COP24

It’s Time to Try Fossil-Fuel Executives for Crimes Against Humanity

The death toll of climate change could easily creep up into the hundreds of millions, and confronting it demands a new legal doctrine similar to the Nuremberg trials.

The fossil-fuel industry is lawyering up.

To date, nine cities have sued the fossil industry for climate damages. California fisherman are going after oil companies for their role in warming the Pacific Ocean, a process that soaks the Dungeness crabs they harvest with a dangerous neurotoxin. Former acting New York state attorney general Barbara Underwood has opened an investigation into whether ExxonMobil has misled its shareholders about the risks it faces from climate change, a push current attorney general Leticia James has said she is eager to keep up.

Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey opened an earlier investigation into whether Exxon defrauded the public by spreading disinformation about climate change, which various courts – including the Supreme Court – have refused to block despite the company’s pleas.

And in Juliana vs. US, young people have filed a suit against the government for violating their constitutional rights by pursuing policies that intensify global warming, hitting the dense ties between big oil and the state.

These are welcome attempts to hold the industry responsible for its role in warming our earth. It’s time, however, to take this series of legal proceedings to the next level: we should try fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity.

Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt

Just one hundred fossil fuel producers – including privately held and state-owned companies – have been responsible for 71% of the greenhouse gas emissions released since 1988, emissions that have already killed at least tens of thousands of people through climate-fueled disasters worldwide.

The Green New Deal advocates have been right to focus on the myriad ways that decarbonisation can improve the lives of working-class Americans. But an important complement to that is holding those most responsible for the crisis fully accountable. It’s the right thing to do, and it makes clear to fossil-fuel executives that they could face consequences beyond vanishing profits.

More immediately, a push to try fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity could channel some much-needed populist rage at the climate’s 1%, and render them persona non grata in respectable society – let alone Congress or the UN, where they today enjoy broad access. Making people like Exxon CEO Darren Woods or Shell CEO Ben van Beurden well known and widely reviled would put names and faces to a problem too often discussed in the abstract. The climate fight has clear villains. It’s long past time to name and shame them.

Left unchecked, the death toll of climate change could easily creep up into the hundreds of millions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in turn unleashing chaos and suffering that’s simply impossible to project. An independent report commissioned by 20 governments in 2012 found that climate impacts are already causing an estimated 400,000 deaths per year.

Also Read: Moving Away From Fossil Fuels Isn’t Separate From Moving Towards Social Justice

Counting a wider range of casualties attributed to burning fossil fuels – air pollution, indoor smoke, occupational hazards, and skin cancer – that figure jumps to nearly 5 million a year. By 2030, annual climate and carbon-related deaths are expected to reach nearly 6 million. That’s the rough equivalent of one Holocaust every year, which in just a few short years could surpass the total number of people killed in World War II. All caused by the fossil-fuel industry.

Knowing full well the deadly consequences of continued drilling, the individuals at the helm of fossil-fuel companies each day choose to seek out new reserves to burn as quickly as possible to keep their shareholders happy. They use every possible tool – and they have many – to sabotage regulatory action.

That we need to instead strip fossil fuels from the global economy isn’t up for debate. Without the increasingly distant-seeming deployment of speculative, so-called negative emissions technologies, coal usage will have to decline by 97%, oil by 87%, and gas by 74% by 2050 for us to have a halfway decent shot at keeping warming below 1.5 degrees celsius. That’s what it will take to avert pervasive, catastrophic climate impacts that will destabilise the very foundations of society. (Keeping warming to a more dangerous 2.0 degrees celsius will require decarbonisation that’s almost as abrupt.)

A recent report by Oil Change International detailing the climate costs of continued drilling lays the problem out in simple terms: either we embark on a managed decline of the fossil-fuel industry, or we face economic and ecological ruin. Simply put, the business model of the fossil-fuel industry is incompatible with the continued existence of anything we might recognise as human civilisation.

Barring a major course correction, that business model – and more specifically, the executives who have designed and executed it – will be responsible for untold suffering within many of our lifetimes, with the youngest and poorest among us bearing a disproportionate burden, along with people of color and residents of the Global South.

As recent research and reporting have documented, some of the world’s biggest polluters have known for decades about the deadly threat of global warming and the role their products play in fueling it. Some companies began research into climate change as early as the 1950s. These days, none can claim not to know the mortal danger posed by their ongoing extraction.

The logo of Exxon Mobil Corporation is shown on a monitor above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, December 30, 2015. Credits: Reuters/Lucas Jackson/File Photo

Literally a crime against humanity

Technically speaking, what fossil-fuel companies do isn’t genocide. Low-lying islands and communities around the world are and will continue to be the worst hit by climate impacts.

Still, the case against the fossil-fuel industry is not that their executives are targeting specific “national, ethnical, racial, or religious” groups for annihilation, per the Rome Statute, which enumerates the various types of human rights abuses that can be heard before the International Criminal Court. Rather, the fossil industry’s behavior constitutes a Crime Against Humanity in the classical sense: “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack,” including murder and extermination. Unlike genocide, the UN clarifies, in the case of crimes against humanity, it is not necessary to prove that there is an overall specific intent. It suffices for there to be a simple intent to commit any of the acts listed. The perpetrator must also act with knowledge of the attack against the civilian population and that his/her action is part of that attack.

Fossil-fuel executives may not have intended to destroy the world as we know it. And climate change may not look like the kinds of attacks we’re used to. But they’ve known what their industry is doing to the planet for a long time, and the effects are likely to be still more brutal if the causes are allowed to continue.

The evidence stacks up

In September 2015 InsideClimate News broke the story that Exxon scientists first started looking into climate change in the mid-1970s. It didn’t take them long to find out both that it was a real problem and that their bread and butter was a chief cause. When the rest of the US learned of these dangers – thanks in part to James Hansen’s testimony before Congress in 1988 – Exxon and friends began pouring millions of dollars into elaborate disinformation campaigns casting doubt on findings their own scientists had validated.

Dutch journalist Jelmer Mommers has unearthed many incriminating documents about similar actions taken by Shell, including a 1988 report showing that their executives were fully aware of the danger that climate change posed and the company’s own role in it.

The report’s authors found that their own products accounted for an estimated 4% of the world’s carbon emissions in 1984. “With very long time scales involved,” company scientists recommended, “it would be tempting for society to wait until then to begin doing anything. The potential implications for the world are, however, so large, that policy options need to be considered much earlier. And the energy industry needs to consider how it should play its part.” In response to the documents revealed in Mommers’s article, Friends of the Earth Netherlands has announced it will bring a suit against Shell to rapidly begin winding down its oil and gas production.

Industry-funded disinformation campaigns would shape the US’s national conversation on climate politics for the decades after Hansen’s testimony, and still do. But sensing a change in the political weather, fossil-fuel companies have taken on a new double identity. With one hand – or maybe just a few fingers – they espouse their commitment to climate action and even documents like the Paris Agreement. With the other they continually hunt for new markets and planet-wrecking reserves, sending legions of lobbyists into Washington to beef up subsidies and tear up regulations, and fighting even modest policies to rein in their actions.

Despite clear culpability, the industry’s attempts to present itself as a good-faith actor in the climate fight are largely succeeding. Industry shills stalk the halls of the UN’s annual climate talks, appearing at side events alongside respected environmental NGOs and UNFCCC officials, and chatting freely with national delegations.

At COP 24 last year in Poland, GasNaturally co-hosted a cocktail hour with the European Union, and Shell bragged about its influence in grafting a whole section onto the Paris Agreement. The Polish coal sector was a main sponsor of the whole event.

Also Read: COP24 Summit Shows Global Warming Treaties Can Survive Anti-Climate ‘Strongmen’

Stateside, advocates of certain forms of carbon pricing – like one plan drafted up by former Bush and Reagan cabinet officials – have boasted of garnering support and funding from the likes of Exxon and BP, apparently a marker of their respectability. When one such policy actually came up for a vote in Washington State last year, though, BP and other oil producers spent tens of millions of dollars to crush it. We’ve let them get away with it for too long.

The Nuremberg Precedent

Let’s call this what it is: an atmosphere of impunity for atrocity. At the very least, the fossil-fuel industry should be barred from international climate negotiations and any national-level climate policy making discussions, just like the tobacco industry and its emissaries are barred from World Health Organisation talks. In the US, that ban should include the congress people on both sides of the aisle that the industry deputises to act on their behalf with hefty campaign contributions. There were more than a few good reasons, after all, that the Allies didn’t invite Hitler to weigh in on their strategy for crushing the Nazis.

After the war, though, the ensuing Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals wrote an important precedent into international law, establishing that “crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.” At that point, there was no legal framework to understand violence on the scale of those that Hitler’s regime had just carried out, let alone to punish it. To remedy that the international community came together to create and implement one.

On climate, the precedent set in Nuremberg offers other lessons as well. It’s hard to think of a problem more widely attributed to “abstract entities” than global warming, allegedly the product of some unquenchable, ubiquitous human thirst for new stuff. That old Pogo cartoon still holds sway in the popular imagination: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

There’s some truth to that – we do all create demand for fossil fuels, after all. But supply creates demand. And while free market dogmatists may think otherwise, there’s no reason why the popularity of a product means it should exist in perpetuity when the risks are so colossal and there are alternatives at the ready.

One of the best parallels for trying corporate executives for crimes against humanity might be the so-called IG Farben Trials, in which executives of the IG Farben Company – which worked with the Nazis to produce Zyklon B gas, a pesticide used extensively to kill Jews in the Holocaust – were tried before US Military Courts in Nuremberg. The company also developed several processes that aided in the Nazi war effort, like synthesizing rubber and oil out of coal. They employed slave labour provided by the Nazis, even constructing a factory just outside of Auschwitz so they could put prisoners to work.

Farben executives and plant managers were tried on these and other charges. Just thirteen of the twenty-four indicted were found guilty, and the longest sentence anyone of them served was eight years, including time served. After prison, several went on to lucrative consulting gigs and board positions for German chemicals companies, including former subsidiaries of the now-disbanded IG Farben, and companies like Dow Chemical. After serving his four-year prison term for the “plundering and spoliation of occupied territories,” IG Farben CEO Hermann Schmitz went on to take a senior post at Deutsche Bank.

The head of the company that would become the war’s largest distributor of Zyklon-B – Bruno Tesch – fared less well. He was tried separately before a British military tribunal and executed, alongside his second-in-command. Court documents detailed precisely how much money he and his main business partners had made from selling the agent to the Nazis.

Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg trials. The main target of the prosecution was Hermann Göring (at the left edge on the first row of benches). Credit: Work of the United States Government, Public Domain

Start with Tillerson

In the case of the climate crisis, it’s the industry itself that is driving crimes against humanity, and states that are complicit in issuing everything from drilling and infrastructure permits to generous subsidies – $20 billion per year in the United States alone. There are plenty of people in C-suites to hold responsible, with roles that more closely parallel those of Hermann Göring than Hermann Schmitz.

But to narrow the field of potential indictments, we might start with Rex Tillerson and other ExxonMobil executives – particularly good targets given that there’s been extensive documentation proving that the company’s top brass both knew about and then covered up the existence of climate change, even as they fortified their supply chains against climate impacts.

Of course, the legal hurdles to making such trials happen would be substantial. If the Nuremberg Trials were outside the box for international law at the time, trying fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity might well be in the stratosphere. For one, the US is not a party to the Rome Statute, so unless the UN Security Council were to grant a US court jurisdiction over the matter – which hardly seems likely – a case would have to happen in a country that is for anything to go before the ICC. And the legal doctrines that the ICC operates under were designed principally to go after states, not multinational corporations.

But if we were able to overcome those considerable constraints, what might trying fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity actually look like? Royal Dutch Shell, for instance, is based in the Netherlands – in the Hague, in fact – and is a party to the Rome Statute. In order for their executives to be tried for crimes against humanity, the ICC prosecutor would need to open an investigation to determine whether domestic courts in the Netherlands had not done enough to hold the offending parties accountable. The prosecutor could then use their proprio motu power to bring an indictment before the ICC, which would then hear the case.

Also Read: What Trump’s Decision to Pull the US Out of the Paris Climate Deal Means

Alternately, the Dutch government could refer the case to the court itself. Plenty of countries have crimes against humanity statutes, however, so a trial wouldn’t necessarily have to happen under the auspices of the ICC. And because companies like Exxon have operations all over the world, they could theoretically be tried in any country that has such statutes on the books, or that is a party to the Rome Statute. Options abound.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson takes part in a news conference with Canada’s Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland (not shown) on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, December 19, 2017. REUTERS/Blair Gable/File Photo

But none of these lengthy bureaucratic processes will kick off without massive public pressure, which in itself could bear fruit beyond indictments. Exciting as these trials might be, the most pressing work ahead is to decarbonise the global economy.

One obvious implication of calling people like Tillerson mass murderers is that their ilk should probably not be in charge of the world’s most powerful corporations; every piece of evidence we have suggests they’ll just keep killing. If we are going to embark on the managed and just transition off of fossil fuels that science is telling us we need, fossil-fuel executives simply can’t be trusted to oversee it.

So if in the long run we hope to bring fossil-fuel executives to court, the road there should make sure that their destructive companies are taken out of private hands and run in the public interest – that is, wound down as quickly as possible, with the first priority being to ensure a dignified quality of life for those workers who stand to be most affected.

While there are plenty of barriers to getting a conviction or even opening a case, the Nuremberg trials were themselves a kind of experimentation, wherein Allied forces effectively tested a new legal doctrine crafted to fit the specific atrocities committed by Axis forces, for which there wasn’t – to that point – an established legal framework for punishing. Confronting climate change – the greatest existential threat the world has ever known – demands thinking no less creative.

This article was originally published on Jacobin.

Last Year Was The Fourth Warmest on Record

Almost 200 nations agreed to a “rule book” to govern the Paris climate agreement in talks in Poland last month, even though critics said it was insufficient to prevent dangerous levels of global warming.

Oslo: Last year was the fourth warmest on record, extending a scorching streak driven by rising concentrations of man-made greenhouse gases, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Monday. Average world surface air temperatures were 14.7 Celsius (58.5 Fahrenheit) in 2018, 0.2 C less than 2016 which was the hottest year on record, it said in the first global assessment of temperatures based on full-year data.

The year 2016 was boosted by an El Nino event that warmed the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

“In 2018, we have again seen a very warm year, the fourth warmest on record,” Jean-Noël Thépaut, head of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement.

Also Read: Mitigating Climate Change Is Possible, but Only If We Are Serious About It

“Dramatic climatic events like the warm and dry summer in large parts of Europe or the increasing temperature around the Arctic regions are alarming signs to all of us,” he added. The years 2017 and 2015 were also fractionally warmer than 2018 in records dating back to the 19th century, Copernicus said. Almost 200 nations agreed to a “rule book” to govern the Paris climate agreement in talks in Poland last month, even though critics said it was insufficient to prevent dangerous levels of global warming.

The 2015 Paris accord seeks to end the fossil fuel era this century by shifting to cleaner energies such as wind and solar power. US President Donald Trump plans to pull out and instead promote the US fossil fuel industry. The Copernicus report confirms projections by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in November that 2018 would be fourth warmest, after a cool start to the year.

Review: The Promise of an Affordable Transition to a Fossil Fuel Free Economy

While offering solutions and hope, Prem Shankar Jha’s book ‘Dawn of the Solar Age: An End to Global Warming and to Fear’ is a timely overview of the alarming consequences of global warming.

When the Paris climate summit concluded in 2015, there was a sense of achievement and relief. At last, all nations had agreed to take measures to mitigate climate change. Even then, experts had felt that this was too little and, perhaps, too late.

When the Paris Agreement came into effect on October 5, 2016, then US president Barack Obama admitted as much, saying:

“Even if we meet every target…we will only get to part of where we need to go.”

Since then, President Donald Trump has announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement. Today, even after 195 countries at the just-concluded United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP24) in Poland have agreed and adopted the Katowice Rulebook that lays down a roadmap for the implementation of the Paris Agreement for controlling emissions after 2020, the prognosis keeps getting bleaker.

Also read: We Can Limit Human-Induced Global Warming to 1.5℃, but It Will Be Painful

According to studies reported in the magazine Nature (August 2017), none of the major industrialised countries had met their pledged commitments and the sum of national pledges was not enough to keep global temperature rise to “well below 2 degrees C” which was the Paris Agreement target. The just-released findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report calls for keeping the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C and the reduction of global emissions by 45 per cent by 2030.

Dawn of the Solar Age: An End to Global Warming and to Fear
Prem Shankar Jha
Sage Publications India, 2018

Prem Shankar Jha’s book, Dawn of the Solar Age: An End to Global Warming and to Fear, is the culmination of over 30 years of his engagement with this vital issue. It is extraordinary and timely as it not only gives a comprehensive overview in simple and lucid language of the disaster that is looming but also offers hope that we could actually enter into an era where the sun provides all our electricity and transport energy needs. Jha makes a compelling case for the use of technologies which are proven and affordable and which can drive the transition to a fossil fuel free economy and that too in the limited time available to mankind.

Jha illustrates the alarming consequences of global warming and climate change vividly. On December 22, 2016, the temperature at the North Pole was +0.4 degrees Celsius when it should have been lower than -25 degrees Celsius.

The melting of the polar ice cap is one of two “tipping points” according to British scientist James Lovelock, which is the point “beyond which global warming will set off a succession of changes in the earth’s biosphere which will make global warming self-reinforcing and take it out of human control”.

Half of the extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, severe floods, intense heat waves between 2011 and 2016 are, in the assessment of the World Meteorological Organization, due to the global warming that has already occurred. The planet needs to keep the concentration of carbon dioxide to below 450 ppm. This had crossed 400 ppm by 2012 and over 2 ppm are being added every year, making the 450 ppm target appear simply unattainable.

A neighborhood in the Philippines devastated by Typhoon Haiyan. Credit: Reuters/John Javellana

Since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports began making the danger to mankind from climate change both imminent and stark, the puzzling question has been why industrialised nations with their enormous scientific and technical prowess had been doing so little to develop technologies and solutions which would enable the replacement of fossil fuels. Why has there been no grand project like the ones in the US to make the atom bomb during World War II, or, for the mission to send man to the moon? Here, Jha provides a genuine insight:

It lies in the enslavement of the human mind to a specific ideology — an enslavement that is so complete that few people are conscious of it. This is the ideology of the Free Market…Applied to the realm of energy, the sanctity of the Free Market virtually mandates leaving the choice of technologies that will succeed fossil fuels to the market. … and therefore the preserve of private enterprise. It was therefore a no-go area for governments.

Also read: Is Global Warming Making Us Sicker?

Jha asserts that the state, preferably a consortium of states, needs to take responsibility and assume leadership to push renewable energy technologies that can deliver.

The real breakthroughs in renewable energy in recent years have been in harnessing electricity from wind and solar photo voltaic (SPV) panels. These were initiated by aggressive state policy, primarily by Germany. Both have now become competitive vis-à-vis electricity from fossil fuels. Wind power as a result is growing rapidly in the world.

The temperature of water in the Arctic has changed very little so far because most of the sun’s heat has been absorbed by the melting of the ice. But this cushion will disappear the moment the last of the ice is gone. Credit: Reuters

But the total estimated feasible wind power potential on the planet is limited and can provide only a modest fraction of what is needed. SPVs have experienced a remarkable reduction in costs and are now being seen as a possible panacea. The well-known limitation of SPVs is that it generates electricity only when the sun shines. If the electricity needs outside day time are to be met then fossil fuels would continue to be used, unless it is possible to store electricity generated in the day for use at night. Storage technology is a global buzz word these days. The challenge is to increase storage capacity and to lower its costs.

Jha strikes the right word of caution in drawing attention to the fact that all present storage battery technologies use lithium and other rare earth minerals. The supply of rare earth minerals on the planet is limited and there is no way that it can provide storage capacity on the scale needed to meet all the night-time needs of electricity in the world.

Also read: Policy Confusion, Cost Issues Cast a Shadow on India’s National Solar Mission Target

Jha zeroes in on two key technologies that hold out the promise of an affordable transition to a fossil fuel free economy: concentrated solar power (CSP) and biomass gasification.

CSP plants have the potential of bringing about a “solar thermal revolution” as they are able to use the sun’s energy to generate electricity when the sun is no longer shining. Mirrors are used to concentrate the sun’s rays to heat molten salt that can store heat for long periods. This heat is then used to generate electricity through conventional steam turbines.

As CSP plants do not use rare earth minerals, there are no constraints for them being scaled up to replace all fossil fuel usage for generating electricity in the world. Since only a few plants have been built in the world, there is considerable potential to improve the design of the mirrors, the heating system, to reduce costs and ensure trouble-free operation. Tariffs of some recent plants have come down to below 20 US cents per unit. Jha argues that as these plants use conventional materials, if they were to be built in India, their tariffs should come down dramatically to 8 to 9 US cents per unit making it fully competitive to new coal-based power plants.

A solar thermal power plant. Credit: Facebook/Solar Reserve

Transportation is the largest user of petroleum. Jha is right in drawing attention to the rare earths constraint limiting the extent to which electric vehicles can replace all automobiles. He sees the way forward through biomass gasification, using waste biomass in the form of crop residue and municipal solid waste to get liquid fuel for transportation. A research report concluded that “almost all types of biomass with less than 50% moisture content can be gasified…to produce a fairly uniform-in-quality fuel that could readily substitute for fossil fuels and fossil fuel derived products”.

These would be methanol as a substitute for petrol and dimethyl ether (DME) for diesel and bio fuel for airplanes. Rough calculations show that there is enough crop residue waste, other biomass and urban municipal waste to fully meet the transport fuel needs of the world. There are a few frontier technologies for this which are proven. Large-scale competitive deployment would bring costs down and these may turn out to be cost competitive with present prices of crude oil. This thrust would have to be led by the state.

Also read: Karnataka’s Days in the Sun: The Paradox of Expanding Solar Parks

With proven technologies being available which could effectively avert the consequences of climate change, Jha wonders what is preventing the state from assuming leadership and acting decisively. He suspects that the enormous stakes of the global fossil fuel industry in preserving the status quo with, at best, modest progress in the use of renewables is a factor that needs to be understood and confronted in the industrialised countries. The faith in the market obscures understanding of the power of incumbents and their ability to delay or even derail disruptive change. The US is a good example of how even complete denial can become politically dominant.

India has the late mover’s advantage. With smart state policy and action it can leapfrog into a global leadership role in the solar age. By creating value and hence a price for crop waste and other biomass, it can increase incomes of farmers and create jobs in rural areas, thus revolutionising agriculture by making it the supplier of energy for transport and industry. Further, by ending the burning of crop waste, the air pollution crisis faced by northern India every winter would be reduced. As biofuels replace petrol and diesel, air pollution from automobiles would cease to be an issue. India could stop using fossil fuels altogether surprising itself and the world.

This review was first published in Biblio: A Review of Books. Read the original here.

Govt Plans to Increase Height of Solar Panels so Farming Can Continue Below

If India is to generate 100 GW of solar power by 2022, it is only a matter of time before agricultural land also goes under.

The biggest victim of India’s solar revolution has been land – especially hundreds of acres in arid and semi-arid regions. When a large solar park is set up, a vast patch of land goes under the solar panels. The Government of India has maintained that most such land is barren and unfit for farming. However, if India is to generate 100 GW of solar power by 2022, it is only a matter of time before agricultural land also goes under.

Recently, officials of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) said they’re working on a workaround. “We are actively working on a policy to ensure that will give solar companies an option to have legal agreements with farmers wherein farming can continue if the height of the panels are increased,” Gopal Krishna Gupta, joint secretary at the MNRE, told The Wire at the India Pavilion at the recently concluded COP24 in Katowice, Poland. “We are simply giving [solar companies] an additional opportunity.”

It’s unknown if private companies are willing to take on the extra cost. Gupta added that the discussions were nearing their close, and that “we can expect it very shortly”.

Also read: The Paradox of Expanding Solar Parks

Each megawatt of electricity from solar parks requires 5-7 acres of land on average. With an installed capacity of 24 GW, nearly 500 sq. km of land now lies in the shadow of solar panels. By 2022, India has to install 75 GW more to meet its target – that’s 1,500-2,000 sq. km more.

“Now we are thinking of increasing the lease to Rs 30,000 per acre. Going forward, we will only lease the land and not acquire it,” Gupta said. “The farmers will continue to own the land. They can set up solar parks or tie up with developers.”

The MNRE’s job in this setup will be to “ensure that farmers are not fleeced by anyone”.

Upendra Tripathy, director-general of the International Solar Alliance, pointed to Rwanda as an example. “Here, the farmer is allowed to grow fodder under the panels and is paid for the cleaning services. The locals are also paid to bring water and clean the panels,” he said.

Some interventions remain necessary, but they only highlight the need for community participation further. “The panels are installed at a height and automatically become flat if the wind gets too strong,” Tripathy added. “There is an agreement between the solar park authorities and the local community that operations inside the park will be fully labour-oriented.”

Also read: Can India’s Solar Revolution Help Meet Its Paris Agreement Emission Goals?

Increasing the height of solar installations also presents an economic challenge. “In the Sunderbans, women grow tubers like turmeric and ginger on the side of the panel, where the water drips. We need more research on whether this kind of farming is scalable,” Tripathy explained. “While fodder can be grown and cut under panels, allowing for grazing might be dangerous for the animals.”

Activists have taken the line that, ultimately, the community’s needs should be prioritised. “Commons like water and grazing area should not be diverted. When there is a drought, these are critical access points” the community to sate its needs, Leo Saldanha of the Environment Support Group, Bengaluru, said. “There are no shortcuts to this problem and merely increasing the height is not going to solve it.”

It’s just one cog in a bigger machine, but a cog nonetheless.

This story was supported by the 2018 Climate Change Media Partnership, a collaboration between Internews’ Earth Journalism Network and the Stanley Foundation.

Karthikeyan Hemalatha is a freelance journalist based in Bangalore. He covers issues relating to the environment, climate change, agriculture and marine ecology.

Climate Change Hurts Women More but They Don’t Get to Make Decisions About It

At COP24, the average delegation was 63 per cent male and 37 per cent female.

New Delhi: Who gets to decide how governments across the world will tackle climate change? Surprise surprise: it’s not the section of people who will be most affected by it.

Numerous studies have shown that women are disproportionately affected by climate-related changes. But at COP24 – like previous United Nations’ conferences on climate change – women aren’t the ones calling the shots. According to a report in Earther, the average delegation was 63% male and 37% female. This is similar to last year’s COP, when delegations on average also had 37% women.

In addition to studies by academics and NGOs from across the world, the UN and its arms have multiple reports on how women suffer more than their male counterparts due to climate change. This is from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC’s) website:

Women commonly face higher risks and greater burdens from the impacts of climate change in situations of poverty, and the majority of the world’s poor are women. Women’s unequal participation in decision-making processes and labour markets compound inequalities and often prevent women from fully contributing to climate-related planning, policy-making and implementation.

Yet, women can (and do) play a critical role in response to climate change due to their local knowledge of and leadership in e.g. sustainable resource management and/or leading sustainable practices at the household and community level.

The World Health Organisation sees things the same way:

Many of the health risks that are likely to be affected by ongoing climate change show gender differentials. Globally, natural disasters such as droughts, floods and storms kill more women than men, and tend to kill women at a younger age. These effects also interact with the nature of the event and social status. The gender-gap effects on life expectancy tend to be greater in more severe disasters, and in places where the socioeconomic status of women is particularly low. Other climate-sensitive health impacts, such as undernutrition and malaria, also show important gender differences.

According to research by the Women’s Environment & Development Organisation (WEDO) quoted by Earther, women’s participation in global climate talks has been improving, but slowly. By their calculations, at this rate it will take till 2040 for the dialogues to be more equal. Men will continue to make decisions that affect women more until then.

Also read: COP24 Summit Shows Global Warming Treaties Can Survive Anti-Climate ‘Strongmen’

The UN know that this is a problem and is looking for a way out of it. In a ‘Gender Action Plan’, the UNFCCC talks about how it wants to “achieve and sustain the full, equal and meaningful participation of women in the UNFCCC process”.

Just having women in the discussion isn’t enough, however. “Even when we bring women into positions of power, they end up in discussions that are less powerful,” the head of WEDO, Bridget Burns, told Earther. Like in other field, topics considered ‘softer’ – education, adaptation and gender – are assigned to women, while the more ‘hardcore’ issues like finance, technology and emission reductions continue to be male-only zones.

There is one team at COP24 that is standing out, Earther reported. Kyrgyzstan has sent an all-women seven-member delegation to the dialogue. However, according to Earther, lead delegate Aizada Barieva said that the representation of women shouldn’t be the main concern. “What matters is that real specialists are involved.”

While the needs for specialists is inarguable, what worries those who criticise the male-dominated make up of the dialogues is that it will skew priorities (in addition to reinforcing patriarchal notions of who gets to make important decision). An Oxfam report from 2009 talks about how market-centric approached to climate policy may actually make matters worse if they don’t consider the social roles assigned to men and women. And by having no women present, it will become much easier for those making the decision to ignore their concerns.

Why Non-Party Stakeholders Could Be Torchbearers of Climate Change Fight

Every country must empower and acknowledge local non-party stakeholders to do more. Without them, we can’t move the needle on climate action.

The two-week long climate negotiations in Katowice, in the heart of Poland’s coal region, wound up last week. Nearly 200 countries laboured against geopolitical headwinds to agree on rules to implement the Paris Agreement.

Nonetheless, while the negotiations saw some progress, the sense of a challenge – to implement real climate action – persists. The outcome at Katowice follows other alarming signs. History’s largest polluter, the US, pulled out from the Paris Agreement. Germany declared that it might miss its 2020 climate targets. Russia is yet to ratify the agreement. The governments of Australia, Brazil, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia face political uncertainties in their fight against climate change.

The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report underlined that even a half-degree rise in temperature could severely impact the world’s ecosystems. Real climate action matters more today than ever before.

In this context, the sight of countries dilly-dallying is disheartening. But at the same time, non-party stakeholders have provided some hope.

These stakeholders include regional governments, civil society organisations, corporations, research institutions and multilateral organisations. With a wealth of ideas and innovative solutions, they are increasingly supporting ambitious climate plans and – more importantly – helping meet transparency obligations under the Paris Agreement. Their independent status could also increase trust and confidence among countries.

Also read: Ten Inconvenient Truths About the Paris Climate Accord

According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), there are over 12,000 stakeholders executing more than 19,000 tasks to fight climate change.

Around 200 regions and local authorities across the globe have committed to reducing their emissions by at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. More than 150 influential companies have joined the RE100 initiative to embrace renewables. Together, they demand 188 TW-h of renewable energy (enough to power Egypt).

At the same time, investors are increasingly moving away from fossil fuels. Around 1,000 institutional investors have committed to divest more than $6 trillion from fossil fuels. Around 280 investors with assets worth nearly $30 trillion have signed up for Climate Action 100+, a five-year initiative to curb emissions and strengthen climate-related finance disclosure.

With support from national governments, non-party stakeholders could be the torchbearers of the fight against climate change, inspiring collective action. A domestic platform must be designed to share best practices and to acknowledge these stakeholders’ contributions.

A report by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a think-tank, found that non-party stakeholders could also strengthen institutional capacity and meet enhanced obligations.

Disclosure: The authors work for CEEW and one of them, Sumit Prasad, is an author of the report.

First, they could do so by helping build guidelines to report on climate action. For example, the Initiative for Climate Action Transparency, a collaboration between governments and civil-society organisations, is devising ways to improve transparency based on countries’ needs and circumstances.

Second, they could improve data for reporting. In Brazil, Climate Observatory, a network of more than 40 non-governmental organisations, introduced a system to present comprehensive emissions estimates.

In India, a coalition of six civil-society organisations have started a similar project – GHG Platform India – to provide economy-wide emission estimates. This platform complements extant efforts by the Centre by plugging data gaps and improving accessibility. As a result, its work exceeds the scope of national inventories.

Third, non-party stakeholders could conduct independent reviews. For example, Climate Action Tracker, a joint project of three research institutions, assesses the nationally determined contributions of countries and what they’ve done to achieve them.

Gold Standard, endorsed by more than 80 NGOs, sets the best-practice benchmark for energy projects under the clean development mechanism, ensuring they deliver long-term sustainable development objectives.

Also read: The Contemptible Conflicts of Interest That Cloud UN Climate Talks

In light of these advantages, non-party stakeholders should be made a legitimate part of climate negotiations. A group of UNFCCC-accredited research and independent NGOs could form a task force mandated to share practices, develop standards and support capacity-building programmes. Philanthropic foundations and host governments could fund this exercise.

Just moving on the Paris Agreement, curbing emissions and fulfilling commitments, will instil hope. At the same time, non-party stakeholders also bear great responsibilities. It has been over two decades since countries first agreed to cut emissions and provide funds to support developing countries. However – and 24 rounds of climate negotiations later – the world still seeks clarity on how it can avoid a climate catastrophe.

Every country must empower and acknowledge local non-party stakeholders to do more. Without them, we can’t move the needle on climate action.

Sumit Prasad is a research analyst and Arsheen Kaur is a communications specialist at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, an independent not-for-profit policy research institution.

Geoengineering: Should India Tread Carefully or Go Full Steam Ahead?

Solar geoengineering doesn’t help reduce carbon emissions, and is founded on reckoning with the distressing possibility that reduction strategies won’t be enough.

In April 1991, the people of Aeta, a village near the foothills of Mt Pinatubo in Philippines, saw multiple steam explosions along the northwest side of the prominence. They were followed a few weeks later by the second largest volcanic eruption of the century. Millions of tonnes of magma erupted. Ash clouds reached 35 km up into the sky. Around 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide escaped.

Then, some time after the eruption, the temperature of the air around the world fell by 0.5°C.

Scientists later realised the sulphur vented into the atmosphere behaved like aerosols, and had reflected ~1% of Earth’s incident sunlight back into space.

If humans had deliberately released such sunlight-reflecting material into the air, it would’ve been called geoengineering. It describes large-scale human efforts to mitigate the impact of global warming by ‘engineering’ natural processes to have palliative effects.

Also read: An Engineered Climate Can Harm Biodiversity More Than Climate Change Itself

One way is to block solar radiation by putting aerosols in the atmosphere, placing reflectors in space or seeding clouds with more water droplets. Another way is to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through afforestation, carbon capture or by sequestering carbon using algae.

In 2016, 194 countries and the European Union pledged to keep global surface warming below 2º C and to make that 1.5º by 2030. But this hasn’t been happening. The UN-organised multilateral climate talks that just concluded in Katowice, Poland, revealed a “lack of political will” among member countries to limit their carbon emissions and uphold the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“Annual emissions have increased by an average of about 2% since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997,” said G. Bala, a climate scientist at IISc Bengaluru. “If we reverse the course at the same 2% rate, which by itself is an uphill task, it would take about 35 years to cut emissions by 50%.” This renders the 1.5º goal nearly unattainable.

Perhaps it’s time for more drastic measures – such as bouncing sunlight away from Earth.

It does sound like an elegant idea. Doing so could cool Earth’s surface sufficiently in 2-4 years, and it’s cheap enough. But somehow, policymakers haven’t been grabbing at this solution.

Probably because there’s a catch.

A 2007 study found that, after Pinatubo went up, the temperature of the world’s air fell – as did the amount of rainfall around the globe. In fact, precipitation levels were the lowest between 1979 and 2004. There were also widespread cases of moderate to severe drought that could be directly attributed to the temperature dip.

Other studies have shown that once we commit to managing solar radiation, we’ve to keep at it. Sudden termination can increase the global average surface temperature by 4º C within 30 years. This can be catastrophic for everyone involved.

At the same time, geoengineering remains an attractive idea because of the lower investment and its quick-fix nature. Some believe that if we prepare better to mitigate its side-effects, it’s an eminently workable option.

One such effect is already known. Pinatubo’s eruption affected the atmospheric temperature everywhere but rainfall patterns shifted mostly over Europe, South Asia and northern South America.

Indian researchers, using lessons from that incident, are beginning to investigate the possible effects of geoengineering on summer monsoon cycles and heat.

Recently, IISc scientists – including Bala – simulated injecting 20 million tonnes of sulphate aerosols into the Arctic stratosphere. They found that this shifted the inter-tropical convergence zone, a belt of low-pressure winds that bring India its summer monsoons, southward and reduced rainfall in the northern hemisphere – where India lies – by 12%.

Interestingly, other studies have shown that solar radiation management schemes can alleviate extremes in the intensity and frequency of rainfall.

Also read: How a Soviet A-Bomb Test Led the US Into Climate Science

“However, if we maintain warming at 1.5º or 2º C, there will be no reduction in mean precipitation,” Bala clarified. “The extremes in temperature and rainfall could be reduced” but that might be the effect of managing sunlight.

There’s also the matter of solar power. Bala: “The reduction in sunlight at the surface would be 1-2% [due to] solar geoengineering. So there could be a marginal reduction in solar power production.”

There isn’t much clarity on what we should be doing on the policy front either. “Currently, India doesn’t have an official policy on climate geoengineering,” according to Arunabha Ghosh, CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water.

He added that the Department of Science and Technology (DST) had “launched a research initiative in 2017 at IISc to understand the implications of solar geoengineering for developing countries.”

The results were the studies on the effects of geoengineering schemes on tropical rainfall and climate extremes.

Beyond the IISc, the DST has also been funding a “geoengineering climate-modelling research programme” since 2013. The studies conducted under this programme (such as this and this), have probed the climate’s response to different solar geoengineering strategies.

Apart from Bala at IISc, other prominent scientists studying the effects of geoengineering on the Indian climate include Saroj K. Mishra (IIT Delhi), S. Ramachandran (Physical Research Lab, Ahmedabad), V. Vinoj (IIT Bhubaneswar), R. Ramesh (NISER Jatni) and S.N. Tripathi (IIT Kanpur).

“As a scientist, I think we should perform small-scale experiments. It is not very expensive,” Bala said.

That much is true. A study published last month estimated it would cost $3.5 billion to launch a working solar geoengineering programme, not just a test, by about 2030 and another $3 billion a year to maintain it.

But “any geoengineering research or implementation should be transparent,” Bala added. “The public should be informed and their concerns should be addressed.”

It’s not clear if such public engagement would be required under the Environment (Protection) Act 1986.

In fact, the path from the lab to the field isn’t clear anywhere, especially in a way that encompasses efforts from many parts of the world. There’s no global framework for research, experimentation and deployment of geoengineering strategies.

This has precipitated concern that developed countries, which have the bigger carbon footprints per capita, may initiate unilateral action towards geoengineering or use it to control climate patterns. There’s also the worry that “investments in research could build momentum down a slippery slope towards deployment” and, separately, the problem of “ascertaining intent”.

Also read: UAE Wants to Build a ‘Rainmaking Mountain’ – Are We All OK With That?

“Countries should now become more forthcoming about their positions [on] geoengineering,” he added. China, Germany, India, Japan, Norway, the UAE, the UK and the US have all entered the fray, and others are poised to. “Eventually, there should be mandatory state-to-state disclosure via a globally negotiated agreement to empower countries to make informed choices.”

Scientists could help by setting up a common repository of geoengineering data. Research that affects the whole world can’t afford to be siloised.

The DST also organised two meetings in 2017 and 2018, of policymakers and subject experts. They all recognised the need for a cohesive national geoengineering strategy.

Even if all these issues are resolved, the moral hazard lies in wait. Solar geoengineering doesn’t help reduce carbon emissions, and is founded on reckoning with the distressing possibility that reduction strategies won’t be enough. It puts our planet’s fate in the hands of a “carbon-sucking fairy godmother” with uncertain consequences. Then again, it’s not like we can take forever to decide either.

Surat Saravanan spent her PhD at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, peering down a microscope to understand how tissues create beautiful patterns. Currently, she writes about the science that catches her eye.

Moving Away From Fossil Fuels Isn’t Separate From Moving Towards Social Justice

Society is divided by class, and this is reflected in its energy systems.

The following interview is the first in a new series that will address salient issues in the impacts and politics of climate change.

Avoiding the catastrophic effects of climate change requires a rapid move away from fossil fuels and lower emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. On behalf of The Wire, Nagraj Adve interviewed Simon Pirani, senior visiting research fellow, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, to understand different aspects of this energy transition. He is also the author of Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (2018).

The questions are in bold. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

In your understanding, the use of coal, oil and gas, particularly since 1950, has structural roots in technological systems, and underlying those, social and economic systems. Can you elaborate on this and what it implies for greenhouse gas emissions?

Simon Pirani. Source: Author provided

A good example of a technological system is an urban transport system. Usually, these are centred on cars, which are fuel-intensive to build and even more to use. Priority is given to cars and the roads they use. Other modes of transport – public buses, rail, bicycles – and pedestrians take second place.

How have these technological systems evolved in such illogical, unpleasant and fuel-inefficient ways? The answer is to be found in social and economic systems. Car-based cities were first built in the US in the early 20th century. Politically powerful car manufacturers lobbied against rail and public transit systems, and resisted regulators’ attempts to compel them to make cars more fuel-efficient.

By the late 20th century, the US not only had more cars per person than any other country, but thanks to its economic dominance, had helped spread this system to other rich countries, and was starting to spread it to developing nations as well.

There’s another way. Cities such as Amsterdam have been designed to put cars in second place. Why shouldn’t all cities be like that?

To cut fossil fuel consumption, we need to look beyond the individual consumer at the end of the technological systems, and think more about the systems through which they consume. Transport is just one such technological system. Other significant ones are electricity production, heating and lighting for buildings, industries and industrial agriculture. In each case, engineers identified huge inefficiencies long ago in the way they use fuels. Why are these inefficiencies not addressed? For reasons to do with the way society works.

Of course, there are plenty of rich world consumers who could slash their personal consumption tomorrow with no great hardship. But the first focus of our attention must be the technological, social and economic systems through which most fuels are consumed. I can’t envisage a transition away from fossil fuels without changing all these systems.

You argue that the ongoing transition away from fossil fuels worldwide has only taken its “first steps”. What would a more comprehensive transition imply?

Most new investment going into electricity generation, worldwide, is for renewables. This is hugely important and hopeful. But for electricity generation – let alone the other technological systems that use fossil fuels – to really move away from fossil fuels for good, much more has to be done.

For a start, integrated technologies made possible by the computer revolution of the last 30 years can be used to reduce electricity demand. They can also be used to integrate electricity supply systems with systems to supply heat and other forms of energy. We now have computer systems that can balance electricity supplies – i.e., make sure the electricity is where it is needed, when it is needed – and that can use multiple small-scale sources of supply, such as many wind turbines or solar panels. Storing electricity is still a headache for engineers, and dealing with intermittency (due to the fact that the wind doesn’t always blow and the Sun doesn’t always shine) is tricky. But they’re working on it.

Private corporations that now dominate the electricity sector in many countries obstruct this type of change. For them, electricity is a marketable commodity. They make money by selling as much of it as possible. But what is needed is electricity as a service. Changing electricity systems is therefore not just a technological problem but a social and economic problem, of breaking the power of big energy corporations.

And electricity generation is only one use of fossil fuels. In other areas of the economy, even less effort has been made to move away from fossil fuels.

False hopes are raised. Electric cars is a good example. While an electric car engine is more energy-efficient than an internal combustion engine, there is no evidence that it is more carbon-efficient if the electricity is produced from fossil fuels. Electric car enthusiasts always respond, “It will be okay if the electricity is produced from renewables”. But that is a huge ‘if’. We can reduce greenhouse gas emissions faster by transforming urban transport systems.

Governments are currently meeting in Katowice, Poland, for the 24th Conference of the Parties, a process you’ve called a “collective failure”. Why? And how would you respond to the argument that, under the Paris Agreement, governments can up their commitments every five years?

When the world’s governments signed the 1992 Rio convention, they recognised that fossil fuel use had to be cut. In the quarter of a century since, global annual fossil fuel use has risen by more than 60%. What is that if not a collective failure?

The talks were always focused on using market mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, despite the catastrophic failure of the emission trading schemes. The other constant in the talks, as insisted by the US, was that there would be no binding targets that nations would’ve to meet.

The 2015 Paris Agreement on the one hand gave civil society some important levers to work with – particularly the reference to the importance of keeping global average temperatures to 1.5º C above pre-industrial levels. On the other hand, the agreement finally abandoned efforts to adopt binding targets. Moreover, the voluntary targets tabled are estimated to be associated with an average temperature rise of about 2.7º C even if they are met.

Obviously, it would be welcome if more nations adopt and improve on their voluntary targets. But we should not live in a world of false hopes. The talks have failed because they have effectively limited action to the adoption of market mechanisms. They have left the industrial and financial elites that control the world’s economies untouched. Thus, they’ve made, and continue to make, decisions that have ensured huge increases in fossil fuel use.

They have cloaked the endless failures of governments to regulate fossil fuel use more effectively in diplomatic discourse, and the continuing flow of hundreds of billions of dollars per year in subsidies to fossil fuel production and consumption.

Where do you then see the way forward? What are the social forces that can effect change or pressurise governments to act with greater urgency?

Some social forces are making their voices heard pretty loudly. Look at the thousands of Australian school students who went on strike last month, demanding government action on global warming. We will see much more of these sorts of protests in future.

Someone who is 18 years old today will realise that nine of the ten hottest years ever recorded were in their lifetime, and the tenth, 1998, was just a few years before they were born. Young people aren’t easily fooled.

We’re also seeing campaigns against unconventional fossil fuel extraction. Oil and gas companies have increasingly moved to them – e.g. fracking and oil recovery from Canadian tar sands – as the resource base has changed. Social movements make a difference. If a type of energy supply loses what companies call their “social licence to operate” – as nuclear energy has in many countries – it becomes unsustainable.

I don’t want to suggest that it’s easy to turn the broad concern that the vast majority of people feel about the threat of dangerous global warming into effective action. This isn’t about one government policy that can be altered by campaigning pressure. That is why we need to look at the technological, social and economic systems that consume fossil fuels, and think about how all these can be changed. These are big problems we have to face collectively.

Students protesting inaction against climate change in Melbourne, November 2018. Source: Author provided

China is the world’s largest emitter and key to current emissions. What does your analysis of China’s energy trends since the late 1990s tell you about how those might play out in the near future?

China’s decision in the 1990s to become the “workshop of the world” was essentially a decision to produce energy-intensive raw materials. These include steel, aluminium and cement in vast quantities, and export them – or products made with them – to rich countries. It led to a huge rise in China’s fossil-fuel use.

The corresponding fall in rich countries’ fuel use led many of them to claim that their economies were “decarbonising”. But in fact they had merely shifted their energy-intensive processes to China and other developing nations.

As for the future, China’s decision to invest heavily in renewables is welcome. But if it intends to take action on global warming, a bigger change in the way that its economy works will be needed.

What specific choices and/or mistakes has the West, and in particular the US, made that India ought not to repeat as we continue on our development trajectory?

As a historian and researcher of fossil fuels, I don’t feel qualified to make big statements about India’s developmental trajectory. It’s for the Indian people to decide. About the systems that consume fossil fuels in India, I have learned a great deal from Sunila Kale, whose work shows that different states have been electrified differently, according to the social forces at work.

For example, the strong farmers’ lobby in Maharashtra led to (limited) electrification in the countryside to meet their irrigation needs for growing cash crops. In Odisha, private companies have been brought in but have limited their activities to cities, where they can make money by selling electricity, and doing little to nothing to address rural electrification.

Society is divided by class, and this is reflected in its energy systems. The transition away from fossil fuels cannot be separate from progress towards social justice.

In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein has said that climate change can be a catalyst for positive change in many ways: rebuilding local economies, reclaiming public services like health and water, etc. Your thoughts?

Klein makes the essential connection between systems of wealth and power and the technological systems that make up the fossil-fuel-powered economy. And I completely agree with her that the transition away from fossil fuels must be thought about together with fighting for public services, against privatisation and against the commodification of these services, and developing new, better kinds of energy systems, transport systems, urban environments, etc.

What would you say to young people who ask, “What can we do?”, but may find systemic change too challenging or abstract? What can give them hope?

Working to change systems is far more convincing than individual action. For example, if you can fit a solar water heater at home, great. But even better is to campaign for integrated energy systems that encourage solar and wind power generators to be installed city-wide. If you decide to ride a bicycle instead of driving a car, great. But even better is to find out why the city you live in is built in such a car-friendly, cycle-unfriendly way, and do something about that.

Don’t let the government tell you it is fixing the climate problem. None of the governments are. Society has to take this issue into its own hands, which means taking it away from government. That’s a necessary starting point. Make energy and climate issues a collective problem for all of us.

Nagraj Adve works and writes on issues related to global warming. His booklet, Global Warming in the Indian Context: An Introductory Overview, has been translated into Hindi, Kannada and Tamil.

Attempts Being Made to Distill CBDR Principle at UN Climate Talks, India Says

The move came as the UN climate talks to create a rule book on how to control greenhouse gases post 2020 entered the crucial stage.

New Delhi: India and other developing countries have complained at the UN Climate talks in Poland that attempts were being made to do away with the Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) principle that states that all nations are responsible for addressing the climate change.

The move came as the UN climate talks to create a rule book on how to control greenhouse gases post 2020 entered the crucial stage.

During the negotiations at various levels, developed countries led by the US and the European Union made attempts to dilute the CBDR principle, but India and other developing nations strongly resisted their move, citing the historical responsibility of the developed nations in emitting carbon dioxide contributing to global warming.

Also Read: The Paris Agreement and Being Grateful for Small Mercies

“There should be no dilution of differentiation CBDR in operationalising the rules for Paris agreement. The principles enshrined in the Paris agreement need to be respected while framing the rules,” Indian climate diplomat Ravi Shankar Prasad said in Katowice.

Countries in Katowice are negotiating the rules that will operationalise the 2015 Paris agreement.

For two days, negotiators have been trying to make progress on a host of contentious issues relating to the rule book without much breakthrough.

COP24: Here’s What Must Be Agreed to Keep Global Warming at 1.5°c

Earth is fast approaching the red lines that scientists have urged temperatures cannot cross if we have any hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change. Here are the emergency measures we need.

The 2015 Paris Agreement has a central aim to keep global temperature rise this century well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to “pursue efforts” to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5°C. This is an ambitious aim – global temperatures are rapidly approaching the 1.5°C target and the 2°C limit is not far away.

The path to 1.5°C requires that the world achieve zero emissions before 2050. It is imperative, therefore, that we stop burning fossil fuels, known as mitigation. However, our present trajectory suggests we’re not on track. COP24 can’t take its eye off this ball – there is no long-term plan that doesn’t include zero fossil-carbon emissions. The scientific consensus is that we need to reach “net zero” CO₂ emissions by 2050. But to tack closer to a scenario of 1.5°C warming, COP24 should set this target for 2035.

Carbon removal and non-CO₂ emissions

The UN, in the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC has accepted that there isn’t any obvious pathway to zero emissions in such a short time frame, so they have pegged their hopes on NETs – Negative Emissions Technologies. These approaches include carbon capture and storage (CCS), which involves sucking CO₂ from the air and storing it deep underground.

Carbon removal along these lines is the second imperative for COP24 in Katowice. Globally we emit around 40 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually, so net zero CO₂ by 2050 will require CO₂ removal of this scale, starting immediately.

Also Read: COP24: Will It Ever Be More Than a Yearly Gathering?

But CO₂ isn’t the only problem. We emit other greenhouse gases such as methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) which all contribute to climate change. Methane is on the rise and is 84 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO₂.

It comes from cows, and it leaks from oil wells and coal mines as “fugitive methane”. It is also seeping out of the melting permafrost in the Arctic. This is a worrying form of “positive feedback” where global warming causes the further release of gases that cause further warming.

Nitrous Oxide, which is 300 times more potent than CO₂, is rising too, caused by modern agriculture. And the concentration of refrigerant gases, such as CFCs, which are thousands of times more potent than CO₂, is not falling as fast as we’d hoped. So COP24 has a third imperative, to prevent the rise of non-CO₂ greenhouse gases. If we can stabilise non-CO₂ greenhouse emissions at present day levels we’ll be doing well, but concentrations are rising fast.

Desperate times, desperate measures

All of this is going to be hard work. We’re failing to cut down our emissions, the technologies for NETs don’t exist at any meaningful scale, yet and there are no political drivers in place to enforce their deployment. There is also a real risk of a dramatic rise in methane in the near future. COP24 will have to consider emergency plans.

Also Read: Tropical Marine Conservation Needs to Change as Coral Reefs Decline

One such plan is very controversial. There are so-called “geoengineering” technologies which can be used to cause changes in global temperatures. One of these is Solar Radiation Management (SRM), which involves injecting tiny aerosol particles high in the atmosphere where they reflect sunlight into space.

We know from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 that stratospheric aerosols caused a cooling of around 1°C over a year. The northern winter of 1992 saw a dramatic increase in sea ice and a stalling of glacial melting. SRM technologies exist and the first sun-dimming experiments are underway

There is a realistic possibility that deploying SRM can buy us some time to enact the essential measures needed to stop warming at or before 1.5°C. The discussions at COP24 must keep all options on the table, and as unpalatable as geoengineering technologies might seem, their deployment may prove to be unavoidable.

The indicators are all in the danger zone. We are seeing increasing Arctic temperatures, rapid loss of Arctic sea ice, reduced Arctic reflectivity, rapidly melting ice shelves and methane release from permafrost. These are leading to rapidly rising sea levels, coastal flooding and storm surges, increased hurricane and storm activity, dry and hot conditions conducive to wildfires, and drought and crop failure.

Also Read: Mitigating Climate Change Is Possible, but Only If We Are Serious About It

The urgency for decisive action is the imperative for COP24. The UN must press on with four major strands for meeting the Paris 1.5°C target:

Reduce fossil carbon emissions.
Remove carbon from the atmosphere (NETs).
Halt the rise of emissions of non-CO₂ greenhouses cases (Methane, Nitrous oxide, CFCs).
Investigate techniques for geoengineering, including Solar Radiation Management.

All four of these must proceed simultaneously and in parallel. COP24 must make this perfectly clear. There is utmost urgency and no time to “wait and see”.

Hugh Hunt is a Reader in Engineering Dynamics and Vibration at the University of Cambridge.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.