On 23rd of September 2019, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for all the world leaders to the New York Headquarters for the Climate Action Summit. He asked them to come with concrete and realistic plans, and not just glorious speeches.
At the summit, it was reinforced that 1.5? will be the social, economic, political and scientific safe limit for global warming. The Summit demonstrated the need for countries to urgently update their short-term commitments by 2020, enhance the mid-term commitments by 2030, and achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
Source- Vox
Countries like the United States, Brazil and Saudi Arabia who neglected their emission commitments were excluded from speaking. Rightly filling that void was a 16 year-old girl from Sweden, who personifies sustainable development and fights pressing environmental issues.
She famously became a public figure after she called on world leaders to urgently take steps to combat climate change. She critiqued nations with high carbon emissions for just talking about “money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth”, while the world we live in is getting destroyed.
zSource- CNBC
In spite of all this, Donald Trump ironically called quits on the Paris Agreement, a commitment signed by 195 countries pledging to reduce their CO2 emissions. The withdrawal will come into effect in November 2020, but the administration has already started making changes in their economic and environmental policies accordingly.
Source- Vox
What led us to where we are today, a time in which we are taking such drastic steps to ensure that we will have a planet to live in tomorrow?
In 1899, Drake Well in Titusville, Pennsylvania gave the world its first pocket of oil. It was predicted that oil and competition would make the nation prosper. During the same time, capitalism was gradually starting to gain popularity in the Western world based on the belief that ‘greed is good’.
Capitalism is defined as an economic, political and social system in which property, business and industry are privately owned, directed towards making the greatest possible profits for organisations, industries, and people. Everything is viewed as a ‘resource’ and organisations seek to exploit these resources for their profit.
It didn’t take long after 1899 to get an oil boom triggered. Over a span of few years, oil was used in multiple products such as fabrics, toothbrushes, tires, insecticides, cosmetics and of course, fuel. Even today, crude oil price is a barometer for national and global economic conditions. Soon enough, oil came to be known as the one commodity that could make a better life on earth and cure most diseases from which humanity suffers.
Source- Vox
Over the years, as oil and fossil fuel was being put to more uses to produce additional goods, new oil companies started coming up to compete in the race of earning pots of black gold. The oil reserves below the ground started to decline, and oil companies set up research divisions to find new techniques and technologies to exploit this resource.
In the recent years, technology giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon have started entering the fossil fuel industry to profit from it. They have the benefit of using machine learning, artificial intelligence and algorithms, to develop new technologies in order to dig for black gold.
On a more positive note, The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting took place in Davos, early in 2020. All political figures and major corporate leaders met at the conference to discuss the future of cohesive and sustainable world.
World leaders and over 200 corporate executives pledged to stop scratching the surface for oil in an endeavour to reduce carbon footprint from burnt fossil fuels, coal and gas. Instead, they are rooting for renewable and sustainable energy sources such as wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal energies. People from all over the world have been rallying, chanting “keep it in the ground”, which is to encourage major organisations to keep fossil fuels in the ground, where they belong.
Currently, the world relies on oil, gas, coal, fossil fuels for 85% of the total energy output. High wealth individuals and asset management companies have already started switching to the more sustainable energy sources. As per their analysis, financing fossil fuel industries is getting more expensive by the day, and we will soon reach a stage where it will be cheaper to finance renewable energies. Although the fossil fuel industry will ensure short term benefit to companies, it will cause an economic catastrophe in the long run. Needless to say, a climate emergency is bound to come with that.
Source- Vox
It’s about time we realise the importance of our mother Earth. In the past year we’ve had innumerous natural disasters, which is essentially just nature telling us that we’re not treating our environment right and taking it for granted.
Over the previous year, the Amazon rainforest fires increased by a record 31%, Delhi was covered in smog with an AQI of above 500, the worst on the Index. Unusually high and irregular rainfall caused extreme floods in Kerala for 2 years in a row. The Australian bushfires burnt over 18 million acres of greenlands, including 3000 houses and claimed the lives of 28 people. Indonesia had to forcefully shift its Capital to a city yet to be built on an island, as Jakarta rapidly sinks due to melting ice caps and rising sea levels. Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas, costing a total damage worth $3.4 billion, and it will take 3 years to rebuild what was lost.
These are to a great extent, the results of our actions towards our environment. The industrious and diligent organisations that function today don’t give anything for free, they come with an expense. For the organisations that function with capitalistic motives, the expense is resources. But they have seemingly cost us our environment and the planet that we live in.
Source- Vox
Written by: Shyam Sampat
Literary& Statistical Sources: CNBC, Vox, World Economic Forum, United Nations.
Note: This article was written in February 2020.