Madrid COP25: an expected failure

To paraphrase US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, one of the architects of the Washington Naval Treaty which, in 1921, imposed the drastic paralysis of the arms race, there is only one way to reduce CO2 emissions: by reducing them. However, this statement, which would seem like a truism, has vanished one more year in the conclusions of the Madrid Climate Change Summit, under the cloak of the various national interests of the participating countries.

Nothing new under the sun, no doubt, but that leads us to wonder how much sincerity there is in political leaders who declare themselves convinced of the imminence of a climatological crisis with catastrophic consequences for humanity and, despite this, refuse to take the only effective measures under the most diverse and futile excuses. Because if the scientific consensus that attributes the greater warming of the Earth to the increase in carbon dioxide emissions is accepted as indisputable, the only possible answer is to undertake its reduction, either by expanding the emissions market, which forces the most polluting industries to pay a fee for each ton of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, or through multilateral treaties that impose green tariffs on the economies most deficient in environmental protection.

Only the European Union and Switzerland remain in accordance with what was agreed in the Kyoto Treaty, although, in order not to fall into angelism, it should be noted that these are, in general, economies dependent on the import of oil and other fossil fuels, such as gas, which benefit from the greater implementation of renewable or nuclear energy. In fact, the increase in the price of emission rights, which has gone from 3.51 euros per ton of CO2 in 2013 to 24.64 euros in 2019, that is, an increase of 524 percent, seems to have been the most powerful incentive to proceed with the substitution of energy sources. If, at the same time, it were combined with reasonable fiscal support for electricity companies that, as in Spain, are betting on green energy, the transition would be faster and more feasible.

But the underlying problem is not in the hands of the European Union, which is only responsible for 9 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. China, the United States, India, Russia, South Korea and, to a lesser extent, Japan, which take the lion’s share in CO2 production with more than 60 percent worldwide, have no interest, no matter how many declarations of principles they sign, in changing cheap energy sources, such as coal, for more expensive ones. with the loss of industrial competitiveness that this entails.

What’s more, China continues to build coal-fired power plants at the fastest pace in four decades. In this sense, the Madrid Summit, like the immediately preceding and certainly the next ones, has resulted in a general failure, even though there has been a small advance in the management of the so-called ‘green funds’. But what has been increased, let’s call it the “Greta effect”, is the grandiloquence of the messages of politicians, launched in an alarmist race of peremptory deadlines for the climate catastrophe – thirty, forty years, a century – that no scientific panel is able to sustain. There is, therefore, only one possible answer to the question we were asking ourselves at the beginning. That there is more of populist posture among some leaders who have put themselves at the head of the demonstration, than of sincere will to face the serious climate problem. As if, deep down, they just pretend to believe what science says because it is, of course, what gives and takes votes.

Source: Reason