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.
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 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.
A message from South Africa
As you probably know, the big win at the last climate jamboree (COP27 in Egypt) was the establishment of the Loss & Damage facility. And a big win it was! The question, now, is how we’re going to provision that facility, how we’re going to fund the fund.
The principle of this website is transitional justice — how to provide the resources needed to actually achieve the climate transition. In the next year, we’ll have a lot to say about this, and about Loss & Damage finance in particular, but today, as I dig out my email, I just want to quote a particularly pithy summary of the road forward, one written by the inestimable Lidy Nacpil, together with Thuli Makama, both of whom hail from the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development. It’s called Rich nations can afford to pay their fair share to fix global crises and here’s their summary of the menu, as it stood just after the COP.
The first [option] is making fossil fuel companies pay. While many households were pushed into poverty this year, oil and gas companies made record profits and governments continued to subsidise them. Ending fossil fuel subsidies would raise at least $600 billion a year, and a 10% tax hike on oil and gas production about $400 billion in 2022. Along these lines, the EU and UK among others have introduced windfall taxes on oil and gas profits, and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres and small island governments are calling for part of these to be levied toward the loss and damage fund.
There is also momentum to shift a particularly influential form of fossil subsidy – international public finance – towards renewable energy instead. At COP26, 39 countries and institutions promised to end their $28 billion a year in international finance for fossil fuels by the end of 2022. While Germany, Canada, the U.S. and Italy have yet to meet this pending deadline, a growing group of countries has.
Second, a small tax on extreme wealth would raise $2.5 trillion a year, and related proposals to crack down on tax dodging would significantly bolster this. Because the world’s richest 1% have caused 23% of greenhouse gas emissions growth since 1990, these measures are also needed to reach climate targets. In a push that mirrored the loss and damage win, last week African countries secured a key step towards these reforms by passing a resolution for the U.N. to hold its own intergovernmental talks on tax rules rather than them remaining the sole domain of the OECD.
Calls to cancel Global South countries’ sovereign debts – incurred through our neo-colonial global financial system – predate the climate crisis but are intensifying with it. Campaigners brought these asks to COP27, pointing out that low-income countries are forced to pay wealthier countries the initial $100 billion a year they have been promised in climate finance many times over in debt service payments.
The economic volatility of the last few years has compounded debts in many countries, preventing public spending on basic needs, let alone climate action. In response, some governments and agencies are finally making serious debt proposals like cancelling $100 billion a year for the next decade.
Finally, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s popular Bridgetown Agenda to tackle debt and climate has components of many these proposals, as well as an ask for the International Monetary Fund to inject at least $650-billion worth of reserve assets into struggling economies annually through Special Drawing Rights.
Together, these modest proposals add up to well over $3.7 trillion a year. More ambitious versions, closer to the scale of the Global North’s ongoing and historical debts to the rest of the world, could free up even more. We have always had the money for a liveable future where no one must choose between heating and eating, or transport and shelter – what may finally be arriving is the political impetus for the governments most responsible for today’s global crises to pay up.
The Guardian just ran this article here. I really have no comment, except that I’m not even sure even this would work. Depends on who they are, I guess.
The climate fair shares idea is no longer novel. But as the planetary crisis deepens, its profile is changing. Humanity is facing a civilizational emergency – a polycrisis with both climate and injustice at its core – and we need big ideas that can help guide us out of it.
This discussion paper, which was prepared by the Climate Equity Reference Project for the Climate Action Network International, is focused on one such idea: climate fair shares. Its purpose is to support analysis and campaigns for equitable climate action, including – quite explicitly – greatly increased international climate finance flows.
Note here a political premise — the equity challenge cannot be set aside while we concentrate on “implementation.” To be absolutely clear — we are in trouble, but a rapid global climate transition can still be achieved. We have (all) the money and (most of) the technology we need. But it is hard to see how any sufficiently rapid transition will be possible unless the benefits and promises and also the unavoidable pain and disruption are shared amongst the people of this world in a way that is widely accepted as being fair, or at least fair enough. We can not follow, yet again, the all too often repeated pattern in which most of the benefits are captured by those who are already wealthy and powerful, while most of the pain and suffering is born by those already marginalized and oppressed.
Some highlights:
Tom Athanasiou, for the Climate Equity Reference Project.