Global economic justice as the key to emergency climate mobilization
Just a few days ago, John Fetter of the Institute for Policy Studies interviewed me, at some length, to get my views on Climate Debt. This video, in which I tried to diplomatically suggest that there might be better frames, is the result. Normally, I can’t stand to look at videos of myself, but this one is pretty smooth.
Not failure, not yet, but we can see it from here
2015’s Paris Agreement could have been a turning point. It posited a world in which all countries – the wealthy and the rest – would do their proper parts, as they saw them, to stabilize the climate system. Paris wasn’t ideal — there was no agreed way of understanding national fair shares in the common effort of global transition, and no real climate finance strategy, and of course there was no enforcement. But there was still a real chance at another pathway, another storyline.
Ten years later, such guarded hope is even more difficult to sustain. Despite a superbloom of technological solutions, the international climate regime is failing catastrophically. Paris promised a new kind of cooperation, but instead the talks have been stalled by systemic pathologies rooted in long historical injustices, by grotesque levels of inequality both between and within countries, and by the entrenched power of the fossil-fuel complex. Current policies are steering the world far beyond the 1.5°C warming limit, with devastating consequences already being borne disproportionately by the poor, especially in the Global South.
The abject inadequacy of the NDCs (the national pledges) is a consequence and not a cause. The central fact of the Paris regime is that the NDCs are weak because there has been no meaningful finance breakthrough. Nor can there be, not while the wealthy – people and nations – utterly fail to do their fair shares. This is one of the key points of this year’s Equity Review, Inequity, Inequality, Inaction, a report that stresses that Global North countries have uniformly failed to do their fair shares; and that while Global South countries — with important exceptions — have done far better, they too have not done enough; and that, absent the finance support they need to leapfrog to a post-carbon world, they cannot reasonably be expected to.
As one of the authors of Inequity, Inequality, Inaction, I fear it will be overlooked in the informational avalanche of the COP. So let me add, as an enticement to your attention, that we have allowed ourselves to stray from the stiff, overdrawn Global North vs Global South positions that often define international climate politics. The whole truth is more complex, and we have, in this report, tried to face it. We have in particular concluded that, at a certain point, the finger of blame must turn from the Global North and point directly at the world’s rich elites, who have repeatedly used their vast wealth to amass disproportionate political power, and then used that power to service their often fatally short-sighted conceits and self-interests.
This isn’t exactly news, but neither have the dots here been clearly and repeatedly connected. The fact is that the world’s rich could easily afford to finance a just global climate transition, and would barely even notice, say, an expenditure of $1.3 trillion, the amount needed to deliver on the Baku to Belem roadmap. Such a figure fades to insignificance compared to the additional $33.9 trillion the global one percent have accumulated since Paris. The rich could pay the entire cost of the roadmap, say by way of progressive global climate taxes, and hardly feel it.
Not that I expect them to embrace such taxes anytime soon. In fact, this is a moment of retrenchment and “greenlash,” and incrementalism, we are endlessly told, is the order of the day. But let us not bend too quickly to agree. The truth is rather that the climate reckoning demands a more challenging kind of realism, a “climate realism” that takes the imperatives of both science and justice into proper account, and admits (sorry if I sound like a “doomer”) that our civilizational survival is contingent on a transition to a fairer world.
It’s too late to avoid a 1.5°C overshoot, but it’s not yet too late to keep that overshoot reasonably brief and shallow, and to do absolutely everything in our power to avoid even a transient warming of 2°C, which we can now now begin to see, dimly but unmistakably, on the near horizon. Unfortunately, given the power of the fossil-fuel complex – from Houston to Riyadh to Moscow – this is shaping up to be a tall order indeed. It’s not too much to say that everything depends, as per Dubai’s final agreement, on “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” We can only hope that the Brazilians play their hand well in Belém, and that COP30 somehow manages, in the words of environment minister Marina Silva, to land an outcome that “sends a message” on a “just, planned, gradual and long-term decommissioning of fossil fuels”.
Silva is being “realistic” of course. You can tell by her reference to “gradual and long-term” decommissioning. In truth, the fossil-fuel phaseout had best happen as quickly as humanly possible, and even in the best case, wherein we achieve the “highest possible ambition” called for by the Court of International Justice, we’re going to be flirting with catastrophe.
The arts of international coalition-building are daunting . . .
Originally published in Earth Island Journal, here
Let’s be honest.
Many activists have long insisted that the international climate negotiations are bullshit, greenwashing, Kabuki. Or, more charitably, that they are simply doomed. For those in this camp, the negotiations have primarily been occasions for protest and networking, most of it “outside” the conference zones. As for the negotiations themselves, and even their greatest accomplishment — 2015’s Paris Agreement — these are seen as mere feints, overblown failures.
But if the negotiations are failures, so too is everything else. The renewables revolution has not forced the rapid retirement of existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Mainstream techno-legislative strategies have provoked changes only at the margins. The protests, even the largest of them, have not driven the emergence of a viable transition strategy. Even the frontline battles, essential though they are, have done little to stop, say, the rate of sea level rise.
The climate movement’s “inside” wing — that works within the formal negotiating system — tries its best, at every turn, to grind real wins out of a long-deadlocked and fantastically frustrating process. It is strange and often lonely work, but if you believe global governance will be needed to stabilize the climate system, then you believe the negotiations must be continued, even though, to date, they have “failed.” And you believe they are essential, even though the prospects for not only climate diplomacy, but diplomacy in general, have come to seem increasingly futile. So the question today isn’t whether the climate negotiations are doomed. Rather, it is whether the fractious nations of the twenty-first-century world, besieged by fossil capitalism and tides of cheap nationalism, will be able to cooperatively face their deteriorating conditions of existence.
The real problem has never been inside the negotiation halls. It’s that the nations that determine what happens in those halls are still locked into a catastrophically unjust system in which the political right and the fossil fuel industry can block all effective action. For instance, the United States (admittedly an extreme case) is paralyzed by its far right, to the point where we can barely imagine it doing its fair part in any global mobilization.
The story of the future is a global story. The old saw — “Think Globally, Act Locally” — isn’t going to cut it. Though, as my experiences in EcoEquity have taught me, acting globally is no simple matter, nor does one do it alone. I learned this quickly enough when I walked into my first climate COP — it was COP6, at The Hague, in 1999 — and I’m still learning it today.
The arts of coalition are daunting, even when the coalitions are local. When global coalitions are at issue, and when you’re working with a sea of actors that includes not just, say, the activists of Power Shift Africa but also, say, the government of Saudi Arabia, the coalitions are daunting indeed. Both activists and governments are trapped within them and lost without them.
Robin Hahnel, U.S. left libertarian economist and stalwart of participatory economics, has long been a friend of EcoEquity, and of the Climate Equity Framework that defines much of its work. In this guest essay, he argues that a fair shares climate transition can most effectively be financed by a global emissions trading system. Such an idea will of course be anathema to many of today’s activists, but note well that Hahnel speaks for a system in which “trades” only count towards a nation’s fair share if they are aggregated and accounted at the national level — like so:
“(1) If they wish any country government should be allowed to certify emission reduction credits for emitters within its national territory who apply for credits to sell.
(2) When calculating whether a country has complied with its national pledge to reduce emissions, any emission reduction credits purchased by anyone within the country will be added to the country’s national emission allowance, and any emission reduction credits sold by anyone within the country will be subtracted from the country’s national emission allowance.”
By Robin Hahnel. Robin can be reached at robinhahnel1946@gmail.com
Ideally an international climate agreement would be:
Readers should always ask whether, and to what extent, any proposal under discussion achieves these three goals – what we might call the three “E’s” for an international climate agreement.
In Climate Change Not All Countries are Created Equal!
Before presenting a proposal for an agreement that would be effective, equitable, and efficient I want to explain where the distinction between “economically more developed countries” and “economically less developed countries” came from, and the important role it has played in international climate negotiations. The terminology “more developed countries,” or MDCs, and “less developed countries,” or LDCs, is taken from the development economics literature. More economically developed countries traditionally include countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the countries which comprise the European Union. Most other countries, whose citizens have yet to enjoy the benefits of economic development, are traditionally designated as less developed countries.
Under the Kyoto protocol, which was negotiated in Kyoto Japan in 1997 and entered into force in 2005 after it was ratified by 192 countries, but not the United States, only countries designated as more developed were expected to commit to mandatory emission reductions, while less developed countries were excluded from mandatory emission reductions, presumably until they reach some higher level of economic development. However, this binary distinction between more and less developed countries fails to take account of important differences within each category. For example, China and the Republic of the Congo were both classified as less developed countries under the Kyoto protocol. But China bears much more responsibility for causing climate change and has much more capability to contribute toward its solution than the Republic of Congo; even though China bears far less responsibility and capability than the United States, which of course is classified as a more developed country.
While international negotiations continue to be dominated by disputes between less developed and more developed “blocs,” in truth the binary distinction between more developed and less developed countries is quite imprecise. For years nobody had developed procedures to overcome this problem. However, fortunately, that is no longer the case. We can now measure different levels of responsibility and capability on a continuum. Continue reading “Guest Essay: A New Idea as COP30 Approaches”