Follow the money…
Any chance of meeting the decarbonization targets needed if human life is to continue on the planet is slipping away as the post-pandemic economic recovery continues. Estimates indicate that we have only a 50% chance of reaching the targets for curbing global warming by 2026, and the outlook for 2050 worsens with each day.
Air pollution already causes one in six deaths worldwide: cutting emissions could save around fifty thousand lives a year, plus more than $600 billion in healthcare costs in the United States alone. In India and Pakistan, increasingly severe heat waves are threatening the survival of people in more and more areas, potentially creating a disaster that could create thousands of casualties and tens of millions of climate refugees.
In this context, it is clear that phasing out fossil fuels, the real danger to the planet’s survival, offers better life quality and life expectancy. But doing so will be difficult because the banks still see financing oil and gas projects as an economic opportunity, while at the same time, thousands of these projects are protected by contracts that will cost the countries that agreed them at the time hundreds of millions of dollars to cancel.
What can be done to reduce the incentives to invest in fossil fuels, and to turn this industry into what it really should be, a symbol of another age? One interesting idea is…
