Peter: An equal piece of pie please

Summary

But India is developing
non-carbon energy sources

In “Climate change: Net zero targets are 'pie in the sky'”, Matt McGrath (2021) says that in contrast to the urgent cooperation urged by the United Kingdom and US special envoy on climate change, John Kerry, India’s minister for energy, Raj Kumar Singh, has complained that it is unfair of already developed nations, who caused most of the carbon emissions that now threaten to push the Earth over the danger point of 1.5C, to expect developing nations to sacrifice their own development to save everyone else. Mr Singh has also ridiculed commitments by developed nations and China to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 as unrealistic promises that merely sound wonderful, but are really “pie in the sky,” emphasizing that the desire of 800 million people who don’t even have electricity to rise to the same standard of living enjoyed by people in developed countries cannot be denied. 

This is version 3. If took some work to get the word count down from the initial 163 words to the current 148. Yu can also see my Google Doc for this summary. An example of my planning for an earlier summary paragraph, which I usually do in MS OneNote, although paper works perfectly well, is also online. 

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Response

To be honest, this article is not the one that most interested me: that was an article about an exciting new discovery in particle physics. I chose to summarize and respond to this one because it's closely related to the topic we have been reading about for the past couple of weeks: energy. In particular, it talks about sources of energy, whether they are sustainable or not and whether they are carbon neutral or better. The research on muons is high energy, but not so close to our recent topic.

My mum - I hope my appetite is
half as healthy when I'm 90.

As I read the BBC News article very closely so that I could summarize it, I was reminded of how complex the climate change challenge is. Unfortunately, it might also be crucial for our species’ continued existence on Earth as we know it. When I think about it, it seems so very distant to be worrying about things that might happen by 2050 or 2060, by which time I’m unlikely to be around to worry at all. My family history is, however, in my favour, but 90 is still very old, and like my 90 year old mum today, if I’m still here at that age I might worry more about lunch today than the global situation of tomorrow. 

And that is perhaps part of the problem with climate change. As the Indian minister points out, 2060 seems a long way off, and it’s easy to make promises for that distant time, especially when the people making those promises and the decisions are more likely to be older people than the young who will be inheriting whatever planet their parents leave them in another 30 or 40 years. 

I also agree with the main point that the Indian minister of energy made: it is unreasonable to expect the people of poor nations to stay poorer because they do not take full advantage of cheap fossil fuels to grow economically. If the rich world wants the less developed nations to rapidly reduce their use of fossil fuels, then the rich world must pay them to do that. That would mean much higher taxes paid in the developed world, but I haven’t seen any nation rushing to do that. On the contrary, in the US, and in my own country, the rich already complain about paying taxes to help the less well off have a decent standard of living. Sadly, this seems to be human nature, and unless we defeat the human nature that mindless nature and our ancestors gave us, it might shortly lead to a very unpleasant reality for all of us. I hope I am wrong. 

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Question

Are the rich people in your country happy to pay higher taxes to help others bear the cost of problems for society such as climate change or Covid-19? 

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Reference

• McGrath, M. (2021, April 1). Climate change: Net zero targets are 'pie in the sky'. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56596200