Climate change will be here long after the war, but the leadership is neglecting it
CEO of environmental advocacy organization Adam Teva V’Din says that one year in, the current government is the ‘worst for the environment in Israel’s history’
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
On Wednesday, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel suggested climate change as a factor in the highly rare gathering of large numbers of manta rays giving birth off Israel’s Mediterranean coast, when the breeding season is usually during spring and fall.
On Tuesday, the Israel Electric Corporation reported another rare, and therefore problematic, phenomenon — thousands of jellyfish, usually seen during the summer, massing around the filters that bring seawater into a power station in southern Israel for cooling.
The Judas Tree, or Cercis siliquastrum, which usually shows its pink blooms in my area in February, started flowering last month.
Scientists have warned that the effects of global warming — driven by humanity’s continuing burning of fossil fuels — will be exacerbated by the natural El Nino phenomenon, which has begun and will last one to three years.
El Nino warms the ocean surface in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, pushing warmer air into the atmosphere and impacting weather throughout the world.
But regardless of El Nino, climate change will still be here long after the outcome of the ongoing war against the Hamas terror group, or the judicial overhaul spat, which preoccupied the current government from the moment it was sworn in a year ago until the war was prompted by the October 7 Hamas massacres.
And yet this government has arguably not only done nothing for environmental policy — it has taken it backward.
Amit Bracha, the usually mild-mannered CEO of the environmental advocacy organization Adam Teva V’Din, described it as “the worst [government] for the environment in the country’s history.”
In a brief trawl of environment activists, The Times of Israel was unable to find anyone with a good word for environmental policy over the past year, or for Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman.
Among the actions that the environmental lobby fought in 2023, with limited success, were the government’s moves to weaken environmental oversight of the planning process, supposedly to remove bureaucratic and regulatory barriers; a rise in the purchase tax on electric cars on January 1 for the third year running, along with a new cut in funding for additional recharging stations; and the cancelation of a tax that was demonstrably working to reduce disposable plastic use.
Single-use plastic is not recyclable. It ends up in landfill, the sea, and even in the human body. However, the powerful Knesset representatives of the ultra-Orthodox community insisted the tax was an assault on their way of life.
The things that didn’t happen last year include passing a Climate Act — which the coalition promised to do within six months — and introducing a carbon tax, discussions about which were held under the previous government but abandoned by the current one.
Carbon taxation is seen by a growing number of countries as a key to lowering the emissions that are driving global warming. Israeli companies will soon have to pay such a tax at the EU border because it does not exist in Israel.
“The year 2023 is expected to be the hottest year,” said the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. “From the professional reports, and even from the summary decision of the most recent (United Nations COP28) climate conference, it is clear what needs to be done: Stop fossil fuels, in favor of renewable energies, while protecting ecosystems. Despite this, Israel continues in the opposite direction: more fossil fuels, and deteriorating ecosystems.”
Israel’s contribution to global warming emissions is relatively tiny, although if every small country were to continue with business as usual, the lack of action would have a cumulative impact on climate change.
Furthermore, lowering emissions also benefits nature and reduces pollution, which currently kills around 2,500 Israelis each year and impacts quality of life.
However, Israel’s size is irrelevant to the need to prepare for the effects of climate change, which are already being felt, and will yet worsen long after the current war against Hamas is over.
Israel is warming at twice the rate of the global average and is poorly prepared for extreme climate events such as heatwaves, forest fires, heavy rainfall and flooding, and drought.
In June, hundreds of thousands of people were left without power as temperatures soared to over 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in many parts of the country, sparking massive demand for electricity as homes and businesses attempted to crank up the air conditioning.
The energy minister, Israel Katz, was only on the job for a year. He has just swapped positions with Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, as part of a rotation deal that arguably reflects Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s lack of interest in the experienced running of either ministry.
Indicating a more widespread lack of awareness about — or interest in — the environment, a committee chaired by Otzma Yehudit MK Limor Son Har-Melech decided in May not to allocate a dime of money from the first tranche of interest from a sovereign wealth fund to renewable energy. The wealth fund is based on taxes from companies that extract natural resources, including fossil fuel gas. According to Adam Teva V’Din, whose court petition on the matter is due to be heard on January 15, the decision violated the sovereign wealth fund law, which says the government must state how much money from the fund is to be invested in renewable energy.
“It’s very indicative of how they [the government] just don’t consider clean, independent energy a national priority,” said Adam Teva V’Din’s deputy CEO Tami Ganot.
Instead of grasping that renewable energy is cleaner, better for the planet, and cheaper than fossil fuels, instead of providing the right incentives (solar panel companies have been going out of business) and cutting red tape, the Finance Ministry recently froze NIS 200 million ($55 million), which the Environmental Protection Ministry had largely earmarked for projects to deal with adaptation to climate change.
The treasury claimed the cut was aimed at releasing funds for the ongoing war. In fact, discussions about it started before Hamas’s murderous onslaught on October 7, during which 1,200 people were brutally murdered, most of them civilians, and 240 were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip.
The Finance Ministry also sees the Environmental Protection Ministry’s roughly NIS 3.2 billion ($890 million) Maintenance of Cleanliness Fund as its own cash machine, not only during war. The most recent attempt to raid the fund was frozen after local authorities protested.
Environmental experts note that Finance Ministry officials continue to see investment in the environment as a cost, rather than something that contributes to healthy ecosystems and quality of life.
This explains why they refused to have any fixed climate targets anchored in law in a climate bill that passed its first Knesset reading in September.
“The budgetary implications of inaction are never discussed,” said Tami Ganot. “We need to go into emergency mode on adaptation to climate change. We know it’s going to happen, but you don’t know exactly how it will hit and when, and we can’t afford to be surprised. Even now, roads are closed because of flooding, and beaches because of pollution. We keep getting surprised, but it’s already costing money and lives.”
Asked about its 2023 achievements, the Environmental Protection Ministry said that its bill to stop construction waste dumping in open areas had passed its Knesset first reading and that it was investing heavily in creating waste sorting and treatment facilities countrywide, including on the Gaza border area, which is to be rehabilitated following the Hamas attack. It said the feasibility of putting a price on carbon was being examined within the context of 2024 budget discussions.
The Finance Ministry said it had approved several policies to promote renewable energies, public transportation, and the transition to electric buses. It included the climate bill and the National Infrastructures Act (the one accused of weakening environmental oversight over planning) as victories, saying the latter would speed national infrastructure projects in energy and mass transportation.
