A Move Forward: Climate Trace

Regardless of whether we want to believe it or not, climate change is here to stay.

Although the scale of climate change often seems too large for us to handle single-handedly, it is extremely heart-warming to see dedicated groups and individuals all around the world mustering all their power and influence to enact meaningful changes in our fight against climate change.

An example is the Climate Trace group, which is helmed by former Vice President Al Gore. Al Gore served as the 45th Vice President of the United States in the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001. He is also a prominent environmentalist and one of the very few top leaders in the US government advocating fiercely for sustainability policies.

With reference to Time’s recent article about Climate Trace, Al Gore launched a new coalition of 9 climate and technology organisations with the aim of accurately tracking greenhouse gas emissions from everywhere remotely. The article clearly articulates the benefits of having such a robust effort, which include:

• Allowing individual countries to verify if their counterparts are following through on their climate commitments.

• Fostering an environment where countries and world leaders will be more inclined to live up to their promise with regard to their environmental claims.

• Allowing countries to use the shared data to go after local companies/individuals within their borders who are illegally emitting more greenhouse gases than they should.

While this effort is indeed commendable and unprecedented in the field of environmental sustainability, there will still be significant hurdles in place to hinder an otherwise successful campaign to reduce our emissions. It is important to have a balanced and nuanced view of any new project, especially something of this scale. Things are often not as rosy as the mainstream media may be portraying.

Lack of Regulations

Source: Bill Oxford

Firstly, despite increasing the inclination of countries to be more upfront about their emission levels, there are currently still no formal regulations in place to enforce these targets strictly. In the Paris Agreement, the fundamental principles were built on consensus-building. The targets set out by individual countries were politically encouraged but were not legally binding. This essentially meant that the most countries could do was to call their lying counterparts out, embarrass them and nothing more.

Corruption and Myopia

Source: Markus Spiske

Secondly, there will still be the problem of corruption in governments, or simply the problem of a government who doesn’t care about the environment or climate change. We see this in many countries today, where their top leaders are blatantly encouraging their local companies to sacrifice their natural forests in exchange for economic gains.

Although this project would indeed make it easier for governments to crack down on companies that emit a large amount of greenhouse gases, the final decision still lies with governments themselves. If they are staffed with climate deniers or are fixated on the short-term gains rather than seeing the bigger picture, the result would still be devastating and the supposed benefits of the shared data will never see the light of day.

This situation is made worse by the presence of lobbying and special interest groups. To put it bluntly, these groups are often described as a form of “legalised corruption”, and as long as they continually use their fat wallets to exert their huge influence on legislators, real and effective change will forever be hindered.

Invasion of Privacy

Source: Matthew Henry

Finally, there may be some backlash and withdrawal from certain countries, citing reasons like privacy invasion. As this new technology allows users to track emissions from “individual factories, ships and power plants”, this goes even further than any other broad international agreement enacted in the past. The tracking is extremely specific and the very notion of this may irk some governments who value the privacy of its local companies above all else. They may be afraid that the data may be used to disadvantage their economy in the highly-competitive marketplace.

There Is Still Hope

Source: Markus Spiske

At the end of the day, it is undeniable that the creation of Climate Trace is a great step forward in our collective fight against climate change. However, certain issues need to be resolved in tandem with the initiative:

• Citizens of every country should start looking at climate change seriously and elect a government that pursues good and beneficial green policies.

• Create a regulatory authority for major climate agreements, with members selected from a diverse range of countries to ensure transparency and equality.

• Enact strict legislation that prohibits special lobbying groups from holding such huge influence in the policy-making sphere.

This is all easier said than done. This issue is multi-faceted and is not something that can be resolved overnight. However, with the increased occurrence of climate-related disasters in the past few years alone (the Australian bush fires, hurricanes, record-high temperatures in Russia), it is PARAMOUNT that we as humans do more.

After all, we only have one planet to live on.