Global efforts to combat climate change (Final Part)

The news out of Nigeria, an oil producing nation, is that the court has ordered the seizure of a luxury apartment block owned by a former Minister of Petroleum Resources bought for US$37.5 allegedly from ill-gotten gains. This is in addition to a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice seeking to recover US$144 million of assets, including an US$80 million yacht owned by two Nigerian businessmen who allegedly bribed the Minister to gain lucrative oil contracts.

The Chicago Sun-Times carried an interesting editorial recently in which it highlighted the findings contained in a major draft new scientific report on climate change. This report, which was ordered by U.S. Congress and endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences, noted that the world is already experiencing higher temperatures and bigger storms and that climate change is no longer an issue relating to the future but to the present. The editorial bemoans the Trump Administration’s efforts to actively promote deregulation, especially of the coal industry, thereby allowing more carbon dioxide to be released into the environment. The Head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has also denied that climate change is man-made. The report made it clear that climate change has added significantly to the amount of rain and snow, especially in the Midwest, as well as to increased average temperatures. Across the United States, average temperatures since the 1980s have risen faster than at any time in the past 1,700 years, and each of the last three years has been the warmest on record globally. The report concluded that human activity has been the most likely chief cause of the global warming since the middle of the last century.

In our last two articles, we focused on global efforts to combat climate change following the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016. The main thrust of the Agreement relates to the curbing of the use of planet-warming fuels and encouraging the generation and use of renewable sources of energy. The goal is to keep a global temperature rise this century well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The top four polluters of the environment account for 50% of the global greenhouse gases: China (20.09%), United States (17.89%), Russia (7.53%) and India (4.10%). It is worth repeating last week’s Table I which shows the top 20 emitters of greenhouse gases: