Editorial: The hard work ahead after the Dubai jamboree

New Delhi and surrounding areas were enveloped in a haze and dense fog this week causing the usual disruptions in travel and people’s lives. Chennai is yet to recover from the cyclonic rain and floods earlier this month; reports are trickling in of how certain areas of the city, poorer areas, have been overlooked in the relief work. The air in tens of cities across India continues to be moderately to severely polluted with numbers registering on the Air Quality Index that tips the scale off.

Unseasonal rain and hailstorms destroy standing crops in parts of the country while unprecedented high temperatures scorch the earth. Forest fires, cyclones, hurricanes, flash floods, stark droughts are on every continent. This year, as it closes, has been recorded as the warmest yet on earth.

Evidence mounts by the year that the human species have not lived harmoniously and sustainably with planet earth – the only home we know. To invoke the poignant words of astronomer Carl Sagan: “The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.

” Yet, human beings, in all our collective wisdom and with all the mounds of information at our command seem unwilling to set right and recalibrate our relationship and terms of engagement with the earth and its ecosystems. What else explains the cop out at the COP28, the annual climate summit held as the conference of parties backed by the United Nations, which concluded earlier this month in Dubai? A climate summit in a petro-state is like having an arms manufacturer at peace talks but this is hardly the first or the last time such conflicts of interest have arisen about the annual meet, the first of which was held way back in 1995. The point is not merely on the UAE Consensus, as it’s being called, which acknowledged the colossal role of fossil fuels — by name — in the global warming that has led to climate change whose impacts are felt by every nation on the face of the earth.

Let the cheer die down on that. The point is also to hold the UN body accountable for skirting around the topic for nearly 30 years and drowning the world in word salads about environment, carbon storage, climate finance and so on. It took the COP, where heads of governments and most influential business leaders confabulate every year, three long decades to mention the ‘F’ word but having finally landed at the right diagnosis it dithered from taking the next logical step to mandatorily phase out the fossil fuels.

That would have been too radical for those who live by business-as-usual mantra. Fossil fuels, like tobacco, rakes in huge profits. As of 2022, the global oil and gas industry was worth an estimated $5 trillion with the market size of oil and gas exploration and production industry at $6.

6 trillion. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), this industry’s profits in 2022 jumped to $4 trillion, up from an average of $1. 5 trillion in recent years.

The global coal market grew from $614. 96 billion with 8. 3 billion tonnes of it in 2022 to $621.

89 billion in 2023, and is projected to grow annually till 2032. All fossil fuels with their emissions into the atmosphere are ‘dirty’ but none more than coal. India is a huge market for coal and an exporting nation — part of the humongous global market.

How is this squared — booming fossil fuel industry worldwide with rising and intensifying impact of climate change from its emissions? So, COP or no COP, the work of people on the ground is cut out. Scientists, activists, civil society people, students and youth around the world have to hold their governments and businesses accountable, pushing them to phase out fossil fuels and bring in renewable green energy. The central and state governments in India are not willing to listen but the effort to make them hear cannot cease.

The COP28 has, among the few good things it did, brought cities and people’s health to the high table, not a year too soon. People have to make good use of these doors that have been opened up to press the simple message — the earth is our only home, protect it — if persistent floods, heat, air pollution have to be addressed squarely. The hope lies with people, not with governments and businesses.

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