Government Failures
The failure of governments to keep commitments on greenhouse gas reductions means that either plans are not made that could meet the committed reductions or if they are made, they are not enforced. How can this happen, given the dire consequences of lack of action?
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There are three reasons for the failure. First, human beings tend to discount future events, especially in countries with short election cycles. Climate catastrophes, such as severe droughts, floods, forest fires are discounted as onetime events and forgotten by the time the election is called.
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What is more critical for politicians to get elected is donations and in this area, fossil energy sellers and big greenhouse gas producers are influential throughout the election cycle supporting directly or indirectly all types of candidates and propagating their point of view. Hence, politicians may or may not care about climate change but regardless of words, tend not to do the right actions on climate change once they are elected as they do not want to alienate large donors.
In the end, like humanity in general, politicians act in their own selfish interest (on getting reelected) and so do government employees who are meant to develop regulations and enforcement plans. For government employees, if they act against the interest of strong lobbyists, they are likely to get into political difficulties. On the other hand, if they are slow to develop regulations or fail to enforce regulations nothing happens. So, bureaucrats tend to be painstakingly slow and careful, even when they are genuinely committed to doing something about climate change and this slows action down to the point that targets are missed dramatically in most countries. Even if lobbyists ae not involved, government action is always slow, as government are not designed to be action oriented like the private sector, this general slowness of government is known as inertia.
Governments also have another issue, if we are to succeed in stopping climate change, no nation can do it alone, we must come to a global agreement and stick to it. Unfortunately, nation states vary significantly in their commitments to climate and countries with large emissions have differing opinions on climate change, some are concerned, and many do not seem to care. As such it is hard for one country to commit to major changes knowing that other countries will not do much and therefore their effort may be wasted. In other words, we would need to find a way to overcome diversity among nations on climate change urgency to make progress and this seems a very big challenge in today’s world.
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Governments need to tackle the largest Greenhouse Gas emitters as soon as possible while working with all the sectors in parallel since every gram of Greenhouse gases counts (CO2, methane nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases and water vapor).
