Even as the United States and China engaged in a partial thaw in horribly strained relations to agree to work together to contain climate change, we remain on shaky environmental ground. Even as the pandemic stemmed energy usage for a time, the predictions for our immediately approaching months are anything but reassuring. For example, ecologists in California, measuring the moisture content in natural vegetation across the state, warned that local plant life was significantly drier than in any earlier year. Prognoses in recently fire charred areas around the world reflect similar findings. Climatologists predict still warmer temperatures, embraced by powerful winds. Fire warnings are everywhere.
Indeed, as these experts measured the rising water temperatures in ocean seas where typhoons and hurricanes are born, they warn of more such tropical storms, likely slower and heavier with greater intensity. While green energy sources across the planet have risen to produce 30% of our total energy needs, the growing Malthusian level population, plus the explosion of pent-up energy demand that experts predict will follow as the pandemic fades, suggest that mankind has done relatively little to stem global warming.
“The International Energy Agency (IEA) is predicting a major surge in CO2 emissions from energy this year, as the world rebounds from the pandemic… Total energy emissions for 2021 will still be slightly lower than in 2019, the agency says… But CO2 will rise by the second largest annual amount on record.
“The use of coal in Asia is expected to be key: the IEA says it will push global demand up by 4.5%, taking it close to the global peak seen in 2014.” BBC.com, April 20th. While demand in some sectors, notably travel (jet and passenger ocean liner fuel), may remain below traditional demand levels, we can look at 2020 as a pandemic-driven anomaly. Coal – noting there is no such thing as commercially viable “clean” coal – is still the biggest climate warming demon: “The empty roads, high streets and airports that marked the global response to coronavirus saw the biggest fall in demand for energy since World War Two… That decline saw carbon emissions tumble by around 6% in 2020, as the more carbon-intensive fuels such as coal and oil were hardest hit by restrictions.
“Many hoped that these changes in energy use would be sustained in the recovery from the pandemic, but these latest predictions from the IEA indicate that is not likely to be the case… Energy demand is booming in the developing world, with a rise of 3.4% predicted for this year - this contrasts with richer economies, where overall energy use is expected to still be 3% below 2019… In the places where energy demand is growing, coal is playing a key role… Overall global use declined by around 4% in 2020, but is expected to rise by 4.5% this year.
“This is mainly happening in Asia, where China is leading the way and expected to account for more than half of the global coal growth this year… But even in the US and EU, where coal has been on the back foot for some time, demand is expected to rise - although it will still likely remain below 2019 levels in these regions.
“According to the IEA, coal demand is likely to be close to the global peak seen in 2014 - and that has implications for efforts to rein in climate change… ‘Global carbon emissions are set to jump by 1.5 billion tonnes this year - driven by the resurgence of coal use in the power sector,’ said Fatih Birol, the IEA's executive director… ‘This is a dire warning that the economic recovery from the Covid crisis is currently anything but sustainable for our climate.’” BBC.com. After many years of binge-building coal fired power plants to meet its growing energy needs, China finally hit that environmental wall and in 2018 committed to shift out of coal into renewables. Too little too late? Perhaps, but at least it is moving a little in the right direction.
It is essential to foster global policies to counter our climate change emergency. Pollutants, particularly greenhouse emissions, obviously do not recognize international boundaries. Glacial destruction accelerates warming as reflective ice is replaced by darker patches of land an ocean beneath that simply absorb the sun’s heat. Melting ice raises ocean waters across the planet. The resulting temperature rises flow into every nook and cranny in and on the planet. Every living thing on earth is profoundly impacted. There is no escape. But we do have to begin with our own malignant contributions to the problem.
And while government budgetary expenditures and executive orders and decisions can help – of necessity reversing the previous administrations efforts to deregulate limits on greenhouse gaseous emissions – in the end, the magnitude of the problem is so massive that only a concerted effort by all three branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial) can make a difference. As of now, our legal system, from taxation to environmental regulation, is still biased in favor of fossil fuel energy. See my recent Ending the Subsidies to Fossil Fuel blog for more details. We’re are killing ourselves, decimating our economic future and dooming ourselves to massively more expensive recovery costs from climate change caused or severely enhanced natural disasters. Climate change denial and marginalization must end. Our lives depend on that.
I’m Peter Dekom, and while preparing for an environmentally sound future will create millions of American jobs (by far more than any jobs lost to the contraction of fossil fuel extraction and energy creation), remaining primarily reactive to resulting natural disasters just might break our financial ability and bring our economy into utter destructive chaos.
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