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© 2024 AFPClimate pledges of big firms 'critically insufficient': report
By Linda GIVETASH PARIS©2025 GPlusMedia Inc.
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© 2024 AFP
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-business models that produced and sold fewer products.
That just means higher prices and shortages, damaging livelihoods and increasing poverty.
If these activists want this to happen, they need to get elected on a mandate to suppress the economy, erase jobs, increase prices and empty supermarket shelves. Have fun with that, given that a simple Low Traffic Neighourhood gets councillors death threats.
There are also limits to the roll out of green tech, that these companies can fund. Turbines and solar panels take time to produce. There will be more limits in the future when the USG bans Chinese kit - green tech will cost a lot more and take much longer to obtain. Expect any green transition to take three or four times as long without Chinese production.
Although carbon credits are a scam, it doesn't matter where on the planet you reduce emissions. It all counts.
Western companies could pay to reduce emissions in the global south (where wood and coal are the main fuel sources and plastic-filled rivers are common). Here, their intervention can actually improve lives rather than impoverishing people, hiking prices and taking away their jobs. Current and future emissions are reduced and eco resources are preserved, in countries where it will not otherwise happen. The West will reduce its own impact more slowly over time. There are limits to how fast you can damage peoples' lives. Hence 'net zero', not 'zero'.
You can change peoples' lives quickly whilst improving them, but the green transition in first world countries damages every aspect of citizens' lives. Push it too fast and they will rebel, initially by voting out governments and replacing them with alternative (and then more Trump-like) regimes. And by targeting both climate change protestors and scientists. You really need to take people with you. Flipping to state enforcement may be an obvious option for scientists, but is something that is only going to work on paper. In the real world, things will get very ugly, very quickly. People are simply not going to live like medieval monks for the next two hundred years, particularly whilst other nations do little or nothing.
We also need to be spending much more money of climate resilience such as lagoons to prevent urban flooding and reservoirs for summer drought, as there is no way we will stop climate change. At best we can take the edge off.