Opinion Vikram S Mehta writes on the climate crisis: The global way out

The world is “boiling”. That is evident from data and visuals. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has noted that the first week of July was the “hottest week on record”. And that between 2024-2027, there will be one year when the average global temperature will exceed the limit of 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels — the limit set in 2015 at COP 21. Xinjiang in China recorded a high of 52.2 C last month; Phoenix in Arizona logged 19 straight days of above 43 C temperature and if one picked up an international newspaper at random, one will most likely will see pictures of forest fires coursing through southern Europe.

More worrying, the world is coming closer to the tipping point. Recently, two scientists from the University of Copenhagen published a peer-reviewed paper that stated the North Atlantic Gulf stream will “collapse some time between 2025 and 2095 most likely 2050s”. Were this to happen, the northern hemisphere would suffer pronounced cooling and the south intense heat. It would, according to IPCC, have catastrophic consequences.

The script has been written on what must be done. More can be said but the essentials of the action plan are well known. The president of COP28, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, has stated, for instance, that in his view the priority should be to increase the share of renewables in the energy basket and to scale up yet-to-be-proven technologies like green hydrogen and carbon capture. Governments should also honour their financial commitments.

What is, however, increasingly clear is that this script captures only the necessary steps. It is not sufficient. It does not take into account the inadvertent consequences of singular  solutions. Former US Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson has, for instance, noted that a laser focus on increasing solar and wind power could “accelerate nature’s destruction”. He cited the examples of solar facilities built on forested land, mining in environmentally sensitive areas or the one million bird deaths caused by wind turbines.

What is clear in my mind is that there is no one political, social or institutional instrument to tackle the challenge of global warming; nor any omnibus linear, technocratic or engineering solution. The challenge can only be met if the global community sink their differences and act in political, economic and financial concert. That, unfortunately, is not likely to happen. At least not until the present international order is radically reshaped.

I have not always been so pessimistic. Not so long back, the international order was characterised by globalisation, laissez-faire economics and relative social harmony. There was talk of the world being a global village. But today the world is divided geopolitically, the pendulum has swung away from free markets towards government-led industrial strategy and protectionism and people have turned inward and become narrow-minded. The escalating tensions between the US and China manifests the depth of this geopolitical divide. It is not limited to these two countries. It has percolated across the world. The US Inflation Reduction Act, Europe’s Carbon Border Adjustment mechanism (CBAM), the blockers on technology trade and rising tariff barriers reflect this pendulous swing towards economic nationalism. And finally, the electoral success of right-wing parties in Europe and the mind-boggling political durability of Donald Trump reveals the depth and spread of social polarisation.

Against this somewhat hopeless backdrop, Duhaime’s book offers the hope that the human brain, which is what drives our every action and determines our behaviour, could be conditioned to encourage pro-environmental policies. She writes that the brain is “plastic” and “ flexible and responds to changing reward systems and that the reason why decision-makers have not responded urgently to the problem of global warming is that their brains have” not had time to evolve “to handle such a problem”.

Life began on earth 4.5 billion years ago with a single-cell organism but humans have only been around for 2,00,000 years — a mere blip in the evolutionary time span of our planet. In consequence, our “neural equipment” has not been able to adapt and change to create a reward system that would encourage pro-environment policies and behaviours.

It is not clear how such a reward system can be created. Nor how long it might take. The concluding chapter of the book provides nothing more than generic responses to these questions. Notwithstanding, I would recommend the book to policymakers and others. It is an original exposition; it offers insight into how we make decisions and set priorities. And given the “plasticity” of our brain, it proffers the hope that our neural equipment will find a brain reward system that results in policies and behaviours that narrow the gap between rhetoric and action.

We have all suffered the experience of Covid19. The world faced a monumental challenge, but it overcame it through collaboration and coordination. Geocivics and geoscience overrode geopolitics and geoeconomics. We have done it once; it can therefore be done again.

The writer is chairman and distinguished fellow, Center for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP)