Unearthed today: No, Shell my emissions problem is not just like yours
Morning!
Thinking of staying up for the election but finding the presidential just too stressful? Here’s a great piece on the smaller congressional races that could decide the future of US action on climate change.
I’m reading about… dodging the facts.
I’d really recommend Greta’s interview with the New York Times today where she notes “If you fully understand the science, then you know what you as an individual have to do. You know then that you have a responsibility.”
It’s a powerful statement that draws on our near-universal values of integrity and responsibility for each other. But it can also be twisted.
“What are you doing to help reduce your emissions?” Asks Shell on Twitter. See what they did there? It’s not about them – it’s about us.
Shell would say that’s not what they are doing because after that they tweeted about what they are doing so they are also creating a false equivalence between the actions and decisions of a huge company and those of individuals.
It isn’t the only way in which action on climate change is slowed, delayed and contorted.
In an intriguing section of the Greta interview, she attacks the focus on her, on the strikers and on celebrity as – effectively – an understandable distraction. She suggests the fires in western countries will not truly shift the needle because; “We have lost contact with nature so much that even when it’s burning right in front of us, we don’t care.”
She notes how many now argue it may be cheaper to adapt than to prevent warming from happening.
“We forget that the majority of the world’s population don’t have that opportunity and won’t be able to adapt. They’re also the ones who are going to be hit hardest and first and are least responsible. That is being ignored to a degree that is pathetic.”
And China’s actions on the environment.
Away from all the bother of (vaguely) democratic elections; two interesting reads this morning on China and it’s newfound green bona fides.
Starting in the FT which points out quite how messy the transition away from coal – which has fuelled the country’s post-covid rebound – will be domestically – not least because new plants being built now will need to be shut-down before the end of their life.
“Coal is just so important in China from an energy supply and security point of view, and local governments don’t believe it is possible to get rid of coal immediately,” said Yang Yingxia, a senior fellow at the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy. “I don’t think the Chinese government has a crystal clear sense of how to get to carbon neutrality by 2060.”
The nature of that transition may also not be just – or pretty.
“A drive to reclaim grassland in Inner Mongolia has turned local nomadic communities — deemed responsible for desertification — into “ecological migrants”, who have been settled into newly built areas in cities,” devastating their way of life, and livelihood.
“It could translate into policy [measures] that intervene into every realm of social life,” warns Li Yifei, a scholar at the University of New York’s Shanghai campus and co-author of a recent book on China’s “coercive environmentalism”. “These heavily industrial areas are becoming the forgotten parts of the Chinese economy. The traditional fossil fuels sector and the most environmentally destructive centres of the economy are being thrown under the bus.”
And, of course, China has not made anything like as firm commitments about what it does beyond it’s borders.
“About 40 per cent of all China’s overseas power plant financing from 2000 to 2019 was in coal, while only 11 per cent goes to renewable energy, according to data compiled by Boston University,” the FT notes.
It’s a point picked up by Bloomberg focusing on fishing where again China has made significant domestic pledges which – again – are not backed by its actions oversees.
“China’s distant fishing fleets are the leading actor in an unsustainable illegal trade that’s emptying fisheries from North Korea to West Africa. China has made few efforts to restrain this trade, and in some cases has encouraged it. In doing so, it has undermined its own claims to be a champion for emerging markets while worsening food security for some of the world’s most vulnerable people,” writes Adam Minter.
Two things you need to know:
UK competition watchdog probes greenwashing of consumer goods.