The starkest warning yet about the dangers of man-made climate change emerged yesterday from the UN Climate Panel meeting in Brussels. Unless greenhouse gas emissions are capped and then reduced, global warming will bring starvation to millions, and billions of people will be affected by flooding.
The experts warn of severe worldwide economic disruption unless all governments take immediate action to curb atmospheric pollution. It was unclear, however, just how committed every country will be to cleaning up their environmental act. The Chinese, for instance, complain that the now fully industrialized countries of the developed world laid the foundations for global warming. China may have to pay the price by slowing its own breakneck economic growth. While there is justice in such arguments, China misses the most important point. The world is actually faced not with disaster but with arguably its greatest-ever economic opportunity. Much of the technology for controlling, if not largely eradicating, dangerous climate-warming emissions from the burning of all fossil fuels already exists. Where it does not, once the commercial need is clear, the necessary new investment will pour in. There are fortunes to be made, not simply stopping the wreck of the earth’s atmosphere but in ending the appalling pollution of rivers and oceans.
If politicians everywhere line up behind the need to stop poisoning our world, there is actually no need to fear more than a temporary hiatus in the rapid growth of the new industrialized economies such as China and India. The UN should create a special fund to buy up existing environmental technologies and make them freely available, like open-source software, to any business or organization that wishes to use or develop them. Meanwhile, through the World Bank, funding should be made available, if necessary on a concessionary basis, to allow all countries to purchase and install the equipment that will reduce carbon emissions. The trillions of dollars needed to make, for instance, every coal-fired power station on the globe virtually pollution-free will be a long-term investment, both in terms of the lenders and also of the saving benefits that will accrue to the environment.
Further massive economic opportunities exist in building protection for some of the world’s greatest cities like London and New York, which face catastrophic floods, even when greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, because it is clear that there is also a natural warming cycle at play here. The extraordinarily large sums that all these improvements will require will not pauperize economies — merely redirect the flow of earnings into different sectors. Productive economic activity will still continue and may actually even be boosted by the massive environmental and protective works. Providing the technology and credits are made available, there is no reason why this apparently forbidding challenge cannot be turned to everyone’s advantage.
