Fair Shares in a Net Zero World

I was recently invited to write a short opinion piece on the need for a public climate finance breakthrough for Yale Climate Connections. You can find the result as Equity and fair shares in a net-zero world, though I implore you to ignore the rather distracting graphic. (What year is this? Who’s the woman in the sharkskin suit? What’s the deal with Al Gore’s boots?)

After publishing the piece, I received an email from a friend with a nice picture of a flying pig. I see the point, but I don’t take it. My explicit goal, after all, is to redefine realism for this the time of climate emergency—which is why I’m arguing that the US should move to animate the global climate talks by offering $27 billion a year in international public climate finance.

Not that this would be the US’s fair share. But, when combined with a major domestic effort, it would be a respectable opening move, as is clearly argued in the US Fair Shares NDC, which an ad hoc group of us recently drafted “as if” we were speaking for the U.S.

I’ve long said we only need two things to save ourselves and our civilization — a thorough-going green technology revolution and a “high cooperation world”. I see now that I’ve been too abstract. We actually need three things, and if the green tech revolution is the first, the climate justice movement is absolutely the second. We haven’t a hope without it.

As for the third, I don’t quite know how to characterize it, save to say that it has to do with the ruling elites, who had better wake up soon, and ask themselves some hard questions.

Because it’s their move.

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