A2 · Elementary
9 min
climateenergyeconomicspoliticsenvironment
El País que Se Hunde: Pakistán, el Petróleo y el Clima
The Country That Sinks: Pakistan, Oil, and the Climate
Fletcher breaks down this story in English. Octavio reacts and expands in Spanish. Follow along with the live transcript, tap any word for its translation. Elementary level — perfect for beginners building confidence.
So here's a number that stopped me cold this week.
Pakistan just raised petrol prices by forty-two percent.
Diesel by nearly fifty-five percent.
In a single announcement.
Bueno, sí.
Well, yes.
La guerra en Irán sube el precio del petróleo.
The war in Iran is pushing up the price of oil.
Right, and crude oil is now over a hundred and thirteen dollars a barrel in the US.
Which is staggering.
But here's what gets me about the Pakistan story specifically.
Mira, Pakistán es un país muy pobre.
Look, Pakistan is a very poor country.
El petróleo caro es un problema muy grande.
Expensive oil is a very serious problem.
It's a catastrophic problem.
But what I want to dig into today is the deeper contradiction here.
Because Pakistan is not just poor and dependent on fossil fuels.
It is also one of the most climate-vulnerable countries on the planet.
Sí, exacto.
Yes, exactly.
Pakistán tiene muchos problemas con el clima.
Pakistan has many serious problems with the climate.
And I think most people outside of South Asia don't fully grasp the scale of what's happened there.
So let's start with 2022, because that's the moment that really put Pakistan on the map for climate researchers.
A ver, en 2022 hay inundaciones muy grandes en Pakistán.
Well, in 2022 there are very large floods in Pakistan.
Very large is almost an understatement.
One third of the country was underwater.
A third.
Thirty-three million people displaced.
The damage was around thirty billion dollars.
In a country where the average income is roughly fifteen hundred dollars a year.
Es que treinta millones de personas es muchísima gente.
The thing is, thirty million people is an enormous number of people.
It's the entire population of Australia, essentially.
And scientists at Oxford ran the numbers afterwards and concluded that climate change made those floods significantly more severe.
Not caused them outright, but made them dramatically worse.
Bueno, y Pakistán produce muy poco CO2 en el mundo.
Right, and Pakistan produces very little CO2 in the world.
That is the thing that makes this so morally complicated.
Pakistan is responsible for less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Less than one percent.
And yet it absorbs some of the worst consequences.
La verdad es que no es justo.
The truth is, it's not fair.
Pakistán no tiene la culpa.
Pakistan is not to blame.
No, it absolutely is not.
And this idea, that the countries least responsible for climate change are most punished by it, that's one of the central moral arguments in every international climate negotiation.
It's been there since Kyoto in 1997.
Mira, hay calor, hay inundaciones, hay problemas con el agua.
Look, there is heat, there are floods, there are water problems.
All at the same time.
And that's genuinely unusual, even for climate-vulnerable countries.
You have glaciers in the north, in the Himalayas and the Karakoram range, melting faster than almost anywhere on earth.
Which floods rivers.
And simultaneously the south gets these catastrophic heat waves.
Jacobabad, in Sindh province, recorded temperatures that were literally at the edge of what human physiology can survive outdoors.
A ver, los glaciares en Pakistán son muy importantes para el agua.
Right, the glaciers in Pakistan are very important for the water supply.
Pakistan has more glaciers than anywhere outside the polar regions.
More than seven thousand.
And they are the freshwater reservoir for hundreds of millions of people.
When they melt too fast, you get floods.
When they're gone, you get drought.
It's not a future scenario.
It's happening now.
Bueno, y ahora el petróleo es muy caro.
Right, and now oil is very expensive.
La gente no tiene dinero.
People don't have money.
So here's the trap.
And I think this is the real story today.
Pakistan needs to get off fossil fuels, for climate reasons, for its own survival.
But right now, because of a war in the Persian Gulf it has nothing to do with, it is being pushed deeper into energy poverty.
It cannot invest in renewables when it can barely afford the diesel to keep the lights on.
Es que la energía solar en Pakistán es una opción buena.
The thing is, solar energy in Pakistan is actually a good option.
It's a fantastic option, actually.
Pakistan gets enormous amounts of sunshine.
The Thar Desert in Sindh alone has solar potential that could theoretically power the entire country several times over.
There have been projects.
But the infrastructure gap, the investment gap, is enormous.
La verdad es que Pakistán necesita mucho dinero para el cambio.
The truth is Pakistan needs a lot of money to make the change.
And where does that money come from?
That's where it gets genuinely complicated.
Because Pakistan is also in perpetual debt crisis.
It's been going to the IMF for bailouts, I think this is its twenty-fourth IMF program, for most of its modern history.
Bueno, China invierte mucho dinero en Pakistán también.
Right, China also invests a lot of money in Pakistan.
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
CPEC.
Sixty-two billion dollars, officially.
Roads, ports, power plants.
Which sounds great.
Except a significant portion of those power plants burn coal.
So China helped Pakistan build its way deeper into fossil fuels at the exact moment the world was supposed to be transitioning away from them.
Mira, el carbón es barato.
Look, coal is cheap.
Eso es el problema.
That's the problem.
Coal is cheap upfront.
And that's the logic that traps developing countries.
The immediate cost of coal is lower.
The long-term cost, ecological, medical, climate, is catastrophic.
But when you're a poor government trying to keep the lights on today, you make today's calculation.
A ver, en Europa también usamos carbón antes.
Well, in Europe we also used coal before.
No es solo Pakistán.
It's not only Pakistan.
No, you're absolutely right about that.
Britain powered the Industrial Revolution on coal.
Germany was still burning enormous quantities of it until very recently.
The difference is that Britain and Germany got rich first, and then cleaned up.
Pakistan doesn't have that option anymore, because the climate timeline has changed.
Es que no hay tiempo ahora.
There is no time now.
El clima cambia muy rápido.
The climate is changing very fast.
Exactly.
And I think about the Pakistani climate negotiators sitting at COP summits, having this argument, and the position they're in is almost impossible.
They need development.
They need energy.
And the rich world is telling them to leapfrog straight to renewables, which takes investment the rich world has been slow to provide.
Bueno, hay el fondo climático.
Well, there is the climate fund.
Cien mil millones de dólares.
One hundred billion dollars.
The hundred billion a year that rich countries promised developing nations at Copenhagen in 2009.
They didn't actually hit that target until 2022, thirteen years late.
And even then, much of it came as loans, not grants.
So developing countries are being asked to borrow money to adapt to a problem they didn't cause.
La verdad es que eso no es mucho dinero.
The truth is, that is not much money.
El problema es muy grande.
The problem is very large.
The economists who work on climate finance say the real number needed is in the trillions, not billions.
Per year.
There's a gap between what's been promised and what's actually needed that is almost embarrassing to state out loud.
Mira, en Pakistán la gente normal paga más por la gasolina ahora.
Look, ordinary people in Pakistan are paying more for fuel right now.
And that's where this week's news lands.
The forty-two percent petrol increase, the fifty-five percent diesel increase, those aren't just numbers.
That's a truck driver whose costs just doubled.
A farmer who runs an irrigation pump.
A family that cooks on a kerosene stove.
The Iran war just made their daily lives significantly harder.
Es que la gasolina cara también es mala para el clima.
The thing is, expensive fuel is also bad for the climate.
Say more about that, because it's a counterintuitive point.
Bueno, la gente pobre usa madera o carbón cuando el petróleo cuesta mucho.
Well, poor people use wood or coal when oil becomes too expensive.
That's a really important point.
When fuel gets too expensive, people in poor countries don't switch to electric vehicles.
They switch to biomass.
They burn wood.
They burn dung.
Which is worse for local air quality and, in some accounting frameworks, worse for the climate too.
The energy ladder goes down, not up.
A ver, Pakistán necesita paz en el mundo para vivir bien.
Well, Pakistan needs peace in the world to live well.
That is a quietly profound statement, actually.
The interconnection between geopolitical stability and climate outcomes is something that doesn't get discussed enough.
Wars drive up oil prices.
High oil prices push vulnerable countries away from transition pathways.
It's all one system.
La verdad es que el clima es un problema de todos.
The truth is that climate is everyone's problem.
Everyone's problem, but not everyone's equal problem.
And I think that's the line I'll end on today.
Pakistan this week is a case study in how everything connects, war, oil, poverty, climate, debt, and how the most vulnerable countries get hit first, hit hardest, and hit most unfairly.
The story isn't just about fuel prices.
It never is.
Bueno, es un país importante.
Well, it is an important country.
Pakistán tiene doscientos veinte millones de personas.
Pakistan has two hundred and twenty million people.
Two hundred and twenty million people, the fifth most populous country in the world, sitting at the intersection of almost every major global crisis at once.
Worth paying attention to.
Octavio, as always, gracias.
De nada, Fletcher.
You're welcome, Fletcher.
Y practica tu español, por favor.
And please practice your Spanish.