Global economic justice as the key to emergency climate mobilization
Recent publications, comments, and provocations from EcoEquity and its friends
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.
This essay was first published in Foreign Policy in Focus
I have for decades been assuring both colleagues and comrades that the climate negotiations are not a sick joke, that “COP” is not short for “Conference of Polluters,” that the negotiations matter. The argument has become easier to make as more people have come to see the implacable necessity of an international way forward. As imperfect as the COP process is, a world without multilateral climate negotiations would be far worse.
Still, there comes a time, amidst the floods and the firestorms, when even the practiced realism of seasoned observers must break down. This time didn’t quite come at COP29, though it came close. As Martin Wolf put it in the Financial Times, “the assessment has to lie between failure and disaster—failure, because progress is still possible, or disaster, because a good agreement will now be too late.”
The climate problem demands an earnest and cooperative international response, but Baku instead saw the Global North present the Global South with a “grim ultimatum”—agree to an inadequate offer of support or risk the collapse of the only international process where it has significant voice and influence. By its end, the Global South had been forced to accede. With the clap of the president’s gavel, and despite a broad push to assert that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” it got a very bad deal indeed.
There was also action on the emissions trading front, where the rules were finally nailed down. But the rules are pretty bad and the deal is more likely to generate a flood of illusory offsets than a flood of quality investment. Also, and importantly, neither carbon trading in particular nor private finance in general can honestly be expected to entirely finance a successful climate transition.
On the public finance side, the pressure to relitigate the Baku deal, already high, can only increase. The last-minute adoption of the “Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3 trillion”—a critical commitment to find a real path forward—is likely to define the COP30 agenda. The problem is that, barring an unanticipated political shift of the first order, the Belém COP, too, will fail to rise to the occasion.
Continue reading “After COP29: The Climate Negotiations Reach Their Crisis”
A number of things are now obvious. The shape of the future is not among them.
We know, for example, that Donald J. Trump is likely to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement (and maybe even the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), and this despite the terrifying, and rising, instability of the climate system. To pick one horror from among thousands – we now know that the AMOC, the Atlantic Overturning Meridional Circulation, is far more likely to collapse than was hitherto projected, and soon, and with “devastating and irreversible” consequences.
There is much to say, about Trump, about the political crisis, and about the climate reckoning. I will hazard just one claim – the “neoliberal order,” as historian Gary Gerstle calls it, is clearly behind us, and though we are still trudging through Gramsci’s interregnum, there are signs that it, too, is ending. The order, or disorder, that replaces it will have everything to do with the planetary boundaries we’re now crossing, and with the political and equity challenges they present. Its precise nature will be defined by how, and how successfully, we face these challenges.
Since I’m writing this during COP29, the “finance COP,” I’ll say a few words about money. I particularly want to note 2024’s Civil Society Equity Review, which I helped to write (there were about six principle authors) and which we’ve called Fair Shares, Finance, Transformation: Fair Shares Assessment, Equitable Fossil Fuel Phaseout, and Public Finance for Just Global Climate Stabilization. I’ve been working on the annual Equity Review since 2015 – the Paris year – but I’m particularly pleased with this new report. You’re no doubt too busy to read it, but you should try to take a look. It’s probably worth your time.
Our key message is that stabilizing the climate quickly enough to prevent catastrophe is going to be expensive, but that we nonetheless have the money. Or, rather, the global rich have the money, and – one way or another – they are going to have to pay, as per Foreign Policy’s rather inelegant formulation, to “help fix the planet”.
The 2024 Civil Society Equity Reviews includes:
An updated look at fairness, and unfairness, of the current NDCs , out to 2035
The finance challenge
How much would it cost to save ourselves and our civilization? You’ll find plenty of details – and footnotes – in the report. What I will say here, and what climate policy activists around the world are stressing, is that the figure is denominated in trillions, not billions, of dollars a year, and that a good deal of this must come as public finance. This latter necessity – the need for the new global finance goal, the “New Collective Quantified Goal”, to have a large grant and grant-equivalent public finance core – is now, finally, at the center of the UN climate negotiations.
Trillions of dollars in public finance, obviously, are not yet on offer. Indeed, with authoritarian populism on the main stage – and not just in the US – the battle for public finance for the public good is mired in the myths and agenda of the right. Instead of fighting a long-term battle for a new international finance architecture, one fit for the purposes now before us, we are forced to engage in endless short-term battles to prevent further tax cuts for the rich, further attacks of our social safety nets, further deregulation, further militarism, further dismissals of any fundamental sense of global solidarity. All that said, this last year has nonetheless seen an explosion of work designed to show that we have the money.
Here for example, is a table from Fair Shares, Finance, Transformation:
The Civil Society Equity Review is not alone in making this case. See for example here, and here, and here, and here, and here. But the 2024 Civil Society Equity Review report is notable for the deliberate manner in which it lays out the path forward, for the way it names and quantifies the barriers to decarbonization and for its careful, explicit distinction between finance sources that are immediately available, given only political and economic reforms, and more fundamental transformations that will require deeper system change.
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We’re moving now into a new phase in the climate battle, and because it has so much to do with finance, it is important to stress that there is more on the table than just money. Think of the global South’s overwhelming international debt, which can never be repaid. Think of our massively unbalanced and unsustainable international trading system. Think of the planetary divide between the rich and the poor, and how the global rich exploit it at every turn.
Still, we have the money, or could, and this is extremely good news – to stabilize the climate system in time, we’re going to need a “global just transition”, and it’s not going to be cheap. This is the main point here, but we also have to realize that there’s a danger in focusing too tightly on finance. Doing so can create the impression that finance is the key to a future that can, in effect, be seen as a lower-carbon version of business as usual. But this is not the case. Sure, climate transition must begin here in the “real world,” but there’s no such thing as climate-friendly business as usual. If we pretend there is, we will only find that other elements of business as usual will undermine effective climate action.
Fortunately, the situation is fluid, and filled with possibility. People everywhere are concluding that we’re at a tipping point, and perhaps we are. The climate negotiations, certainly, are heading for crisis. Perhaps the finance showdown will lead to clarity, and break the deadlocks that have mired the negotiations now for decades. That said, superficial reforms will not be enough, precisely because equity is a prerequisite of rapid decarbonization. Nor will equity as a mere principle suffice. We also need equity as a nexus of political realism, for it is quite impossible to imagine collecting, or releasing, the trillions of dollars that the global finance transformation will demand unless this is done in a manner that is very widely – and internationally – seen as fair.
Rapid planetary decarbonization will only be possible if the global North pays its fair share of the cost. This is only possible if the rich, everywhere, do the same. Nor is this an exorbitant demand – a trillion dollars a year in public climate finance would be enough to get things moving. It is not much, but it is an implacable necessity. That’s the point.
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Also, note that the Fair Shares, Finance, Transformation report has received some nice publicity in the US.
Wen Stephenson, who recognized its importance, invited me to do a Q&A session about it and its core arguments for The Nation. It was a lively exchange, and you can read Wen’s synopsis of it here.
And Bill McKibben has quoted it, and me on it, in his substack newsletter, The Crucial Years. Bill has a good eye for a punchy quote,, and notes that the report decries the “organized obstructionism of the fossil fuel industry and the parasitism of the global rich.”
This essay was originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus
Just before the recent climate summit in Dubai, COP28 president Sultan Al-Jaber, with some exasperation, came out with the following rather amazing statement:
“Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”
Al-Jabar was posturing when he made this quip about caves, but he can almost be forgiven. We badly need a roadmap for a “phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development.” By noting the lack of one, he underscored its absence. This is true even if he spoke as a flack of the fossil fuel cartel.
Speaking of COP28, it helped settle the question of the COPs, which still troubles the climate left. The COPs are easily dismissed as “blah blah blah.” But they are, in a word, necessary. We would be in far greater trouble without them, and this is true even though the COPs are condemned to make decisions by consensus, even though they engender endless greenwashing, even though, with next year’s COP29 slated for Azerbaijan, two in a row will be hosted by straight-up petrostates.
The climate negotiations are finally circling core issues. COP26 saw a decision to “phase down” coal, and COP28 opened with the Loss and Damage fund finally lurching into existence. Then came COP28’s key decision text, which called for “Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Only a month later—with President Biden’s move to “pause” the approval of new liquified natural gas terminals, a decision the White House explicitly linked to COP28— the COP decision demonstrated real world benefits. It could have many more in the future, including outside the United States.
Meanwhile, COP29 is set to see the next big battle begin in earnest, as climate finance takes center stage. This battle could (if all goes well) culminate in 2025, where COP30 will be hosted by Lula da Sila’s Brazil, and deliver a meaningful decision on that crucial front. This is not the time to performatively insist that COP stands for “conference of polluters.”
Having said all this, I must immediately add that the climate negotiations have thus far failed, as decisively witnessed by the steadily rising atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration. COP skeptics are quite right about this. But in their failure the international negotiations are hardly alone. Domestic climate action has had many victories, but it has hardly put us on a path to deep and rapid decarbonization. Nor has the green technology revolution brought planetary emissions into a peak-and-decline pathway. Nor—and this is not easy to say—have the world’s direct action and climate justice movements filled the gaps. Politically, they may be everything, but they too have failed to stop the warming.
One key point: the COP28 text does not simply call for transitioning away from fossil fuels but rather stipulates that this transition must be “just, orderly, and equitable,” a much more challenging prospect. This led Sivan Kartha, a climate equity specialist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, to add that the “deepest fissure” in Dubai was between those who simply want a rapid fossil phase out and those who insist that, to have any hope of success, such a phase out must be fair.
Many of us agree—but what does such fairness imply?
Continue reading “After Dubai — Towards a “just, orderly, and equitable” fossil fuel phase out”
This essay was originally published in The New Republic
In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its first report on global warming—and by so doing started the clock on our collective response. In the three decades since then, humanity—as nations, peoples, and corporations—has spewed more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it had in all preceding history.
There are primarily three groups to blame for this depressing fact. The first is the fossil fuel cartel, which is to say the coal and oil and gas companies. It goes without saying that fossil capital, some of it “sovereign” capital owned and controlled by nations and some of it just straight-up private capital, has done everything to ensure that we remain dependent on fossil fuels for as long as possible.
In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its first report on global warming—and by so doing started the clock on our collective response. In the three decades since then, humanity—as nations, peoples, and corporations—has spewed more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it had inall preceding history.
The second is the global north. A huge percentage of both current and historical emissions comes from North America and Europe, with the United States responsible for twice as many emissions as any other country. Admittedly, the world has changed since 1990: China’s “emergence,” for example, lifted more people out of poverty than any other event in human history, though it also released immense plumes of carbon dioxide. These emissions get a lot of attention in the U.S., and deservedly so, but the poverty alleviation does as well. And the “developed” countries of North America and Europe still account for about a third of post-1990 emissions.
The third is the Global Rich. This, not China’s rise, is the story that’s most crucial if we want to understand why our poor efforts at mitigation have been such unrelenting failures. It is impossible to appreciate the forces at work behind the past three decades of emissions without recognizing how many of these emissions belonged to the rich.
This essay was originally published by The Nation, here
The 1.5°C temperature target is difficult to honestly and openly discuss. Within the climate movement, it has become a locus of anguish, confusion, and even despair. Long a symbol of mobilization and hope, 1.5°C has become central to both activist campaigns and scientific analysis. Yet it’s now clear that the planet will almost certainly warm more than 1.5°C.
This is a rough prospect. It will likely condemn countless communities, many of them largely innocent of responsibility for the climate crisis, to suffering and destruction on a vast scale. It will trigger major ecological crises, extinctions first among them—the coral reefs, to pick just one example, could almost entirely vanish as the warming breaches the 1.5°C line.
These are not encouraging words, but they should not be taken as invitations to despair, or to a strange denialism in which, fearing hopelessness, we soft-pedal the severity of our circumstances. Because the truth is that the planet is not doomed, and neither are the world’s most climate vulnerable people.
The message here is that it’s time to act. Fortunately, significant action seems finally to be possible. At the last climate summit, after a grand push from the Global South coalition (the G77 + China) and the climate movement, the long-deadlocked battle to establish a “loss and damage” fund was finally won. That fund could finance disaster prevention and disaster mitigation in regions that have been pushed beyond their adaptive capacities. There will, of course, be limits to such interventions, but this could be the beginning of real climate internationalism. And it would not be alone. To cite just one other justification for cautious optimism, the renewable technology revolution has finally arrived.
Still, implacably, year by year, the “emissions budgets” are being drawn down, and the IPCC’s new “Synthesis Report” has made this undeniable. We’re going to hit 1.5°C. Thus, if 1.5°C is still achievable, it is only by way of an “overshoot and decline” pathway in which the temperature, in time, drops back below 1.5°C. As Peter Thorne, a physical geographer at Maynooth University in Ireland, noted at the report’s launch, “Almost irrespective of our emissions choices in the near term, we will probably reach 1.5 degrees early in the next decade.… The real question is whether we reach 1.5 degrees and then maybe go a little bit over and come back down or whether we go blasting through one and a half degrees and two degrees and keep on going.”
The challenge now is to limit the depth and duration of the 1.5°C overshoot and thus the destruction that occurs during and after it. This means, among much else, rapidly phasing out fossil fuels, a tremendously challenging prospect that will disrupt economies and political alliances around the world. Such a phaseout can succeed only if it unfolds in a manner that is widely accepted as fair.
Continue reading “The Planet Will Warm Past 1.5°C. What Now?”
The first thing I want to say about The Deluge, Stephen Markley’s doorstop of a novel on the climate emergency, is that the prestige reviews it has thus far garnered, at least in the US – I’m thinking in particular of the Times, the Post, and the LA Times – are all a bit irritated by it, and all of them in irritating ways. Especially the LA Times, which actually complains that The Deluge “drowns us in catastrophes”. Don’t get me wrong – there are good criticisms to make here — but somehow these reviews avoid, or miss, or downplay, the point that should be highlighted, which is that you should absolutely read The Deluge. In fact, should put it at the top of your stack. This book is an event like few others, and you don’t want to miss it.
I’ll not go into the details. This isn’t my job and in any case I don’t want to drop any spoilers. Which seems to be a part of the problem that seriously reviewing The Deluge poses. How, for example, do you talk about the ending? Unlike Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, which was always going to conclude with an uptick – Stan’s point is to show that we are not doomed, that we could absolutely make a different future – The Deluge is more an extrapolation of the current storyline, the one we’re trapped in, and let’s just say that this extrapolation ends on a razor’s edge.
Many things here are just absolutely fucking great. One of them, a big one, is its take on the climate movement. We talk, some of us, about “the movement ecosystem” – how the frontline activists work in implicit if sometimes hostile coalition with the legislative activists, how the technologists are essential, but prone to exaggerate their own importance, how the climate movement, as it become the climate justice movement, is passing through some challenging cultural water, how eco-desperation can decay into eco-terrorism – but rarely, if ever, has there been a fiction that more intelligently centers these cross currents, even as it shows the resulting mélange being tossed about in rising waves of seemingly unstoppable fossil-fueled fascism.
Also, the writing can be sublime.
What criticisms would I highlight? Well, the description of Kate Morris, the charismatic activist at the center of the tale, can in extreme moments collapse, or almost collapse, into caricature. On the other hand, I have to add that I would really like to have been on her staff, back before everything went to shit. Also, if you’re sick unto death by the suggestion that the US will have to lead the world out of these dark precincts, you’re probably not going to love the pathway forward, which includes an embattled US Administration managing, despite all, to nonetheless lead negotiations that actually achieve a viable international climate accord. Which, given the strength of the winds blowing against it, isn’t really all that bad.
Here’s a quick summary, as that deal emerges out of some very delicate talks in the tumultuous year 2037:
“The framework was not a new idea. Each country would bring its per capita carbon emissions into alignment so the carbon budget of developing countries could rise minimally while developed nations would have to drastically reduce theirs. The CSDF [ Climate Stabilization and Development Fund] would pay for zero-carbon infrastructure in the Global South, while debt forgiveness would be tied to each participant’s decarbonization and biodiversity preservation. Free riders would be dealt with, first with limited sanctions and then with economic boycotts. If the major economies could stick to this, it would flush the carbon out of the world’s economy to limit warming to 2.5 degrees.”
Do note that terrifying number. Because, by the time we get to this point (page 814) in the tale, the Paris temperature goal is fading history. And note too that even holding this desperate line — 2.5C is not where we would choose to turn the tide — involves winning an endlessly deepening and dispiriting battle against insane new forms of sociopathic Christian authoritarianism. It also involves a culture dominated by virtual reality, an AI-assisted surveillance state, identity politics, heroic but cantankerous scientists, very clever bombs, cap and dividend, a democratic revolution in China, the methane emergency, solar radiation management, and the widespread acceptance, won at very high cost at the very last moment, that there is no way forward save the realization that we really are in this together.
The Deluge is long. But it’s written by a real novelist – this is not climate fiction as usual. And it is imbued with a realist sensibility, tinged with hope, that I for one found to be quite congenial. It deserves way more attention than it has thus far received.