Israel, Palestine, and climate change

A profile of carbon emissions in the Holy Land

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With so much of the world’s attention turned to Israel and Palestine, I thought I would look at them both and how their politics and unusual relationship affects their greenhouse gas outputs.

Israel and Palestine are beginning to suffer and will suffer disproportionately from global heating. The Mediterranean Sea and the countries that border it are warming 20 percent faster than the rest of the world. In the next quarter century the Mediterranean is expected to rise by approximately three feet. This will most certainly wipe out much of Israel’s coveted beaches and potentially jeopardize their desalination plants. Sewage and drainage of Israel’s and Palestine’s coastal cities, compromised by climate change, have already polluted the sea to fatally hazardous levels. Rising seas will intrude on an aquifer upon which Gazans rely, further straining a region that is already growing short of water.

Having a dearth of fossil fuels but an abundance of sunshine, Israeli engineers have been at the forefront of renewable energy for decades. Consequently, per capita emissions of CO2 have dropped from a high of over ten tons of CO2 per year in 2000 to a little over six tons per person per year in 2021. This is about half of the yearly per capita emissions of the U.S., which stood about 15 tons of CO2 in 2021.