Climate change fiction officially went mainstream in 2021. Climate change and its effects are defining the world we live in, and our time’s most astute observers and storytellers have their pens at the ready to describe this new reality. Fictional stories chronicling the circumstances of a changing Earth can range from the terrifyingly dystopian to the inspiringly optimistic. But what all forms and tales of climate fiction share is a call to action, either to avoid a dark future, or to strive for a better one. Here is Earth.Org’s selection of five unmissable climate fiction novels.

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Literature and fiction are time machines into the past, able to vividly capture the nuances and emotions from a far-removed point in time. Cold War-era global anxieties fuelled the brilliant dystopian fiction of the late 20th century; rapid technological and mechanical revolutions in the 19th century inspired the science fiction classics of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. We now have a deep and intimate knowledge of bygone eras because of the literature they incited, and for the generations to come, climate change fiction being written today will be their window into our present.

As we grapple with the confusing and disruptive changes of a warming world, all our anxieties, dreams and fears are being transcribed into gripping fictional tales of hope, despair and resilience. In the decades and centuries to come, it may well be that readers and lovers of books will be analysing the early 21st century’s works of literature to understand how humanity coped in such a pivotal time for our species. 

There are stories being written now that channel everything we fear the future could be, and everything we still hope for, and as climate change becomes an intractable public issue across the world, authors from every genre are turning their creative gaze towards climate change fiction. If one is looking for hope, inspiration, solutions or simply a new perspective on what a changing climate will mean for us and our planet, consider picking up one of these fascinating and thought-provoking books.

1. The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)

Kim Stanley Robinson is certainly one of modern science fiction’s forefathers, but his work has long addressed ecological and biological themes. The author’s interest in environmental issues has been evident throughout his nearly 40-year career, including the acclaimed Mars trilogy. But climate truly took centre stage in his 2020 outing: The Ministry for the Future.

Robinson’s latest book delves into the very topical need for a global agency whose mandate is to protect the rights of future generations of unborn people and animals. Our actions violate the planet’s livelihood today, but this damage is minimal relative to the suffering that unmitigated climate change and biodiversity loss will inflict on our descendants. Robinson details, chapter by chapter, how such a ministry would operate and what it would have to do to accomplish its goals. 

The tale of how the ministry operates centres around the experiences of two people from very different backgrounds struggling with very different challenges and traumas, but what truly sets The Ministry for the Future apart is its vivid, and often visceral, episodic descriptions of how humans have adapted to life in a warmer world. 

These are isolated story arcs, framed as fictional eyewitness accounts peppered throughout the book, and each is deeply human, representing the most hopeful and the desperate tendencies of humanity. One of these episodes, contained in the book’s very first chapter, may well be the most harrowing literary depiction of climate change ever put to paper, and sets the tone for a novel that does not hold back from the uncomfortable realities of what sacrifices our brighter future will incur.

2. Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy (2020) 

In this deeply personal and emotional book, McConaghy places us in a world that on the surface appears much the same as ours, but becomes progressively more unrecognisable as its details become clearer. In this dire future, a rampant global extinction event brought on by climate change and unrestrained human activity has left the Earth virtually devoid of animal life. Humans are still here, but we will soon be alone.

At its core, Migrations is a simple story about a woman battling internal demons and grief who embarks on a dangerous nautical voyage following the last known family of Arctic terns. These birds are known for covering exceptionally long distances, and are about to undertake what will probably be their last, epic journey from the Greenland interior to the icy shores of Antarctica. But it is McConaghy’s incredibly crafted characters and excellently paced narrative that make this book a deep meditation on what it means to be human in a world we’ve ruined.

Migrations is a gripping, powerful merging of climate change fiction and naturalist writing. While it can at times be a crushing read, it is also a hopeful introspection of what our responsibilities are towards the ecological world and to those species that also call the Earth their home. How much do we owe them, and would it still be home without them?

You might also like: 20 Best Books on Climate Change and Sustainability

3. Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson (2021)

Neal Stephenson is an author who has built his career on predicting the future. He is, after all, the man who first coined the term for 2021’s biggest tech buzzword: the metaverse, having come up with the idea almost 30 years ago in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash. Since then, he has gone on to become one of the world’s foremost science fiction novelists, with an emphasis on scientifically accurate, or at least conceivable, hard science fiction. In 2021, the acclaimed writer and futurist finally turned his attention towards the climate crisis with Termination Shock.

Like all Stephenson novels, Termination Shock directly and resolutely deals with the most advanced and prescient technology of the time. In this case, it is solar geoengineering, a hypothesised ‘last-resort’ technological fix to climate change that would involve artificially adjusting global temperatures by injecting aerosols into the atmosphere that would reflect some of the Sun’s rays. Geoengineering is an untested solution with a lot of possible unintended consequences, some of them potentially catastrophic, but what would happen if an eccentric Texas billionaire got a hold of such a technology and decided to use it anyway?

In a sweeping and exciting mesh of techno-thriller and climate fiction, Stephenson follows through with this plot line as only he can, and the result is an inventive and yet fully believable portrait of humanity’s ambition and hubris. Stephenson’s work is never short on thought-provoking big ideas, and Termination Shock is no exception.

4. The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi (2016)

The Colorado River basin supports a regional economy worth USD$1.4 trillion that, if it were its own country, would be the seventh largest in the world. So should the river suddenly dry up, the consequences would be extremely dire.

This is the central plot thread of Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2015 novel, The Water Knife, which details an intense militaristic outbreak in the US fuelled by the Colorado River’s dwindling state. This is an exciting climate thriller that has a little bit of everything, from exposing corporate greed to unequal land rights. But at the core of Bacigalupi’s story lies a very real cautionary tale of the consequences behind one of the most serious effects of climate change: water shortages.

Like many other freshwater sources across the world that have sustained civilisation for the entirety of human history, the Colorado River is dying, as warmer temperatures have devastated the mountaintop snowpacks that fed it for millenia. What will follow is anybody’s guess, but Bacigalupi shows us how terrifying the prospect of a proper water war might be, and why we need to dedicate our best efforts to avoid this very plausible scenario.

5. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler (1993)

When Parable of the Sower was published back in 1993, few people had any knowledge of climate change and what it would mean for us and our planet. And yet the late, great Octavia Butler was able to write a presciently aware book that still outshines much of the dystopian climate fiction novels we see today.

Set in the mid-2020s, Butler accurately depicts a ravaged world where climate change has aggravated water and food shortages, wealth inequality and social injustice. Within this world of terror and hostility, a young girl realises she was born with a rare gift: empathy, and the ability to share other people’s pain. What follows is a beautifully written journey through the American heartland, where our protagonists are constantly surrounded and threatened by the realities of a terrifying warmer world. And yet hope and the birth of a new vision for the future still emerges from simple acts of empathy that can heal even the most vitriolic wounds.

Parable of the Sower stands out for several reasons in addition to being one of the first climate  change fiction books in our literary canon. It depicts a world that may have been speculative 30 years ago and is now agonisingly close to becoming a reality, but it also depicts a world where human nature is inherently good and can overcome even the most ardent challenges.

The post 5 Great Climate Change Fiction Novels appeared first on Earth.Org.

2021 was undoubtedly a landmark year for the environment. From unprecedented climate and weather extremes to swathes of pledges involving everything from the automotive sector to private finance, it all culminated in a crucial set of talks in Glasgow at COP26. It is still too early to know whether 2021 was a turning point, but it is undeniable that the needle moved forward this year. For better or worse, taking action on climate change is now firmly at the centre of every industry and every part of our economy, and it is worth looking back at what 2021 represents – and what will come next.

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Action on climate change was somewhat dismissed in 2020, something that might have easily been repeated this year. As the world continues to grapple with the throes of a global pandemic that has impacted every segment of our society, the environmental crisis could have been swept under the rug. 

Fortunately, this didn’t happen. COP26, the UN climate summit which had already been rescheduled from its 2020 date to take place in person last November, went ahead as planned. And despite the overbearing concern over short-term risk mitigation in the face of a global health crisis, climate still shifted to become a leading concern for governments and interested parties worldwide.

This is probably the biggest trend coming out of 2021. Decarbonisation has suddenly become the buzzword of choice for every government and every component of the global economy. This has redirected huge sums of money to the shared goal of reducing economy-wide emissions, albeit in a somewhat chaotic and disorganised fashion.

At COP26, former director of the Bank of England Mark Carney announced that he was organising a coalition that would see $130 trillion in assets around the world decarbonised. BlackRock – the largest asset manager in the world – also announced that it had raised $673 million to finance projects tackling climate change in emerging markets worldwide. The momentum is in decarbonisation’s favour, as it becomes increasingly unappealing for businesses to delay ambitious action to reduce their emissions.

17 of the world’s biggest automotive companies have announced clear target dates for carbon neutrality or entirely phasing out their production of internal combustion engine cars, and that doesn’t even include the numerous start-ups that have been bringing groundbreaking EVs to market since Day 1. As of December 2021, 217 companies worldwide signed the Amazon-backed Climate Pledge, a mutual agreement to reach company-wide carbon neutrality by 2040. Signatories include corporate behemoth Procter & Gamble and tech giants such as HP and Salesforce.

But while all these commitments are promising and needed, they were made under the spectre of an impatient planet that has already begun to transform. If 2021 was the year of mobilised climate interest, then it was also the year that unheard climate extremes truly made us all take notice. 

Climate disasters have finally made landfall on the world of the rich, as northern Europe, the US, Canada and China all grappled with devastating extreme weather events. But in poorer countries who have the fewest resources to spend, climate-related impacts continued to hit harder and more frequently, as happened in Guatemala, Madagascar, Angola and many more. Nowhere in the world can events of this magnitude still be brushed away as an anomalous year. The pandemic itself may well have been a result of human impacts on the environment, and we are already beginning to plan how to lessen the effects of the next, inevitable one.

2021 may have been the year where we began to understand that this is our new normal, and we will have to learn how to adjust to it because climate change is already happening. Food security is at risk, seasons are becoming erratic and people are being left behind. As always, it is the world’s developing nations that are suffering the most. We may have finally reached the point where, whether you are rich or poor, a banker or a farmer, a climate scientist or a labourer, it is impossible to be blind to the awesome and terrifying convulsions of a planet and its weather systems that are spiralling out of control.

World leaders at the COP26 UN climate summit. Photo by: Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

You might also like: The COP Climate Conference Is Only A Part Of The Process, The Real Fight Goes On

Which is why the biggest challenges still remain ahead of us. We have the technology we need, and now the interest in using it is catching up, but we still need to implement it. The problem is that we now have to do so in the midst of global climate chaos that threatens to flood our homes one week and set them on fire the next.

One of the biggest looming challenges, for instance, is updating our electrical grids to handle the stresses that will inevitably accompany the energy transition to renewables. The actual transition is not too far off anymore, especially given the nosedive in costs of modern renewables and the impending chaos of oil prices that leave investors sleepless at nights. But a reliance on renewable energy means a reliance on battery storage capabilities and a largely decentralised electrical grid, which many countries currently lack. This is made even more complicated by the threat of natural disasters accelerated by climate change, which can wreck infrastructure and cause widespread disruption. Our energy systems themselves are not necessarily unreliable, but the warmer world we are entering is certainly unpredictable.

2021 may best be described as a transition year. It was a year in which everyone realised that big changes are about to happen, and we are past the point of no return for some irreversible shifts to our planet. But it was also a year in which people, governments and businesses finally decided that it was time to get serious.

The measures and new climate targets announced this year, especially those pledges made at COP26, would take us to 1.8C of warming this century under the best case scenario. This is, of course, highly ambitious and well above the 1.5C target set out in the Paris Agreement which would condemn many of the world’s most vulnerable countries to uninhabitability. But it is a far better trajectory than the 2.7C of warming we had before the COP26, which is itself much better than the 4C we were on track for a decade ago.

Taking action on climate change is a strange issue. It is a problem that takes time to fix, and doing so requires years’ worth of incremental progress that gradually brings us to a slightly better future. National governments and their policies may get all the attention, but incredible and inspiring progress is also being made on the ground from less visible local and city governments, as well as informal communities who realise that their intimate bonds with each other are under an existential threat from the effects of a changing climate.

It may be a frustrating process, but looking forward to 2022 and beyond, there is ample reason to hope. 2021 may be remembered as a transition year for how we think about this crisis and our place in the natural world. Perhaps 2021 was when we started to think about the future not in terms of five or ten years, but in 100 or 1,000, as we become aware that our actions today have consequences that will reverberate long past any individual lifetime. It may be the year we began to think about humanity’s ability to share our planet, care for its wellbeing and recognise that our health and prosperity is contingent on our home’s ability to provide.

We have our goals and ways to take action on climate change. Continuing to pressure our governments, electing politicians who care about these issues, supporting the activists, thinkers and organisations who are leading movements for change and understanding how we as individuals can strive for a life that is more synergistic with the natural world. This is what we must do, and what we can do.

It serves no purpose to feel despair and dejection. There is always a reason to strive for a little bit more and a little bit better. Change and progress are always happening, and if we recognise the value of working collectively and compassionately to adapt in a changing world, there is no reason we cannot thrive in it.

Until next year.

Featured image by: Wikimedia Commons

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What would 2C of global warming actually mean for us? Why is the climate system so fragile? Why is biodiversity so valuable to humans? Environmental science can be very complicated, but a solid understanding of its basics can help put into perspective how climate change affects us, how serious it is, and what can be done about it. Here is our selection of the seven best, must-read and accessible books on environmental science.

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Best Books on Environmental Science

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)

There have been five mass extinction events throughout the history of life on Earth. Each time, biodiversity experienced a steep nosedive, wiping out abnormal amounts of species from the face of the planet. History’s major extinction events happened because of natural events like shifts in the Earth’s climate or incidents like asteroid strikes, but since humans began exercising our heavy grip on the planet, we may have inadvertently kicked off the sixth of these mass extinction events.

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning work and arguably one of the best books on environmental science, Elizabeth Kolbert reports from the front line of biodiversity disappearance and ecological loss. By 2050, climate change may have driven the extinction of up to half of the world’s species, a cataclysmic event initiated entirely by human development. Deforestation, sea level rise and most of all, greenhouse gas emissions are driving this mass extinction. What do we stand to lose? And what can we do to slow the pace of extinction?

Writing with an unmatched entertaining and ironic voice, Kolbert also taps into the complex emotions that inevitably accompany witnessing such a tragedy, and asks the biggest question that is increasingly difficult to answer. If this extinction comes to pass, then that will surely be the firmest imprint humanity could make on our planet. Are we okay with that being our most lasting legacy?

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, by James Lovelock (1979)

Authored by one of the world’s first true academic environmentalists, Gaia remains a highly influential book to this day and a topic of fervent debate amongst scientists and non-scientists alike. This book is the first to articulate and popularise the Gaia hypothesis, formulated by Lovelock himself, which suggests that all the living organisms on the planet interact with their surrounding environment to form a self-regulating system. Consequently, this leads to climactic and biochemical conditions that make life on Earth possible at all. Life on Earth essentially functions as a single organism, a complex and semi-sentient being that is inherently fragile.

Written for non-scientists, Gaia changed conventional opinions on how organic matter interacts with the environment. Lovelock dissects the compelling evidence that makes the Gaia hypothesis credible, as well as making several predictions that have since proven true. Gaia presents readers the science that proves the Earth is a living, complex, and fragile thing, and makes an impassioned case for its protection.

Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency, by Mark Lynas (2020)

Basing his work on countless academic papers and the latest climate science, Mark Lynas succinctly describes what our world will look like for each degree of warming that we encounter.

Each chapter in his book adds another degree of warming, and Lynas breaks down this world by the diverse set of natural disasters, human impacts and erratic climate conditions that will accompany a warmer planet. From 1C of warming, the world we live in right now, right up to a hellish 6C world, Lynas escalates the tension and the consequences of a world that becomes mountingly unliveable. 

Lynas makes it clear that we can still avoid these future consequences as long as we take action now, and outlines the key changes we have to make if we want to stand a chance of keeping temperature rise at manageable levels. If you are looking for a book that breaks down the latest climate science on what we should expect from global warming, this one’s for you.

For Earth.Org’s review of Our Final Warning, click here.

Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, by Edward O. Wilson (2016)

A seminal book by one of the world’s greatest biologists and multiple Pulitzer Prize winner, Half-Earth essentially proposes that we set aside half of the Earth’s surface as a human-free reserve dedicated to preserving biodiversity. While that may sound like a laughable suggestion, Wilson draws on decades of research and experience to explain why, exactly, such an initiative would be successful. 

What Wilson sets out is not only a realistic plan to protect global biodiversity, it is perhaps the best explainer for why we need to do this. Thriving biodiversity is essential to a thriving human civilisation, and avoiding biological extinction is critical if we want to avoid our own. Wilson provides a detailed scientific underpinning for his proposal, while also impassionately calling for the preservation of the natural world, making this our pick for one of the best books on environmental science. 

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have & the Breakthroughs We Need, by Bill Gates (2021)

Tackling climate change requires changes in our policies, behaviours and our economies. The future on the other side of this transition is bright, but how do we get there? What are the technologies and instruments we need to bring us into the future?

These are the questions tech godfather Bill Gates attempts to answer in this book. A man passionate about climate solutions and the promise of innovation, Gates delves into the challenges we face, and what role technology can play in averting them. With valuable input from fields as disparate as chemistry, physics, engineering and politics, this is an authoritative book, one that answers many questions its audience will have on how exactly these new technologies work.

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman (2007)

Weisman’s The World Without Us is largely a thought experiment. It asks the question as to what the world would look like if we, humans, suddenly disappeared from it. What would happen to nature? To our cities? To all the things we left behind?

The depth of humanity’s encroachment upon nature is hard to really imagine. We have built so much, and we have left footprints that will stay for generations to come. To really put into perspective how much human activity has affected the natural world, The World Without Us takes a step back and looks at how the world would react to our disappearance. How long would it take for nature to reclaim our cities? How will surviving species fare, and eventually evolve? And what will be the most lasting legacies of humanity on this planet?

Steeped in a scientific understanding of the power of the natural world and the extent of humanity’s impact, The World Without Us creates a surreal and fantastical world to present what humanity’s relationship with nature really means.

Walden, by Henry David Thoreau (1854)

Written in the 1850s, it may come as a surprise to see Thoreau’s famed work appear on a list of best books on environmental science. When Thoreau wrote this book, there was no knowledge of climate change, accelerated biodiversity loss and future scenarios of global warming. This is an introspective work composed during a transformative time, which highlights humanity’s affinity for the natural world and the intersection between science and pure poetry.

Written in Thoreau’s inimitable transcendentalist style, Walden is at its core a simple reflection on living in nature, at a time when the rest of the world was moving en masse to densely populated cities for the first time. On its surface, Walden is about finding meaning, purpose and independence, framed in an autobiographical story of Thoreau living in quiet solitude in the woodlands by Walden Pond in rural Massachusetts for two years. 

While Walden dabbles in the philosophy of simplicity, interlinked throughout the story is a smart and at times groundbreaking ecological analysis. Thoreau performed and articulated a detailed and poetic scientific examination of plant and animal life, accurately describing the behaviour of water bodies and understanding how seasons influenced the local climate and ecology. Walden is seminal for the time it was written in, and how it masterfully interlinked science with poetry and human emotion. It is one of the first, and best, books that artfully describe how humans can live sustainably with nature, and how the two can help each other thrive.

The post 7 Great Books on Environmental Science appeared first on Earth.Org.

COP26 is in the books, and the way the summit wrapped up has attracted as much condemnation as praise. But regardless of how the climate conference ended, the talks were an instrumental part of an ongoing and complicated process that does move the needle forward. We can be disappointed by COP26, but it is crucial for everyone to remember that it is only a small part of a process that is far from over.

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It is easy to feel short-changed by the way COP26 turned out. After last-minute objections by major emitters, the Glasgow Climate Pact ended up being considerably watered-down and small but important language was revised. And despite a slew of new commitments, pledges and targets, it is still hard not to be skeptical that these will actually be respected.

But whether COP26 should be considered a success or not, saying that no progress was made is a difficult argument to back up. There are several positive takeaways from this year’s edition of COP, and while many were hoping for more, we are undoubtedly in a better position now than before the summit took place. 

Temperature rise projections have also been adjusted, and now indicate that we are on track for 2.7C of warming, and as low as 1.8C depending on how aggressively we reach to meet our targets. This is still way higher than our definitive goal to keep temperature rise below 1.5C, but is far better than the 4 to 6C rise we were on track for a decade ago. 

Warming projections based on November 2021 announcements and stated targets; Source: Climate Action Tracker; 2021.

It may be hard to believe, but the COP26 climate conference more or less did its job. Could it have done more? Probably yes. Was COP26 supposed to provide the entire world with a trajectory to keep temperature rise below 1.5C? No, but we should never have expected that.

It is important to remember what COP represents in our global efforts to tackle climate change. The UN’s annual conference of parties, usually referred to with its acronym as COP, brings 197 countries together to talk, share accomplishments and encourage one another to raise targets. COP is an exercise in international compromise, and it is impossible to reach a compromise without someone being disappointed. 

There are several ways to put COP’s role into a greater context that can not only make us feel better about Glasgow’s outcome, but also more confident about the process’s future. The bottom line is that COP is all about incremental progress and moving the needle forward. COP26 was largely successful in this, but the work is far from over.

Building on the Paris Agreement

At COP26, and probably at every other COP for the foreseeable future, delegates are not expected to come up with a new overarching goal. We already have it: keep temperature rise well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, and pursue best efforts to remain below 1.5C.

This goal was established six years ago, at COP21 in Paris. This is our target if we want to protect the world’s most vulnerable regions from the devastating effects of accelerated climate disruption, and the cascading feedback loops that will impact the entire world if temperatures continue to rise.

From here on out, every COP climate conference is supposed to be putting more meat and substance on the framework established in Paris. Delegates are supposed to gather, present what their country is doing to meet the Paris goals and pressure laggards into doing more. All this comes together when agreements are drafted and incorporated into the framework Paris gave us.

The additions that the Glasgow Climate Pact made to the Paris Agreement are a definite improvement. For a number of unknowable reasons, the term ‘fossil fuels’ was never included into the text of the Paris Agreement, despite their being the single largest contributor to global warming. And while the last-minute change to ‘phase-down’ coal instead of ‘phase-out’ was certainly discouraging, this was the very first time that fossil fuels have been specifically mentioned in a COP document, in this case coal.

So if the goal of the Glasgow Climate Pact was to flesh out the Paris Agreement in more concrete terms, then it was more or less successful. After six years of deliberations, we now have an idea of what the global carbon market first proposed in Paris will look like. What was once an abstract proposal is now a tangible set of rules for countries to follow. This could unlock trillions of dollars in tradable carbon credits that will incentivise innovations in carbon capture and storage technology, as well as finance adaptation efforts in the developing world.

Glasgow’s global methane treaty, anti-deforestation pledge and independent pacts to phase out fossil fuels all build on the foundations of Paris, and that is largely what a climate conference is for. It is a forum where these agreements can be hashed out, but the actual policies to make these targets a reality were never going to be announced, much less enacted, in Glasgow.

COP’s Role To Play

COP is organised by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), but as a transnational entity, the UNFCCC does not really have the power to do much of anything. That power remains pretty much exclusively with nations, subnational governments and the private sector. As a body, the UNFCCC convenes representatives and creates a structure that publicises national goals.

This was always going to be the purpose of COP. The UNFCCC realised early on in its history that it did not have much power to actually make change happen, and the best it could do was make it as easy and compelling as possible for nations to individually put their best efforts into mitigating climate change.

Take the global methane pledge for instance, to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030. This doesn’t mean that every signatory country has to reduce their methane emissions by 30%, but they have to enact domestic targets that are in line with a global 30% reduction goal.

The pace at which Australia phases out its methane emissions won’t be determined by what its diplomat said in Glasgow. It will depend on local politics and trends in Australia, what makes economic sense and what the political priorities are. Because this is a global, multilateral goal, there is no explicit requirement or enforcement mechanism for individual countries to take any action to a specfic degree. That comes later, but COP plays no part in the domestic politics that actually see these goals realised.

The UNFCCC and COP are an important part of the process, but neither is the ultimate cure to the climate crisis. COP’s value is that it takes a snapshot of every country in the world, and of how they’re doing. Rich and poor, developed and developing, fossil fuel-dependent and transitioning. Everyone has a seat, and everyone is measured up against one another. 

The utility of this process is that it provides transparency and peer pressure, which can be effective in moving governments towards action. COP relies on incremental progress: gradually shifting baselines, making more ambitious policies progressively normalised and bringing more actors to the table. 

Unilateral Responses to COP

But incremental progress can only take us so far when the window of opportunity we have to mitigate climate change is so small. COP is a multilateral process, and like all multilateral processes, it requires compromise, extensive deliberations and outcomes that are rarely ideal for everyone involved. While multilateralism can certainly be useful, unilateral policies have a role to play as well.

The EU’s proposed carbon border adjustment tax is a perfect example. The scheme, slated to kick off its transitional phase in 2023, will impose levies on imports into the EU that are particularly emission-intensive. A carbon border tax is a departure from most carbon pricing models, which tend to only affect domestic industry, and instead targets the ways other countries and companies operating abroad do their business. The EU, an entity with relatively ambitious climate policies and among the most credible contenders to the title of global climate leader, can impose this tax to ensure that other countries are complying with international emissions standards.

Measures such as a carbon border tax are decidedly anti-COP, in that they are less diplomatic and represent more forceful action from major actors to incentivise other countries to ramp up their ambitions, but we will probably be seeing much more of these kinds of policies in the future.

The world as a whole is trending away from fossil fuels. The commitments made by the private sector at the COP26 climate conference, including a pledge to mobilise over USD$100 trillion to finance the global energy transition, put independent and private actors in the driving seat. Philanthropists and other private funders also came through with big promises to ramp up their financing efforts. What this shows is that there is a whole lot of willpower to make things happen, and governments and multilateral fora do not have to be an obstacle to that.

Mark Carney, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Finance Adviser for COP26, poses with world finance ministers; Source: Christopher Furlong /Getty Images; 2021.

National governments are important, but smaller entities also play a big role, arguably bigger. City and state-level governments have a tremendous impact setting local environmental policies that may not make international headlines, but are nonetheless critical, given that cities account for up to 76% of the world’s energy-related CO2 emissions. Local governments can independently decide to make their cities greener, commission more renewable energy projects, expand public transportation initiatives and retrofit aging infrastructure that contributes to inefficient energy use. These are not policies that happen because of COP, they happen independently of it.

What national governments do is very important, but it is not even close to the whole story. So when we see diplomats make half-hearted commitments at summits like COP, we need to keep in mind that there is so much more progress happening that we can’t even see. Climate truly is everything, it involves every corner of our governments and our economies, but what that also means is that many of our responses to climate change are invisible, and certainly not on display at COP. 

High expectations and high disappointment is in the nature of events like the COP climate conference, but we need to remember what COP is really about. It is a spotlight on a world that is – slowly but with growing expediency – moving towards progress in the midst of an epic and existential challenge. 

We cannot be complacent, as there is still so much work to be done, but the needle is inching forward in ways that we cannot always see. COP has its value, but it is far from the only thing we have going for us, and unilateral and independent action is just as, if not more important.

The post The COP Climate Conference Is Only A Part Of The Process, The Real Fight Goes On appeared first on Earth.Org.

In a press release this week, Apple announced that it would make components to repair its devices available to individual consumers, indicating the tech giant’s openness to joining the right to repair movement. Apple’s move could bring down the costs of fixing its devices, extend the lifespan of consumer electronics and reduce global electronic waste.

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Apple is finally taking its first steps towards joining the right to repair movement, which advocates for tech manufacturers to give consumers the right to repair their own devices, rather than forcing them to buy new ones. The high cost of fixing electronic devices, and the inability to do so independently, makes it much more convenient to simply throw away a damaged phone or computer and buy a new one instead. This has contributed to the planet’s ongoing e-waste (electronic waste) crisis.

We generated over 57 million tonnes of e-waste in 2021, weighing in heavier than the Great Wall of China, the heaviest man-made object on Earth. E-waste officially became the world’s fastest-growing waste stream in 2020, and less than 20% of that waste is being recycled. For each tonne of un-recycled e-waste, we release around two tonnes of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.

Apple has historically been opposed to right to repair, citing potential security concerns for consumers. Tech corporations including Apple, Amazon and Google have spent years obstructing legislation that would make it easier for consumers to independently fix their own devices. Apple’s U-turn on right to repair comes as some competitors have promised to make their products easier for individual users to fix, as Microsoft did last October.

The service will be available in early 2022 for new iPhones, and will soon expand to also cover new Apple computers as well. The program will at first only be available in the US, but Apple intends to bring it to other countries throughout the course of 2022. The components consumers can purchase are mostly for trivial repairs, initially limited to replacing screens, batteries and cameras, but can still lead to massive savings.

Consumers have so far been forced to go to Apple directly if their device is damaged, but this is hardly a sound financial option. For out-of-warranty iPhones that have been released in the past few years, repair costs for a simple cracked back glass can be as high as USD$599, half the price of a new phone. Consumers have been able to go to third-party providers who can provide more cost-competitive services, but Apple has been making this increasingly difficult. Many iPhone repairs can now only be authenticated with Apple’s software tools, which are not available to the public. The providers who do have authorisation to use these tools often charge similar prices that an Apple store service would. Because of these high costs, consumers often prefer to simply buy a new device.

This model might be good for Apple’s year-end returns, but it is incredibly harmful to the environment. In a recent survey in the UK, 30% of consumers reported to throw away their phones mainly because they couldn’t fix them themselves or because the cost of having it done professionally was too high.

If Apple can make the components for its devices affordable, it could have a massive influence on resolving the e-waste crisis. Being able to buy the components means that consumers can either do the repairs themselves, or bring them to someone else who can. Fixing your old smartphone and prolonging its lifespan instead of discarding it is one of the most impactful actions individuals can take to help fight climate change. With Apple joining the right to repair movement, the company makes it much more convenient for consumers to do just that and hold on to their devices for longer.

Apple and Microsoft’s openness to right to repair comes after the Biden administration began cracking down on the monopolistic tendencies of technology giants to promote further competition in the tech sphere. Back July, the US Federal Trade Commission voted unanimously for technology companies to loosen restrictions on components, accelerating the transition of the tech industry towards right to repair. With this big announcement from Apple, it is likely that we will see right to repair become the norm across the industry over the next few years, significantly alleviating the ongoing e-waste crisis.

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The 26th annual UN climate talks, or COP26, concluded this past weekend in Glasgow, Scotland after a postponed deadline for the summit’s conclusion and several sleepless all-nighters for delegates. A deal was struck on Saturday November 13 that reiterates and intensifies global efforts to fight climate change, establishes rules for a global carbon market and urges wealthy nations to commit more money to international climate finance. But despite the positive takeaways, the conference was unable to realise all of its goals. Weighing its successes against its failures, how will the COP26 summit be remembered?

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COP26: A Recap

The COP26 summit was labelled the most pivotal and influential climate talks in a decade that will in all likelihood prove crucial to reducing global emissions and tackling climate change. As per the terms of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015, world leaders were expected to submit updated ambitions and plans at COP26 to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and set out clearer pathways to large-scale emissions reductions by 2030 and net-zero by mid-century. Glasgow essentially intended to put meat on the framework built in Paris.

COP26 took place at a consequential time when many governments were rolling out economic recovery plans as they emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, with a remarkable window of opportunity to invest in clean energy projects and energy transitions. 2020 was also when the US returned to the global conversation on climate after replacing a climate-denying president with one who promised to put climate at the centre of his agenda. The US’s promise to engage with the rest of the world on climate, even with perennial adversary China, made many hopeful in the buildup to the COP26 summit.

So did its promises bear fruit? Was COP26 the life-saving panacea that the world’s most vulnerable countries needed? Did we just fix climate change?

No, we didn’t. The COP26 summit was a combination of some breakthroughs and, as President for COP26 Alok Sharma put it, ‘deep disappointments.’ The climate summit failed to achieve all its targets, but it did represent some significant progress from the international community – much like every other COP. 

Alok Sharma at the COP26 summit/Source: Getty Images

Pledges and promises were abound in Glasgow, but we frankly still have no idea if these will translate into actual policies, and perhaps most importantly, whether or not this will happen in time. This has been the story for the entirety of COP’s history, so none of this should come as a surprise. 

What the COP26 summit did do positively was to highlight the ways that we can get ourselves out of this climate crisis mess, providing pretty clear and convenient pathways for nations to follow and work together towards common goals, if they are inclined to do so. The pathways are there, and not only do they lead to a better future, they can still be vastly improved upon at future COPs. Even though we still have a long way to go, we also still have time, although vanishingly less of it each time one of these conferences rolls around.

Where Did We Win?

It is important to remember that, at this point, the UN climate conferences are pretty much only intended to amplify, improve and refine the frameworks put in place six years ago at COP21 in Paris. We know what it is we have to do, which is to keep average global temperature rise well below 2C, and ideally below 1.5C. So from here on out, COP summits are forums to create better rules, establish monitoring and verification procedures, clarify who should be financing how much in global adaptation to climate change and periodically update emissions reduction targets. COP is a periodic magnifying lens that shows the world how different countries are doing. By this metric, COP26 was more or less successful, although not to the extent that many had hoped for.

The COP26 summit started off with an auspicious bang. On November 1, Day 1 of the COP summit, India announced an unexpected and highly consequential 2070 net-zero emissions target, surprising many who had viewed India as a stubborn outlier in the net-zero announcements game that has taken place over the past year. 

On Day 2, 105 countries signed on to the Global Methane Pledge to collectively reduce methane emissions 30% by 2030, a target that, if successful, would curb global warming by at least 0.2C by 2050. On the same day, over one hundred countries backed a declaration to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030, including Brazil, where the government has long been unapologetic about its destructive presence in the Amazon.

Day 4 saw a much-needed announcement by 40 countries pledging to phase out coal use, the dirtiest fossil fuel, although the US, China, India and Australia were notably absent from this pledge. The announcement prompted Sharma to triumphantly declare that, “the end of coal is in sight.”

Rules were put in place to finally resolve Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, a framework for a global carbon market that has been six years in the making. While some activists have called the rules not restrictive enough, a global carbon market is the first step towards unlocking trillions of dollars worth of investments into clean energy, green technologies and financing resilience and adaptation measures in the developing world. It will also help regulate the growing voluntary carbon offset market, which if left untamed, would become a much bigger problem.

The private sector also stepped up in a noteworthy way, and although the feasibility of the UK’s former central banker Mark Carney’s plan to decarbonise USD$130 trillion in assets across the world is debatable, it is undeniable that the financial sector is looking to move away from carbon. Some of the largest financial institutions and asset managers in the world have taken tangible action, often more so than governments, in committing funds to decarbonisation and energy transitions. BlackRock – the largest asset manager in the world – announced on Day 2 that it had raised $673 million to finance projects tackling climate change in emerging markets worldwide.

Combined, these measures would take us to 1.8C of warming this century. This is of course contingent on countries actually delivering on their promises, and even the new projection is above the 1.5C target set out in the Paris Agreement, and would condemn many of the world’s most vulnerable countries to uninhabitability, but is a far better trajectory than the 2.7C of warming we had before the COP26 summit kicked off.  

You might also like: Climate Debt and Justice: How Much Do We Really Owe?

Where Did We Lose?

These are all great targets to have, but at the moment they are just that: targets. COP26 kicked off with every major world leader and recognisable political face making grand announcements, pledging that their country will respond to the urgency of the climate crisis. But most world leaders left Glasgow after Day 2, leaving the actual deliberations and accord-making to their ministers, diplomats, technocrats and bored ex-presidents. All the hard work, in other words.

It is easy to make a pledge, with perhaps a well-worded public statement and a photogenic image of leaders shaking hands. It is very different to actually implement the policies that will see that pledge accomplished.

The second half of COP26 was low on attractive policy and pledge announcements, heavy on compromise and overshadowed by a voracious group of activists at the doors of Glasgow’s Scottish Event Campus clamouring for more decisive action. The activists, predominantly young and female and in stark opposition to the old and male average making the decisions on the other side of the door, were unimpressed with the final resolutions of COP26.

Shortly after the conclusion of the talks and the signing of the Glasgow Climate Pact on Saturday, climate activist and sometimes figurehead Greta Thunberg tweeted: “The #COP26 is over. Here’s a brief summary: Blah, blah, blah. But the real work continues outside these halls. And we will never give up, ever.”

Blah, blah, blah. It has become a slogan of sorts for those unimpressed with the credibility of the current slew of climate pledges. Even UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson used it. And Johnson, like Greta and countless others, have good reason to be unimpressed.

On the eve of the Glasgow talks’ conclusion, everything seemed to be aligned perfectly. Agreements had been struck and delegates from 197 countries seemed happy. Everyone was getting ready to board their flights and return home, content that best efforts had been made to put the world on a legitimate pathway towards ambitious emissions reduction goals.

It didn’t last long.

Last-minute objections by China and India forced Alok Sharma to revise the pact’s draft in small but important ways. Instead of an agreement to fully ‘phase out’ coal, we were left with a discouragingly vague goal to ‘phase down’ the fossil fuel, gradually lessening our dependence on it but stopping well short of cutting it out of our lives entirely. The current plan to phase down coal does not incorporate any concrete deadline, and does not include any specific enforcing mechanism to hold countries accountable.

Objections to the final draft also requested scaling back ambitions on eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, and expressed disagreement over the language used, with India stating that the draft “lacked balance.”

The murmurs of dissent had been brewing all week. Indonesia, the fifth largest emitter in the world, unexpectedly rescinded its commitment to Day 2’s anti-deforestation pledge, calling it “unfair.” Similarly, many of the pledges agreed upon at the summit remain purposefully vague, open to interpretation and lacking deadlines, enforcement mechanisms or both.

When China and India expressed their dissent, the representatives of several low-lying island nations, whose residents are responsible for a minute fraction of global emissions over time and yet stand on the front lines of climate catastrophe, were not happy. But despite objections, anger and tension, every country agreed to the objections and dutifully revised the package. One by one, the world’s most vulnerable nations agreed to a scaled-back, watered-down version of the pact. 

A compromise was reached, and a deal was signed. For many, this was a sign of progress. “Glasgow has delivered a strong message of hope,” Seve Paeniu, climate envoy for Tuvalu commented on Saturday. As he held his phone with a picture of his grandchildren in the air, he continued: “I will now be able to tell them that Glasgow has made a promise to secure them their future.”

Not everyone was as optimistic. Alok Sharma, the organiser of the event who has spent months travelling across the globe knocking our preliminary deals and smoothing out tensions, felt the need to apologise at the conclusion of the talks. “I am deeply sorry. I understand the deep disappointment,” Sharma said in an emotional moment, taking a second to regain his composure before concluding: “but as you have noted, it is also vital that we protect this package.” 

The agreement reached at the conclusion of COP26 is not ideal, but it is progress. And after all of it, the goal remains the same as it did two weeks ago. Now, it is imperative to enact the policies that can make pledges a reality, and continue ratcheting up the world’s ambitions. 

Our Climate Outlook

Our new climate outlook is the same as our old one: to meet the Paris Agreement goals. How do we ensure that the next year (or five, or ten), are not more blah, blah, blah? This is the big question countries will have to face in the coming months and beyond.

A disconcerting aspect about COP26 was the sheer number of announcements and updated pledges that were delayed to COP27, to be held November 2022 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. India was the only major emitter to produce a revised commitment to reduce emissions at COP26, despite the Paris Agreement calling for revised pledges to be submitted in Glasgow. In light of this, revised pledges will be discussed extensively next year and in 2023. 

Starting in 2022, it is expected that countries will finally be able to pay up the promised $100 billion in international climate finance a year to accelerate the developing world’s transition to decarbonised economies and adaptation to climate change. This commitment will go a long way towards paying off the industrialised world’s climate debt, and if the international carbon market agreed upon at COP26 proves successful, even more aid money could be unlocked.

The COP26 summit has paved a roadmap towards more concerted and ambitious plans to be announced next year. That may sound discouraging, like kicking a can slightly further down the road while the road is literally melting, but it doesn’t have to be, since committed countries can spend more time leveraging their neighbours to be more ambitious. “COP27 starts now,” UN Secretary General António Guterres said in his closing remarks.

But while ramping up ambition over the next year is all well and good, it must be acknowledged that time is running out to take the most difficult measures to tackle climate change. The methane pledge reduction target, for instance, was not a difficult deal to get over the line. Unlike carbon dioxide, which needs to be released into the atmosphere in order to have any economic benefit, methane leaks are unintentional and count as a loss in owners’ books. Additionally, there is a thriving market to be had around capturing methane leaks, as the gas can then be easily resold for a profit.

To be clear, we need to reduce our methane emissions, which can be over 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year timescale, but it is also the low-hanging fruit of the climate crisis. It is definitely an important part of our response, but does not really require much of a sacrifice on our end. Phasing out fossil fuels, consigning coal to history, eliminating inefficient subsidies and paying off our climate debt to the world’s most vulnerable regions are the hardest and most important steps to take.

All these challenges, these existential threats, will require coordinated action to handle. The only way to make the voluntary mechanisms we have in place now work is enforcement through accountability. Knowing your country isn’t doing enough while your rival is meeting expectations will help ratchet up international ambitions. And if the global carbon market concept develops, along with more unilateral approaches such as the EU’s carbon border adjustment tax and a similar scheme proposed in the US, then we might see a clear financial incentive emerge to treat carbon as an undesirable asset as long as it is in the atmosphere, so that removing it will actually turn a profit.

The arguable surprise of the conference was the joint US-China announcement that both countries would work together to reduce emissions over the next ten years in line with the 1.5C temperature rise goal. The joint statement addressed climate change as an ‘existential threat,’ underlining the severity of the crisis. US-China relations are at a historical low point, but if climate is enough to bring both to the table, perhaps successful climate diplomacy is not such a far-fetched idea after all.

So, was COP26 a failure? It was definitely less than what many had hoped for, but it probably did its job. We were never going to fix the climate in Glasgow but we have better roadmaps now, targets more conducive to more ambitious goals and perhaps most importantly, a world more or less united in the belief that we need to tackle this problem, and we need to do it soon. Like Greta said, the real changes were never going to happen in the halls of COP, but that does not diminish the fact that these summits are an important part of that process.

Featured image by: Tim Dennell/Flickr

The post Did the COP26 Summit Succeed Or Fail? appeared first on Earth.Org.

The 2021 Ecological Threat Report by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) has analysed the correlation between ecological threats, resilience and peace. The main finding is that the most vulnerable countries in the world, home to 1.26 billion people across 30 countries, are suffering from both extreme ecological risk and low levels of resilience.

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The 2021 Ecological Threat Report, released October 7th 2021, is the second edition of an annual report published by the IEP, a global think tank specialised in quantifying the economic costs of violence and informing the global conversation on peace. 

The report looked at 178 independent states and territories, covering 99.9% of the world’s population.  Countries were assessed by their exposure to ecological risks and their resilience. The ETR determines which countries are facing the most severe threats and have the lowest ability to cope. In an interview with Earth.Org, IEP founder Steve Killelea explains that the Ecological Threat Report “explores the relationship between ecological shocks and conflict, and what we find is that interconnection is really quite profound.”

The ecological threats addressed in the report include food risk, water risk, rapid population growth, temperature anomalies and natural disasters. It was found that the countries most vulnerable to these threats and with the lowest level of socio-economic resilience were the most likely to descend into further instability and ecological threat-related conflict.

Ecological degradation can therefore act as a primary driver of conflict, and can impede countries from reaching a state of Positive Peace, a vision of peace that includes attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies, rather than the simple absence of fear or violence.

Findings of the Report

The main findings from the report include:

• The most vulnerable countries in the world are concentrated in three pockets: The Sahel-Horn belt in Sub-Saharan Africa from Mauritania to Somalia; the Southern African belt from Angola to Madagascar; and the Middle East and Central Asian belt from Syria to Pakistan
• 11 of the 15 countries with the worst environmental threat scores are classified as being in conflict. The other four are considered at high risk of substantial falls in peace, and the country with the lowest score is Afghanistan, highlighting the connection between ecological threats and conflict.
• By 2050, half of the world’s population will live in the 40 least peaceful countries, an increase of 1.3 billion people from 2020 levels.
• Global food insecurity has increased by 44% since 2014, affecting 30.4% of the world’s population in 2020, and is projected to rise further.

The countries most vulnerable to ecological risks are located in hotspots that will see threats grow tremendously over the upcoming decades. For instance, 11 countries, all in Sub-Saharan Africa, are expected to double their populations between 2021 and 2050, placing significant stress on resource availability in the region. Global demand for food is also expected to increase by 50% by 2050, and by 2040 over 5.4 billion people will live in countries with extreme water stress.

The Ecological Threat Report is relatively unique in the way it discusses climate change in terms of its ecological threats. Climate change, while a pressing concern, does not pose the highest risk to vulnerable countries now. It is these direct ecological threats that need to be addressed in the more immediate term. Climate change is and will, however, act as an amplifier of these aforementioned ecological threats, accelerating their scale and aggravating their impact as global temperatures rise.

The report emphasises the link between ecological degradation and conflict, comparing it to a vicious and self-reinforcing cycle wherein degradation of resources leads to conflict, and the ensuing conflict leads to further resource degradation. The only way to break this cycle is to build socio-economic resilience and adaptability to improve resource management and encourage economic growth.

Policy Recommendations

The report puts forward several policy recommendations to alleviate stresses and potentially break this cycle for good. These include building more integrated developmental agencies that combine all these ecological threats in their considerations of strategies in high-risk areas. This would make organisations more agile, simplified and efficient in carrying out chains of command and managing resources. 

Another proposed solution is to empower local communities to lead their own development and security-building initiatives. This includes starting businesses and taking private, local ownership of supply chains and resources. The report finds that exceptional success has been had where communities leveraged their strong local ties to build business cooperatives which can pool resources and minimise individual costs.

The report also sees high promise where businesses are founded that engage in purposefully positive ecological investments. These businesses are best run by local communities and are small in scale, emphasising on local knowledge and traditional resource management techniques. 

The developmental challenges created by the vicious cycle between ecological degradation and conflict emerge from systemic dynamics, but right now we are not applying the right solutions. “A lot of these problems are systemic in nature, but we don’t go about using systemic solutions.” Steve told us, going on to say that, “to get a full understanding of the problem, you need a systemic perspective, and we don’t do enough of that at the moment.”

Building societal resilience, and ensuring that local communities are enabled to build and sustain their own profitable and ecologically positive economies, are all systemic solutions. Current developmental and international strategies are not ideally equipped to do so, but more integrated and interdisciplinary agencies could provide more responses for vulnerable countries facing increasingly complex sets of ecological threats.

The post Ecological Threat Report 2021: Summary & Key Findings appeared first on Earth.Org.

As the decade’s most pivotal climate talks are underway this week in Glasgow, Scotland at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), climate financing will inevitably be one of the main talking points. The industrialised world has pledged to submit financial assistance to developing nations in order to accelerate the global transition towards decarbonisation and net-zero, but progress has so far been minimal. As climate justice and equality become bigger and bigger ideas, it is worth asking how we got here. What does the developed world owe, and how do we make sure that the world’s wealthy few fulfil their climate debt?

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At the UN’s 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, the industrialised world reached an agreement to provide international financial support, or climate finance, to help poorer countries adapt to climate change. The pledge ensured that the most vulnerable nations to climate change would have access to adequate resources in the short and long term to minimise global temperature rise’s disastrous effects on the developing world.

Wealthy nations eventually pledged to direct USD$100 billion a year towards adaptation and resilience in the developing world, starting from 2020. But as of 2021, the industrialised world has failed spectacularly at delivering on its pledge. 

Official numbers indicate that the fund totalled between $70 and 80 billion a year by 2018, but further investigations have revealed that the vast majority of this was in the form of loans that would have to be paid back by developing nations, which more or less defeats the purpose of the whole initiative. When considering only grants and low-interest lending, the real number was between $19 and 22 billion.

Wealthy nations have issued a revised statement pledging that the funding will arrive no later than 2023, in full. But as climate finance takes the stage at COP, it is worth diving deeper into the dark history of climate debt. How much does the industrialised world really owe everyone else?

What Is Climate Debt?

In September 2017 Hurricane Maria made landfall on the US territory of Puerto Rico, causing USD$43 billion in damages and nearly 3,000 deaths. The devastating event was supercharged by climate change, which makes storms of this magnitude nearly five times as likely to occur. CO2 emissions in Puerto Rico are around 0.22 tonnes per capita each year. In the continental US, emissions per capita are 15.52 tonnes, over 70 times higher.

The Marshall Islands, a low-lying island nation in the South Pacific, is responsible for 0.00001% of global emissions, and is yet facing a very real threat of becoming partially uninhabitable as early as 2035 due to sea-level rise. The South Asian country of Bangladesh contributes to less than 0.1% of climate-altering emissions, but is still one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change due to its low-lying topography, economic reliance on agriculture and high poverty rates.

This is the bedrock upon which the concept of climate debt is founded. Developed countries owe a debt to the developing world because they are the ones responsible for the vast majority of global emissions and ecological devastation. At the same time, the countries who will bear the worst impacts of climate change are those least responsible for them. 

Climate debt takes into account how historically prominent greenhouse gas emitters, like the US and EU, have vastly exceeded their fair share of emissions, while other countries who took longer to industrialise have barely scratched the surface in comparison. It is why countries like China and India, today the first and third largest emitters in the world respectively, have pleaded with the US and other historical polluters at COP26 to provide more climate financing.

Source: Carbon Brief; 2021.

How do we ensure that the world’s most climate vulnerable, the people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, do not have to face catastrophe alone and unprepared? The answer is climate finance, aid directed towards the most vulnerable and provided by the industrialised world. Climate finance is intended to put the world’s most vulnerable countries in a better position to adapt, mitigate and build resilience to the threats posed by climate change.

Climate debt spotlights the interests and needs of peoples and nations historically underrepresented in the climate financing debate, filling in the gaps where net-zero pledges and emissions reduction targets cannot accurately represent the cost being shouldered by developing countries. While climate debt needs to be repaid to help the world cope with a warmer future, it still remains unclear how much countries are willing to pay off.

Who Pays, and How Much?

However industrialised countries choose to repay their debt to the world, questions will inevitably rise over who has to pay, and how much. The aforementioned $100 billion by 2020 pledge failed in part because wealthy nations never really sat down to talk about how much each of them should be expected to contribute, and how to measure each of their commitments. 

This has repercussions on a global scale, because without this financing, developing nations are being forced to bear irrationally high adaptation costs on their own. According to the African Development Bank, Africa holds 15% of the world’s population, is responsible for around 3% of global energy-related CO2 emissions, and yet is currently forced to “shoulder nearly 50% of the estimated global climate change adaptation costs.”

The divergence in responsibilities is stark. In a 2020 study, researchers quantified the fair share emissions of every country in the world if we were to stay within a ‘safe’ planetary boundary roughly equivalent to 1°C of warming (a threshold we have already passed). The study found that the world’s most industrialised countries were responsible for over 90% of excess emissions today. Virtually every developing country was within the boundary for its fair share of emissions, and perhaps most tellingly, so were China and India. Despite these two countries’ high contributions to current emissions, their fair share pales when compared to the historical emissions of the US and EU.

The total value of climate debt, how much industrialised countries owe to the developing world, may currently be as high as $34 trillion. Based on current estimates of how much carbon will cost us in the future (the social cost of carbon, currently pegged at $51 per tonne of carbon emitted), this number may swell to be as high as $57 trillion by 2035, mainly due to China’s rise and continued usage of fossil fuels. 

2035 Climate Debt Projection Breakdown by Country (no policy action scenario)/Source: Centre for Global Development; 2021.

That is if the social cost of carbon is fixed at around $50, but if we want to stay in sight of the global target to keep average temperature rise below 1.5°C, the reflective social cost of carbon would have to be at least $100, if not much higher. According to agro-ecologist Max Ajl in his 2021 book, A People’s Green New Deal, the world’s climate debt would be $112 and 448 trillion by mid-century if we want to stay below 1.5°C of warming. For reference, current global GDP is around $80 trillion.

Despite their frankly unreasonable size, these sums are not impossible to pay off, especially if the industrialised world starts doing so early while also making every effort to keep emissions down within their own borders. But climate debt is not only about money. It is also about history and legacies of extractivist and exploitative relationships between the developed world and its neighbours. The consequences of these relationships, in many cases going back to the European colonial era, are clearer now than ever, and leaders will need to reconcile these less tangible debts as well.

You might also like: Is Carbon Trading a Solution for the Climate Crisis?

Paying Off Our Debts

At COP26, leaders from the developing world have been doing everything in their power to make the reality of their homelands’ dire circumstances clear. “They [big emitters like the US and China] are not only destroying lives, they’re destroying livelihoods,” Gaston Browne, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda told Axios. “And if this situation continues, the alternative situation is literally losing our lives, losing our civilisation in the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian oceans.”

To fairly compensate these nations, and to reach a more equitable future, monetary transfers won’t be enough. Countries will need global transformations in the ways they use energy, how they employ transport and how they interact with neighbours. This means providing patent-free clean energy tech transfers to the developing world at a near-zero cost. It means treating emissions as financial debt, valorising domestic biodiversity and investing in technologies to sequester more carbon. It means making borders more open, easing visa procedures and providing the right for climate migrants to live and work wherever they are forced to go.

Climate debt is seeped in a long and often bloody history of inequality and unequal relationships, making it very difficult to quantify. And much like the legacy of climate debt reaches far into the past, it will extend similarly far into the future. As strategies move on to how we can adapt to a warmer climate rather than avoiding it altogether, developing nations will be faced with an exponentially escalating number of crises. To fully pay off its debt, the industrialised world will have to be ready to handle the consequences.

Discussions on climate finance at COP are necessary, but they have to be followed by tangible policies that ensure these payments materialise. In the second week of the conference, talks over a global carbon market plan are expected to progress, plans that were initially proposed in Paris six years ago but have yet to find any real traction. There is growing optimism that these plans may actually turn into policy soon, which would be a definite game-changer in our efforts to pay off climate debt and build global resilience. Reaching an agreement and setting well-designed rules for an international carbon market could well be what make or break this year’s climate talks.

An international carbon market would take us a step closer to treating emissions as financial debt, an undesirable asset that becomes more and more invaluable the longer it stays in the atmosphere. If designed correctly, a global carbon market could unleash trillions of dollars’ worth of investments into green energy, clean technology and adaptation measures. Given recent commitments by the private sector to mobilise financial support towards climate resilience in the developing world, at least some of these returns can be reinvested into adaptation and paying off the climate debt.

There remain some problems. A badly organised deal for a global carbon market with lax rules might be worse than no deal at all, as it might simply allow wealthier corporations and countries to emit more while shifting the blame elsewhere. And as ever, it wouldn’t be a proposed climate solution without a classic COP-related problem rearing its ugly head: credibility, or rather the lack thereof. Members in any eventual international market would need to ensure that their actions are credible, and the best way to do that would be to actually show that their emissions are falling and the revenue from the carbon market is going into expanding green technology.

If well-designed rules for an international carbon market are established this week, developing nations will have a reprieve in the form of trillions of dollars’ worth in adaptation measures, and investments will pour into clean technologies, making future energy transfers easier to envision. And the more countries are brought onboard to a global market, the faster this transition will happen and the cheaper it will be in the long run.

Climate debt, at least in theory, is not a radical proposal. It simply asks the ones who made the mess to take responsibility and clean it up. Its implications, however, are enormous. Repaying our debt in full would entail an enormous transfer of wealth, which is why wealthy nations have been opposed to it or have played ignorant about it, despite the lack of any real logical argument against climate debt. It makes perfect sense that wealthy countries would have to repay it, but under current circumstances, that probably won’t be enough to make them do so.

An international carbon market could go a long way towards paying off our climate debt by changing the norms that make debt so unattractive to talk about right now. Getting countries on board, and vilifying those who refuse to, is the first step towards ensuring the climate debt crisis is met in a reasonable time frame, but it is only the start. Climate debt can be an important tool in our arsenal, because it highlights something that is often forgotten: the inequality of climate change. This will be a long process, but making sure that our leaders are talking about the problem in honest terms will be the first step.

Featured image by: UN Women Asia Pacific/Flickr

The post Climate Debt and Justice: How Much Do We Really Owe? appeared first on Earth.Org.

On October 31st, the 26th session of the UN Conference of Parties (COP26) will kick off in Glasgow, Scotland. The conference was originally scheduled to take place in November 2020, but was delayed due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, allowing the summit to take place physically in relative safety. World leaders, delegates and experts from around the world will attend two weeks of what are understood to be the most important climate talks of the decade, if not the century. What should we be keeping an eye out for as the pivotal meetings begin?

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The purpose of the UN Conference of Parties is to hold regular forums where the newest scientific information on climate change can be presented, negotiations between business and political leaders can be conducted and policy agreements can be reached. The goal is to arrive at a coordinated consensus on how the world will adapt to climate change impacts, enable economic development in a sustainable manner and reach agreements on emissions reduction and climate change mitigation.

2020’s delayed session aside, the UN climate change conferences have been held annually since 1995. In 2015, at COP21 in Paris, the participating parties signed an agreement that provided a cohesive plan towards coordinated climate action, known as the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement calls for countries to keep global temperature averages to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and pursue best efforts to keep warming below 1.5°C. 

Since the Paris Agreement was first signed, many countries have come forward with commitments to reduce their carbon emissions and net-zero target dates. The agreement ruled that every five years on from Paris, countries would have to update their targets and pledges to reflect the latest science, and in light of 2020’s delayed conference, COP26 will be the time for leaders to do so. Since 2015, progress has been made in reducing emissions, but it’s not nearly enough. The latest UN Emissions Gap report shows that current policies will lead to 2.7°C of temperature rise by the end of the century, an outright nightmarish scenario. This is our leaders’ chance to make a stronger push for a better future.

Figure 1: Four potential trajectories for emissions reduction. Our current pathway indicates a temperature rise of 2.7°C to 3.1°C by 2100/Source: New York Times.

The goal at COP26 will be to accelerate the world’s progress towards achieving the goals outlined in the Paris Agreement, to put some flesh on the framework established six years ago and to ensure that countries are on the right track. Here are the important stories to keep in mind as the session kicks off. 

Who Will Be There?

Despite being delayed by a year, the ongoing pandemic is still leaving its mark on COP proceedings, and some world leaders have opted out of attending the critical climate conference, ostensibly citing health concerns.

Notable physical absentees from COP26 include Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has not left China since January 2020, months before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the WHO. Despite some hope amongst counterparts that Xi would make an exception for the pivotal climate talks, it remains highly unlikely that he will be in attendance. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has also played an elusive figure throughout the pandemic, exhibiting much more stringent personal protective measures against contracting the virus than most other world leaders. The Kremlin confirmed on October 20th that the Russian President would not physically attend COP26, but would be present through virtual means.

Other notable world leaders who have opted not to attend COP26 in person include Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, leader of the Catholic Church and occasional climate activist Pope Francis, Mexico President Andres Manuel Obrador, and South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has yet to confirm whether he will be in attendance or not. Several least-developed countries have also been at risk of not being able to attend the conference, given quarantine restrictions for unvaccinated travellers to the UK, high costs to stay in Glasgow, and low vaccination rates for COVID-19 in much of the developing world.

COP26’s organisers have insisted that the no-shows will not affect the conference’s proceedings, but activists and other observers have been skeptical. Informal and backchannel discussions were crucial to getting the Paris Agreement over the line six years ago, and virtual meetings might not have the same effect as physical attendance.

That the leaders of high emitters like China and Russia, first and fourth respectively in annual emissions, are not physically attending COP is certainly less than ideal, but it does not mean that the climate talks are doomed. The countries will still send large delegations to Glasgow, with Russia alone sending more than 200 representatives. Veteran Chinese diplomat and special climate envoy Xie Zhenhua will represent his country at the talks, and his historically amicable relationship with foreign counterparts bodes well for fruitful diplomatic talks.

Climate Financing

COP26 will see fresh debates over the state of international climate finance, a point of significant tension in recent years. At the 2009 COP conference in Copenhagen, world leaders agreed that developed nations and historically large emitters, such as the US and EU countries, would deliver financing to developing countries to help withstand climate change impacts and accelerate the full adoption of renewable energy. 

This climate finance sum was fixed at USD$100 billion each year starting from 2020, but the industrialised world has failed spectacularly at delivering on this promise. A 2021 OECD report estimated that wealthy countries delivered USD$80 billion in climate financing in 2019, but these numbers have been criticised as vastly inflated. The OECD is mainly composed of rich and industrialised nations, and further investigations found that several wealthy countries had counted the full value of some aid projects as ‘climate relevant’ even when they didn’t exclusively target climate action. A 2020 Oxfam report fixed the actual value of climate financing between 2017 and 2018 at between $19 billion and $22.5 billion.

Figure 2: How much financing have wealthy nations actually delivered to the developing world?/Graphic by Earth.Org

When wealthy countries agreed to deliver $100 billion a year in climate finance, nobody thought to discuss how to split up the cost. This has allowed the US, the world’s most egregious historical emitter, to get away with relatively minimal contributions. According to an analysis by the World Resources Institute, the US should technically be responsible for nearly half of the $100 billion financial commitment, but the country only delivered an average of $7.6 billion a year between 2016 and 2018.

The poor state of climate finance has been a particularly sensitive talking point in recent years, as developing nations have criticised the industrialised world for broken promises and wasted time. But on October 25th, only a week before COP’s kickoff date, Canadian and German representatives released a comprehensive roadmap detailing how wealthy countries plan to reach $100 billion in annual financing. 

The industrialised world now believes that the $100 billion target can be reached by 2023, and will likely be able to mobilise more than that each year thereafter. But while wealthy countries express confidence in this amended target’s feasibility, developing nations are expected to discuss how the shortfall and three-year delay can be made up. India has already announced that payments for losses and missed financing will be an integral talking point for the country at the conference, and other developing nations are expected to do the same.

Climate Leaders

On the eve of COP26, nobody is really sure who is going to emerge from the climate talks as the most ambitious climate leader. Months ago, the US had been expected to take on this coveted role, and many believed that US President Joe Biden and his administration were committed to putting climate change at the forefront of America’s domestic and foreign policy. After years of languishing under former President Trump, many were enthusiastic about the new President’s chances to cement the US’s role as a global climate leader.

But a stagnating clean energy bill and a dubious carbon tax proposal later, the US is seemingly less prepared than many gave it credit for. A USD$3.5 trillion infrastructure bill has been worryingly watered down in recent weeks, putting at risk climate provisions critical to meeting the US’s goal to reduce carbon emissions by 50-52% by 2030. 

Congressional Democrats are currently in the process of reworking the bill and ensuring that it passes into legislation, but time is short before COP. If Democrats are unable to come up with a solution in the coming days, then we can expect the US to come under fire in Glasgow for not matching its rhetoric with actionable policies, and the country could suffer damage to its global credibility.

The US is not the only heavyweight under pressure to impress at COP. Several countries, including South Korea and Saudi Arabia, have recently updated their pledges to reduce emissions and reach net-zero emissions, but others, like China and India, the world’s first and third largest emitters respectively, have yet to announce any updated climate pledges in the buildup to the conference. What these countries do is crucial to mitigating global climate change, so expect their actions and words at COP to be highly scrutinised.

“Our Last Best Hope”

COP26 will also take place under the shadow of the ongoing energy crisis that has afflicted the entire world, driving up energy costs and increasing uncertainty. No country has been more affected than major emitters China and India, both of which have been forced to reopen disabled coal plants and slow their transitions towards renewable energy.

The energy crisis shows that countries with high populations and energy demand​​ need pretty much all the electricity they can get, and in times of crisis, cannot be too picky about the source. It is possible that the crisis will make China and India unwilling to phase out coal in the near-term, and the two might remain tight-lipped in Glasgow. How other countries and competitors respond, whether through pledges to commit financial assistance or through other diplomatic measures, will be a key point in the climate talks. 

The energy crisis is just one external factor that might impact the talks’ outcome. The perpetually turbulent state of US-China relations is also another point of interest, as it seems unlikely that climate change can be isolated from the tense relationship between the two superpowers. Animosity between nations could come to the fore during COP, and hinder diplomatic progress. There are also logistical issues that simply come down to poor planning by the event’s organisers. Around 20,000 delegates from all over the world will be in Glasgow for the conference, a city that a year ago had fewer than 11,000 hotel beds.

But despite these issues, COP26 is happening in a vastly different context, and in a vastly different world, from six years ago. Climate change and its related impacts are now an incontrovertible truth, and even countries like Russia, which took years to ratify the Paris Agreement, have now come around to acknowledge the reality and imminent danger that climate chaos poses. The plan to equitably divide responsibilities for international climate finance is crucial, and the onus is now on the world’s wealthiest nations to do their part.

COP26 represents “the last best hope for the world,” according to US special envoy for climate John Kerry. Time is running out to get the world on track to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals, and if we want to have even a chance of staying within its parameters, it is likely that what happens in Glasgow next week will be critical.

The post COP26: What You Need to Know About the UN Climate Talks appeared first on Earth.Org.

Buying an electric car has almost become a foregone conclusion for many consumers. Between tax breaks, incentives and good old-fashioned clout with your neighbours, EV sales worldwide have begun to skyrocket. But as sales increase, these financial perks for consumers are beginning to show up in many governments’ reports as lost tax revenue. To replace this tax glut, could road pricing become the new norm?

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By 2030, the date when the UK plans to ban the sale of new diesel and petrol-powered cars, 6.5 million British households are projected to have bought an electric or hybrid vehicle, and 18 million such cars will be on the road. Buying a new EV instead of an internal combustion engine car can come with many benefits: a lower individual carbon footprint, of course, but the impressive tax breaks and financial incentives from governments certainly do not hurt.

In the UK, government grants for electric vehicles mean that consumers can save up to 42% when buying a new car, and annual savings for British EV owners run up to around £1,000 between fuel and tax cost reductions. In the US, major automakers and legislators are working to pass legislation that would boost EV tax credits to up to $12,500 per vehicle. And in Norway, where electric vehicles made up 77.5% of all new car sales in September, drivers do not have to pay purchase or value-added taxes, and can enjoy highway toll exemptions, bus lane use and even free parking in some cities.

Tax breaks and financial perks are swaying people away from petrol and diesel cars towards EVs, but governments are beginning to reckon with the long-term losses in tax revenue these incentives are creating. The UK’s recently released net-zero strategy report predicts that the country’s tax revenue will fall by around 1.5% of the UK’s GDP due to the transition away from fossil fuels. Most of this tax revenue comes from the country’s Fuel Duty and its Vehicle Excise Duty (VED), which combined to generate £37 billion in tax revenue in 2019-20, revenue that will continue to decline as EV sales rise.

If there were only electric cars on the road in the UK, that would mean £37 billion less for the government to spend on public works and services. Nationally subsidised projects, ranging from everything from the National Healthcare Service to simple road infrastructure maintenance, would suffer from this sudden glut in tax revenue. This would have a direct impact on every British citizen, because to make up for lost tax revenue, the government would be forced to borrow more, which would drive up interest rates and reduce private investing, severely impacting economic growth.

Figure 1: Projected EV market share growth by region to 2030/Source: Deloitte Insights.

These revenue loss projections will of course only be applicable if the tax regimen remains unchanged, and because the switch to EVs is as inevitable as it is necessary, it is becoming increasingly likely that alternative taxation measures will come into effect in countries with high rates of electric vehicle sales.

A road pricing mechanism seems to be the most likely of these to feature, but what exactly will this entail for drivers? Will EVs still be economical relative to petroleum-powered cars? Could this dampen the palpable public excitement surrounding electric vehicles?

What is Road Pricing?

Road pricing can include a few different kinds of charges levied upon road users. Some forms of road pricing are already widespread, including road tolls and fees based on distance driven or time spent on highways. But in a more electrified world, where EVs are ubiquitous, versatile and even more affordable than they are now, road pricing may take on a different form.

Projections for new EV sales over the next decade and beyond are high, especially in several EU countries and the UK, and it is entirely conceivable that current forecasts are an underestimate. These countries may soon have to contend with a very high demand for EVs, possibly even from people who have never owned a car before in their lives. 

From a perspective of lost tax revenue, this is a very real risk, and there is every reason to think demand for EVs will be high enough for it to come to pass. A recent report released by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change revealed how fuel costs could fall by as much as 71% for drivers in the UK who switch to electric cars, which will undoubtedly drive higher demand as more affordable EV models begin to hit the market. The report estimates that resulting losses in the UK’s tax revenue from EV market growth will amount to £10 billion by 2030, £20 billion by 2035 and £30 billion by 2040.

In addition to the lost tax revenue issue, high demand for electric vehicles will also generate much higher traffic congestion, which is toxic for economic growth. A general rule of thumb in urban planning is that, however many roads and lanes a city builds, there will always be an underlying demand for driving. In a process economists like to call induced demand, building more roads rarely resolves congestion, it just leads to more cars. Regrettably, the energy transition won’t mark the end of traffic, and this will have high economic costs, regardless of whether you are sitting in a pickup truck or a Tesla.

You might also like: 7 Misconceptions About Electric Vehicles

Figure 2: Costs of motoring to society versus tax revenue raised, 2020 and 2040 projection/Source: Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

Road pricing is a proposed mechanism that could conceivably solve both the revenue and congestion problems. A road pricing system would address the higher costs associated with driving at a snail’s pace in a city centre relative to driving on empty roads in the countryside. It’s the same idea behind why air travel is more expensive around holidays, why movie tickets are cheaper on weekdays, or why an Uber ride during peak afterwork hours costs more than the same route would at lunchtime on a Monday. When traffic, congestion and demand are higher, road pricing would make the costs of driving reflect that.

In theory, such a mechanism would ease congestion during peak hours, and perhaps even be a deterrent for driving in general, if an affordable and functional public transport and walking infrastructure were available. In comments made to the UK House of Commons transport committee, Toby Poston of the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association believes road pricing to be “inevitable,” adding that “the longer we leave it, the more people will get used to the idea of having very low-cost transport, and [road pricing] is going to be a shock.”

In practice, implementing road pricing would be a lot more difficult, and there would have to be some exceptions. Low-wage care workers, for instance, need to make several house visits each day during peak traffic hours and may not be able to afford a road tax. And public opinion towards higher transportation costs will undoubtedly be negative, which is likely why very few politicians have even floated the idea of a road pricing mechanism yet. There is also the risk that road pricing might deter people from switching to EVs at all, since so much of the appeal surrounding electric vehicles is wrapped up in low taxes and financial perks.

Based on the UK’s recent net-zero report, it is likely that the government will make road pricing happen, as the authors essentially stopped short of warning consumers to prepare for higher road taxes. The possible alternatives outlined were indeed less than appealing. An option would be for the government to simply borrow more and run up its debt to resolve the temporary tax revenue glut, but this would be a patchwork solution at best and unfair to future generations, in addition to doing nothing to resolve the congestion problem.

Whatever way governments choose to implement pricing mechanisms to regulate high traffic congestion and loss in tax revenue, it is a virtual certainty that they will do so in some form, and road pricing seems to be the preferred course of action. Keeping tax regimes as they are now could lead to economic downturn further down the line, and it would be advisable for politicians to implement gradual changes to tax codes that start low and increment over time. 

Who is Paying?

Market forces are pushing fossil fuels out, and despite likely changes in taxes, switching to electric vehicles will likely remain an economical choice for consumers. Besides that, phasing out combustion engine cars is essential to our long-term health and prosperity, as is transitioning away from fossil fuels and hitting net-zero emissions by 2050. 

The debate over road pricing is symptomatic of a larger question we will need to grapple with sooner or later. Who is actually going to pay for net-zero? Will it be our governments? Corporations? Or, as is the case with road pricing, will it be us?

Net-zero won’t come cheap, and the hope is that the transition costs will be borne somewhat equitably, with large corporations and polluters taking on more of the relative financial burden than individual consumers. But taxing consumers may be a more popular option for policymakers at least. As road pricing picks up steam in the UK, Australian state governments in Victoria and South Australia have already introduced a road user charge for electric vehicles, adding around AUD$500 for every 20,000km travelled (around USD$375).

South Australia treasurer Rob Lucas believes the charge to be necessary. “The reality is, if you’re driving an electric vehicle then you’re not paying fuel excise at the pump and you’re contributing significantly less to the vital upkeep of our vast road network,” the treasurer said.

Governments need to be careful about how these charges are introduced. When Australians were surveyed on how the new charge affected their opinion on EVs, nearly 70% said that the tax would make them less likely to purchase an EV. If electric vehicles, or any new technology that could bring us closer to net-zero for that matter, are sold to consumers at a low tax rate and bundled with financial incentives, a sudden turnaround from governments to impose higher taxes speaks to poor planning from politicians more than anything else.

And if higher taxes do need to be imposed to cope with the transition, governments, corporations and individuals all need to split the costs fairly. If pricing mechanisms are meant to hold us accountable for how much we pollut and emit, then consumers have a right to know that each part of that equation is paying its fair share.

Ideally, a pathway towards net-zero would be seamless for consumers, marked by incremental and barely discernible changes in tax codes implemented through perfectly timed policies. In the case of transportation, people who need to drive should remain incentivised to buy new EVs, but this doesn’t change the fact that electric vehicles carry their own environmental costs, and are not enough to solve the climate crisis on their own. Cities should incentivise us to ditch our cars altogether, replacing automobiles with rapid and affordable public transportation networks and walkable communities. 

This is easier said than done, and the road will be bumpy. The UK’s warning of looming road pricing shouldn’t come as a surprise, but ensuring that the costs of the energy transition are divided fairly will require engagement and continuous pressure on policymakers. Transitioning to net-zero won’t be simple, and everyone will need to play and pay their part.

The post Let’s Talk About Road Pricing To Pay For Our Electric Cars appeared first on Earth.Org.