This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

An article in the Guardian, based on a recent report, caught my eye this week. The carbon footprint, it said, of the first 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza will be greater than the annual planet-warming emissions of a hundred individual countries.

“The long-term climate cost of destroying, clearing and rebuilding Gaza,” the story said, “could top 31m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e).”

I couldn’t help doing the maths in my head and throwing those numbers into the soup of figures I now carry around regarding Scotland’s greenhouse gas emissions. The latest report had them at 40.6 MtCO2e released over the year of 2022. It's not less than the 31Mt estimated in the report, but it is three-quarters.

I toyed - or perhaps 'worried' is more the word - with the figure some more. Between 2021 and 2022, Scotland’s emissions reduced by 1 Mt, from 41.6. The 31Mt to rebuild Gaza is thirty times that much. It's also ten times what we would release if we made the same reduction over three years. And it is 10 Mt more than the 20.6 Mt Scotland had been aiming for as target by 2035, a goal that is now dropped.

I mention this because this slightly nonsensical mathematical comparison seems........

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