Coal a climate villain
Just the week that young Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg took the world by storm with her climate strikes and impassioned speeches, and the UN had a summit on climate change, Sri Lanka’s Cabinet approved the addition of another 300 megawatts of coal power to the national grid.
A Carnegie Institution for Science study shows that emissions from burning a lump of coal or a gallon of gas has an effect on the climate 100,000 times greater than the heat given off by burning the fossil fuel itself. And, the heat trapped by those emissions can be felt within just a few months of the fuel being burned. Burning fossil fuels is the globe’s biggest source of human-caused greenhouse gases and the primary cause of climate change.
Nations around the world are phasing out coal in an effort to control global warming but Sri Lankan policymakers feel the need to buck the trend—as if the critical and urgent problem of climate change is just not our business. Even annual floods, droughts and rising frequency of natural disasters have not brought home the message.
Trek a little out of Colombo and farmers will bear testimony to how weather patterns have changed significantly over the years. Today, their crops are destroyed not only due to prolonged periods of far more intense drought than previously experienced. They perish because, when the rains arrive, they come down hard.
What used to be showers spread over longer spells with time aplenty for gentle soil absorption and appropriate filling of water bodies are now torrential downpours lasting over a few days, beating down on crops so fiercely that their flowers drop and cultivations rot. Subsistence farmers rely on rain-fed cultivation. And these erratic weather patterns also affect inland fisheries.
Changing temperatures are encouraging the spread of invasive species of pests and plants that have destroyed acres of farmland in the recent past. We will feel the pinch when food production takes a far more severe hit than we have seen so far.
Sri Lanka has a problem. It does not accept the reality of climate change. Its responses are piecemeal, if any. The Climate Change Secretariat sends officials to countless international conferences, but is powerless to, or ineffective at, influencing policy.
The electricity and transport sectors burn fuel as if global warming is a myth. When the UN Secretary General urges nations to have no more coal power plants by 2020, Sri Lanka coasts in the opposite direction. The Ceylon Electricity Board is planning one even in 2039.The land height of Colombo Port City is half a metre. Some parts of Jaffna and Batticaloa are just six inches above sea level. What will a metre’s rise in sea level by 2100 do? Colombo will never be flood free after high rains. And, when storm surges that happened in once in 100 years happen every year, parts of the coast line in South-West and East will be uninhabitable.
If Sri Lankans do not wake up to these realities, we will not have anyone to blame but ourselves. The connection between climate change and the extremes in weather experienced now is a result of climate change and we are doing nothing but intermittently, uselessly, treating the symptoms.