As COP26 enters its second week, climate and energy experts from the University of Delaware are sharing their opinions about the proceedings, including pressing issues, conference goals, and future outlooks. In this entry, Victor Perez,
Core Faculty at UD’s Disaster Research Center and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice, shares his thoughts.
What is the most pressing issue in climate change today?
There is no “most pressing issue,” as they are all deeply intertwined and driven by capitalism and the perceived need for growth economies. I think, if we had to, we can prioritize some issues to deal with sooner than others because they have contributed to climate change so profoundly they must be halted right away. Take, for example, the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. This is arguably the chief source of climate change impacts, and the most powerful economies on the planet contribute the most to it. Of course, this would mean that other structural changes need to happen so that our society, so deeply dependent on the use of these fuels, would be able to rearrange its relationship to energy and consumption.
One of these structural changes could be the immediate planning for managed retreat from coastal areas. We are already decades behind in making this happen, and our slow response to sea level rise and insistence on “building back” is getting us nowhere but deeper in a seriously complex and painstaking process: climate migration. I fear that coastal retreat will be a series of ad hoc endeavors that may result in furthering inequalities that, if done appropriately, could be alleviated by just managed retreat. The stories you may read about redeveloping rural America and other places with climate migrants are lovely, but we should have been reading them decades ago and trying to put them into place.
What is your takeaway from COP26 so far?
Politics as usual. It’s an extraordinary thing to me: we are unequivocally heading towards massive ecological changes that will make many cities too hot to live in, flooding too severe to manage, and sea levels to rise (e.g., one study suggests 5 feet here in DE). So much focus has been on ensuring that we limit global warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius, but research suggests that we won’t be able to do that and we’re looking more at 2 to 2.5 degrees Celsius. I’m exasperated by the performance, to be frank.
What are you hoping to see in the time left in COP26?
More coverage of the protests and critiques. In my view, promoting and covering these events in the media can help to raise awareness that we haven’t done and are not doing what truly needs to be done.
What do you think of the goals that COP26 set for itself (net zero by 2050, adapt to protect communities and ecosystems, mobilize finance, and work together)?
The goals sound promising, of course, but you have to remember that climate change is fueled by global capitalism, which itself is a competitive system by which countries (and multinational corporations) have relationships. Until we can radically alter the nature of the relationship the most powerful economies have with one another and the environment, we aren’t going to make much progress.
Where do we go from here?
Despite my frustrations noted earlier, I do think a carbon tax is a good start on a global, policy level. If it costs more for countries to produce something because it burns fossil fuels and if mass consumption remains a chief driver of the global economy, it might work on a few levels. It could even translate into stronger support for renewable energy and actually save money because of the direct costs of burning fossil fuels to our health and environment.
