Opinion | The Global Carbon Surveillance State Is Coming
Excerpt from this Op-Ed by David Wallace-Wells from the New York Times:
For decades, those of us wondering why so little action had been taken to reduce carbon emissions, and why the public felt so little urgency about that failure, would sometimes lament that carbon dioxide was invisible. Unlike the pollution that smogged up cities, set rivers on fire and inspired the Clean Air and Water Acts here and similar legislation abroad, the stuff that was damaging the climate was being put into the atmosphere without anyone really seeing it.
That’s why one of the most fascinating developments from this year’s major climate conference, COP27, which kicked off Nov. 6 with the U.N. secretary general António Guterres declaring that the world was on a “highway to climate hell,” is a new online tool released by the nonprofit coalition Climate Trace that allows us to see emissions in near-real time.
For a while, we’ve used ballpark estimates for emissions from countries, industries and the planet as a whole. The point of the Climate Trace project is to bring it down to the level of individual polluting facilities: to make it possible to track climate-damaging carbon released from more than 72,000 “steel and cement factories, power plants, oil and gas fields, cargo ships, cattle feedlots,”as The Times put it — to name just a handful of the sources.
The Climate Trace project doesn’t turn that carbon from invisible to red or green, and it is only one of many recent efforts to better assess the real-time state of emissions rather than imprecise approximations and modeling. But it marks another step toward what is beginning to seem like the inevitable development of a sort of global carbon surveillance state — one which, even independent of any global enforcement mechanism, promises to change some aspects of the conventional picture of climate change and what is causing it.
The basics, of course, remain the same: The world’s carbon emissions are produced primarily from the burning of fossil fuel, and the power, transportation and industrial sectors dominate. But examining the flow of pollution in a more granular and detailed way does change some features of the carbon landscape in three key ways.
To begin with, methane begins to look much more significant.
Second, it starts to seem less intuitive that we should build our understanding of emissions and decarbonization around the unit of the nation.
The emerging surveillance state also points the way to a third change in the way we think about emissions, offering another piece of the emerging framework for global sanctions and climate litigation. In the United States, dozens of lawsuits are already proceeding against individual companies, part of a broader global movement to push climate action into the courts to hold nations accountable to their own promises, as well as corporations for their damages and greenwashing. Clarity of data helps here, as it will in any future effort to incorporate emissions into trade agreements, too.