EDITORIAL: Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif raised all the right points in his meetings with world leaders at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt, from presenting the case of the most affected countries to demanding “climate justice”. Yet, spot on though he was, he still didn’t say anything that everybody didn’t already know.
In fact, suffering countries like Pakistan have already gone a step further and demanded that industrialised countries primarily responsible for this mess cough up some of the money needed to address it. And that, precisely, is the elephant in the room that such get-togethers routinely ignore, which is why they have largely been reduced to elegant debating clubs which afford world leaders a fancy retreat every now and then.
But Sharam el Sheikh was supposed to be different. US climate envoy, John Kerry, hinted that Washington might finally be interested in talking about financial problems faced by the third world. This is welcome news, but only if it moves beyond fancy headlines because some of the poor countries, like Pakistan, do not have much time left to address climate-related issues. This year’s floods ruined lives, uprooted infrastructure, devastated crops, pushed the fiscal deficit deeper into red, and even cut GDP growth by half. And if the next year, or the one after it, is even mildly similar, then the economy may well collapse.
This is not just unpleasant, it is also very unfair. After all, Pakistan’s contribution to carbon emissions is barely a little more than zero percent. Yet it’s among countries that are front in line when it comes to facing its effects. And since these are already very trying times, with record stagflation holding down the economy and leaving people helpless, another season of nature’s fury, which owes to nothing more than rich nations’ naked, self-serving pursuit of profits, is the last thing the economy and the people need. Therefore, poor countries are justified in asking richer ones to bankroll their transition to green energy; which in itself is going to take a very long time even when, or if, the ball does get rolling.
However, the bad news is that it’s very unlikely that rich, industrialised countries would like to offer anything more than assurances for now. Much of the west – the US and mainland Europe, especially – is on the brink of what seems like a long recession, even if it’s not a particularly painful one. Long years of zero rates, first because of the great recession and then Covid, have let inflation gallop out of control and they are racing each other in tightening monetary policies, to the point of deliberately raising unemployment and inducing recessions in their economies. At such times, it doesn’t seem that climate caused suffering of people in the third world would be very high on their priority lists.
That leaves us with little more to do about “climate justice” than raise it at all important forums. It is because of rich countries’ obsession with fossil fuels in their blind pursuit of gangster capitalism — which turned their industries into behemoths at the cost of the planet’s survival – that we are in this problem to begin with. Now, not only do poor countries not have the luxury of growing their own industries in the same way, but they must also pay for the excesses of others. The only viable option seems for like-minded and similarly suffering countries to join and demand “climate justice”. A good start would be writing off some, if not all, of their debt. And once they are free from the stress of debt repayment, default, etc., they will still need help, and a lot more money, to shift to green energy.
If COP27 can get the most influential world leaders to even touch upon a few of these points, it should be counted as a success.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022