IN the US, torrential rain has washed out the Burning Man festival of hedonistic excess.
Few tears will be shed throughout the world for the well-heeled denizens of Black Rock City, the temporary encampment of 70,000 of the most entitled and self-indulgent people on the planet.
With the few roads in ruins and the normally dried-up desert reduced to a quagmire of mud, the happy campers are instructed to take shelter or trek home through the dirt.
A sentient voice with a warning that extreme weather events are brought about by climate change comes from Michael Mann, presidential distinguished professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Earth and Environmental Science.
“These sorts of heavy summer rainfall events in the region are expected, as the well-known south-western summer monsoon is expected to yield larger amounts of rainfall in a warming climate,” he says.
Meanwhile, as reported in today’s Morning Star, last year nearly two million children in sub-Saharan Africa were left displaced by climate disasters.
Save the Children reports that at least 1.85 million children in sub-Saharan Africa were displaced at the end of 2022 compared to the one million similarly displaced in 2021.
These children and their families are the innocent victims of a global consumption regime that places a large part of the consequences of profligate energy use in the developed capitalist world on people whose collective energy use would barely suffice to make a cup of coffee each day.
The statistics show where the problem principally lies.
China’s carbon emissions total 7.44 tons per person. The US figure is 15.32 tons. The British figure is a comparatively creditable 5.60 tons while Sudan emits just 0.34 tons per person.
Of course, the statistics don’t tell the full story. China, where much of the world’s manufacturing is now located, has a very large population and so its total impact is substantial.
According to the Office for National Statistics, the main goods imported from China in 2021 included machinery and transport equipment (£27.5 billion), office machinery and telecoms and sound equipment; machinery and transport equipment was also the main goods export (£7.7bn).
It takes a lot of energy to make this kind of stuff — things that Britain used to make and export.
Last year UN chief Antonio Guterres wrote that the report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was a litany of broken climate promises.
“Together with the IPCC’s previous two reports on physical science and adaptation in the past year, it reveals the yawning gap between climate pledges and reality. And the reality is that we are speeding toward disastrous global warming of more than double the limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, as cited in the Paris Agreement of 2016.”
The science presents a disastrous scenario. To maintain the 1.5-degree limit as an achievable target, the world needs to cut global emissions by 45 per cent this decade. But current climate pledges would mean a 14 per cent increase in emissions. And most major emitters are not taking the steps needed to fulfil even these inadequate promises.
The finger points to the G7 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the US — as the worst backsliders.
Guterres has called for an end to the use of fossil fuels, a key driver of global warming which in Africa has resulted in flooding, droughts and erratic rainfall patterns.
To implement the steps necessary to mitigate climate change is a matter of global justice, but even for the developed capitalist countries it is increasingly a matter of domestic necessity.
