Difficult climate

Is anything else new?

The climate summit in Glasgow wasn’t a complete failure. There were real moves made. On paper. And given what’s been going on in the last 10 years, we hear less and less from those who used to claim that climate change was a hoax.

How bad it may get is still being debated, and numbers are still being plugged into computer models, but the climate-change-isn’t-real crowd isn’t as loud as it once was.

The Glasgow Climate Pact is the first deal made by the world to say, out loud and written down, that mankind must move away from coal and other fossil fuels. But — there’s always a but — the language had to be watered down to get many countries on board.

This is a fundamental problem with addressing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere: Poorer countries are still developing and want to catch up. It doesn’t seem fair to them that, for decades, the West has been pumping greenhouse gases into the sky while building great economies and great infrastructure — to the point that richer countries can now talk about, and afford, going green.

But now that climate change has become such a worry that the West wants everybody to shut down or reduce the increase in coal-fired plants, poor countries consider that drawing up the ladder after only a few have reached the top.

And if Red China and India and other, poorer Asian countries continue to build coal-fired plants, and the pollutants are put into the air-supply commons, why should other countries hurt their economies by shutting down? The Tragedy of the Commons isn’t just for sheep.

But, according to The Washington Post, wealthy nations also fought off an effort to help poorer countries deal with loss and damage. Instead, delegates only agreed to start talking about such a thing. (This calls for immediate discussion!)

Which gave one delegate the chance to tweet: “In Glasgow, the needs of the world’s vulnerable people have been sacrificed on the altar of the rich world’s selfishness.” Not everybody was in the mood to sing around the campfire.

But the most difficult problem to overcome when it comes to climate change will be to get countries to report accurately. Not all are created equal this way. Red China’s media will report what the government tells it to. So will the media of many countries. Whereas the American media will report more accurately, no matter what the government desires.

The Post had a team of reporters look at this in a fascinating group of stories this past month. As we sometimes say to friends here, save that one for the contests.

Malaysia, for example, issued its report to the UN about its greenhouse gases and other emissions. Turns out the trees in Malaysia absorb carbon four times faster than the trees in neighboring countries. Unbelievable. As in, it can’t be believed.

Something like 73% of that country’s emissions were slashed from the bottom line because of its magic trees.

According to the Post: “An examination of 196 country reports reveals a giant gap between what nations declare their emissions to be vs. the greenhouse gases they are sending into the atmosphere. The gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion to as high as 13.3 billion tons a year of under-reported emissions — big enough to move the needle on how much the Earth will warm.”

If folks are allowed to make up their own data, how can the world address the problem?

And there are major players playing the numbers. For example, Russia. Satellites can measure methane leaks, and show Russia as the top leaker. But the land of Putin doesn’t report that to the United Nations. In fact, its official numbers are millions of tons off. And Persian Gulf countries operate similarly.

This is when countries report pollutants at all. “Some 45 countries,” The Post reports, “have not reported any new greenhouse gas numbers since 2009.”

There would seem to be a solution. These columns have promoted it before: Nuclear plants.

Nuclear energy doesn’t have the emissions problem. It doesn’t have the methane problem. It doesn’t have the availability problem that renewables have. Nuclear energy has a PR problem.

If more developed countries would consider putting more nuclear plants in the bends of their rivers, the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere would drop considerably. It would take money. But how much money is mankind thinking about spending in the next 10 years to combat climate change? It would seem nuclear would be a better investment.

This wouldn’t solve the problem of certain countries massaging the numbers of their own emissions. Or butchering the numbers. Or even ignoring them.

But it could mitigate the problem. And that’s an important first step.