There is a national referendum coming up in Switzerland about climate change. Basically the proposal is to become climate neutral by 2050 and one of the main arguments by the federal government in favour of the proposal is to become more energy independent, less dependent on other countries for energy, particularly fossil fuels which all come from abroad. It is a counterproposal to a more extreme initiative.
At the same time climate protesters are marching on the streets, when they are not glued to them, in favour of the proposal, not so much because of energy independence and rather to help address global climate change.
I find the global climate change argument spurious. The Swiss population is about 0.1% of the world population. India and China together are around one third of the world population. The USA is the biggest polluter per person and disproportionately affects world climate (although the USA anyway might decline economically over a 50-200 year timeline for other reasons). These are the three countries which need to make drastic changes. Switzerland’s contribution to global warming is minimal. If we were to reduce our Swiss emissions overnight by half, there would by negligible effect on global climate change. Some might argue that Switzerland needs to set an example but I don’t think that the big polluters will follow where the Swiss lead.
The energy independence argument does, however, make sense to me. Increasingly I tend to think that the Degrowth movement is on to something.
Maybe the only way to avoid environmental collapse within the 50-200 year timeframe is to continuously decrease the total global GDP. I deliberately write ‘total’ GDP not GDP per capita. So preventing further global population growth is one key way to limit total global GDP.
One way to theoretically achieve reduction of total GDP could be that well-off countries (all of Europe, North America, Australia, China, Japan, the Middle East and so on) would all need to accept a continuous long-term decrease in standard of living and the population would need to find happiness or satisfaction in other ways than consumerism. This is never going to happen. Our evolution has given us human nature which completely opposes this approach. It would go against our nature. I think this is the least likely outcome.
Another way would be that an ongoing series of environmental disasters lower total global GDP. We have already seen covid pandemic going in this direction. Further and harder hitting disasters could cause long-term decline of total GDP through famine and disease, surely leading to increased geo-political tensions and war. This will not be pleasant but it is seems to me to be the most likely outcome.
A third outcome to our current perilous situation would be global thermonuclear war. As climate change pushes food availability down and prices up, drinking water supplies become scarcer and energy prices, availability and geo-politics become more problematic, then the preferred human reaction can only be more unrest, war and conquest, also something we have seen in recent years, the Arab Spring for example, which was partly due to food prices and availability, although of course there were multiple factors at work. Similarly the current war in Ukraine has complex reasons behind it, including wheat production. I think that global thermonuclear war is the second most likely of the three scenarios.
Coming back to the referendum in Switzerland, given the three possible outcomes which I can foresee within a 200 year timeframe (one of which seems impossible, one of which will destroy the world population, and one of which involves multiple environmental disasters and ensuing wars) then I feel that energy independence is an important topic for Switzerland in an increasingly unstable world.vThe question is whether this new law would achieve that and at what cost? I do not have an answer for that.