De-hyping climate change

We need hybrid solutions to adapt to climate change, not panic-driven funding of net-zero goals

Climate change is driving us towards a new form of polarisation. It has become an ideological battle, with the Left demanding that countries declare climate emergencies, and the Right largely opposing such drastic moves.

In the US, a “progressive” group within the Democratic party is calling for the declaration of such an emergency, while Republican voices — often seen to be representing business interests — are opposing the idea. One Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, has gone as far as to dub climate change a “hoax”.

Some 24 countries, or their parliaments, including Japan, Bangladesh, South Korea, Spain, Italy, and New Zealand, not to speak of the European Parliament, have already made declarations of a climate emergency. Pressure is building on the rest.

This reminds me of a story I was told in school: A king once tasked his minister with finding a solution to keep his feet clean, no matter where he set foot in the kingdom. One of the solutions proffered, no doubt by business interests, was to cover every square inch of the territory with leather. The wiser and more affordable solution was to give the King, or whoever else wanted to keep their feet clean, a pair of shoes.

Today’s climate solutions are beginning to resemble the more draconian solution suggested to the king in the above story. Activists are calling on everybody to opt for trillion-dollar net-zero solutions on carbon emissions when the problems may not be the same for all. A pushback against this populist rush to declare climate emergencies began last year, when a group of over 1,000 scientists and professionals issued a World Climate Declaration (WCD) emphatically titled: “There is no climate emergency”. By mid-August this year, the signatories, or those who at least agreed with the thrust of the declaration, had swelled to over 1,600, including five from India. (Read the WCD report at, bit.ly/3EpibsE)

The report does not seek to deny climate change, but calls for a more rational, scientific basis for dealing with it so that mindless sums are not committed to it by generating hype and public panic on the issue. Its key points sound like commonsense to me: First, global warming is not just because of human actions, “natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming”. Moreover, the actual warming has been far slower than what climate change scientists predicted. The WCD says that “climate policy relies on inadequate models”, which have real shortcomings, and these models often ignore the fact that carbon dioxide is not just a villain, but is the very basis of plant life, on which all human life depends.

The WCD’s bottom line advice is simple and reasonable: “Science should strive for a significantly better understanding of the climate system, while politics should focus on minimising potential climate damage by prioritising adaptation strategies based on proven and affordable technologies.”

The question is: Why have the panic-mongers been so successful in getting large parts of the world to agree? The answer lies in a simple human trait: Media hype and the activists’ ability to convert observable events (floods, forest fires, typhoons) into a coherent (but under-substantiated) narrative of impending  climate disaster. We are more likely to believe the whole of a story if some part of it is playing in front of our eyes.

We should always be wary of declaring emergencies, for emergencies concentrate power in the hands of a few people, making them inherently undemocratic. It is one thing to declare a short-term emergency if there is a life-threatening pandemic to deal with, quite another to declare one on climate. Do we want a handful of climate extremists to wield so much power over our futures?

A few points are worth making here. One, while there may be no climate emergency in general, specific countries, which may be facing the brunt of it, may well need to declare climate emergencies. Small islands like the Maldives, or Kiribati, or parts of coastal Bangladesh may surely want to do so, but large countries, with a variety of climate zones, should be as focused on adaptation as reduction of carbon emissions.

Two, for countries like India, which has a large continent-sized population but not the financial and natural resources of a US, the focus should be on more immediate issues of environmental damage, where our air, water and earth are badly polluted and causing real health damage. The focus on achieving net-zero emissions should be a lower priority. We should be obsessing on the side of adaptation, not achieving net-zero.

Three, for the world as a whole, the focus should be on better science and better climate modelling on which most reasonable people can agree. The effort must be to build agile disaster-relief systems for the people who will be most affected by natural disasters like floods, droughts, heat and cold waves, and forest fires.  The Dutch, for example,  are preparing for a rise in sea levels by building coastal protections two meters higher. This is what Bangladesh or coastal Kerala could consider as well.

So what should India do now?

As a country that is used to dealing with floods and droughts almost every year, we tend to be unfazed by such yearly disasters and don’t link them with climate change. But we need to consider whether we are in a position to deal with massive heat waves, or forest fires of the kind that have

damaged Hawaii or parts of the US, Australia or Canada recently.

If disruption is going to be the norm in economic activity, should our companies not be directed to devote more resources to enable adaptation and mitigate harm? A policy change we should consider is to reassign the already mandated CSR (corporate social responsibility) spending to create a business disruption reserve, which can be used to both keep employees on the rolls when business flags, and support suppliers from the medium and small sectors with liquidity when needed. With most governments now making welfare their calling card, corporate do-gooding needs to focus not on CSR, but supporting business activity during disruptions.

Finally, we must empower the third tier of government, local bodies, and district administrations, so that effective local solutions can be found for skill-building, food security, basic education and healthcare, and disaster management. 

We must de-hype climate change and focus on affordable solutions, most of it local. We must choose commonsense over political extremes. We don’t have to choose between panic-mongers and climate deniers. They are both likely to be wrong.

The writer is editorial director, Swarajya magazine