Outside In | Hong Kong’s annual global warming bill is HK$22 billion, but do we have the will to pay it?
- The IPCC’s global report urging action on the environment says we need to spend US$2.38 trillion a year on ‘mitigation investment’. Hong Kong’s leader will face a difficult choice in whether to pay our share
Imagine the setting: the head of Hong Kong’s Central Policy Unit (or whatever it is called nowadays) rushes into Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s office after reading the most recent dire warnings from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about how global warming, still unchecked, is putting in jeopardy the lives of literally billions of people on the earth.
In the wake of Typhoon Mangkhut, with perhaps HK$10 billion (US$1.28 billion) in insured damage, he points to the IPCC scientists’ call for US$2.38 trillion a year needed globally for “mitigation investment” that would help us adapt to higher temperatures, and protect us from the severest harm.
“I’ve just been doing some back of the envelope arithmetic,” he said: “Hong Kong generates 44 million tonnes of CO2 a year, according to the Global Carbon Atlas. That’s 0.12 per cent of the global total of 36 billion tonnes generated in 2016 by human activity. That means our share of the global mitigation investment would amount to just over HK$22 billion. We should budget that – it would be money well spent, don’t you think?”
Lam would of course push back: “Tell me what this mitigation investment would achieve.”
Her advisor pauses: “Well, according to the IPCC scientists, it would keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees from 2010 levels. Sea levels would rise 10cm less than if temperatures rise 2 degrees. If we don’t invest now, we can’t rule out, later in the century, really catastrophic warming, with Greenland’s ice cap melting, and all of our coral reefs disappearing.
“The money would be spent on getting us off fossil fuels and onto renewable energies, much improved energy efficiency, weaning us off meat.