world might finally pull together to
confront climate change. Nearly every nation signed on, each agreeing to
take specific steps to rein in emissions. But what if, in retrospect,
Paris was not the start of an era of cooperation, but its high point?
The nationalist narrative
As
the covid-19 outbreak rages across the world, it’s easy to forget about
the climate crisis. The priorities right now are, and should be,
slowing the pandemic, saving lives, and then restarting economies left
in shambles. But by that point few countries are likely to be able or
especially eager to sacrifice near-term growth to help slow global
warming.
In the short term, global emissions are falling, as
they did during steep economic declines in the past. But carbon dioxide
can stay in the atmosphere for centuries, meaning the total
concentration will continue to rise even if we’re producing less of it.
And emissions will bounce back as soon as economies do. They’re already
nearly within normal ranges in China again.
So
the threat of rapidly accelerating climate change will remain. And
we’ll be living in a much poorer world, with fewer job opportunities,
less money to invest in cleaner systems, and deeper fears about our
health, our financial futures, and other lurking dangers.
These
are ripe conditions to further inflame nationalist instincts, making our
global challenges even harder to solve. Indeed, the breakdowns in
international (and even intra-national) cooperation as countries race to
understand and tackle the covid-19 outbreak offer a stark warning for
our climate future.
By its very nature, climate change is a
global problem: every country needs to nearly eliminate emissions. But
they don’t all have the same incentive to do so. Regions like Europe
that pumped out
huge shares of historic emissions
have less to lose by curbing them than nations like India that need
faster economic growth to reduce poverty. Those rich countries also
aren’t likely to face nearly the same level of climate disasters
as poor ones. Colder nations, like Russia and Canada, could
even benefit economically from warming.
“It’s
not surprising that the most ardent nationalist populists—in Brazil,
the US, EU skeptics in Britain—are also the most skeptical of Paris,”
says David Victor, co-director of the Laboratory on International Law
and Regulation at the University of California, San Diego. “But that
whole agenda is deeply problematic for climate because ultimately what
you need is a set of institutions and some measure of cooperation that
helps diffuse good ideas and products around the global economy.”
America first
Donald Trump, a
self-described nationalist
who denounces “globalism,” inflicted the single biggest wound to the
Paris agreement by declaring, on the very first day he could, that the
US would withdraw from it. During his Rose Garden speech on June 1,
2017, he laid out a case against the deal that had little to do with the
actual terms—which were self-determined and nonbinding—and everything
to do with stoking simmering resentment of foreign nations,
international institutions, and distant elites who would dare tell the
US what to do.
He’s lambasted international treaties and trade
deals along similarly zero-sum, narrowly nationalist lines, launching a
bitter, costly, and divisive trade war with China.
“The Paris
agreement handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise
from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long
sought to gain wealth at our country’s expense,” Trump said that day.
“They don’t put America first. I do, and I always will.”
For
Trump, the pandemic is one more opportunity to fan fears of outsiders
and push his nativist policies. He’s repeatedly referred to the
coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” in a transparent attempt to pin blame
overseas and deflect criticisms of his own failures in handling the
public health crisis.
Using powers granted to the surgeon general, the White House said it would immediately
send back asylum seekers
and others who illegally cross the borders, in defiance of earlier
court orders to grant them due process. Later, the administration sought
to compel manufacturer 3M
to stop sending respirator masks
to its customers in Canada and Latin America, in a move the company
warned would prompt retaliatory restrictions on critical medical
supplies flowing into the US.
None of this portends well for the future of international cooperation on climate change.
The collapse of trust
Before
the outbreak, the world’s largest carbon emitter, China, had made major
strides to increase its solar, wind, and nuclear generation, meet the
rising demand for automobiles with more electric vehicles, and build up
huge domestic industries to pump out solar panels, batteries, and EVs.
It still appears to be on track to achieve its central (if not
particularly ambitious) Paris pledge: achieving peak emissions no later
than 2030.
But there have been worrying signs more recently of a
slowdown in its efforts. China’s investments in renewables fell 8% last
year to the lowest level since 2013,
according to BloombergNEF,
even as the world total slightly increased. Moreover, it’s kicked off a
new building boom in coal plants: nearly 150 gigawatts’ worth are under
construction or likely to be revived, roughly the capacity of the EU’s
entire fleet, according to a
report late last year by Global Energy Monitor.
China
may pump money into some clean energy sectors through economic stimulus
efforts in the coming months, but there are few reasons to suspect it
will back off its reliance on cheap coal or accelerate its timetable for
cutting climate pollution in the foreseeable future.
Indeed,
even before the pandemic, there were signs China was souring on climate
cooperation. During COP25, it and other emerging economies made clear
they have no intention of tightening their emissions targets at the next
conference, whenever that now happens, asserting that rich countries
first need to make good on their commitments to provide funding and
support to developing nations.
A major factor in these shifts is
that rising nationalist sentiments elsewhere, and related trade
hostilities, were already changing how China sees its choices, says
Jonas Nahm, who studies China’s energy policy at the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies. Increasingly unable to rely on
predictable supplies and prices for imported fuels and parts, it seems
to be turning to the energy source it can rely on—abundant domestic
coal.
“I think the rise of nationalism, in the US and elsewhere,
has created a degree of economic uncertainty that has strengthened the
hardliners and forced them to rethink the degree to which they can rely
on green energy to power their future,” Nahm says.
One other
casualty of the pandemic has been our faith in a global supply chain. As
countries shut down production and distribution, first in China and
then around the world, essential goods are in short supply. It has
become evident how vulnerable we are to trade relationships and
concentrated manufacturing centers.
That too presents a
challenge for climate change. China produces about a third of the
world’s wind turbines, two-thirds of its solar panels, and roughly 70%
of its lithium-ion batteries, as Nahm highlighted in
an article in Science
late last year. Even with massive government support, it took decades
of growth at “a breakneck pace” for Chinese businesses to create the
technologies, supply chains, and manufacturing capacity to achieve that.
“It
is unrealistic to expect that another nation will be able to rival
China’s capabilities ... in the time frame needed to limit climate
change to below 2 ˚C,” Nahm and coauthor John Helveston of George
Washington University wrote. That means countries, businesses, and
researchers around the world need to figure out how to forge closer
relationships and collaborate more productively with China—“the United
States in particular,” they said.
Climate fascism
As the historian Nils Gilman argued in February in a persuasive essay, “
The Coming Avocado Politics,”
there are good reasons to worry that rising anxieties over
environmental emergencies will justify a more hard-line set of solutions
on the right, an “ecologically justified neo-fascism” that includes
militarizing borders, hoarding resources, and bolstering national
protections against climate change.
It could lead us into far
darker places as well, potentially justifying “neo-imperialist”
responses “where we actively seek to repress the development and
ambitions of the rest of the world,” Gilman says. Specifically, the US
or other nations could turn to extreme methods, from eliminating
development financing to deploying military force, to prevent the carbon
bombs that would go off if billions of poor people start consuming
goods, services, and energy at the same levels as Americans.
The
tragic trial run of the coronavirus outbreak certainly bolsters fears
that sentiments could rapidly turn in this direction. In addition to
Trump’s efforts to inflame foreign resentments, there have been
widespread reports in recent weeks of
hate crimes and harassment against those of Asian descent around the world, including brutal beatings on public streets, verbal attacks on public transit, and racist memes online.
As
the virus spreads and the economic downturn deepens, people will,
rightfully, focus primarily on the immediate dangers: their health and
that of friends and family; the likelihood of losing work; and the
plunge in their retirement savings and home values. Enhancing global
cooperation and combating distant climate dangers just aren’t going to
take priority for some time.
The question, of course, is what
happens as the pandemic recedes. In theory, this presents a new
opportunity to get climate progress back on track. Stimulus packages
designed to kick-start economic growth could include funding and
policies to accelerate clean energy and climate adaptation projects, for
example. The world will certainly be better equipped to face both
pandemics and climate catastrophes if nations choose to
more readily share resources, expertise, and information.
“That interconnectedness is quite apparent when it comes to getting masks and medicine,”
says Jane Flegal,
program officer with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s
Environment Program. “And it’s also apparent when you talk about the
importance of making clean energy cheap and the role of technology
transfer in the climate context.”
But in the end, whether people
are left feeling that we need to tighten international ties or erect
higher walls may depend a lot on how ugly things get in the coming weeks
and months, and the political narratives that take hold as we try to
make sense of how it all happened.
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