Next Century Foundation Secretary General, Dr William Morris, is at a Middle East Peace and Security forum in Dohuk, Iraq. And Iraq is a country severely affected by climate change. He was asked to speak to the delegates on the subject. This is what he said:

Climate change is an acute problem in Iraq. I notice it in the mountains here around Dohuk, where villages are abandoned because the trees are dying that make up the orchards on which these little Christian mountain villages depend. The trees grow tinder dry and then the Turks shell the villages because they accuse them of offering refuge to PKK insurgents and then the orchards catch fire and that’s the death blow to the villages.

You also notice it when it comes to the Tigris and Euphrates. These two great rivers are now great streams. Iraq is “Rafidain”, the land of the two rivers, and it is disheartening to see the damming of these rivers upstream by Turkey causing such a vast decline in the amount of water available. That said the truth is the Turkey is not completely to blame. Even in Turkey in the high mountains there is not the kind of snow that there used to be in the winter. What this means is that there is insufficient snowmelt to fill the Tigris and the Euphrates  in the way that the snows of winter once did.

Of course water can also be a weapon of war. There is little or no water available to the villages of Hasekah, the Kurdish area of north eastern Syria. But that’s not because of climate change that’s because the Turks deliberately  block the river to ensure that they depopulate the Hasekah area.

It is one world

I am reminded when I think of this climate change issue of the mediaeval philosopher Mulla Sadra who used to say that the whole world is alive even the rocks. The stars in the sky are alive everything in the universe is alive and we are just part of this living creation. We should have that attitude of mind with regard to creation we are the caretakers of the Earth.

And here in Iraq things grow desperate. Even in southern Iraq the situation is bad and the impact on some parts of the South is considerably worse than others. Farmers have had to leave their farms because the microclimate has become so intensely hot. They try drilling illegal water wells but it does little good. They migrate to the towns because their farms have failed them and become dustballs.

There are areas of the Middle East where they’re coming to terms with climate change and taking measures to deal with it. And there are measures that can be taken. About this time last year I was in Sayadnaya in Syria and in that little town all the street lighting has been paid for by the locals and is by solar power. It’s a good way to move things forward. In Dohuk the tree planting is taking place as a defiant act because of the way that Saddam Hussein cut down all the trees of Kurdistan. It’s pretty remarkable seeing the tree planting program in Bazarn province where this work has been extensive. This tool is a way of hitting back at climate change .

It cannot go on

Of course in the long-term hydrocarbons are untenable, but that said the worst kind of hydrocarbon carbon is that produced by coal the worst of all polluters. My own home country the United Kingdom has just opened a massive new coal mine. Germany however has gone overboard since the outbreak of the Ukraine war and is burning more and more brown coal in its power stations the most polluting kind of coal there is.

The truth is we have some great climate change deniers in the west. Rishi Sunak, President Trump, president Xi Jinpin of China, these are all men who roll back on climate change policies or deny that it’s a real threat. We need to take steps to change this attitude and we have to change our own behaviour. Short haul flights are not a good idea. I mean an aircraft uses a lot of fuel on takeoff and again on landing, less so when it’s cruising along. So to fly short-haul means whilst takeoff and landing remains a heavy fuel cost with less time spent cruising and therefore short haul flights are very climate change polluting in terms of pollution per mile. Some countries like France have taken steps to put constraints on this kind of pollution.

There are positives around of course it’s good to see Bolsonaro gone. He was responsible for so much of the destruction of the Amazon. Not that the destruction of the Amazon is halted. Still a vast area is cut but not at the same pace as it was with Jair Bolsonaro. We need progressive policies on climate change. I remember I once lived in the Sultanate of Oman for half a dozen years from my sins with my family and Oman has a policy of pricing electricity at a modest price per unit for the first thousand units that are used each month but thereafter they doubled the charge for more than 1000 units if you consume more than 1000 units. And if you consume more than 2000 units they doubled doubled i. e. quadrupled the price of the electricity you consumed. It certainly put people in mind of the fact that that things needed to be done to conserve electricity. And it is a very good way of doing so. It means that the poorest families still get very cheap cheap electricity. We should be doing in the west but we don’t do it.

The clock is ticking

I will tell you something. The dinosaurs lived on this earth for millions upon millions of years. The human race, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, has only been here for some tens of thousands of years. If you look at the civilisation we now have here, it’s been belting out radio waves and light waves into the ether  for 100 years now since we’ve had a sophisticated civilisation on the planet. That signal of our presence has gone out for 100 light years therefore in every direction. Within  100 light years of the Earth there are countless stars but there are only about 20 or 30 or so yellow orange stars with planets that are  potentially life bearing and G type stars of the kind that we have for our sun, stars that could potentially sustain life. Well there’s a thing called the Search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI for short, that’s been examining the stars and they’ve found not a whisper coming from any of them, they’re silent as the grave, so there is currently unlikely to be any advanced form of civilisation, any technological civilisation, on those  comparatively nearby stars which means what? Well one theory is that the advanced civilisations that are technologically advanced live for such a very short space of time before they destroy themselves and that’s why we don’t see any indication of them being around. That’s a possibility. Are we going to do that, are we going to destroy ourselves before we even got off the ground because of climate change?

I am reminded of the old adage, we do not inherit the Earth we borrow it from our children.

Some background

A few statistics for you: the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change estimates that sea level will rise by 1.3 m by 2100 if we do not deviate from our current climate pledges. We have not remotely kept to our current climate pledges and nor are we likely to. 600,000,000 people inhabit coastal areas less than 10 m above sea level. Do you know what my hope is? I hope that we will wise up when we see the Seychelles disappear underwater and change our ways. The nations with the largest carbon footprint: the first is China by a country mile followed by the United States of America but the most carbon polluting nations per capita are the United States first, Germany second and the others are well behind. There are so many things we could do. We could have free public transport for the elderly on trains and buses and the like. That would take a huge number of cars off the road in the United States of America as the elderly can be quite miserly and if they have free travel on trains, they will change their habits.

Worldwide the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UNHCR, estimates there will be 1.2 billion climate change refugees by 2050. Way back in 2009, the G-7 nations promised to mobilise $100 billion a year in help for countries most affected by climate change. Not one red scent of that has actually been distributed. Who are the G7 nations? They are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom and United States of America. Those same G-7 nations promised to end funding for coal power. They certainly haven’t done that. Germany makes the excuse of the Ukraine war for the escalation of its use of coal power. That is no excuse. Two wrongs never make a right. We need clear assertive steps to be taken now if we want to stop climate change getting out of control.

A footnote: Nadim Zahawi MP has been here and he has also been addressing the Middle East Policy Forum. He is perceived, as a former Chancellor, as representing the UK Government. Interestingly, he said that the world currently consumes 100 million barrels a day of oil. And the “equivalent” of 80 million barrels a day of natural gas. And the equivalent of 70 million barrels a day of coal. Which is interesting.

On a disturbing note, Zahawi was shameful in his repeated promotion of nuclear power for the Middle East. Can you imagine the potential dire consequences on an attack on a nuclear power station if an unstable country like Iraq were to develop nuclear power? Nuclear power does not belong in war zones. Zahawi should be ashamed of himself.