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Class Footprints in the new Emissions Gap Report

The focus of the 2020 Emissions Gap report is, of course, the emissions gap, which, alas, the pandemic will do little to close. But this year’s edition of this indispensable series also contains a surprise: Chapter 6: Bridging the Gap – the role of equitable low-carbon lifestyles.

The gap itself has been well reported, so I’ll not review it. The crucial numbers are that total emissions reached 59.1 GtCO2e in 2019, leaving us with a gap of 15 GtCO2e to close by 2030, if we would have a 66% chance of achieving the 2°C temperature goal, or 32 GtCO2e if we’re still dreaming about 1.5°C (with the same 66% probability).  Today’s pledges (formally, NDCs) are absolutely not on the necessary scale.

“countries must collectively increase their NDC ambitions threefold to get on track to a 2°C goal and more than five-fold to get on track to the 1.5°C goal.”

Furthermore, most of the pandemic stimulus has thus far been wasted. Globally, Covid related government fiscal spending has to this point amounted to about $12 trillion, a huge percentage of 2020’s global GDP. Unfortunately, a lot of this money has gone into high fossil sectors. The details are more than dispiriting, for they show that many countries have used the pandemic emergency to deepen their support for fossil energy. According to Energy Policy Tracker, the world’s largest countries, grouped into the G20, had (as of December 9th) directed more than $240 billion in stimulus funds to support high-carbon activities and fossil energy, while $157 billion had gone to renewables and low-carbon activities. The US, a particularly egregious fossil funder, had directed over $70 billion to high-carbon activities.

The surprise, and a good reason to go beyond the executive summaries and actually read the GAP Report, is Chapter 6, which focuses on “lifestyle emissions” or, as I prefer, “class footprints.” The first part of this chapter ably summarizes the latest research. The second part is also worth a good look, in part because it offers a master class in just how bland and bloodless analytic prose can get, even when it’s taking on politically fraught matters of absolutely existential significance – like the burden of the rich and their consumption.

Anyway, here’s the takeaway, in a nutshell:

“Around half the consumption emissions of the global top 10 per cent and 1 per cent are associated with citizens of high-income countries, and most of the other half with citizens in middle-income countries (Chancel and Piketty 2015; Oxfam and SEI 2020). One study estimates that the ‘super-rich’ top 0.1 per cent of earners have per capita emissions of around 217 tCO2 – several hundred times greater than the average of the poorest half of the global population.”

The two citations here are essential reading. The Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty paper, Carbon and inequality: from Kyoto to Paris, is I suppose a classic, because it came out before Paris. (I reviewed it here). The Oxfam and Stockholm Environment Institute paper, The Carbon Inequality Era: An Assessment of the Global Distribution of Consumption Emissions Among Individuals from 1990 to 2015 and Beyond, is the hot new item, and it deserves far more attention than it has received.

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The US Climate Fair Share

The U.S. Climate Action Network has taken a position on the U.S. fair share, which is to say–the US Fair Share in a global emergency effort to stabilize the climate system at 1.5C.  This is a long story, but the position itself is short and sweet. To wit:

“USCAN believes that the US fair share of the global mitigation effort in 2030 is equivalent to a reduction of 195% below its 2005 emissions levels, reflecting a fair share range of 173-229%.”

This position was actually adopted some time ago, on July 17th 2020, when a long “alignment process” led by ActionAid USA, North Carolina Interfaith Power and Light, the Center for Biological Diversity and EcoEquity culminated in the adoption of this position during USCAN’s annual national meeting in 2020.

We’re now going public. The US Fair shares website is at https://usfairshare.org/, and it contains, among other things, a political and technical briefing, which is what you should read if you want the details of this position and its meaning. One point I want to stress is that we’re not saying we have the keys to the kingdom of global climate stabilization. Far from it. We’re just saying we have a critical missing piece, one that spotlights the logic of global climate justice, one that could help make the global climate mobilization fair enough to actually succeed.

There’s some nice early press. Notably, Bill McKibben featured the USCAN fair shares position in his New Yorker Climate Newsletter — in a piece he called The Climate Debt the U.S. Owes the World. I myself placed a longer and more detailed piece in Sierra Magazine called It’s Time for the US to Carry Its Fair Share on Climate Change. Bill’s piece is of course well written, but mine lays out more of the gory details.

And there’s more!  Hunter Cutting has an excellent tweet thread here.  There’s a very informative press release here.  A YouTube of the press briefing is available here.  And, finally, there’s a cool Video. 

 

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It’s Time for the US to Carry Its Fair Share on Climate Change

This essay was first published in Sierra Magazine

The term “climate injustice” is easy to understand. When the poor and vulnerable people of New Orleans or Nicaragua are abandoned to the ravages of a climate-fueled hurricane, we know something hideous has occurred. But climate justice is not just the absence of climate injustice. It also demands the presence of real and meaningful fairness, and an extremely ambitious climate mobilization that takes this fairness just as seriously as decarbonization itself. No mobilization that tries to skip this step can possibly succeed.

Check the science and you’ll see how very late it is. Stabilizing the climate would be extraordinarily difficult under the best of circumstances, which these are decidedly not. Add the imperative of mobilizing in a fair way and the challenge can seem overwhelming. Why is fairness so decisive? The simple answer is cooperation. Absent an overall sense of fairness, justice, and equity—and the cooperation required to achieve those ideals—we haven’t got a chance of avoiding climate chaos. Bringing down greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to keep global temperatures (more or less) in check is going to be the hardest thing we’ve ever done. We can only do it together.

But how to achieve a sense of fairness in a world where many people are appallingly poor and some are astonishingly rich? Where all nations are divided? Where some have vastly overdrawn their proper share of the planetary carbon budget, while others have done almost nothing to cause the climate crisis? This, in a nutshell, is the fair shares problem, as we find it on the climate front. Even if the United States honestly reduces its emissions to net zero in 2050, it will not have done its fair share of the planetary effort.

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