The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is lined with warnings that no longer warn of the emergency, but argue that we are now immersed in it, with all that that may mean setbacks and disastrous losses. Around the world, consternation is followed by nagging questions: why is leadership eroding around this vital issue and why is it so difficult to take action?
The state of emergency does not generate the same promptness or the same efficiency in the reaction, political at least. The planet may be dying, but for now its eyes are on the shocking war being played out in Ukraine. There, the emergency takes the implausible form of citizens forced to learn the basics of handling weapons. The absurdity of this crazy war aimed at undermining a democracy of course requires a state of emergency, and we have seen the Western world rally around this small country of proud nationalism and even the European Union, in a historic gesture, to untie a fund of 450 million euros intended to finance and deliver arms to the beleaguered country. The stakes are high – economic, humanitarian, geopolitical – and require rapid and urgent organized action.
In the wake of the pandemic, nations around the world have also demonstrated their ability to combine the urgency to act with elaborate health action plans. Here too, the prospect of human lives in danger served as an accelerator for political inventiveness. The production of a COVID-19 vaccine, normally subject to a tedious years-long approval process, was very fast. Several laboratories have succeeded in licensing vaccines as early as 2020, featuring messenger RNA vaccines with more flexible manufacturing. Today, 63% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. A total of 4.3 billion people are fully immunized.
As a counter-example, let us underline in broad strokes the misuse and misunderstanding of the notion of urgency by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau; struggling with a convoy of truckers and demonstrators who came to paralyze the city center without being stopped at the right time by the authorities in place, the Prime Minister spent the first half of this bad film in hiding, silent and apparently indolent , to ultimately brandish the use of the Emergency Measures Act, deemed unnecessary and exaggerated by the vast majority of seasoned observers. The fall of this bad scenario is astonishing as it is bad: less than 48 hours after the House of Commons gave its approval to the Act, a historic gesture, the Prime Minister revoked its use, considering that “we was more in an emergency situation”.
Urgency is therefore a malleable material. Yet it oozes from every chapter of the latest IPCC report, which warns that the window to a “viable” future is inevitably closing in on us. “This report is a serious warning of the consequences of inaction,” warns IPCC Chairman Hoesung Lee. Over the six years that separate the IPCC’s watchful eye, the balance sheets darken. Urgency is no longer an eventuality. It invites itself into the irreversible changes already traced on the road of the countries, all signed by an indolence of the nations in the fight against climate change. Climate marches have already agitated hundreds of thousands of citizens in the streets of the biggest cities on the planet, but trivialization has made its way onto political agendas. The climate emergency is not shaking as it should.
And yet! 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change. Human lives are in danger because of global warming, just think of reduced access to drinking water and famines caused by drought or heat waves. We have seen and we will continue to see columns of climate migrants fleeing mother earth, because it no longer offers the resources to ensure survival. Close to us, floods and fires are causing death, and these acute manifestations of climate change will not be extinguished by magic.
Our global dependence on fossil fuels — first enshrined in the final declaration of the 26and UN Climate Conference, Scotland — playing its dual role of destruction. It risks making us miss the precious target of reducing greenhouse gases, necessary to avoid the worst. And it slows down, by the deleterious action of its lobby and the weight of the habits which are attached to it, political action. In an emergency, you have to know how to hurry.