Saudi version of climate justice rejected by developing countries

The drama was high in Katowice when a rotten bloc of four countries (the Saudis, of course, and also the U.S., the Russians and the Kuwaitis) refused to welcome the IPCC report.  But it wasn’t the drama that made the fight an important one.  It was that the Saudi’s argument. . .

“Saudi Arabia’s lead negotiator Ayman Shasly said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report – released in October – ‘shows that [halting warming at 1.5C] is achievable, it’s doable, let’s all do it together, which is not fair. What is the equity in this? Where is history in this?’ ”

. . . has definitely passed its use by date.  Read more here.

Confronting Climate Change in a Deeply Unequal World

The folks at inequality.org recently released this nice brisk introduction to the climate inequality emergency.  It’s a nice intro to the subject, which I cite because it takes inequality and climate crisis as two crises that can no longer be successfully addressed in isolation from each other.   The strategy of the piece is to juxtapose the IPCC’s new special report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and Oxfam’s The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2018. The first of these, in particular, is a milestone document which has deservedly gotten a lot of attention, though few have noted that the IPCC itself has a lot to say about the equity challenge.  See the discussion of this in After Paris: Inequality, Fair Shares, and the Climate Emergency, which was just published by the Civil Society Equity Review coalition.

After Paris: Inequality, Fair Shares, and the Climate Emergency

And here is something new!  A report that evaluates the current national pledges of action in the light of the IPCC’s bracing new report — Global Warming of 1.5°C — and in the context of an analysis that takes inequality within countries just as seriously as it takes inequality between countries.

The report is titled After Paris: Inequality, Fair Shares, and the Climate Emergency, and it has an extremely impressive list of organizational endorsers, from all over the world.  Which is not surprising, as it was produced under the aegis of the Civil Society Equity Review coalition, which has built quite a bit of momentum at this point.  EcoEquity, as one of the partners in the Climate Equity Reference Project, is one of the principle authors.

One of our partners even call this report “elegant,” which is something for this sort of a report.  Take a look!