I nominate Looking Beyond Durban: Where to from Here? by Navroz K. Dubash, a policy activist at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.  It’s short, it’s diplomatic, it’s well-informed by what other commentators have argued, and most of all its forward looking.  It focuses, that is, on the real issue, which is “Reconceptualising Climate Equity” after Durban.

You should read the whole thing, but here’s the key bit:

“A re-formulated approach to climate equity should embrace an important distinction between responsibility for an action or culpability and responsibility to respond, or a duty (Rajamani 2011b). An approach that combines attention to industrialized countries’ historical responsibility for the problem with an embrace of the responsibility to explore low carbon development trajectories is both ethically defensible and strategically wise. Ironically, our own domestic national approach of actively exploring “co-benefits” – policies that promote development while also yielding climate gains – suggests that we do take climate science seriously and have embraced responsibility as duty. However, by focusing on articulating rigid principles, rather than building on our actual policies and actions, we weaken our own position. Is accepting a responsibility (understood as duty) to explore low carbon development pathways (as part of a larger package that keeps focus on industrialised country culpability) a slippery slope towards ever more onerous commitments? The answer depends, in part, on the domestic policy and regulatory framework that India establishes to implement its chosen approach of pursuing co-benefits. If this framework is robust, leads to domestic actions that actively explore low carbon options, and to tangible carbon gains, then India is well placed to defend itself against further demand

It proceeds by exploring the potential greenhouse gas emissions, and corresponding mitigation obligations, of three “stylized futures” for developing countries:

• Without Development: a business-as-usual (no policy) scenario with the standard economic growth rates found in climate-economics models;
• Development with Carbon: a business-as-usual (no policy) scenario with more rapid economic growth rates.
• Development without Carbon: a policy scenario with rapid economic growth and significant public measures to reduce emissions

Stanton’s approach is influenced by the Greenhouse Development Rights approach, but she considers other justice-based approaches as well.  Her goal is show the problem know known as “equitable access to sustainable development” is a realizable one, if we think about it in a reasonably coherent way.

She begins with a business-as-usual scenario in which each one-percent increase in per-capita income is associated with a 0.34% decrease in national emissions intensity.  Then she defines a variant “Development with Carbon” scenario in which poorer countries have higher income growth rates.  This, unsurprisingly, almost doubles the global emissions gap between the path we’re on and the one we need to get to.  Then she takes the same higher-income-growth statistics that she used in this first scenario and cranks up the rate of decrease in emissions intensity, first to 0.34% and then to 0.53%.  The last of these scenarios models a pro-development, rapid-decarbonation future, which is of course the one we’re interested in.

It’s bracing to look at, and to consider.  Which is the point to note that Stanton may have tried a bit too hard to make 2C seem easily realizable.  Her claim that “the budget for maintaining a 98-percent chance of keeping temperatures increases below a 2°C is approximately 2,700 Gt CO2-e” is based on no science that we know of, and is altogether too optimistic.  To be sure, this is a solvable problem, but soft-pedaling isn’t the way to solve it.

There’s a lot to say here, and I won’t say much of it.  But a few points.  First, on the “how frankly should we talk about the climate crisis” question, Anderson is extremely bracing.  He considers the tendency of most scientists to underplay their public discussions of the severity and immediacy of the climate danger to be a form of denialism.  The way be puts it in the talk (slide 53) is “I think that the scientific community has hugely underplayed the size of the problem, knowingly, because it’s very hard to come up and say what you really think, because people don’t want to hear the message.”  This, IMHO, is fantastically helpful, though the scientists are hardly alone in being guilty here.  Economists are far worse, and in truth the whole, broad American climate policy community should be called out on the carpet for its soft-pedaling.  In any case, Anderson, who was until recently the director of Britain’s Tyndall Center (and is still its Deputy Director) is performing a public service by making this point so clearly, and he should be commended for doing so, and in general for being a straight shooter.  He’s also a vegetarian, by the way, and he does not fly.

Dave Roberts, for his part, is a good deal mellower than Anderson when it comes to the soft-pedaling question, saying for example that “lots of folks in the climate hawk coalition (broadly speaking) have counseled a new approach that backgrounds climate change and refocuses the discussion on innovation, energy security, and economic competitiveness.”  But he’s also an honest man, and his real point is that “This cannot work.”  Also, it seems to me that the Anderson Bows paper, among much else, has pushed him to have a Big Think, and his call for giving scientific realism its due (the focus of his third “Brutal Logic” piece) is extremely welcome.  It may have more impact than Anderson himself, at least in the US.  This because Roberts’ has not been shy about his sympathies with political “realism” (see for example, his glowing review of David Victor’s new book, published in The American Prospect), which falls clearly into the soft-pedaling camp.  And because of his huge blogspace footprint.

In any case, I don’t want to give the impression that Kevin Anderson, though a brave man and a first-tier scientist, is above criticism.  He is not.  For example, he blithely dismisses all talk of negative emissions (even, say, biomass with carbon capture and storage) as “geo-engineering,” which is a bit rough, and he isn’t even willing to be guardedly optimistic about reforestation, bio-char, agro-ecology and other potentially win-win approaches to sucking carbon out of the air.  Jim Hansen, it should be said, is more optimistic on the “potential for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere via reforestation and improved forestry and agricultural practices.”  See The Case for Young People and Nature, which was published by Hansen’s team in 2011, and which estimates that we could get 100 Gigatonnes of carbon (not carbon-dioxide or carbon-dioxide equivalent, but actual carbon) out of the air before the end of the 21^st Century, if we really tried.  It’s a lot, and it would make a difference.

Finally, and most importantly, there’s a notable silence in the story that’s being told here, one that unsurprisingly has a lot to do with the equity question.  Anderson’s approach (technology and equity as two sides of one coin) is an excellent one (pick it up at his slide 38) but at the same time, his analysis (which Roberts’ echoes) is notably lopsided.  That is to say, his bluntness about the predicament of the developing countries is not supplemented by any discussion of a political accord designed to help them out of it.  Their predicament, that is.

Which is not to suggest that he doesn’t have a lot to say.  He speaks of all the rich people in Shanghai and Beijing, but immediately notes how outnumbered they are by the poor masses in China as a whole.  He emphasizes that the rates of emissions growth in the rapidly-expanding Asian economies will leave the climate system reeling, but does not forget to note the near certainty that most people in Asia will still be poor when it does.  Most importantly, he emphasizes the need to focus on the emissions of the top 20%, the top 4%, the top 1%.  It’s a great setup, though (at least here) he has virtually nothing to say about how we might, politically, accelerate the overall rate of planetary decarbonization, save to note that most of the emissions on the planet can be traced to the rich.  Which is, I have to admit, suggestive…

Roberts, alas, follows him in this silence.  So his (very welcome!) discussion of carbon debt (see the second bit of his trilogy, here) mentions the UN’s principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” but has nothing to say about what it might imply.  Or how it might contribute to an increase in the rate of global decarbonization, such that it might come to approximate the maximum rates that even Anderson thinks might be achievable, if we are very, very aggressive, and very, very lucky.

Anyway, all this stuff is well worth reading.  In fact, doing so would be a good way to start the new year.  In fact, it would be a good way to launch yourself into the post-Durban period, wherein – I earnestly hope – we finally begin, at least part of the time, at least late at night, at least in bars, to discuss the real issue: Global emergency mobilization.

PS: The bit about “debate tables” vs. Kalashnikov rifles is on slide 37.

The EASD report was released on December 3^rd in Durban, just about the time that the talks started hotting up, so it’s unlikely that most negotiators had time to read it with any care.  But if Durban goes at all well, if that is it manages to save the Kyoto Protocol and to otherwise open the door to serious consideration of a next-generation climate accord, one that’s actually fair enough to support real ambition, then this report will, eventually, be recognized as a turning point.

The South’s Ministers, at least, will take it seriously.  They know the problem of “equitable access to sustainable development,” and that it must be solved if there’s to be a successful global climate regime.   And, at this point, it may also be reasonable to hope that, after Durban, the environmental NGOs will finally begin to face the challenge of fair-shares global burden sharing.

The governments of the North are another matter.  The Europeans, certainly, do not imagine that the demands of sustainable development can be put aside, and even the United States, despite its political crisis, is in some kind of motion.  Not that the Obama team will welcome this reassertion of the equity agenda.  That would be too much to hope for from the “realists” that brought us the Copenhagen-era push for Pledge and Review.  But at the same time, it seems clear that the orthodoxies of traditional realism no longer charm as they once did.  They have become cover stories, and this no realism can survive.

This report, for its part, is a serious one.  It wastes no time pretending that the global carbon budget has not already been essentially exhausted, or that development-as-usual is still a viable option for the South.  Nor does it pretend that we can muddle through with bottom-up accounting and a bit of technological optimism.  These are all things that just can’t happen if we seriously intend to stabilize the climate system.  Developmental justice is a precondition for high ambition, and this report imagines that we’re serious enough to face this bottom-line fact.

“Equity,” unfortunately, is a notion that’s easy prey to self-serving twists.  The authors here are thus to be commended for their effort to delimit the salient core of the climate-equity debate.  The cost of this effort is high.  For example, they focus on a 2000-2050 global emissions budget of 1440 Gt CO2 that many among us view as dangerously high.  The benefits of compromise, though, are also visible, for in the end the authors are able to mark out a consensus that, while still vague, is precise enough to indicate a way forward.  If “equity” is defined as a universal human right to sustainable development, then only two approaches to a global fair-shares reference framework – cumulative per-capita budget sharing and the “responsibility and capacity index” approach to effort sharing that’s marked out by the Greenhouse Development Rights framework – are at all promising.  The fact that, in this report, high-level teams from throughout BASIC recognize and publicly affirm this reality is thus a very big deal.

The report, of course, has its shortcomings.  My particular criticism is that the authors give almost no attention to economic stratification within countries.  Even South Africa, while speaking for an approach that includes economic capacity as well as historic responsibility, passes too lightly over the subject.  But all told it’s the accomplishment here that’s most notable.  This report is a marker of the debate that’s actually needed.   May we have it soon.

I don’t think of The Nation as being “hard left.”  Nor Klein for that matter.

Anyway, her title is catchy, but also a bit misleading.  Most of her case isn’t against capitalism in itself, but  against “capitalism-as-usual,” or “contemporary capitalism,” or “the corporate sector, with its structural demand for increased sales and profits.”  Which is I suppose what you’d expect, this being a reasonable piece.  Because it’s not at all clear that we’re up against capitalism in itself.  What we know for sure is that we’re up against this capitalism.  That we either fix it or it’s “game over,” as Jim Hansen recently put it.

Klein touches only lightly on the really tough issues in the climate and capitalism debate (yes, there is one!), which she does – cleverly? strangely? — in the “Ending the cult of shopping” section.  This is where we get the problem of “growth” (the most confusing abstraction of them all) and the reference to Tim Jackson’s definitional book Prosperity without growth (download the original report here for free).  The problems of redistribution, and of desire (the democratic disciplining of desire) are only suggested.  In other words, there’s not really much here about the problems of capitalism in itself.

Which is fine with me, at least for now.

There are people out there writing books about how capitalism (the thing itself) is absolutely and intrinsically incompatible with the continuation of human civilization as we know it – and Klein, at least to my mind, has done us a major service by taking a different tack.  It seems to me that she’s not taking an abstract position, but speaking, concretely, for renovations so grand and sweeping that we’d have a hard time recognizing them as “reforms,” in the old sense.

I should speak for myself.  And my view is that, while the climate crisis is a crisis of capitalism, it’s also a manageable one.  Which is to say that we’re not already doomed.  But to save ourselves, we have to create a different kind of capitalism.  Nothing more is possible in the limited time left before us – the climate clock really is ticking – but it’s actually quite a lot.  Recognizing this is radical enough for me.

First, it makes the case that..

“Africa is able to deliver clean and sustainable energy to millions of energy-poor people across the continent without increasing greenhouse gas emissions” …  It has the “renewable power potential to drive a green economic expansion across the region.”  To wit “an abundance of resources and its sustainable development ambitions give Africa a real advantage when it comes to renewable energy.”  And that, “with access to a ‘leapfrog fund’ from global mitigation finance, this could lay the ground for a low-carbon future.”

Second, it raises the question of a “leapfrog fund.”  Which comes to this — given the pressing need for energy services in Africa, and given the importance of providing these energy services on the basis of renewables, does Africa not have a claim against the global climate finance system, whatever it turns out to be, for the technical and financial support that will be needed to ensure rapid, low-carbon development?  And, if so, who should foot the bill?

The “problem” here is that we’re not talking simple mitigation.  We’re also talking about new energy services.  We might even be talking a right to energy services.  Moreover, we’re not talking about dirt-low levels of energy services like those implied by, say, the Millennium Development Goals.   The goal here is rather to hit the MDG milestones (which doesn’t actually look like it’s going to happen anytime soon) and to keep on going, to a standard that is “actually designed to meet Africa’s need to develop.”

This standard is still very, very low by wealthy-world standards — “the target level of electricity is enough to provide a rural household with enough electricity to power a floor fan, two compact fluorescent light bulbs and a radio for about five hours a day.”  And “the amount of cooking fuel (22kg of LPG) allotted per person for one year … is about the energy equivalent of a half-full tank of petrol in a typical US passenger car.”  What would this cost for, say, sub-Saharan Africa?  Well, on the electricity side, it comes to a cumulative investment of US $390 billion between 2010 and 2030.  And the clean cooking fuels side adds another $US 1.1 billion a year, or $US 22 billion by 2030.  The grand total is $US 412 billion, by 2030.

Now here’s the question — should this $412 billion be understood as a mitigation cost?  If so, it would just go into the (more or less non-existent) mitigation funding queue, where it would compete with all the other unfunded high-priority mitigation projects on the planet.  Or should we look, instead, to some other sort of financing stream, which the “leapfrogging fund” (once it exists) can draw on to meet the needs of Africa, and the needs of Asia, and all the many other up-from-the-bottom needs of people around the world?

The answers aren’t in this report, but at least the questions are.

First, the amazing Global Wealth Report that has just been released by the gnomes at Credit Suisse.  This report can be misinterpreted as evidence for all sorts of geo-economic hypotheses, but what it really is, at least in my view, is excellent support for the “twice divided world” thesis, which insists that the divide between the North and the South be taken together with that between the rich and the poor.   For an extended commentary on the report — and the climate negotiations — see my High Speed History essay.

Second, George Monbiot’s latest screed, which he called The Self-Attribution Fallacy.   I don’t agree with George about everything, but this one has the EcoEquity seal of approval, big time.  And by the way, the book he references — Branko Milanovic’s The Haves and the Have Nots, is absolutely a must read.

“Occupy” and the climate negotiations

Anyone who claims that the fate of the climate talks is bound to the fate of the Occupy movement better expect a bit of skepticism in return. Now, if it were Occupy and the Climate Justice movement, that would be a different story! Both are complex social movements, and both are driving hard for economic justice. Their overlap is inevitable. But the negotiations themselves? What have they to do with economic justice? What have they to do with the great divide between “the 1%” and “the 99%”?

It’s an easy question to ask. Too easy, actually.  It’s a question that raises others…

Beyond vague talk about “the most vulnerable countries and people,” few of us are really prepared to approach the climate crisis as a justice problem. So it should be said that it didn’t have to be this way. If justice had long been a major part of environmental politics, we’d be in better shape today. But it hasn’t been, not until recently, and the truth is that Big Green still isn’t really on board with justice environmentalism. In fact, it’s fair to say that today’s progressive enviros are the inheritors of a long tradition, and that it’s not a uniformly admirable one. The climate politics mainline, in particular, has long focused, almost exclusively, on the technical side of the transition problem. Not that there’s any hope without a technology revolution, but must it come packaged with a refusal to understand, let alone confront, the economic divide that’s at the core of the global climate-policy deadlock?

Things are changing now, or at least they could. But the past matters.

Remember Copenhagen? Remember the vitriol of the blame game that followed Copenhagen? Do try, because soon we’re going to see what, if anything, we’ve learned in the two years since that great debacle. As I write this, Durban, South Africa (the next Conference of Parties to the Climate Convention) is coming right up, and it will almost certainly join Copenhagen on the long list of grim, poorly-reported failures to make the international breakthrough that we so badly need. As Durban approaches, and then passes, we’re all going to have to decide what the hell we think is actually going on.

Important things will happen in Durban, but they’ll not alone set the tone of the next year. That role will be reserved for the economy, and the US election, and – for the aficionados among us – the early drafts of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment report. In the meantime, beware China bashing, which was the preferred mode of rationalization after Copenhagen, at least in the North (see Mark Lynas’ genre milestone here). It could easily return again. To see the danger, glance at Joe Romm’s recent report of China’s booming emissions. This boom, and how it’s understood, will weigh more on the overall prospect than the minutia of the negotiations. Not that I’m specifically criticizing Romm, but the fact is that, as a community, we’re poorly prepared to understand China’s trajectory, or its implications. So he can says that “Chinese CO2 Emissions Now Exceed U.S.’s By 50%,” and the numbers seem to speak for themselves.

They don’t actually, but they seem to.

And, most likely, what they seem to say is that the climate negotiations no longer matter. That the Chinese economy is beyond all control. And, with the other “big emitters” (e.g. India) straining to follow along on the same path as the Chinese, that we’re basically toast. That the only real hope of containing the emissions of the “emerging economies” is energy-system revolution – technology, again, as the savior. That “soft” concerns like “equity” – it would be better to be precise and say something like “economic justice in a climate constrained world,” but never mind that for now – have little if anything to contribute.

The “climate realists” (as they fancy themselves) encourage such views, for realism-as-we-know-it sees only power, national interest, and merciless competition dynamics that leave little room for negotiated political restraint. See for example, Dave Robert’s love-letter to David Victor’s realism, here. The truth, however, is rather more complex, and it includes the fact that the negotiations matter a great deal. They matter for the beginnings they’ve made, the progress they incrementally mark out, and, frankly, because they exist. If and when we ever get serious, they give us a place to build.

But we’re not going to get serious until we’re willing to talk about economic division.

Which brings us back to Occupy. Which has, in a few short months, managed to refocus the political battle on economic inequality, and to illuminate this inequality as the (not so) secret substructure of modern life. As a substructure that, remarkably, we’d almost given up on noticing. By so doing, it has raised the possibility of a similar refocusing within the climate world, one that would be particularly welcome, and particularly challenging. Because when it comes to climate, inequality necessarily involves both the domestic and international, both the rich/poor and the North/South divides. When it comes to climate, neither side of our twice-divided world can be ignored, or reduced to the other.

Complicated? Yes, but one of the amazing things about Occupy is the way it has dissolved the image of complexity as an obstacle to clear thinking and sharp conclusion. The way it has stripped away the camouflage, and made the simplicity of economic division visible. We could use a similar magic within the climate war, where complexity is always the final excuse for paralysis.

History is racing ahead. Finance capital is out of control, and this is a challenge to us all. The denialist movement has come out as a division of the right-wing machine, and thus sealed its own doom. The renewables industry is growing by 30% a year, and thus offering us a rare straw that we had better grasp. The international economy is changing fast, and we can’t pretend to know exactly how. America is in crisis. In all this it’s easy to lose perspective, and to forget the inconvenient reality that, even in world of crisis, the environmental crisis must take pride of place, and that the climate crisis is it’s cutting edge, and that our efforts to “mitigate” this crisis have thus far come up very short indeed. That compared to the action that’s needed, we’re going nowhere.

Nor will we go anywhere without a breakthrough in the negotiations. The climate crisis, after all, is a commons problem. The commons problem from hell. Absent a well-functioning global regime, we can’t honestly hope for the global surge of transformative innovation and renewal that’s necessary to hold the risks within manageable levels. And we’ll not get a well-functioning regime unless it’s fair, and seen to be fair.

You may not like it, but there it is.

***

A friend of mine, an officer of a major climate foundation, recently sent out an email entitled “EU begging for help in China.” He pointed to an article in the Financial Times (it’s behind a paywall, but see this similar piece in the New York Times), and argued that the financial crisis is redefining North-South relations. And he opined that “this will have repercussions on the climate debate, for sure.”

He’s definitely right about this. And he might have added that the repercussions will be coming soon. Because when Durban rolls around, it’s going to be dominated by an exhausted but inevitable battle to save the Kyoto Protocol, which the US, backed by Canada, Russia, and Japan, seems intent on pushing off the rails. Which the Chinese, in turn, will play for all the international good will that they can muster. And which the journalists will spin and interpret for all they’re worth. Which might not be all that much. Because whatever happens in the negotiations, they’ll be seen against the background of the financial crisis, and thus we’re sure to be treated to a huge helping of snarky coverage of emerging-market mercantilists (think China) who refuse to pull their own weight.

If this was a story of figures and facts, I’d take this opportunity to explain yet again that China is doing much more than the US to abate its carbon emissions, and I’d cite chapter and verse. But China is not my topic, so let me simply point to this recent analysis of rich world and developing world emission-reduction pledges, which was written by SEI scientist Sivan Kartha (full disclosure: Sivan is a climate-equity geek and a colleague of mine). And, for brave souls who actually want to understand the big picture, let me add this link to Development without Carbon: Climate and the Global Economy through the 21st Century, a fabulous analysis that was just published by E3 Network economist Liz Stanton.

In any case, the immediate topic here is inequality and politics and, inevitably, ideology.

To see how difficult it can be to tell the difference between politics and ideology, click over to Foreign Affairs, which recently published Arvind Subramanian’s The Inevitable Superpower: Why China’s Dominance Is a Sure Thing. Here’s one of Subramanian’s blurbs:

“What if, contrary to common belief, China’s economic dominance is a present-day reality rather than a faraway possibility? What if the renminbi’s takeover of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is not decades, but mere years, away? And what if the United States’ economic pre-eminence is not, as many economists and policymakers would like to believe, in its own hands, but China’s to determine?”

Well, what if? What would this mean for the climate negotiations? Would it, in particular, mean that the US has recently been right to insist – as it continues to do – that the whole idea of a world divided between wealthy developed and poor developing countries is obsolete?

Probably not. But it would sure mean something. It would mean, to exaggerate just a bit, that the world is “turning upside down” (as some of my wonkiest friends have taken to saying) and that any notion of rich-world “responsibility” – as in “common but differentiated responsibilities” – is altogether obsolete.

So, is the world really turning upside down?

I don’t think so.

***

I don’t deny the power of China’s emergence. But even if it does soon “eclipse” the US, in state-to-state power-political terms, this won’t be the whole story. Because – to get back to Occupy – the North is still the heartland of the rich. And even China’s great boom – which, by the way, has lifted an immense number of people out of poverty – has not changed this very much at all.

Cut to the Global Wealth Report that’s just been released by the gnomes at Credit Suisse. Start with Millionaires Control 39% of Global Wealth, a nice post by our friends at the Wall Street Journal that announced the report’s existence and a few of its conclusions. (To be precise, the report says that the world’s millionaires make up 0.5% of the world’s adult population and control 38.5% of the world’s wealth). It got my attention because these are global numbers, and because Credit Suisse’s researchers deal not in income, the usual recourse of development economists, but actual wealth. Capital and real estate and gold and such.

The report contains international wealth-per-adult numbers. Compare the US and Chinese numbers, for both 2000 and 2011, and you get this amazing takeaway – China’s wealth per adult has increased much more (from $6,000 to $21,000 a year) in percentage terms, but the US’s has increased much more (from $192,000 to $248,000) in absolute terms.

Think about that for a second. The recent increase in Chinese personal wealth has been amazing, but what’s even more interesting, from the point of view of the fair global cost-sharing problem that’s at the core of the climate impasse, is that wealth is increasing even faster in the US than it is in China. And that this is happening even as we are repeatedly told that the Chinese are eating our lunch.

Take a look at Figure 6:

Here’s a bit of discussion from the report, but first you need a few acronyms: HNW means “high net worth” and UHNW means “ultra high net worth.” USD means “United States Dollar.”

“Our figures for mid-2011 indicate that there were 29.6 million HNW with wealth from USD 1 million to USD 50 million, of whom the vast majority (26.7 million) fall in the USD 1-5 million range. North America used to host the greatest number of members, and still accounts for 11 million HNW individuals (37% of the total), but membership in the North American regions has been surpassed this year by residents of Europe (37.2% of the total). Asia-Pacific countries excluding China and India are home to 5.7 million members (19.2%), and we estimate that there are now just over 1 million HNW individuals in China (3.4% of the global total). The remaining 937,000 HNW individuals (3.2% of the total) reside in India, Africa or Latin America.

Ultra high net worth

Our figures indicate a global total of 84,700 UHNW individuals with net assets exceeding USD 50 million. Of these, nearly 29,000 are world at least USD 100 million and 2,700 have assets above USD 500 million. North America dominate the regional ranking, with 37,500 UHNW residents (44%), while Europe hosts 23,700 individuals (28%) and 13,000 (15% reside in Asia-Pacific countries, excluding China and India.

In terms of single countries, the USA leads by a huge margin with 34,400 UHNW individuals, equivalent to 42% of the group. The recent fortunes created in China have propelled China into second place with 5,400 representatives.”

What’s the takeaway? Well, the report gives figures for the “Top 1%,” on a per-country basis. It turns out that 27.85% of them live in the US, and 3.54% of them live in China. Is that a lot of rich people in China? Well, yes, but not compared to the number in the US. And don’t forget that rich people in the US are richer than rich people in China, and getting richer still.

So how should we understand the claim that China is “eclipsing” the US? And what does this eclipse, if in fact it’s taking place, imply for the climate negotiations – in Durban, sure, but mostly beyond Durban, when the next major phase of the negotiation, the global phase, is going to eventually have to take place?

And given that so many of the rich – who ultimately should pay much of the cost of the climate transition, and indeed much of the cost of the future – still abide in the North, what does it say about fair, and unfair, divisions of the international burden? And about which nations should take on which obligations? And, critically, what does it mean that so much of the world’s wealth is ensconced in America, a land of wide and deepening poverty?

***

The last 30 years have seen a hollowing out of the US economy. We all know that this “deindustrialization” has had immense negative impacts on the American people, but we rarely consider that it may also have catastrophic global consequences.

The wealth stats indicate that America is still number one, at least as a place for the rich to hide out in. But how does the surfeit of rich Americans bear on the impasse in the climate negotiations? The standard explanation has them mattering very little. Subramanian, for example, focuses not on individual wealth, but instead on national GDP, national trade, and the extent to which a nation is “a net creditor to the rest of the world.” These, he argues, are the decisive factors when it comes to the constitution of national power, which from any broadly realist perspective is what international negotiations are all about. A simple way to say this is that, from the point of view of states, it’s trade and sovereign wealth that matter, and that they overbear the wealth and capacity of citizens (or residents).

But is this the whole story? I don’t think so. I think, rather, that inequality within countries is key to the politics of climate mobilization among countries. This is true for lots of reasons, one of the most important being that countries that do not protect their own citizens lose their political legitimacy, and thus their ability to act. Timmons Roberts, an activist academic and a close observer of the negotiations, even argues in Global Environmental Change that “the roots of the worst stubbornness by the US in recent climate talks lie in growing insecurity about its ability to provide jobs for its workers in a future where all sorts of work is moving to China and India.”

If this is true (and why wouldn’t it be?) it invites an extremely sharp interpretation. To wit, that the corporations, and the ideologues, and all the others that chose to deindustrialize America also chose (though they wouldn’t put it this way) to create a new United States that would be so “insecure” in the face of the climate threat that it refuses to lead, or to act, or even to allow others to act, save in the most timid and inadequate ways. By so doing they may have so poisoned the system of international governance that we will simply be unable to mobilize an effective response to the global climate threat.

Which really is an existential one.

The point here is that inequality and its related dysfunctions are critical obstacles to a successful climate transition. They are obstacles within countries, where the 1% are so coddled by their riches that they will not even notice the rising terrors of the warming world, while many of the 99% are so insecure, and so anxious, that they fear, or can be made to fear, even the policy reforms that they need to protect themselves and their families. And inequality is an international obstacle as well, for it greatly interferes with the goal of negotiating a regime that is both practical and fair. The UN’s notion of “common but differentiated responsibility and respective capability” tells the tale clearly enough, for as a principle of international law it was obviously intended to apply to nations. But what happens when some nations – like the US – are effectively captured, and crippled, by elites that disdain even the notion of international responsibility?

The problem here is “governance failure.” Or maybe we should just call it “decadence.” The United States may at this point be so weakened by rot and ideology that it is unable even to act in its own interests, let alone the interests of its people, let alone the interests of humanity as a whole. Sort of like Russia. Or Saudi Arabia. If this is the case, and to some extent it clearly is, then the challenge of national renewal, of “taking back America” is even greater, and more pressing, than we had previously believed.

– Tom Athanasiou