We’ve learnt about fossil fuels and how they’ve become integrated into our everyday lives. We’ve learnt about the problems that they’re causing now and of the problems that they could cause in the very near future. In other words, we know what the problem is and what’s causing it. And yet temperatures are still rising, ice caps are melting even faster and natural disasters are becoming more frequent and violent. So the big question is: why aren’t we doing more?
Despite global efforts to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, they’re clearly not enough. A worldwide problem is that environmental laws and regulations often lack enforcement, as a study conducted by the UN in 2019 found. Even climate agreements that are generally regarded as successful aren’t as successful as they might seem. The Paris Agreement, for example, states that temperatures must be 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for many consecutive years for it to count as exceeding the warming limit outlined in the Agreement. And COP28 certainly didn’t go as well as we had hoped - there wasn’t even specific mention of fossil fuels in the agreement.
Every country has to contribute their efforts for the climate agreements to work, and so far only a handful of countries are on track to meet these goals. While every country will have problems of their own, all of them have one thing in common: money. This could be in terms of economic development and the wealth of a country, or in terms of cost efficiency and profit. We can split the problems into 2 main areas: the government and industries, and individuals. Let’s start with the government and industries.
The sad truth is that developing environmentally friendly policies isn’t a priority for most governments. This is because they are often focused on more pressing issues, such as disaster mitigation, upgrading infrastructure and economic development. While climate change is arguably the biggest problem the world is currently facing, it’s generally not seen as an immediate threat and its effects are only just becoming obvious today. Examples of countries with other economic priorities include Bangladesh where people are struggling with overpopulation and resource depletion, Liberia where poverty and food insecurity is widespread, and Niger with its water shortages. These countries are all less economically developed, and unfortunately suffer the most from climate change. The world’s biggest polluters, on the other hand, tend to suffer less for their emissions. They also tend to be more economically developed and have different reasons for not prioritising environmental action.
Investing in economic development while also minimising its impacts on the environment can also be quite costly. But when you think about it, the fact that governments aren’t tackling the problem at the source and instead opting to pay for the damage of ignoring the problem probably adds up to a lot more in the long run. The benefits of environmentally friendly policies also tend to take time to show - an easy example is planting trees. Trees are incredibly important carbon capture units that help purify the air and provide natural habitats. But it takes time for trees to grow, so investing in a tree-planting program would take decades to show any benefits. On the other hand, paying to cut down trees and build a factory would yield profit in just a few years. Richer countries also tend to have more industrial production, and big companies contribute fairly large amounts of pollution. One big hindrance to them transitioning to more environmentally friendly practices is to do with economics and profit. Investing in things like replacing their energy sources with renewables and in sustainably sourced materials often isn’t economic. In fact, a lot of investments in environmentally friendly policies aren’t the most cost-efficient, and this is arguably the biggest reason why we aren’t transitioning as quickly as we could. A good example of this is recycling - of the 350 million tonnes of plastic waste we produce each year, only 9% gets recycled. This is because recycling technology still isn’t advanced enough to recycle all types of plastic, and the cost of recycling simply isn’t worth the profit that will be gained from the recycled products.
But before we go pointing fingers at the government and industries and demand that they solve the climate crisis, let’s also take a look at ourselves. We are all just as much to blame for the crisis as anyone else - after all, the government and industries are a reflection of the majority, and their policies are based on our demands. So, to get them to change, we have to change ourselves too. While we may not be able to convince the governments and industries to change overnight, we can do the next best thing and focus on making changes on an individual and local scale - find out how in our next article!
Credits:
Image - Adamas University
Information - Usborne Climate Crisis for Beginners, UNEP, Climate Analytics, LinkedIn, WaterAid Global, USAID, Our World in Data, OECD, rts
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