Greenhouse Gas Emissions – The Big Excuses

Satellite view of recent California wildfires

“Once emissions are in the atmosphere, it doesn’t really matter whether they came from a wildfire or from someone’s Hummer… If they’re in the atmosphere, they’re causing climate change just the same.” 

Torrance Coste, national campaign director for the Wilderness Committee, a Canadian nonprofit.

The big argument from developing and under-developed nations against imposing greater restrictions and control on their greenhouse emissions is that the industrialized and developed world got rich from industrial pollution, burning natural resources (much extracted at bargain prices from the third world) … and they likewise need the right to accelerate their own growth. Most international accords hold such countries to a lower standard. These nations also want money from the first world to pay for the damage global warming from rich-nation industrialization that has been inflicted on them. From small island nations literally disappearing from sea rise to large countries (like India) with impoverished masses. Indian farmers still clear their land with fire. Brazil routinely burns away Amazonian forests to make way for mining and agriculture. Despite its extraordinary wealth, citing remaining underdeveloped regions, China still maintains it is a developing nation, subject to reduced requirements. Nature does not care.

If your think wars – most recently Putin’s war against Ukraine – do not add to the problem, think again. The ramifications of that war, for example, go well beyond the explosions, fires and military planes, ships and vehicles directly involved. The latest double whammy is the removal of Ukraine from even being able to address their climate issues and the withdrawal of Russia from international accords set to deal with climate change. Russia is major industrial polluter and its permafrost (tundra in Siberia, for example) is also releasing mega-tons of far-heavier-than-methane as parts of the Russian surface melt for the first time in millennia. Locked frozen under the surface, through summer and winter alike, these byproducts of long-diseased animal and plant life are now exposed and released. “Not our fault,” say the locals. Nature does not care.

Addressing climate change is obviously disruptive to well-capitalized corporations heavily invested in some aspect of extracting or deploying fossil fuels. Fixing and enhancing the necessary supportive infrastructure to move into a necessary zero-emissions economy require massive investment from both the public and private sector. Yet job displacement, if properly managed, becomes job replacement with even more employment opportunities at serious wage rates. 

Nevertheless, change is disruptive and easily captures politicians with no moral compass pledging to restore a past that can never be, often refusing to authorize basic required infrastructure investments, under the economic lie that such funding is “inflationary.” They often know, with a wink and a malignant smile, that their constituents are led by words and not facts. Investments generate a rate of return, a powerful productivity increase, and pay for themselves. Raw expenditures do not. Politicians who imply that we can go back to the economic and political world of yesteryear are lying, lying, lying. But their followers continue to buy into that incredibly dangerous denial of change itself, the very definition of “future.” Nature does not care.

Isn’t it strange that so many of those who call themselves “conservatives” are actually working against “conserving”? Climate change just is. It is not an issue that can be voted out or where kicking the can down the road is a minor distraction. It so easy to dismiss the effects of climate change – much more frequent devastating mega-storms and tornados, serious sea rise, flooding in some areas and wildfires in others, desertification of once productive agricultural land, unlivable heat, insect-borne disease, as well as migration and conflicts/migration from dwindling access to natural resources – as the products of “natural” disasters. The destruction from these “natural” disasters are addressed, one-by-one, and “aid” often rushes in… as trillions and trillions of dollars of values disappear or are severely damaged. Governmental and private budgets are thus increasingly strained. Nature does not care.

Private industry in the developed world, often encouraged by labor unions in fossil resource extraction and use, is spending billions of dollars to stop or at least slow the transition to “alternative energy.” Look at the voting records from representatives in coal, gas and petroleum-driven states. Listen to their rhetoric, even as “natural” disasters consume massively increasing sums from government and private coffers. They continue to assure their constituents that “woke” environmentalists are trying to subvert jobs and economic growth with false narratives. Talk to those who have watched their farms dry up and blow away, whose buildings have collapsed in coastal regions, whose communities have burned to the ground or who face the never-ending escalation of tornados and hurricanes. Nature does not care.

Ah, “wildfires.” Even in the most advanced regions on earth. Europe, Australia, Canada, the United States… over and above the manmade fires noted above. Nations which have made environmental pledges to meet emissions reduction standards are asking that their statistics not include the extraordinary emissions as millions and millions of acres go up in smoke from these “not our fault” fires. Canada is a nation, without the vituperative polarization that has infected US politics, that has made that request. Writing for the April 20th Washington Post, Amanda Coletta, Chris Mooney, Brady Dennis, Naema Ahmed and John Muyskens explain:

“Canada and some other nations argue that events such as wildfires and insect infestations are ‘natural disturbances’ that are mostly beyond human control… Accounting for those emissions against their pledges under the Paris [climate] agreement would not only be unfair, they claim, but also obscure efforts to understand the impacts humans are having on the land when they plant trees, restore wetlands or improve farming practices to store carbon in soil.

“Instead, Canada has crafted a sophisticated system to determine whether it is managing its forests in ways that help soak up more carbon over time. But that scientific approach leaves an unresolved political question: Who is actually on the hook for the massive greenhouse gas pollution from megafires, thawing permafrost and other land-related emissions around the world? …

“Under United Nations guidelines, countries can partly offset their fossil fuel emissions by subtracting the amount of carbon they claim their lands are absorbing. But that framework is beset with messy math, uncertainty and persistent controversy — creating a major chasm between countries’ greenhouse gas balance sheets and what independent analyses say is going into the atmosphere each year.

“A recent Washington Post investigation found an enormous disparity between the emissions that countries report to the United Nations and what these independent data have documented. That gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion tons to as high as 13.3 billion tons a year of underreported emissions, based on figures through late October. The most substantial part of that gap — at least 59 percent — stems from how countries account for their emissions from land.” Accounting. Hmm. And truly, nature does not care!

I’m Peter Dekom, and even if nature does not care, we really must!