It's now or never: Take action before it's too late

This is the ninth in the "Letters to President Yoon" series The Korea Times has organized to convey policy recommendations in open letters from politicians, scholars and experts to President Yoon Suk-yeol following his May 10 inauguration. ― ED.

By Jang Daul

Dear Mr. President,
Please kindly accept my congratulations on your victory to become the nation's new president.

As you stressed in your inaugural address, we are faced with multiple crises. Without a doubt, the global climate crisis is the single "biggest threat modern humans have ever faced," as naturalist, broadcaster, biologist and natural historian David Attenborough told the U.N. Security Council.

If you are not fully convinced that climate change is the No. 1 priority on your table, then I strongly encourage you to read two recent reports.

The first insight report is the Global Risks Report by the World Economic Forum. It shows global risk perceptions among nearly 1,000 risk experts and world leaders in business, government and civil society.

In the latest 2022 version, even in the middle of the global pandemic, world leaders and experts chose "climate action failure" as the most severe risk on the global scale over the next decade followed by "extreme weather" as the second most.

It might be surprising for you to see such a result. Yet, please recall that we had the worst heat wave in 2018, the longest monsoon in 2020 and we just had the longest wildfire ever in history in 2022. Furthermore, without a notable extreme event, the year 2021 was recorded as the second warmest year in our history. Clearly, we are living in a climate crisis.

Another report is the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is a neglect of duty for the president of Korea's 52 million people if you don't clearly understand the scientific analyses and warnings of this report.

To make the long but important findings of the report short, it says that if we want to limit the global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to avoid the disastrous consequences of global climate change, it is now or never, for us to make "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes" in all aspects of society, according to the IPCC.

However, I do not see that your administration has put the utmost priority on climate action with the urgency scientifically required. Carbon neutrality has been downgraded from the level of "national vision" to the level of "promises" in your administration's plan.

You should not fail to enforce, enact and invest in effective and timely climate change mitigation measures. We already do have solutions and the benchmarks required to decrease greenhouse gas emissions.

Regulating and pricing the carbon emissions, replacing the use of fossil fuels with renewable energies mainly in industry, power generation, buildings and transport, increasing energy savings and efficiency, and developing energy storage and flexible resources in the power system are the key and priority policies to implement.

A rapid and ambitious transformation to a carbon neutral economy is good for keeping our climate livable and good for our economy.

As U.S. President Biden remarked after Hyundai Motor Group's announcement that it will invest more than $10 billion in the U.S. up to 2025, "Electric vehicles are good for our climate goals, but they're also good for jobs, and they're good for business". He also emphasized that investing aggressively in electric vehicles and battery production must happen now, not tomorrow.

Moving away from fossil fuels and increasing the use of renewables in power production and battery electric vehicles in transport is even more important now, when the prices of global fossil fuels has skyrocketed due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In order not to be led, but to lead in this changing global market, you need to actively accelerate the transformation from a fossil-fuel based to renewable energy-based economy.

Without a radical increase of renewable energies in the coming years, our industry and corporations will lose their competitiveness and we will also fail to attract foreign investment.

Out of many, there are two things you can do first for our climate and economy.

The first one is to set an ambitious renewable energy expansion goal together with a concrete roadmap. Your plan of 20 percent of renewable energy in power production by 2030 is simply not enough at all to avoid a forthcoming climate disaster and to provide enough renewable electricity for Korean companies to compete globally.

The second one is to keep your election pledge to give a clear signal to the industry and society that there will be no new sales of internal combustion engine vehicles allowed from 2035 onwards. It needs to be followed by an audacious plan to support the transition of the auto industry as justly and inclusively as possible.

Lastly, as emphasized in the recent open letter from the international executive director of Greenpeace to you, I would like again to urge you strongly to reevaluate whether nuclear energy could be safe, fast and affordable enough to achieve the goal of keeping the temperature rise below 1.5 degrees.

The world nuclear industry is clearly declining. In the coming decade, it is expected that more reactors are shut down than those that are newly connected to the grid. Therefore, it is difficult for nuclear even to keep the current share, 10 percent, of global power production.

Small modular reactors (SMRs) are still far from reality. It is very unlikely that SMRs would contribute to substantial decarbonization of the global power sector in the next decade.

Again, it's now for you to place the utmost priority on climate action. If you fail in your term, we will never have a chance again.

We look forward to your climate leadership.

Yours sincerely,
Jang Daul

The writer (daul.jang@greenpeace.org) is a government relations and advocacy specialist at Greenpeace East Asia Seoul Office.