There has always been a chasm between the rich West and the developing world in their attitude to decarbonisation, because of the different stages of industrialisation they find themselves at. The West built foundations for exponential wealth growth in the industrial revolution, lifting their populations permanently far away from the extreme poverty that is still pervasive in much of the rest of the world. And they did so using fossil fuels, which they have now become so rich as to be able to afford the luxury of considering phasing out, hence the hugely ambitious goal to achieve net zero carbon emissions by the middle of the century.
But global unity has been lacking. At the latest meeting of the UN’s climate summit, in Glasgow earlier this year, the agreement reached fell a long way short of the post-industrial West’s lofty ambitions, because they could not persuade less developed countries to abandon the fossil fuels that they still need to power their industry-led economies.
Fast forward a few months, and the war in Ukraine has exacerbated already existing fault lines in the world economy to create a perfect storm in energy markets. The West’s hard-line sanction regime has put a stop to cheap gas from Russia, on which much on Europe relied. Energy prices are skyrocketing. Germany, a country that has been phasing out its nuclear energy production in deference to the rabid green movement, are especially vulnerable, and, despite the Greens entering the German government earlier this year, has opted to re-open coal power plants to fend off blackouts and even more serious trouble when winter comes. Other European countries are placing huge new orders of gas and coal from Africa, while an overhaul of the EU’s carbon agreement is being delayed as well as watered down. And the crisis has only just begun.
The discrepancy between the net zero goals and these new policies is stark, and certain to have been noticed across the developing world, where leaders must be padding themselves on the back for not having caved into the pressure they faced in Glasgow. How will they ever take the West seriously now, if they are asked again to make sacrifices to reduce carbon emissions, when it has been demonstrated how they West’s virtuous aspirations are sacrificed the minute there are consequences in the here and now, rather than in a still distant future? The truth, which those of us who have both opposed and ridiculed the net zero agenda have always know, is that the inherent short-termism in the politics of representative democracies lends itself very well to sweet-sounding ambition but very poorly to enforcing actual sacrifice onto large parts of the population.
The fact is, the west is still powered by fossil fuels, because the alternatives are totally deficient: wind and solar are unreliable and storage impossible because battery capacity is utterly inadequate. None of this will change in the short or medium term, but to reach net zero by 2050, very expensive reductions in emissions must be achieved in the not-too-distant future. They believe they can replace fossil fuels, but reality is that carbon emission can only be eliminated by a huge reduction in energy use. Britain has reduced its carbon emissions by 44% between 1990 and 2019, but they have done all the easy work so far. With every new %, reduction gets a lot harder, and the truth is that politicians have no idea how to achieve net zero, but have legislated for it nonetheless. They explain their mis-placed optimism about the achievability of their policy with unfounded expectations for technological advances, but they always evade questions of what happens if those expectation are not met. Not that we needed to exercise our brains too hard to guess the answer, but the energy crisis we find ourselves in has provided it with absolute clarity: they will abandon their goals the second the going gets tough. We knew it, they probably knew it, and now the developing world knows it as well. Global agreement to sacrifice economic growth and modern comforts to combat carbon emissions has become impossible. Net zero is dead.