Last week was
intense. The atmosphere of hope over COP21 meetings in Paris, a couple of days
in Mombasa working with a supremely creative local performance group on our
Young Cities initiative, and then a former British colony celebrated 52 years
since independence.
Like many Kenyans
celebrated Kenya@52. And how I wish we could all truly love our country,
denounce greed and corruption and jettison from narrow ethnic calculus. This
country can be great but such greatness must be built on the backs of selfless
individuals who ask not what they can reap, but what they must sow.
Energy is at the heart of the global
climate crisis. What is needed is a robust and binding commitment by all
countries to shift from the use of oil, coal and gas, which supplies 80 percent
of global energy needs, to the use of renewable sources such as solar, wind,
geothermal and hydro. However, such a transition would require huge breakthroughs
in technology and major investments in infrastructure. Moreover, the
expectation of developing countries is that developed countries pay for their
energy transition through direct spending or through inexpensive transfer of
technology.
COP21
started on a promising note. The United States and 19 other countries pledged
to double their spending over five years to support clean energy research. Led
by Bill Gates, 28 private investors, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and
Amazon's Jeff Bezos, pledged money to help build private businesses based on
publicly funded clean energy research.
The promising, cooperative start of COP21was
short lived. It was depressing to see hubris and ego of nations on display in
the final days of the COP21 meeting in Paris. China led the so-called
developing world in pressing for the continuation of the current two tier
system where obligations to cut back carbon emissions or a shift to clean
energy must be shouldered by the so-called developed countries.
On
December 12, 2015, after 13 days of negotiations, diplomats issued a final
draft of a climate change agreement in Paris. If adopted, the agreement would
set an ambitious goal of holding the increase in the global average temperature
to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, and pursuing efforts to limit
the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees.
However,
the agreement does not mandate how much each country must reduce its greenhouse
gas emissions. But it establishes a bottom-up system in which each country sets
its own goal, “intended nationally determined contributions”, (INDC) and
communicates plans to achieve that objective. While it is commendable that many
countries including Burundi, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania actually
submitted their INDC before COP21, greater emission reduction pledges will be
required hold the increase in the global average temperature to below 2 degrees
Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
I
think Article 4 paragraph 1 of the Paris Agreement is pretty tepid in mandating
an end date to greenhouse emissions for developing countries, which include the
world’s foremost polluters such as China and India. The agreement requires that
“Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as
possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country
Parties”. Such wording waters down, significantly, the stated goal to cut
greenhouse emission and slow global warming. Moreover, it is hard to see how
the requirement to update pledges made in nationally determined contributions
every five years after 2020 will be enforced.
The
scientific community is skeptical about how the Paris Agreement will achieve
the goal of holding the increase in the global average temperature to well
below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Kevin
Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research based in Britain believes
that the Paris Agreement is not consistent with the science and is between
dangerous and deadly for the most vulnerable nations of the world. Former NASA
scientist James Hansen has described the agreement as a fraud.
It is shameful that world leaders have
shown no interest in making hard choices to de-carbonize the global economy. The
Paris Agreement was the easy thing to do because a legally binding agreement
would pose international resistance from developing countries. Moreover a
binding agreement would face stiff domestic political challenges in the United
States.
Paris was a missed opportunity. The
narrow imperatives of economic growth triumphed. As Naomi Klein said, the
climate change movement has yet to find its moral voice on the world stage.
Hope you are Well Mr Awiti, been reading your blog since time and it pushed me to do a bachelors in SustDev. what do u think is the panacea for the current youth Situation in Kenya??
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