Air Pollution, Clean Energy and Climate Change. Anilla Cherian
than the cost of the energy transition’ (emphasis included, Shindell 2020).
The significance of the finding that reducing the severe toxicity of air pollution reduces morbidity, ill‐health burdens and costs that not just offset but are actually far greater than the costs of transitioning to clean energy has paramount importance not just for the US, but for those households, cities and countries faced with exposure to hazardous levels of air pollution. It is now or never for addressing the layering of the double threats – energy related air pollution and climate vulnerabilities – both of which are pressing challenges for the broader UN‐led global sustainable development agenda (SDA).
1.2 Time to Look Beyond UN SILOS on Sustainable Energy and Climate Change to Curb Toxic Air Pollution: Why Non‐Nation‐State Actors (NNSAs) Matter in the Fight for Clean Air, Clean Energy and Climate
Responding to the nexus between energy related air pollution, public health and climate mitigation becomes an unmistakably urgent policy imperative for all relevant stakeholders when seen in conjunction with UN’s broader goal of poverty eradication by 2030. According to the World Bank, 10% of the world’s population or 734 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day and experienced extreme poverty in 2015, compared to nearly 36% or 1.9 billion people in 1990. Extreme poverty was found to have declined to 8.6% in 2018. But the World Bank has recently estimated that the COVID‐19 pandemic will have a disproportionate impact on the global poor and will ‘push an additional 88 million to 115 million people into extreme poverty’, with ‘the total rising to as many as 150 million by 2021, depending on the severity of the economic contraction’: ‘Had the pandemic not convulsed the globe, the poverty rate was expected to drop to 7.9% in 2020’ (World Bank 2020). It is within this development context of poverty reduction that the climate related health impacts and morbidity burdens of energy related air pollution needs to be understood. But there is now more than ever a pressing urgency to move beyond UN global goal silos on climate and sustainable energy towards more localized and integrated measures that are responsive to the needs of cities and communities on curbing fossil fuel related air pollution.
Since the adoption of the historic 1992 UNFCCC, which took eleven (11) intergovernmental negotiating sessions to be adopted, more than 25 annual cycles of intergovernmental negotiating meetings have occurred under the aegis of Conference of Parties (COPs) to the UNFCCC (Gupta 2014; Cherian 2012). Notwithstanding the rapid growth in global climate negotiations fora, securing a legally binding global climate change agreement still remains a quixotic goal. There has also been no shortage of policy prognostications and research related to climate negotiations ranging from game theory, regime, institutional governance analysis and climate justice perspectives (Haas et al. 1993; Luterbacher and Sprinz 2001; Giddens 2011; Stern et al. 2014; Bernard and Semmler 2015; Sjöstedt and Penetrante 2015). Robinson and Herbert (2001) outlined the need for integrating climate change early on with sustainable development needs. There is a considerable body of literature on sustainable development negotiations (Sachs 2015; Chasek et al. 2017; Kanie et al. 2017).
Enabling the active participation of NNSAs in global environmental governance to reduce institutional failure has been viewed as one of the most important tasks for policymakers seeking to improve the effectiveness of global governance (Hemmati 2001; Esty and Ivanova 2002). Gemmill and Bamidele‐Izu focused on the role of NGOs and civil society actors in global environmental governance and identified five major roles that civil society can play in global environmental governance: (i) information collection and dissemination; (ii) policy development consultation; (iii) policy implementation; (iv) assessment and monitoring and (v) advocating environmental justice (2002, p. 78). While climate change has galvanized civil society stakeholders’ actions ranging from the world’s most powerful CEOs to student activists, what needs to be reflected upon is that the implementation of the UN segregated goals on climate change, clean energy and curbing air pollution neither yield results nor allows for dynamic partnerships between NNSAs such as local governments and the energy sector. The COVID pandemic with its grave public health precautions of social distancing and global travel shut‐downs caused the necessary postponement of the 26th annual COP (COP‐26). But, the reality is that the decades‐old process of convening annual climate COPs which are now massive global juggernauts resulting in an alphabet soup of newly formed technical groups, ad hoc committees and escalating global air‐travel related emissions associated with transporting participants to diverse cities where these massive global climate conferences/summits are held. Despite the push towards ensuring a carbon neutral COP‐26, according to preliminary estimates by the host government’s official carbon accounting firm‐Arup‐ COP‐26 was ‘responsible for 102,500 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, which was twice as much CO2 equivalent associated with previous COPs held in Madrid in 2019 and Paris in 2015 and ‘four times as much as the earlier climate summits in Copenhagen and Durban, South Africa, according to figures compiled by The Washington Post’ (Booth and Stevens 2021). UNEP’s Executive Director, Inger Andersen in her foreword to the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2020 pointed to the urgency of ‘changes in consumption behaviour by individuals and the private sector’ which included the need to redesign cities and make housing more efficient. But she was categorical about assigning blame for GHG emissions: ‘The wealthy bear the greatest responsibility in this area. The combined emissions of the richest 1 per cent of the global population account for more than twice the combined emissions of the poorest 50 per cent. This elite will need to reduce their footprint by a factor of 30 to stay in line with the Paris Agreement targets’ (UNEP 2020a, p. xiii). Ironically, evidence as to the rich versus poor emission imbalance was apparent when a slew of 400 private jets were used by uber‐wealthy climate celebrities to attend COP‐26 (Parsons 2021).
Feigning ignorance regarding carbon inequality is hard to justify. Over five years ago, climate change was inextricably linked inequality in Oxfam’s Report, ‘Extreme Carbon Inequality’. The report estimated ‘carbon inequality’ to be such that ‘the poorest half of the global population – around 3.5 billion people – are responsible for only around 10% of total global emissions attributed to individual consumption, yet live overwhelmingly in countries most vulnerable to climate change. Around 50% of these emissions meanwhile can be attributed to the richest 10% of people around the world, who have average carbon footprints 11 times as high as the poorest half of the population, and 60 times as high as the poorest 10%. The average footprint of the richest 1% of people globally could be 175 times that of the poorest 10%’ (emphasis added, Oxfam 2015, p. 1). Calling attention to the massive scale of loss, devastation and dislocation imposed by climate change, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights pointed out: ‘Perversely, while people in poverty are responsible for just a fraction of global emissions, they will bear the brunt of climate change, and have the least capacity to protect themselves … We risk a “climate apartheid” scenario where the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer’(emphasis added, UN News 2019a).
Another recent example of this ‘climate apartheid’ scenario albeit by the well‐intentioned wealthy was the 2019 convening of a by‐invitation only, celebrity‐focused, three‐day Google camp on climate change. According to an article in Ecowatch, this event which cost upwards of $20 million meant that the Palermo airport had to be readied ‘for the expected arrival of 114 private jets not to mention private helicopters, yachts and limousines used for the transportation of the various guests’. As the article notes, the modalities used to convene this event were in stark contrast to the event’s promised mission, ‘as a flight from New York to Palermo, Sicily, generates around 4.24 metric tons of CO2’, which is ‘a lot of carbon for just a few people. And, that doesn't include the greenhouse gasses emitted by the 2,300 horsepower diesel‐engine private yachts’ that several attendees used (Davidson 2019). The imbalance in per capita GHG emissions is unambiguous across and within countries and cities and makes the dissonance between those who lack access to non‐polluting energy sources yet also contribute the least in term of per capita emissions versus those who proclaim the need for climate activism by jetting around the world harder to ignore.
IPCC’s AR6 Working Group 1 SPM leaves little room for equivocation or doubt as to the global urgency of climate action.