Breathe
Not that I want to defend Mexico's environmental non-policy today, but it is important to know that the United States - so concerned about how much we pollute - is the country with the highest CO2 production in the West and a state that continues to fund polluting projects within its own borders.
We must lead by example. I fully understand this week's visit by John Kerry, the "lukewarm" Democratic politician in charge of global "warming" issues appointed by Joe Biden's administration, but I think it is important to put into context how much our neighbors care for the environment.
According to the report "New Year's Resolutions: America's Climate Hypocrisy" by the Center for Global Development (CGD), which analyzes the huge energy inequality between rich and poor countries, for example, the CO2 emissions of the average US citizen are more than 100 times higher than those of the average Ugandan.
In fact, the report gives a timeline of January 2022: on the first day of the year, one American had already emitted more CO2 than an inhabitant of the Democratic Republic of Congo in an entire year and, a week later, had surpassed the annual per capita emissions of 23 low-income countries. By January 10, the average emissions of a U.S. resident had already exceeded the annual per capita emissions of Kenya, Côte d'Ivoire and Cameroon, all middle- and low-income countries in Africa.
Closer to home, if we compare with Latin America, 20 days of an American is equivalent to the emissions of a whole year of a Nicaraguan.
While at the Glasgow Summit last November many leaders of the most developed countries signed with one hand an agreement to lower emissions and reduce the increase in global temperature in the future, with the other hand they went ahead with their plans to continue using and investing in polluting energies.
One of the actions that were approved is that developed countries (and with more funds) were going to cancel support and financing to poor or developing countries that wanted to generate energy that was not renewable or clean.
"This is hypocritical because these countries could have a greater impact if they committed to eliminating their own use of fossil fuels," the report reads and even makes a formula. The countries that signed that declaration spent a total of some 56 billion dollars on subsidizing the production or consumption of fossil fuels in their own countries, while stopping funding to countries that have not yet achieved the energy transition will save only 19 billion dollars.
In the case of the United States, it has at least 24 fossil fuel power generation projects in its pipeline pending start-up that represent more than 1.6 gigatons of potential greenhouse gas emissions.
In fact, it is the second country in CO2 emissions globally: 4,535,301 metric tons per year. This is just over half of what China, the world's largest polluter, emits.
Mexico is in 14th place, with 407,695 metric tons per year, which means that we generate 10 times fewer emissions than our northern neighbor.
If we measure it per person, as the Center for Global Development report does, an American produces an annual average of 13.68 metric tons of CO2, and a Mexican, 3.05.
"It's very easy for rich countries to impose fossil fuel financing bans on poor or developing countries, while at the same time increasing their own fossil fuel consumption," Vijaya Ramachandran, director of Energy and Development at the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, California, told The Guardian in an interview. "It's pure hypocrisy and it's devastating for poor countries, as they need a wide range of energy to drive development."
Did you know that the video game industry in California alone uses more energy than dozens of African countries? The demand for this business in this single state alone grew from five terawatt hours (TWh) in 2011 to 11 TWh in 2021. For context, that's the same as the entire population of Sri Lanka.
The data was published by another researcher, Rose Mutiso, of the Energy for Growth Hub think tank, who clearly states that "solving the climate crisis in the medium term is the responsibility of the countries that are currently high emitters, not only because they caused the problem, but also because logically this is where the high emissions are concentrated".
Of course I am in favor of lowering the temperature of the planet (an issue so close to our hearts if we remember the Mexican Nobel Prize winner Mario Molina).
Of course, I am against the current government's promotion of polluting energies and the brake on the development of clean or renewable energies that we had in Mexico, all in the name of ending the energy reform of the previous six-year term (with which the just pay for the sinners).
I am against the fact that such a powerful issue as global warming and its short and medium term effects on our lives matters so little to 4T politicians.
But neither am I in favor of a country like the United States, which does not respect the environment and has all the economic power to make a much more aggressive transition to non-polluting energies, coming to give us recommendations on how to be more responsible with the planet.
It may be politically more difficult, but climate action must start at home.
Words convince, but example drags.
@ba_anderson
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