Author: gqSbgCfmna

Ahead of this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), now underway in Belém, Brazil, Bill Gates, who chairs and funds the foundation that bears his name, released an essay entitled “Three tough truths about climate”. The first of these truths is: “Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilisation.”

Mr Gates recognises that climate change is “a very important problem”, that it “needs to be solved” and that “[e]very tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives”. Nevertheless, to say that climate change will not be the end of civilisation must lessen our sense of the urgency of acting to mitigate it. So, we should ask whether this “truth” really is true.

Mr Gates defends his flat statement that climate change “will not be the end of civilisation” with a graph showing that even if countries do no more than continue what they are doing now, “Global warming will probably be less than 3°C by 2100”.

More precisely, the graph suggests that by 2100, with countries continuing to do what they are doing now, the global average temperature will be 2.9C above the pre-industrial level.

Suppose we agree that, although a global temperature rise of 2.9C would make some parts of our planet uninhabitable because of extreme heat or rising sea levels, enough will still be suitable for human habitation to allow civilisation to continue. The question remains: Will the temperature rise stop at 2.9C?

To make the case that it will, Mr Gates gives a detailed account of technological innovations that, he believes, could enable us to move to zero emissions before the end of the century. But he misses something critically important. To see this, let’s take a step back.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which has been signed by 198 parties, including all United Nations member states, dates from the “Earth Summit” held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Article 2 of the convention states that its ultimate objective is to achieve “stabilisation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.

The convention did not put any specific limit on how much global warming could be tolerated without dangerous anthropogenic interference with our climate. Countries had different views about that, and the science was still developing.

Eighteen years later, however, at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP16), in Cancún, the science was sufficiently advanced for it to be agreed that to avoid danger, global warming must be limited to 2C above pre-industrial levels. Then, in 2015, with further evidence showing the threat of sea-level rise to low-lying island states, the agreement was further refined at COP21 in Paris to hold the increase to “well below” 2C while “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.

All the criticism of the 2C limit has been on the side of saying that it is too high. For example, a two-year expert review reported to the UNFCCC in 2015 that “the ‘guardrail’ concept, in which up to 2°C of warming is considered safe, is inadequate, and would therefore be better seen as an upper limit, a defence line that needs to be stringently defended, while less warming would be preferable”.

No major country, nor any authoritative expert body, has suggested that we could safely raise the 2C limit. The main reason for this is not that civilisation will be unable to survive in a world that is 2C warmer than the pre-industrial world was, or that, as Mr Gates points out, it is easier to improve people’s lives when the climate is stable.

Instead, the main reason is that once global warming exceeds 2C, the risk of activating positive feedback loops increases significantly. These loops may further increase global temperatures even if we have, thanks to the technological innovations Mr Gates mentions, reduced to zero the emissions for which humans are directly responsible.

Three of these feedback loops are particularly important. When we include these and other reinforcing loops in our calculations, we cannot easily brush aside the threat climate change poses to the future of civilisation.

Mr Gates seeks to de-emphasise the existential threat posed by climate change in order to “put human welfare at the centre of our climate strategies”. But this doesn’t tell us how tolerant we should be of the risk of creating a climate that will be disastrous for human welfare for centuries to come. Tolerating 2.9C of warming by 2100 may, in the long run, be far worse for human welfare than doing everything possible to keep warming below 2C. ©2025 Project Syndicate

Amid the drumbeats of military conflict with Cambodia, Thailand’s political environment is evidently unruly and unsettled. The minority government of Anutin Charnvirakul, the third prime minister from the third largest-winning party since the latest national election in May 2023, is hard-pressed to stay in office beyond the four-month “Memorandum of Agreement” between his Bhumjaithai Party (BJT) and the People’s Party (PP), the largest camp in the national assembly.

As pressure mounts from a planned no-confidence motion in December and explosive corruption allegations against cabinet members related to scam networks and cyberfraud, Prime Minister Anutin may be forced to bring forward the election from the anticipated end of March next year, despite his playing up nationalism over the Thai-Cambodian border dispute.

Following the dissolution of PP’s predecessor Move Forward Party and the removal of the second-largest poll winner, Pheu Thai Party’s Srettha Thavisin, from the premiership in August 2023 and Paetongtarn Shinawatra a year later, Mr Anutin took the helm of a stopgap administration. Despite the four-month MoA with PP, the Anutin cabinet comprising old-style unsavoury politicians from provincial patronage networks appeared set to stay in public office where they are able to gain from pork-barrelling projects ahead of the next poll, which is due by May 2027.

While the finance, commerce, and energy portfolios were filled by technocrats, the lion’s share of cabinet posts went to the Anutin-led BJT, overseen by party patriarch Newin Chidchob, along with coalition allies, Klatham and United Thai Nation parties. The BJT-PP deal was that Mr Anutin would steer parliamentary proceedings and see through charter amendments to pave the way for a new constitution by holding a referendum on its drafting structure concurrently at the next poll.

But as he settled into the premiership, the going got tough quickly for Mr Anutin. While a wide array of his cabinet ministers was previously embroiled in scandals, including Deputy Prime Minister and Agriculture Minister Thamanat Prompow’s earlier conviction and jail term in Australia on drug-trafficking charges, allegations of his linkages with cyber-crimes and scam centre networks based in Cambodia put Mr Anutin on the back foot. As more facts surrounding the labyrinthine cross-border multibillion-dollar transnational criminal ring surfaced, more questions went unanswered. Deputy Finance Minister Vorapak Tanyawong had to resign unceremoniously due to accusations of his link with BIC Bank in Cambodia, founded by controversial Cambodian businessman Yim Leak.

It turned out that the accusation against Mr Vorapak was just the tip of the iceberg as a report of cyberfraud, human- and drug-trafficking and money-laundering among cyber-criminal networks became exposed. Chen Zhi of the Prince Group and Hun To of Huione Group were fingered as two of the leading masterminds of these scam networks, along with Benjamin Mauerberger, allegedly the key conduit among these criminal gangs. The United States Treasury Department confiscated nearly $15 billion of the Prince Group’s and Chen Zhi’s crypto and other financial assets on cyberfraud, human trafficking and money-laundering charges. The United Kingdom, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have similarly cracked down on them.

The allegation of a Thai connection to these obscure figures and business outfits appears wide and deep. For example, the Prince Group happened to rent a unit at Mr Anutin’s family-owned Sino-Thai office building. Mr Mauerberger’s photos with senior Thai officials made the rounds on social media. Despite declaring what comes across as a ceremonial “war” on scam networks, Mr Anutin appears unenthusiastic in going after the criminal networks. As the Thai-Cambodian border conflict takes centre stage, consumes attention and diverts headlines, Mr Anutin may be hoping that the frenzy of nationalism at home will crowd out the scam crisis and yield electoral advantages when the poll takes place.

All the same, the Pheu Thai Party under the new leader, Julapun Amornvivat, is on course to file a no-confidence motion when parliament reconvenes in December. The BJT has poached and accepted defecting MPs from other parties, but at under a hundred, its ranks are not enough to withstand a no-confidence onslaught unless PP and its 143 MPs stick to the MoA. But it will be difficult for PP to stand by BJT in view of the damning evidence of corruption and fraud from the scam crisis. Mr Anutin has already hinted on several occasions that he will dissolve the Lower House if a no-confidence motion looms against his minority government without enough support. As he is constitutionally barred from calling a new election once the no-confidence motion takes effect, the prime minister may have to cut short his term.

The four-month timeline pins the Lower House dissolution on Jan 31, with a new poll on March 29, but Mr Anutin may now have to dissolve the assembly before its next session from Dec 12. This would put the election date in February within the mandated 60-day window. To be sure, the ruling party is more prepared for polls in what is shaping up as a largely three-way race among the BJT, Pheu Thai, and PP.

To be sure, the Anutin government has rolled out a sizeable tax relief programme and “half-half” subsidy measures for low-income earners who could purchase basic goods at half price with the government picking up the remainder.

As soon as it took office, BJT recalled and reworked promotion lists of senior civil servants, placing its favourites and loyalists in key positions of authority for electoral advantages and supervision over provincial purse strings. It also put the two red-hot fraud cases of BJT collusion and manipulation of Senate elections, and encroachment of public land on the legal back burner.

With Pheu Thai trying to regain its footing and the PP’s dilemma of whether to stick with the MoA for constitutional reform and therefore with the BJT or ditch the ruling party and potentially put off charter change due to the scam crisis, the BJT will likely rely on oversight agencies and its establishment backers to outmanoeuvre PP and Pheu Thai in an effort to stay on to power after the poll. And if necessary, Mr Anutin could also try to make use of a military clash at the Thai-Cambodian border to delay the election timetable and complicate the planned no-confidence motion.