Speaking at a climate summit in New York before the U.N. General Assembly gets underway, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and several other speakers complained that growing distrust between major powers is getting in the way of climate cooperation.
“International challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them. Crises are interacting and feeding off each other — for example, as digital technologies spread climate disinformation, that deepens distrust and fuels polarization,” Guterres said on Sunday, the first day of the two-day “Summit for the Future.”
“The distress in our institutions of governance, the mistrust between the governors and the governed, will continue to foster social alienation the world over at the very time that we need to find as many people as possible to shape a new world,” Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said at the summit, seconding Guterres’s sentiments.
Digital “disinformation” — a label climate activists use very, very broadly — is hardly the only problem facing the climate change movement in the fall of 2024. The turbulent geopolitical situation is a much greater challenge to any form of international cooperation.
Russia plunged the world into strife, opening a broad rift between the free world and the authoritarian Russia-China-Iran axis when it invaded Ukraine. Russian strongman Vladimir Putin does not seem terribly concerned about the carbon emissions released by his merciless invasion campaign.
The UK Guardian, in June, cited an analysis from a European group called the Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War (IGGAW) that found Putin’s invasion has released more greenhouse gas since 2022 than the combined carbon emissions of 175 countries, including gasses seen as even worse than carbon, such as sulfur hexafluoride.
The IGGAW compared the emissions from Putin’s war to “running 90 million petrol cars for an entire year.” Even more emissions will certainly be on tap when the war ends and Ukraine rebuilds. The group figured Russia owes about $32 billion in “climate reparations,” although it did not suggest a strategy for collecting the fees.
Other observers have noted that Russia’s war on Ukraine has exacerbated global problems, such as food and energy security, which tends to increase pollution as developing nations scramble to make up for shortfalls.
Climate activists have made some grandiose threats about holding Putin accountable for the environmental damage from his invasion, which only increases the atmosphere of distrust and intransigence Guterres and the other Summit for the Future conferees complained about. Russia and its allies will probably be less willing to join international environmental initiatives if they think the climate cops are ready to pounce on them.
China is likewise growing more distant and distrustful of the West, and, while it loves to talk a good game at climate conferences, the world’s worst polluter never had any intention of crippling its industrial goals to reduce carbon emissions. China’s enthusiasm for “green” technologies, like solar power and electric vehicles (EVs), is based entirely on Beijing’s belief that it has cornered those markets.
India, the third-largest global polluter and aspiring leader of the “Global South” group of developing nations, explicitly says it will make no further sacrifices for climate change. The Global South nations take every opportunity to declare that global warming is a first-world problem that must be solved exclusively by the Western powers. Many Western environmentalists are willing to indulge this view because it fits neatly into their anti-Western ideology.
The biggest problem facing the climate movement is that American and European voters who see all of the above factors in play will be increasingly resistant to make the sacrifices demanded of them — and it is increasingly clear that those sacrifices will involve major reductions in the first-world lifestyle, not just paying a few more dollars for gas.
Bullying an American consumer into paying three times as much for an electric car he does not really want will be much harder when Putin is blowing the emissions from 90 million mufflers into the atmosphere in Ukraine and the world’s developing nations are insisting they have done enough to deal with the putative crisis.
