OPINION: Where does the COP26 leave the Highlands? Charles Bannerman focuses on Inverness and the future of the planet
Well that’s COP26 done and dusted and thousands of delegates, protesters and media have jetted off home amid a thick miasma of nasty gases, writes Charles Bannerman.
So, where does this leave the planet? Still committed to too much mucky, carbon dioxide-intense and energy-inefficient coal, I fear.
Love or loathe Greta Thunberg, she does seem to appeal to the young – the very people who hold the key to climate change. Schemes to limit energy use and gas emissions are fine, but it’s a bit like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic rather than bellowing “hard a starboard!” to miss the iceberg altogether.
So how do we avoid that iceberg? Well, it’s people that produce greenhouse gases, so we urgently need to reduce world population, especially in countries with high energy use. It’s currently 7.8 billion and projected to rise 40 per cent to 10.9 billion by 2100. That creates a huge hike in energy demand for deckchair moving schemes like electric cars and wind farms to fill. Far better tackle the issue at source and keep populations down, hence also reducing demand for other resources like food.
In 2006, US Vice President Al Gore lectured and moralised about climate change in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. However the real inconvenient truth is that he is father to no fewer than four children, so Mr and Mrs Gore have actually doubled their contribution to the problem.
Greta and her chums apparently forget their generation’s partiality to rubber trainers, synthetic clothing and pre-packed food. Meanwhile, those she lectures with petted lip about having stolen her childhood grew up wearing canvas sandshoes and woolly jumpers and ate potatoes from their back garden.
But there’s far more Greta and her contemporaries can do than simply revert to the Spartan upbringing of us oldies. Those of reproductive age are ideally placed to slash gas emissions, simply by drastically reducing the rate at which they go forth and multiply. Fewer people, less greenhouse gas. Fundamentally, the planet is fast approaching the limit to how many humans it can sustain and, at current levels, advocating a return to some kind of agrarian, peasant existence is downright simplistic.
And while not a climate sceptic, I’m extremely sceptical about some of the “golden bullets” touted as solutions. Let’s look at two.
The first panacea is the electric car. Yes, very nice, no exhaust pipe, but where’s all the extra electricity going to come from?
“Renewables!” is the knee-jerk response, but hang on. Even now, renewables only provide a fraction of electricity demand, so where do we get all the extra for an estimated 1.4 billion motor vehicles worldwide?
From fossil fuels, even if we also cover all the world’s “last great wildernesses” with wind turbines. Then there’s the vast number of charging points needed, developing the National Grid and the deployment and disposal of billions of lithium batteries.
Hydrogen power then? It’s very clean, emitting only water vapour, but making it usually involves even more electricity or using natural gas with a by-product of, wait for it, carbon dioxide. Then there’s the awesome task of storing the most explosive chemical element and second most volatile substance on earth.
Limiting population is therefore the ultimate key, and how much attention did that get at COP26?