At the gates of hell

That is how UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described the extremes of weather we have been experiencing globally and the concomitant number of natural disasters.

He was speaking at last week’s UN General Assembly meeting in New York. He warned world leaders that we are way off the mark in meeting agreed sustainable development goals, of which the climate crisis is one.

Mr Guterres wants countries to bring forward their net-zero greenhouse-gas target dates from 2050 (USA, EU, UK), 2060 (Russia), China (2070) by a whole decade to reduce the soaring temperatures that are gripping us here and elsewhere. The effect is being felt in the oceans and on land.

North Africa – Libya and Morocco – became the stage recently of nature committing acts of genocide. From one end of the African continent to the other end, the unbearable force that is nature let rip, taking the lives of 7,000 people and injuring very many more.

In Libya, storm waters caused two poorly maintained dams to burst, sending unmanageable amounts of water down a river delta. It washed away avenues of houses, sweeping 4,000 people to watery graves in the wee hours of the morning as they slept in their beds. An entire area equivalent to St James and Maraval to St Ann’s and Belmont, across the Savannah in the foothills of the Northern Range, and down through Port of Spain, from the port area to Invaders Bay, was washed into the sea.

That disaster was apparently not caused only by the unusual weather, but also by the failure of the authorities to maintain the dams, the lack of early-warning systems and a disaster-recovery plan. One report spoke of the waste and littering that contributed to the build-up of water.

The second disaster, in Morocco, was an earthquake that killed 3,000 people in remote regions of the Atlas mountains. There, the absence of building codes contributed to the number of deaths.

It brought home to me and, surely, others how powerless we are in the face of such destruction.

It also made me consider how we in TT would respond to either of those disasters.

The 6.8 earthquake affected the equivalent of a quarter of TT’s population and killed the equivalent of half of Barataria’s population.

Our dams may be constructed differently, but we are plagued by clogged waterways and houses built in swampland areas. If rain fell for aweek in unprecedented torrents, which could happen, how many of us would suffer a similar fate?

What can we do? We don’t do much dairy farming, which produces methane, but we have landfills, which do.

And we do not heat our houses, which is a large contributor to CO2 emissions, but we have a lot of vehicles using petrol, which also raises global temperatures, and we use a lot of gas to generate the electricity for our ACs.

In addition, as our population grows and we increasingly build houses in wooded areas, we reduce the number of CO2 emission-guzzling trees.

TT is one of the 197 signatories to the plan to keep temperatures down, allowing a rise of only 1.5C by 2100. Well, I guess we will be way over that by then, if we have not completely frazzled ourselves to death by then, along with a few other populations.

Global leaders were scandalised by the UK government’s strategically timed announcement during the UN meeting that it would be delaying its target date for net-zero emissions by five years, to 2035. For his part, PM Rishi Sunak said GB was ahead of other countries and had over-delivered on greening policies, and so GB would still be on target for net-zero emissions in 2050.

He pointed to the high cost to the public of that commitment and the fact that GB has reduced carbon emissions by 68 per cent since 1990, which outstrips other countries.

The rollback means that petrol- and diesel-powered cars will be sold till 2035 in Britain, matching other countries, and natural gas heating systems will be too.

Big car makers such as Ford are unhappy, because they are well on the way to mechanising their operations in line with the 2030 target date, but the PM has his eye on the gains to be made in the next general election, arguing that he is changing policy to help lower-income families who are struggling in the present economic downturn and soaring interest rates.

In the end, only governments can take us down the path we need to follow. For them, though, it is the balance between doing what they know they must and what is politically beneficial.

We, however, can put pressure on them and also do what we know to be right to keep ourselves safe.