The real reason greenhouse gas emissions keep rising
"Rising emissions" and "overcoming poverty" are two ways of saying the same thing
You grew up on a farm. Maybe it was in Nigeria, maybe it was in Ecuador, or Bangladesh, or China. That doesn’t much matter. What matters is that you were poor, and it was hot. You had no electricity at home. You hardly ever travelled. Hunger was an ever looming threat. Meat was a rare and treasured treat. You lived in a house your parents had built with their own hands. It kept the rain out, some of the time. It looked something like:
Your parents farmed a small plot of land. They worked themselves to the bone to make it yield enough food for you and your siblings, enough to sell to make the bit of money it took to send you to school. They went through a lot for you. Not every harvest was good, not every meal was enough.
People in rich countries love to romanticize your experience, but you know how much it sucked. There was never enough of anything.
You were determined your parents’ sacrifice wasn’t going to be for nothing. You went to school, and did well. You graduated, and you went on to a technical school. You learned things no one in your family had ever known, and qualified for the kind of job no one in your family had ever been able to get.
And you’ve done well. Well enough you can send some money back home, to help your folks out now that they’re getting old. Well enough that you can afford the things they never could. Meat, even when it’s not a holiday. Trips back home to see them once or even twice a year. Maybe you even bought a little window air conditioner, on installments, to take the edge off of those days when it gets really hot — which come more and more often.
Now you have a city job in Lagos, or Guayaquil, or Dhaka, or Chongqing. After years in a tiny cramped apartment, you even qualified for a mortgage. Your house now looks something like this:
You’re nobody’s idea of a rich person. You’re one work accident away from being right back where you started. But you’re definitely not poor like your parents were. You’re upwardly mobile. You sleep on a foam mattress you bought at a store, not on a pile of straw like they did. Your clothes don’t have big holes on them. Things get tight towards the end of the month, sure, but your kids don’t know what it’s like to cry themselves to bed hungry at night.
Listen, we want to be on your side. You’re the little guy, the underdog. We want you to do well. We want asshole oil executives to be the perps in the little climate morality tale we’ve built for ourselves. When we say Just Stop Oil, we mean just stop the fat cats signing the billion-dollar exploration deals. Not you.
They’re easy to hate.
You’re not.
Here’s the thing, though. You’re one of billions. There are people like you in every corner of the developing world. Individually, your lifestyle generates greenhouse gas emissions that are a small fraction of what the average person in a rich country generates. But it’s not just you. It’s billions of you.
And, collectively, you’re the reason this chart looks like this:
We’re not ready to face up to what your rise in the world means.
We’re not ready to accept that for people like you, in the global lower middle class, salaries are always stretched. That you can only afford the very cheapest source of energy. That nine times out of ten that’s going to be energy extracted by burning things: natural gas if we’re lucky, coal if we're not.
We’re not ready to face the fact that you-being less-poor and you-emitting-more-carbon are two ways of saying the same thing.
And we’re certainly not ready to accept that globally, the rise of people like you is certain to overwhelm the modest reductions in emissions people in the developed countries are able to make with our solar panels and our nuclear power plants and our fancy shmancy LED bulbs.
Of all the things we in the first world climate commentariat are in denial about —and there are many— this is what we’re most in denial about: that the story of rising global emissions is the story of you getting less poor.
They’re not two stories, they’re two ways of telling the same story.
We’re desperate for this not to be so. We long for a baddie we can properly hate. We’re ready for Climate Justice to be a feel-good matter of sticking it to a bunch of capitalist pigs.
We’re not ready for a reality as morally unsatisfying as this one: that emissions are rising because hundreds of millions of children of the world’s poorest people live lives incomparably better than their parents’ were.
This is very important to understand, I believe. Both for the reality of where CO2 emissions are coming from, and for helping us understand how our own psychological tendencies influence how we see the problem .
Well when you go to a fossil fuel funded site ..... you get what they usually deliver. Carefully crafted ff propaganda.
The Statistical Review of World Energy is published by bp that's British Petroleum.
The bullshit never stops!