Global dynamics for fighting climate change - Issue #25
RIP, Bruno Latour
The news comes that Bruno Latour has passed away.
As the Guardian wrote: his work on “how humanity perceives the climate emergency won praise and attention around the world.”
The French philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist started his life looking at society and technology, showing how scientific facts come into being. “Science needs a lot of support to exist and to be objective,” he told the LA Review of Books. “[It needs] support by scientists, institutions, the academy, journals, peers, instruments, money – all of these real-world ecosystems, so to speak, necessary for producing objective facts.”
He next extended this framework to how our societies understand the ecological crisis. He dissected, as the Guardian wrote: “society’s different ways of understanding the climate emergency and communicating about it. In Face à Gaïa, a series of eight lectures published in 2015, he looked at how the separation between nature and culture enables climate denial.”
Here is the very last essay he wrote, asking why the purpose and determination with which Europe has responded to the Ukraine war fades in the face of another existential threat – the climate crisis.
This question takes us back to what David Attenborough had also told us. Decarbonisation is necessary but not sufficient to stop the earth from warming. For that, we have to retool our economic and social systems.
News of the Week
With Latour as (a sad) prologue, what happened last week?
We received a reminder that the global dynamics for fighting climate change are nowhere in place.
Financing for energy transition – not to mention loss and damage – will likely face hurdles at COP27. “Key climate aid provider countries are likely to divert their development budgets towards soaring energy prices and the impending cost of Russia-Ukraine war refugees,” reported Business Standard. “This would lead to climate funding constraints for countries such as India.
”
Little of this, of course, is a surprise. The stockpiling of vaccines by first the developed world – and then by India (we reneged on export commitments) – highlighted the same trend.
Even in India, we see a complete inability to treat climate change with the seriousness it deserves.
Last week, we were told this: “To achieve the country’s updated climate action targets, the government has decided to add three new missions’ — on coastal ecosystem, human health and sustainable transport — to implement its existing National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC).”
The catch is: as The Morning Context reported last week, India is now condoning illegal deforestation by companies. The government is also thinking of, as reported last week, exempting shrimp hatcheries from the purview of Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification, allowing them to operate within the “no-development zone”.
In essence, India is eroding its ecological foundations while replacing them with performative paper protections.
In other news, the country is also thinking of revoking its ban on beach sand mining – and handing the concessionaire to one of the world's richest men, Gautam Adani. From a climate standpoint, this is, again, an appalling design. India is seeing the pairing of an extractive political institution and an extractive economic institution. In such a setup, the business interests of the plutocrat will become national policy. In India’s case, the plutocrats’ vulnerabilities and capabilities will circumscribe what India can achieve.
Also up for commercial use is the ocean floor, which India wants to lease out for setting up offshore wind farms. The first of these is likely to be the ocean floor abutting Tamil Nadu.
Other news. South Asia continues to get roiled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As this newsletter has reported earlier, high gas prices have hammered companies selling gas in the country. India’s oil majors have been hammered as well. All three biggies – HPCL, BPCL and IOC – have posted their second consecutive quarterly loss. The reason? While global oil prices have climbed, India’s government is unwilling to risk unpopularity by passing them on to customers.
In effect, as Business Standard reported, the three firms have not changed petrol and diesel prices for over six months now -- a record since daily pricing came into force in 2017, despite high crude oil prices and weak rupee pushing up the cost of production. “While the government has maintained that oil companies are free to revise retail prices, the three state-owned firms haven't explained the reasons for freezing the rates since April 6,
” said the financial daily.
At some point, like their hapless peers in Gas, these organisations will be unable to take these losses. At this point, the centre will have to take over these costs.
Yet other news. A startup has figured out how to make steel without coal. Another has found a way to make batteries using iron pellets – not costly Lithium.
On the brighter side, European gas reserves are now 90% full. Maybe some of this chaos around gas supplies will subside. Crude oil cartel, OPEC+, however, has approved its largest production cut since the pandemic. And so, oil prices might stay high.
Climate Long-Reads
“Though reluctant to give up on the process, most serious climate activists readily concede that these summits produce little by way of science-based climate action. Year after year since they began, emissions keep going up. What, then, is the point of supporting this year’s summit when the one thing it is set to absolutely accomplish is the further entrenchment and enrichment of a regime that, by any ethical standard, deserves pariah status?” Naomi Klein on COP27 at Egypt.
“The Credit Suisse report is truly remarkable. What stuck with me most was this declaration: For big corporations, the IRA “definitively changes the narrative from risk mitigation to opportunity capture.” In other words, companies should no longer worry that they might be unprepared for future climate regulation, such as a carbon tax. They should be scared of missing out on the economic growth that the energy transition (and the IRA) will bring about.” The Climate economy is about to explode, says the Atlantic.
A similar take from Michael Liebreich. “Twenty years ago, sustainability was the only real driver of the transition to clean energy. Around ten years ago there was a major acceleration when it became clear that wind, solar and batteries were going to become really cheap; economics also started to drive the clean energy transition. I believe this hellish year is going to lead to another similar acceleration, as it becomes clear that clean energy, and not fossil fuels, holds the key to energy security.”
This, however, is not enough to save the world, writes Omar Robert Hamilton. “How much of what we call decolonization was in fact a repurposing of colonial structures for the maintenance of the new rulers’ power? And how much power did the new rulers really have to be able to pull themselves out of the industrial webs of extraction running through their countries? And if modern political power is built upon a foundation of energy power, sustained by the control of that power, and enriched and legitimized by the export of that power — then the question of the energy transition becomes far more complicated for those living under authoritarian regimes. If the world is to transition to new systems of energy power, can it also transition to new systems of political power?”
“This focus on the economic aspect of climate attribution builds on 2015 research led by Marshall Burke, an environmental economist at Stanford University. His team identified an optimal temperature — 55F (13C) — for economic activity as measured in GDP. Countries whose average temperatures fall below that threshold can be expected at least initially to see net benefits in a hotter world. Countries pushed above the optimum temperature, including many developing countries, will experience a further loss of potential.” Bloomberg on reparations.
“Forest scientists... warn that failed afforestation projects around the world threaten to undermine efforts to make planting a credible means of countering climate change by reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or generating carbon credits for sale to companies to offset their emissions.” Yale on tree planting drives.
And, finally, one more report on how ESG is getting gamed.
Book of the Week
The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change
, by Geoff Dembicki.
This is a new book. We are yet to read it – but it looks interesting. As its description says: “Dembicki tells the story of how the American oil companies that founded the tar sands in Alberta, Canada—home to the third-biggest oil reserves on the planet—ignored warnings about climate devastation as early as 1959. Instead of alerting the world to act on this impending global disaster, Exxon, Koch Industries, Shell and others created ad campaigns saying climate change isn't real and that alternatives to oil are an economic disaster. These companies built a global right-wing echo chamber to ensure tar sands could keep flowing into the U.S., which helped elect Donald Trump and now leaves the Joe Biden administration with a sprawling climate mess.”
Here is a review. Also, while on the Alberta Tar Sands, also check out journalist William Marsden’s excoriating book on
the province’s dalliance with oil and gas
.