The previous LOTRW post took a look at Bill Gates’ recent suggestions for COP30 participants in their run-up to next week’s meeting. (Oversimplifying), Mr. Gates argued that the current focus on carbon emissions per se should be re-balanced; nations should give more priority to relieving world poverty and improving world health more directly.
In a sense, his thinking channeled triage: the practice of doctors facing overwhelming patient loads in warfare and emergencies. They quickly assess patients, binning them in one of three categories: those who are beyond saving; those who can wait; those who might be saved if given attention now. Doctors then give priority to that latter group.
Which raises a question: is Mr. Gates’ assessment an outlier? Or does it reflect or is it consistent as well with the diagnosis of others? Recent media coverage provides some answers. David Wallace-Wells provided an excellent summary in September, in a lengthy column with a correspondingly drawn-out title: It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics. The article is behind a paywall but covers a lot of ground and is worth reading in its entirety if you can access it. It contains notes of pessimism and optimism. He begins on the negative side, noting that the initial enthusiasm for the 2015 COP Paris agreement has largely dissipated over the ensuing decade, as country after country has failed to reach its commitments. He cites the United States as a primary backslider (a view supported by subtle policy hints such as recent efforts to claw back funding for elements of the Inflation Reduction Act supporting renewal-energy development[1] and the US decision to send no high-level officials to participate in COP30. (In fairness, this second decision reflects a general worldwide decline in high-level attendance.) He also cites continuing (even increased?) ambitions to extract natural gas and fossil fuels on the part of multiple nations worldwide, again including the United States.
Wallace-Wells also notes the negative impact of the pandemic. Covid-19 exemplified triage at work – and not just in hospital ER’s. In the face of the global emergency, governments shelved efforts to reduce carbon emissions (and more broadly to maintain fiscal responsibility) in order to protect their populations from the accompanying economic slowdown. They have only-partially, if at all, restored fiscal order in the years since. Wars in the Ukraine, the middle East, and Asian threats to national security haven’t helped. Countries are ramping up their defense expenditures at the expense of other priorities. The United States has cut foreign aid – but much of that foreign aid has proven ineffective anyway. For a variety of reasons, international attention to improve conditions for the poor has long been lacking.
On the positive side of the ledger, Wallace-Wells and others have noted that with the declining cost of renewable energy, decarbonization has developed a momentum of its own. The International Energy Agency forecasts that renewable energy generation will surpass coal in 2025. That momentum will likely be maintained and even accelerated on purely economic grounds. As renewable energy use is internalized by corporations and utilities, as it weans itself from government subsidies, it will hopefully be less politically visible and divisive.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but taken literally, the message of the article and its title wasn’t that the world is souring on the climate issue – only the climate politics.
A closing observation: the Catholic church has connected the climate change issue to the plight of the poor all along. It’s been ten years since Pope Francis published his encyclical Laudato si’[2] and two years since his exhortation Laudate Deum. Both documents were rooted in climate science but emphasized climate change as a moral or ethical issue more than a technological one. Both cited the devastating impacts of climate change on the world’s poor (and included the planet itself and nature among the poor- and threatened). And the Catholics are not alone. Other denominations and faiths made similar arguments.
Which leaves the final question raised in the previous post: Is a shift from climate change per se to priority on human welfare more broadly – especially the welfare of the poor and vulnerable – on balance a positive trend or a negative one? More soon.
[2] LOTRW posts on Laudato si’ and Laudate Deum can be found here.