Naomi Klein: Climate Rage
November 23rd, 2009
[read original at Rolling Stone]
The only way to stop global warming is for rich nations to pay for the damage they’ve done – or face the consequences.
One last chance to save the world — for months, that’s how the
United Nations summit on climate change in Copenhagen, which starts in
early December, was being hyped. Officials from 192 countries were
finally going to make a deal to keep global temperatures below
catastrophic levels. The summit called for “that old comic-book
sensibility of uniting in the face of a common danger threatening the
Earth,†said Todd Stern, President Obama’s chief envoy on climate
issues. “It’s not a meteor or a space invader, but the damage to our
planet, to our community, to our children and their children will be
just as great.â€
That was back in March. Since then, the endless battle over health care
reform has robbed much of the president’s momentum on climate change.
With Copenhagen now likely to begin before Congress has passed even a
weak-ass climate bill co-authored by the coal lobby, U.S. politicians
have dropped the superhero metaphors and are scrambling to lower
expectations for achieving a serious deal at the climate summit. It’s
just one meeting, says U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, not “the
be-all and end-all.â€
As faith in government action dwindles, however, climate activists
are treating Copenhagen as an opportunity of a different kind. On track
to be the largest environmental gathering in history, the summit
represents a chance to seize the political terrain back from
business-friendly half-measures, such as carbon offsets and emissions
trading, and introduce some effective, common-sense proposals — ideas
that have less to do with creating complex new markets for pollution
and more to do with keeping coal and oil in the ground.
Among the smartest and most promising — not to mention controversial
— proposals is “climate debt,†the idea that rich countries should pay
reparations to poor countries for the climate crisis. In the world of
climate-change activism, this marks a dramatic shift in both tone and
content. American environmentalism tends to treat global warming as a
force that transcends difference: We all share this fragile blue
planet, so we all need to work together to save it. But the coalition
of Latin American and African governments making the case for climate
debt actually stresses difference, zeroing in on the cruel contrast
between those who caused the climate crisis (the developed world) and
those who are suffering its worst effects (the developing world).
Justin Lin, chief economist at the World Bank, puts the equation
bluntly: “About 75 to 80 percent†of the damages caused by global
warming “will be suffered by developing countries, although they only
contribute about one-third of greenhouse gases.â€
Climate debt is about who will pick up the bill. The grass-roots
movement behind the proposal argues that all the costs associated with
adapting to a more hostile ecology — everything from building stronger
sea walls to switching to cleaner, more expensive technologies — are
the responsibility of the countries that created the crisis. “What we
need is not something we should be begging for but something that is
owed to us, because we are dealing with a crisis not of our making,â€
says Lidy Nacpil, one of the coordinators of Jubilee South, an
international organization that has staged demonstrations to promote
climate reparations. “Climate debt is not a matter of charity.â€
Sharon Looremeta, an advocate for Maasai tribespeople in Kenya who
have lost at least 5 million cattle to drought in recent years, puts it
in even sharper terms. “The Maasai community does not drive 4×4s or fly
off on holidays in airplanes,†she says. “We have not caused climate
change, yet we are the ones suffering. This is an injustice and should
be stopped right now.â€
The case for climate debt begins like most discussions of climate
change: with the science. Before the Industrial Revolution, the density
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — the key cause of global warming —
was about 280 parts per million. Today, it has reached 387 ppm — far
above safe limits — and it’s still rising. Developed countries, which
represent less than 20 percent of the world’s population, have emitted
almost 75 percent of all greenhouse-gas pollution that is now
destabilizing the climate. (The U.S. alone, which comprises barely five
percent of the global population, contributes 25 percent of all carbon
emissions.) And while developing countries like China and India have
also begun to spew large amounts of carbon dioxide, the reasoning goes,
they are not equally responsible for the cost of the cleanup, because
they have contributed only a small fraction of the 200 years of
cumulative pollution that has caused the crisis.
In Latin America, left-wing economists have long argued that Western
powers owe a vaguely defined “ecological debt†to the continent for
centuries of colonial land-grabs and resource extraction. But the
emerging argument for climate debt is far more concrete, thanks to a
relatively new body of research putting precise figures on who emitted
what and when. “What is exciting,†says Antonio Hill, senior climate
adviser at Oxfam, “is you can really put numbers on it. We can measure
it in tons of COâ‚‚ and come up with a cost.â€
Equally important, the idea is supported by the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change — ratified by 192 countries,
including the United States. The framework not only asserts that “the
largest share of historical and current global emissions of greenhouse
gases has originated in developed countries,†it clearly states that
actions taken to fix the problem should be made “on the basis of equity
and in accordance with their common but differentiated
responsibilities.â€
The reparations movement has brought together a diverse coalition of
big international organizations, from Friends of the Earth to the World
Council of Churches, that have joined up with climate scientists and
political economists, many of them linked to the influential Third
World Network, which has been leading the call. Until recently,
however, there was no government pushing for climate debt to be
included in the Copenhagen agreement. That changed in June, when
Angelica Navarro, the chief climate negotiator for Bolivia, took the
podium at a U.N. climate negotiation in Bonn, Germany. Only 36 and
dressed casually in a black sweater, Navarro looked more like the
hippies outside than the bureaucrats and civil servants inside the
session. Mixing the latest emissions science with accounts of how
melting glaciers were threatening the water supply in two major
Bolivian cities, Navarro made the case for why developing countries are
owed massive compensation for the climate crisis.
“Millions of people — in small islands, least-developed countries,
landlocked countries as well as vulnerable communities in Brazil, India
and China, and all around the world — are suffering from the effects of
a problem to which they did not contribute,†Navarro told the packed
room. In addition to facing an increasingly hostile climate, she added,
countries like Bolivia cannot fuel economic growth with cheap and dirty
energy, as the rich countries did, since that would only add to the
climate crisis — yet they cannot afford the heavy upfront costs of
switching to renewable energies like wind and solar.
The solution, Navarro argued, is three-fold. Rich countries need to
pay the costs associated with adapting to a changing climate, make deep
cuts to their own emission levels “to make atmospheric space availableâ€
for the developing world, and pay Third World countries to leapfrog
over fossil fuels and go straight to cleaner alternatives. “We cannot
and will not give up our rightful claim to a fair share of atmospheric
space on the promise that, at some future stage, technology will be
provided to us,†she said.
The speech galvanized activists across the world. In recent months,
the governments of Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Paraguay and Malaysia have
endorsed the concept of climate debt. More than 240 environmental and
development organizations have signed a statement calling for wealthy
nations to pay their climate debt, and 49 of the world’s
least-developed countries will take the demand to Copenhagen as a
negotiating bloc.
“If we are to curb emissions in the next decade, we need a massive
mobilization larger than any in history,†Navarro declared at the end
of her talk. “We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth. This plan must
mobilize financing and technology transfer on scales never seen before.
It must get technology onto the ground in every country to ensure we
reduce emissions while raising people’s quality of life. We have only a
decade.â€
A very expensive decade. The World Bank puts the cost that
developing countries face from climate change — everything from crops
destroyed by drought and floods to malaria spread by mosquito-infested
waters — as high as $100 billion a year. And shifting to renewable
energy, according to a team of United Nations researchers, will raise
the cost far more: to as much as $600 billion a year over the next
decade.
Unlike the recent bank bailouts, however, which simply transferred
public wealth to the world’s richest financial institutions, the money
spent on climate debt would fuel a global environmental transformation
essential to saving the entire planet. The most exciting example of
what could be accomplished is the ongoing effort to protect Ecuador’s
Yasunà National Park. This extraordinary swath of Amazonian rainforest,
which is home to several indigenous tribes and a surreal number of rare
and exotic animals, contains nearly as many species of trees in 2.5
acres as exist in all of North America. The catch is that underneath
that riot of life sits an estimated 850 million barrels of crude oil,
worth about $7 billion. Burning that oil — and logging the rainforest
to get it — would add another 547 million tons of carbon dioxide to the
atmosphere.
Two years ago, Ecuador’s center-left president, Rafael Correa, said
something very rare for the leader of an oil-exporting nation: He
wanted to leave the oil in the ground. But, he argued, wealthy
countries should pay Ecuador — where half the population lives in
poverty — not to release that carbon into the atmosphere, as
“compensation for the damages caused by the out-of-proportion amount of
historical and current emissions of greenhouse gases.†He didn’t ask
for the entire amount; just half. And he committed to spending much of
the money to move Ecuador to alternative energy sources like solar and
geothermal.
Largely because of the beauty of the YasunÃ, the plan has generated
widespread international support. Germany has already offered $70
million a year for 13 years, and several other European governments
have expressed interest in participating. If Yasunà is saved, it will
demonstrate that climate debt isn’t just a disguised ploy for more aid
— it’s a far more credible solution to the climate crisis than the ones
we have now. “This initiative needs to succeed,†says Atossa Soltani,
executive director of Amazon Watch. “I think we can set a model for
other countries.â€
Activists point to a huge range of other green initiatives that
would become possible if wealthy countries paid their climate debts. In
India, mini power plants that run on biomass and solar power could
bring low-carbon electricity to many of the 400 million Indians
currently living without a light bulb. In cities from Cairo to Manila,
financial support could be given to the armies of impoverished “trash
pickers†who save as much as 80 percent of municipal waste in some
areas from winding up in garbage dumps and trash incinerators that
release planet-warming pollution. And on a much larger scale,
coal-fired power plants across the developing world could be converted
into more efficient facilities using existing technology, cutting their
emissions by more than a third.
But to ensure that climate reparations are real, advocates insist,
they must be independent of the current system of international aid.
Climate money cannot simply be diverted from existing aid programs,
such as primary education or HIV prevention. What’s more, the funds
must be provided as grants, not loans, since the last thing developing
countries need is more debt. Furthermore, the money should not be
administered by the usual suspects like the World Bank and USAID, which
too often push pet projects based on Western agendas, but must be
controlled by the United Nations climate convention, where developing
countries would have a direct say in how the money is spent.
Without such guarantees, reparations will be meaningless — and
without reparations, the climate talks in Copenhagen will likely
collapse. As it stands, the U.S. and other Western nations are engaged
in a lose-lose game of chicken with developing nations like India and
China: We refuse to lower our emissions unless they cut theirs and
submit to international monitoring, and they refuse to budge unless
wealthy nations cut first and cough up serious funding to help them
adapt to climate change and switch to clean energy. “No money, no
deal,†is how one of South Africa’s top environmental officials put it.
“If need be,†says Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, speaking on
behalf of the African Union, “we are prepared to walk out.â€
In the past, President Obama has recognized the principle on which
climate debt rests. “Yes, the developed nations that caused much of the
damage to our climate over the last century still have a responsibility
to lead,†he acknowledged in his September speech at the United
Nations. “We have a responsibility to provide the financial and
technical assistance needed to help these [developing] nations adapt to
the impacts of climate change and pursue low-carbon development.â€
Yet as Copenhagen draws near, the U.S. negotiating position appears
to be to pretend that 200 years of over-emissions never happened. Todd
Stern, the chief U.S. climate negotiator, has scoffed at a Chinese and
African proposal that developed countries pay as much as $400 billion a
year in climate financing as “wildly unrealistic†and “untethered to
reality.†Yet he put no alternative number on the table — unlike the
European Union, which has offered to kick in up to $22 billion. U.S.
negotiators have even suggested that countries could fund climate debt
by holding periodic “pledge parties,†making it clear that they see
covering the costs of climate change as a matter of whimsy, not duty.
But shunning the high price of climate change carries a cost of its
own. U.S. military and intelligence agencies now consider global
warming a leading threat to national security. As sea levels rise and
droughts spread, competition for food and water will only increase in
many of the world’s poorest nations. These regions will become
“breeding grounds for instability, for insurgencies, for warlords,â€
according to a 2007 study for the Center for Naval Analyses led by Gen.
Anthony Zinni, the former Centcom commander. To keep out millions of
climate refugees fleeing hunger and conflict, a report commissioned by
the Pentagon in 2003 predicted that the U.S. and other rich nations
would likely decide to “build defensive fortresses around their
countries.â€
Setting aside the morality of building high-tech fortresses to
protect ourselves from a crisis we inflicted on the world, those
enclaves and resource wars won’t come cheap. And unless we pay our
climate debt, and quickly, we may well find ourselves living in a world
of climate rage. “Privately, we already hear the simmering resentment
of diplomats whose countries bear the costs of our emissions,†Sen.
John Kerry observed recently. “I can tell you from my own experience:
It is real, and it is prevalent. It’s not hard to see how this could
crystallize into a virulent, dangerous, public anti-Americanism. That’s
a threat too. Remember: The very places least responsible for climate
change — and least equipped to deal with its impacts — will be among
the very worst affected.â€
That, in a nutshell, is the argument for climate debt. The
developing world has always had plenty of reasons to be pissed off with
their northern neighbors, with our tendency to overthrow their
governments, invade their countries and pillage their natural
resources. But never before has there been an issue so politically
inflammatory as the refusal of people living in the rich world to make
even small sacrifices to avert a potential climate catastrophe. In
Bangladesh, the Maldives, Bolivia, the Arctic, our climate pollution is
directly responsible for destroying entire ways of life — yet we keep
doing it.
From outside our borders, the climate crisis doesn’t look anything
like the meteors or space invaders that Todd Stern imagined hurtling
toward Earth. It looks, instead, like a long and silent war waged by
the rich against the poor. And for that, regardless of what happens in
Copenhagen, the poor will continue to demand their rightful
reparations. “This is about the rich world taking responsibility for
the damage done,†says Ilana Solomon, policy analyst for ActionAid USA,
one of the groups recently converted to the cause. “This money belongs
to poor communities affected by climate change. It is their
compensation.â€
[From Issue 1091 — November 12, 2009]
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