Two of the Ugly Sides of Countering Climate Change

  

   Child labor in Congo mines

 The massive Glasgow summit “credibility, action and commitment gap”

Aside from the costs of the transition – including moving fossil fuel sector workers into clean energy – an alternative-power-generating world looks and feels very different from the world we live in today. Just looking at the levels of rapidly escalating natural disasters, the loss of basic agriculturally productive as well as habitable land, the planet desperately needs a level of transitional investment that is becoming apparently much less in fact than necessary to achieve even modest goals against climate change. It’s called a “credibility, action and commitment gap,” where lots of big words are spoken and lofty goals promised, but the cost of implementation is considered too great an economic burden, even for the taxpayers of the richest nations on earth. The costs we will face without solutions far exceed the damages we face if we do not reverse course. Listen to the sounds of numerous cans being kicked down the road.

Today’s blog will focus on two specific aspects of this transitional discomfort: how nations without the capacity to pay for the necessary transition are being forgotten, and how some of the necessary transitional technologies, notably in the rare earths and specialized metals required for storing electricity – essential batteries – are creating their own extremely negative social and environmental consequences. So, you do not get totally stressed out from this commitment gap, I will also present one possible “cleaner” battery solution with much safer application and more efficient potential.

Starting with the failures of COP26 to create the scale of solutions, without massive global assistance and cooperation, we will have untenable results, as the November 9th BBC.com tells us: “1. New analysis suggests the world is on track for 2.4C of warming, despite pledges made by countries for the next decade… 2. Climate Action Tracker says greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 will still be twice as high as necessary to keep temperature rise below 1.5C… 3. Its report accuses COP26 of a ‘massive credibility, action and commitment gap,’ contrasting with optimism following some announcements [when global leaders departed the COP26 conference].” 

A post-leadership-meeting draft of a comprehensive agreement submitted to the COP26 nations for review and possible ratification, “urges countries to ‘revisit and strengthen’ the targets for cutting emissions by 2030 in their national plans to align them with the Paris Agreement goal of well below 2C or 1.5C by the end of 2022.” BBC.com, November 10th. But the draft falls short on the aid required needed by poorer nations to cope with climate change: “Loss and damage - an issue of key importance to the developing world - has been included in the draft, calling for more support from developed countries and other organisations to address the damage caused by extreme weather and rising seas in vulnerable nations.

“It also recognises that more finance is needed for developing countries beyond the long-promised $100bn a year by 2020, which will not be delivered until at least 2022… But campaigners said these parts of the text were weak and were essentially a ‘box ticking exercise’.” BBC.com. There is no doubt that the poorest nations have absolutely no capacity to fund what they need to do in order to stem climate change. Their plea for help is made even stronger as they remind us that the richest nations of earth got that way by polluting the land, sea and air and extracting precious resources from the same poor countries. Yet even as some smaller island nations are being entirely consumed by rising ocean waters, richer nations are pushing back: 

“The resistance from rich countries behind closed doors is particularly frustrating when they are at the same time ‘talking about transparency in this whole process.’… A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) this year showed that in 2019, about 25% of climate finance from developed countries went towards adaptation - preparing for extreme weather events, or building seawalls, for example - while the rest went to fund projects to reduce carbon emissions… Poor countries say climate change is impacting on communities with such intensity that they can no longer adapt, but instead need financial support to rebuild, or to move away.” Navin Singh Khadka, writing for the November 8th BBC.com. 

Richer nations have claimed that admitting any liability for past climate irregularities and building infrastructure in poor nations aimed at minimizing the damage opens them up for major litigation. That is a relatively easy fix, but I suspect that richer nations are also responding to pushback from their own taxpayers being asked to foot the bill. Without this assistance, climate change will accelerate and impact everyone… even as the poorest are also the most vulnerable.

The hardship to solve our issues seems too often to fall on the backs of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. For example, resource extraction continues to weigh heavily on impoverished miners paid abysmal wages to extract minerals necessary to construct modern-day batteries, the kind you can find in almost any electric car. In the small mines in the southern reaches of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, miners toil long hours to extract cobalt at wage rates that can pay $3.50 to $5 a day under abominable conditions. Many pass up the “free lunch” to earn more. As one miner put it: “Not that lunch is worth waiting for: he claims he is given just two small bread rolls and a carton of juice… ‘The salary is very, very small. It gives me a headache … The mine makes so much and we make so little,’ he says.

“If he takes a day off, he says money is deducted from his wages. If he is sick and misses more than two days in a month, more money is cut. ‘You can’t even argue. If you do, you’ll be fired,’ he says, squatting on the dirt floor of the bare brick shack he rents… ‘The relationship between us and the [mine] is like a slave and a master,’ says [the miner].” The Guardian UK, November 8th. The workers do not have many alternatives to find work at any level, but there have to be better answers than what amounts to slave labor, often involving young children.

If we put aside the lack of alternative economic alternatives for so many desperate workers on earth, which is most difficult to do, there are technological solutions to electric storage that add my promised ray of hope. “[G]raphene aluminum-ion battery cells from the Brisbane-based Graphene Manufacturing Group (GMG) are claimed to charge up to 60 times faster than the best lithium-ion cells and hold three time the energy of the best aluminum-based cells.

“They are also safer, with no upper Ampere limit to cause spontaneous overheating, more sustainable and easier to recycle, thanks to their stable base materials. Testing also shows the coin-cell validation batteries also last three times longer than lithium-ion versions… GMG plans to bring graphene aluminum-ion coin cells to market late this year or early next year, with automotive pouch cells planned to roll out in early 2024.” Forbes, May 13th. 

“Graphene is an allotrope, or form, of carbon, as is diamond and various fullerenes [a molecule that consists of carbon atoms connected by single and double bonds so as to form a closed or partially closed mesh]. It consists of a single layer of atoms in a hexagonal lattice. Graphite, a very stable carbon allotrope, consists of stacked layers of graphene.” SolutionsOK.com. 

We have a few answers, more will develop, but the world is billions if not trillions of dollars of commitments away from making a big enough difference meaningfully to combat climate change. Well-funded special interests whose industries are based on polluting technologies seem so successful at slowing down the steps necessary to make this planet sustainable. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and it no wonder that the strongest protests against climate inaction come from the youngest demographics, those who will bear the greatest burdens from unsolved climate change.