Trumping of Paris Accord!

Khalid Saleem
PRESIDENT Trump has gone ahead and done what he had threatened to do! He has formally announced that the US will opt out of the Paris Accord. As was to be expected, this decision has drawn flack from most quarters, with most countries reaffirming their determination to carry out their commitments – and that includes China that is ‘the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide’.
It is heart-warming to note that in a world, in which human values – what to talk of human life – have lost all sanctity; there exist people who still worry about such causes as global warming. It tends to restore whatever little faith one had in human nature. One had been hearing about the menace of global warming off and on for years, without people who matter taking it too seriously. There is a tendency among the powers-that-be to adopt this lackadaisical attitude till such time as a hazard rears its ugly head. Very few in this unheeding world of ours had taken this issue seriously until the tsunami and earthquake disasters turned everything upside down.A look over the shoulder may be in order. The perspicacious reader might recall that in Multilateral Conferences in the past, when the subject of global warming came up it was brushed aside by the developed world as a Third World worry. Why bother, they appear to have argued, if merely a few measly poor nations were in danger of being submerged by the rising sea? It was always expedient to fob off the responsibility on those Third World states that were eking out a measly living through the clandestine sale of their rain-forest timber. The developed world was never expected to be on the receiving end of things.Nature is a great leveler. It somehow refuses to give special preference to the rich and prosperous. Man-made disasters may target the poor and the deprived, but nature shows no such bias. It was interesting, therefore, to come across, several years back, a series of four articles by a Barry James in the International Herald Tribune each on one of “Four Battlefronts” in, what was termed as the “war against effects of climate change”. The four “Battle Fronts” selected by the author were all in the Developed World. The first of the series, relating to Venice – the much-heralded city of “romantic canals and splendid palaces”- was of direct relevance. It appears that Venice had already sunk a good depth of a step due to the indiscriminate drainage of the underground water table during industrialisation. Regrettably, the ‘thinkers’ in the Third World countries that are projected to be on the “hit list” of global warming hardly took notice.. Tens of millions of hapless people, mainly in South and Southeast Asia, face serious or permanent flooding of their lands if the climate change predictions become a reality. The World Metrological Organization (WMO) had termed the decade before last as the warmest since accurate records began to be maintained in the mid 19th century. The collapse of a huge ice shelf in the eastern Antarctic was reported some years ago. This was apparently due to rise in the temperatures in the region. Scientists surmised that, if the present trends continued unabated, the Arctic could well turn into a navigable ocean by the middle of this century. This is not a phenomenon to be taken lightly. The tragedy is that the world is still engaged in playing ducks and drakes with these issues as it is with several other issues of far reaching import. Multilateral diplomacy, which has progressively become the bane of what we euphemistically refer to as “our civilization”, has been let loose in the world’s arena. It is becoming obvious that multilateral diplomatists are more interested in their paid jaunts to far off exotic resorts than in the well-being of the populace at risk. They are bound to sell their sponsors short, as evidently their selfish priorities hardly square in with the anxieties of the struggling millions of the Third World.Meanwhile, several ecological upheavals are clearly visible on the horizon. The melting of huge chunks of ice near the North Pole is already the cause of serious concern. Not only will the loose chunks of ice pose an avoidable hazard to the shipping in the region, the consequential rise in the level of the ocean will be a danger for the low-lying landmasses in the area. Nearer home, there is an ecological disaster waiting to happen in the Siachin region, where the glacier is in imminent danger of melting. Experts have already warned that unless the military operations in the area are terminated and the forces withdrawn an ecological catastrophe of immense proportions is waiting round the corner. The moot question is: will the two sides take time off from their inane sparring sessions to pay some serious attention to averting the ecological disaster waiting to happen? Global warming is hardly a phenomenon to be taken lightly. The future of millions of human beings is at stake. The sooner the powers that be choose to realise – and take action to avert – the impending danger, the better it will be for mankind.
Time is of the essence. The world would need to act before it is too late. Trumping of the Paris Accord is hardly a good omen!