What we need is a war on emissions
"There won’t be any more “great powers” if we don’t get a grip on the
coming global crisis, which makes us all insecure.
The key outcomes of COP26 are now clear, and we must be clear-eyed in
our response to them. Any chance of keeping the rise in global temperatures
below 1.5 degrees Celsius is now lost. That means that whatever we do, by
the middle years of this century vulnerable states around the world will be
suffering severe and possibly politically fatal impacts from climate change.
This is a threat to the world in general and the United States in particular
that dwarfs rivalry with China, let alone Russia or Iran.
Even after the pledges made in Glasgow, it is predicted that by the end of
the century temperatures will rise by around 2.4 degrees Celsius. If this
occurs, it will lead to a real though unquantifiable possibility that climate
change may escape from human control altogether, pushing temperatures
up to a point where modern civilization will collapse.
Obviously therefore, the effort to reduce carbon emissions must continue
and as far as possible be intensified. This means among other things the
maintenance of existing nuclear power; huge efforts to develop new, cleaner
and safer forms of nuclear power; and (as the Biden administration has
emphasised) the prioritization of research into wholly new kinds of battery
that will allow the storage of excess electricity produced by wind and solar
power. For as we have seen in the United States and Europe over the past
year, the inability to store solar and wind electricity when the wind is not
blowing and the sun not shining remains a severe problem for alternative
energy.
This will not be enough. The lesson of Glasgow is that steep and rapid
reductions in the consumption of coal (the worst of the main carbon fuels in
terms of effect on the climate) by China and India are simply not going to
take place. Nor is it remotely likely that developed countries are going
rapidly to abandon natural gas.
Therefore, to my mind, we also need greatly intensified research and
development in the capture and sequestration of carbon from existing coal,
oil and gas-fired plants. We need to begin research focused on technologies
for geo-engineering in the Arctic; for example, the seeding of clouds to
increase their capacity to reflect sunlight back into space. Research and
development in these areas must take precedence over weapons
development — which even if the Biden administration’s proposed measures
are actually passed by Congress, will still be allocated three times as much
as climate-related research in future U.S. federal budgets.
Here an analogy with wartime approaches is useful. In both world wars,
countries on both sides poured money into the research and development
of multiple alternative weapons systems, in the full knowledge that most of
them would prove either flawed or completely useless; but the flawed ones
were still better than no weapons at all, and the abortive projects were
essential stepping stones to ones that worked.
In other words, I personally believe we must prioritize research and
development into technologies to combat climate change over every other
aspect of state expenditure; we must not be discouraged by failures; and if
we cannot produce the technology ourselves we must buy it from others, or
cooperate with them to produce it.
If we do all this, it is still possible for us to prevent local disasters from
becoming global catastrophe. We also however need to have the moral
courage to recognize that local disasters in especially vulnerable areas of
the world like Central America, western Africa and South Asia are now
inevitable, and that these will have extremely serious indirect consequences
for the United States and Europe as well. U.S. global strategy must be
designed to mitigate these disasters and their consequences for the West.
The danger comes not just from the direct impact of climate change in
countries that are already experiencing very high temperatures and
increasing water shortages. It is also that, as Pentagon reports have
emphasised, climate change can act as a “threat multiplier”, exacerbating a
range of existing social and political tensions to the point where states
collapse.
For the western democracies, the most dangerous result will be the threat of
greatly increased migration. As we can see from the history of the past
decade and the present crisis on the U.S.-Mexican and Polish-Belarusian
borders, the nativist reactions to mass-refugee flows can create
international crises and increase radicalization and polarization. The
domestic political consequences of mass refugee flows due to climate
change risk destroying western liberal democracy long before the direct
physical effects of climate change on the West become critical.
An enormous amount of attention has been paid by the U.S. (and to a lesser
extent European) media and security services to Russian manipulation of
Western politics and public opinion. We need to recognize however, both
that external manipulation pales in importance compared to the impact on
public opinion of actual developments in the real world; and that where such
manipulation enjoys any success it is only because sufficient sections of the
public are already radicalized.
Faced with this impending crisis, both the Left and the Right in Western
countries need to develop much stronger elements of realism and national
responsibility.
Americans and Europeans need to understand that Western aid to build
resilience against climate change in countries most endangered by climate
change is not some form of “charity”, nor is it required by justice. It is
required by the vital interests of Western states themselves. Western aid
needs to be radically reshaped and redirected to this end. In particular, the
United States needs to devote greatly increased assistance to Central
America — a neighboring region and the source of problems for the U.S.
that are likely to increase greatly as a result of climate change — rather than
supporting far-off geopolitical proxies like Ukraine and Georgia.
Finally, COP26 has demonstrated that as far as action against climate
change is concerned, the geopolitical and ideological battle lines being
drawn as part of the “new cold war” between the United States and China
(and supposedly between “democracy” and “authoritarianism”) are at best
irrelevant, at worse a disastrous distraction. The new U.S.-Chinese
statement on cooperation work against combat climate change is a good
step in the opposite direction — but it requires real content, and is at
permanent risk of being destroyed by a new deterioration in the security
relationship.
President Biden blamed the leaders of America’s rivals China and Russia for
not turning up in Glasgow; Western cold warriors try to blame China as
exclusively responsible for the continued mass consumption of coal; but in
the end it was India and China together that watered down a commitment to
abandon that fuel.
China generates the most emissions in the world by far, followed by the U.S.
and India. Ranked by carbon emissions per capita, however, especially
related to per capita income, America’s fellow “Anglo-Saxon” democracies
Australia and Canada, as well as U.S. partners Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are all
far worse polluters than China, India, or Brazil. When it comes to taking
adequate action to limit climate change, no major state or political system in
the world is innocent, and it is very unlikely that our descendants will see
much difference between them."
Written by
Anatol Lieven
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