Climate change, a leaked UN report suggests, will become impossible to
resolve and undo if we don't make significant progress by 2030.
Climate change is a critically important global issue which is most often played down by industrial lobbies and such for their own gains. A leaked UN report now says that if unresolved within the 15 years, climate change will become impossible to tackle.
The key hurdle in resolving climate change is the vested interests of many stakeholders. These include major companies, manufacturers, even countries whose economies depend on the use of fossil fuels and who don’t want to give that up, regardless of how it affects the planet.
And that’s why there hasn’t been a strong enough global consensus in resolving the issue. The leaked UN report was penned down by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and includes a number of findings. According to these findings, although many countries have tried to implement clean energy reforms, the global use of fossil fuels has increased.
This is not surprising because even the developed countries know that they are not doing enough or even implementing the reforms fairly. In developed countries, companies are simply outsourcing the dirty energy jobs to other countries where cheap fossil fuels are still easily accessible and readily used. A case in point: Apple is outsourcing its manufacturing to Foxconn.
Countries such as China are all too ignorant of the global debate on climate change and in a bid to ramp up productions at all costs, they rely on fossil fuels not caring about the environmental costs. According to the UN report, if we are able to mitigate the climate change within the next 15 years or so, the problem could be resolved. The goal is to bring down global temperature increase to 3.6 degree above preindustrial levels.
However, the report also notes, that if we are unable to bottle this genie by 2030, the only viable solution going forward would be to suck greenhouse gases out of Earth’s environment and store them underground. The task certainly seems impossible and even the currently available technology is insufficient to implement it.
At the end of the day, the ugly truth is that countries are sabotaging the Earth’s environment, in an attempt to reap the economic benefits of using fossil fuels. And there’s absolutely no way to reverse this trend until alternate energy sources become as cheap and viable as fossil fuels, or at least nearly as much.