A race with no finish line
Socrates in his dialogues remembers Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, to say, “all things move and nothing remains still,” or change is the only constant. That saying is true for everything, including the climate. Why is climate change, then, not so obvious and such a concern? In his new book, Race for Tomorrow, Simon Mundy narrates 27 stories of the experiences of 60 people and places, to answer this question.
These stories are about losers and winners. In Bangladesh, Habibullah Mollah is moving places and finding other livelihoods. In the US, Vinod Khosla is changing business ventures and finding other sources of energy. For readers who live with a fear of missing out on places due to climate change, the book is also a travelogue, well researched and descriptive. The book compresses facts that show a concrete world on the other side of climate rhetoric. At the heart of the book is the problem of making hard choices.
Book chapters are organised into sections around calamities, food produce, fossil fuels and alternate power. Climate adaptation versus mitigation; genetically modified organisms versus going organic; and the transition costs of choosing renewable energy versus fossil fuels are other themes that unify the chapters.
The choice between adapting and mitigating is a tough one. If mitigation is delayed now, the cost of adaptation will rise in the future. But pressing for mitigation now delays adaptation and deepens the pain of the unprotected.
The book points out an obvious mistake in balancing the two. Climate funds favour vanity infrastructure projects over supporting resettlements. Mr Mundy files this reportage from Taro in the Solomon Islands and Afar in Ethiopia. Easing land conflicts and violence invited by climate disasters takes more effort than selecting a corporation to build solar parks. Mitigation choices are easier for multilaterals to make, but the investments made by rich nations don’t bear fruit to help the poor.
The chapter on India is set in the drought-prone Jalna district of Maharashtra. The choice is to either grow genetically-modified (GM) crops that can adapt to heat or rediscover native and sustainable methods to shift away from synthetic fertilisers and industrial ways of farming. If crop yields do not stop falling, farmers may take their own lives. Faced with this deadlock, the Indian government has banned GM crops.
It may appear that renewable energy has won over fossil fuels, but it’s still a choice in the making for many nations. For miners in the Latrobe valley of Australia, going green means resigning from their jobs with no other source of employment in sight. Miners in Kolwezi, Congo, will get to keep their jobs to mine cobalt needed to store renewable energy. They will, however, continue to live in poverty, with human rights violations and state coercion.
Overall, climate change starts to look like a loselose situation.
That’s when green technology-led capitalism comes into focus. There are gains to be made for tusk hunters in Siberia, the shipping industry in Greenland, climate tourism in Nepal, and geothermal energy in Iceland. Global capitalists and nimble start-ups across Israel, China, and the US are waiting to cash in on their climate breakthroughs. Right from plantbased meat, capturing carbon, generating and storing renewable energy to a wine industry that may flourish in the Atacama desert, ambitions are on their way to reality.
For a fair win, the game must be governed by fair rules. Progress on the international rule of law, though, has been limited. Survivors from the Haiyan typhoon that hit the Philippines struggled to achieve climate justice when Shell, the global oil company, declined to participate in a landmark trial prosecuted by the human rights commission. But the trial managed to make a case for global accountability.
While many across the world lack safety nets, financial markets have stepped in to insure against climate change. Bermuda, the capital of disaster bonds, is attracting financial alchemists from around the world who are using open and scientific climate data to wager against disasters. In Riyadh and Venice, finance follows hubris and corruption. Salman, the king of Saudi Arabia, is happy to throw money at the problem while the Italian bureaucracy has filled its own pockets by delaying a flood defence project for the city, sanctioned years ago in 2002.
The end of the book is a start. In his afterword, Mr Mundy declares, “It’s impossible to predict how this race will play out, as the effects of climate change continue to ripple through the planet and the global economy. What is certain is that this will remain the biggest and most important story that I, or any journalist of my generation, will get the chance to cover. And it’s just beginning.”
No matter how far out the reader is from understanding the climate change phenomenon, this book will anchor that understanding with a lot of context.