by Jason Hickel
These patterns throw the standard narrative of development into question. Rich countries cast themselves as saviours of the world’s poor, but this makes little sense given their role in causing climate change. Indeed, the costs of climate change in the developing world amount to many times more than the aid they receive from rich countries.
In the global South, scholars and activists argue that the North owes a ‘climate debt’ to the South. There have long been calls for compensation, or climate reparations, which would help cover the costs of damage as well as supply the funds necessary to assist developing countries to plan a carbon-free future. In 2014, these calls were underwritten by careful mathematical calculations. Scientists at the Stockholm Environment Institute partnered with Friends of the Earth to devise a fair system for both apportioning responsibility for reducing global emissions to the level required to avoid runaway climate change, and for dividing up the costs of compensation and assistance to developing countries that have been damaged. Their methodology accounts for each country’s historical emissions, economic capacities and national poverty burden. According to their calculations, the UK would have to cut its emissions by 75 per cent on 1990 levels and transfer $49 billion to developing countries. The US would have to cut emissions by up to 65 per cent, while paying out $634 billion. Meanwhile, my home country of Swaziland, for example, would be allowed to increase its emissions by 59 per cent in order to provide space for economic growth and poverty reduction, and would receive $80 million in compensation and assistance.
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Projections of the damage that climate change is likely to cause in the near future are terrifying indeed. But apparently they are not terrifying enough to get the governments of rich countries to take serious action to mitigate their emissions. Scientists tell us that if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, we can only allow our planet to warm a maximum of 1.5°C above baseline. When the world’s governments met in Paris for the COP21 summit in 2015, they agreed to this 1.5°C target. But the text of the agreement indicates that their commitments are little more than lip service. The agreement relies entirely on countries’ voluntary pledges, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). And unfortunately the sum total of the voluntary pledges that have been made so far fall a good deal short of the target. If all of the pledges are upheld (which is very unlikely, given that they are non-binding), we will still be hurtling towards 2.7 to 3.7°C of warming.
If we want to have a 66 per cent chance of keeping below 1.5°C, we can pump no more than another 205 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere between 2015 and the end of the century. This is known as the ‘carbon budget’. At our current rate of emissions, we are pumping 40 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, which means the 1.5°C budget will be blown by 2020. To limit ourselves to 205 gigatons of CO2 will take a monumental effort, given that the world’s fossil fuel reserves currently contain more than 2,600 gigatons’ worth of CO2. These are reserves that are known and extractable using today’s technologies and in today’s economic conditions. In other words, we are presently planning to burn past our global limit by a factor of thirteen – and that’s to say nothing of other major causes of carbon emissions, such as livestock, industrial farming, cement production and deforestation. To stay below 1.5°C we need to keep 93 per cent of known and extractable fossil fuel reserves in the ground.
But the Paris Agreement makes no mention of this red line. In fact, it imposes no limits on the use of fossil fuels whatsoever. What is more, the Paris pledges don’t even kick in until 2020. In other words, countries are allowed to continue increasing their carbon emissions for five years after the agreement was signed, by which time we will have blown the budget for 1.5°C. On the face of it, five years seem a fair transition period, even given the tight budget. But we have known about anthropogenic climate change since at least the 1960s, and international negotiations to reduce carbon emissions have been under way since 1990. And yet instead of reducing annual carbon emissions, we have increased them by 61 per cent over the past two decades. Governments are still subsidising the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $5.3 trillion per year, according to the IMF’s most recent estimates, while perversely using the WTO’s court to knock down subsidies for alternative technologies such as solar panels.
What might our planet look like if it warms by 3.7°C, or by 4°C, which is our current trajectory? Conservative projections show that it is likely to bring about heatwaves not seen on Earth for some 5 million years. Southern European countries like Italy, Spain and Greece will turn into deserts. By 2100, sea levels will have risen by 1.24 metres, drowning cities including Amsterdam and New York. Forty per cent of species would be at risk of extinction, and huge portions of our rainforests would wither away. Crop yields would collapse by 35 per cent, with key staples like Indian wheat and US corn plummeting by 60 per cent, leading to widespread famine – particularly in the global South. Four degrees will probably mean the total melting of the Greenland ice sheet and possibly the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet as well, which would then raise sea levels by another six metres and displace hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Climate scientists are sounding the alarm on the spectre of 4°C. According to a 2012 report by the World Bank, 4°C would mean ‘extreme heatwaves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise’. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which avoids any but the most conservative assertions, even our nearer-term prospects are looking bleak. Latin America will see ‘gradual replacement of tropical forest by savannah in eastern Amazonia; [and] significant changes in water availability for human consumption, agriculture and energy generation’. In Africa, ‘by 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to increased water stress; yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50% in some regions; agricultural production, including access to food, may be severely compromised’. In Asia, ‘freshwater availability [is] projected to decrease in Central, South, East, and Southeast Asia by the 2050s; death rates from disease associated with floods and droughts are expected to rise in some regions’.
In sum, 4°C of warming is incompatible with human civilisation as we know it. We might be able to physically withstand the heatwaves and flee the coastal cities, but – given the impending collapse of agriculture – there’s no way we would be able to get enough food to eat.
And then there are the feedback loops that we can’t even fully predict. The Arctic is set to be ice-free during the summer within a few years, which is already leading to a massive release of methane – enormous plumes of gas, covering millions of square miles, are bubbling to the surface of the sea in quantities twice as great as scientists predicted. Problems like this, which have not yet been fully accounted for, could lead us to as much as 6°C of warming, according to projections from the International Energy Agency. If we can say nothing else about this scenario, we can be certain of this: such a radical transformation of our climate will more than wipe out all the gains in poverty reduction and life expectancy that have been accomplished by development interventions over the past half-century. Scholars of the future who look back on this era will regard the idea of development as a quaint pipe dream of the late Holocene, when the climate was stable enough that it made sense to attempt to imagine a better future for humanity.
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I sometimes wonder why anyone is talking about development at all any more, at a moment when the whole edifice is at risk of collapsing unless we throw everything we have into the fight against climate change. Certainly anyone who still thinks development is just a matter of increasing GDP growth – and thereby CO2 emissions – has yet to come to terms with the brutal facts of climate science.
Development agencies have long been trying to solve the problem of global poverty by tinkering around the edges of our economic system. The idea has always been to keep the basic logic of capit
alism – exponential growth – in place while trying to make it a little bit less destructive than it otherwise might be. But the climate change emergency forces us to discard this approach and think seriously about the logic of capitalism itself. As Naomi Klein puts it in her most recent book, This Changes Everything, ‘Our economic system and our planetary system are at war. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.’
But it’s not just that capitalism itself appears to be in conflict with the pressing need to stave off a planetary emergency. It’s the particular kind of capitalism that is at stake, a model that is geared towards slashing government budgets and eroding the power of the state to regulate the economy. How are states to invest in building a zero-carbon infrastructure when they are subjected to austerity and privatisation? How are governments supposed to tax and regulate fossil fuel companies when the very idea of taxation and regulation has been stigmatised as socialist or totalitarian, and even rendered illegal according to some international trade agreements? How are we supposed to subsidise innovation in renewable energies when subsidies have been banned for running against the principles of ‘free trade’ (with suitable exceptions made for US agribusiness and fossil fuels, of course)? How can states ever hope to respond to the impending humanitarian crisis when their budgets have been cut and public services shut down?
The economic system that we have put in place over the past few decades may have rendered us incapable of meeting the most serious challenge of the 21st century.
PART FOUR
Closing the Divide
Eight
From Charity to Justice
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.
Henry David Thoreau
There is a parable that people in public health like to tell as a way of introducing the principles that are central to their field. Imagine you are standing by a river with steep banks and bends that froth with dangerous rapids. Amid the noise of rushing water you hear a faint voice crying out for help, and notice a figure struggling against the waves. A strong swimmer, you summon your courage and plunge into the water, managing to drag the person to safety just in time. While recovering on the shore you notice yet another figure drifting into peril. Refusing to watch them die, you plunge in yet again. But minutes later you catch sight of yet another, and another. Unable to save them all, you rush to find your friends and assemble a team, and together you dedicate yourselves to rescuing people from the river. But as the hours slog by and the disaster shows no sign of abating, it strikes you that perhaps your efforts would be better spent running upstream to find out why so many people are falling into the river in the first place.
For people in public health, the point of this story is simple: prevention is always better than cure. And in order to be effective at prevention, you need to target upstream causes. This might sound straightforward, but it takes work to train yourself to think this way – to learn to pay attention to systems and not just symptoms. We humans are wired such that when we encounter pain and suffering our immediate instinct is to do what we can to make it stop as quickly as possible. For me, the difference between these two approaches becomes clearest when I think of that clinic in Swaziland where my parents worked – the one with the never-ending line of patients winding out the door and into the courtyard. My father likes to tell the story of how one day a wise elder came to visit him and suggested, enigmatically, with a playful glint in his eye: ‘Doctor, I can see you are working hard to help these patients. But perhaps you are working at the wrong end of the line?’
The same instinct that leads us to want to put an end to suffering in the most immediate way possible is also what leads us to gravitate towards the most obvious explanation for the misfortunes of others. When we pass a homeless person on the street it is easiest to assume that they are responsible for their own misfortune – they didn’t study hard enough in school, they didn’t try hard enough at work, they’re too lazy and weak-minded to make it. It takes another level of analysis to think about upstream causes: they lost their home because of reckless speculation on the housing market by big banks; their pension disintegrated in the financial crisis; they were victims of unfair dismissal in the absence of decent labour laws; or their employer moved overseas to take advantage of cheaper labour elsewhere. The same is true of poverty on a global scale. It might be easiest to blame poor countries for their own misfortunes, but if we give it enough thought it becomes clear that there is much more to the story.
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As Oscar Wilde once pointed out, people’s emotions are stirred more quickly than their intelligence. ‘It is easier to have sympathy with suffering than sympathy with thought,’ he suggested. And when it comes to poverty, we would do well to think more about what this crisis demands of us:
People find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. Accordingly, with admirable intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good. Charity degrades and demoralises.
There are a number of illuminating insights we can draw from Wilde’s words. One is that while charity may indeed improve the lives of the poor in an immediate, temporary sense, it then returns them straight back into the conditions that produced their poverty in the first place. In the end, nothing is actually changed. And once the humanitarian’s urge to help is satisfied, they are unlikely to devote any further effort to thinking about the problem or wrestling with its real causes – it defuses their will for change.
But Wilde goes a step further. He argues that charity not only distracts our attention from the ultimate causes of poverty – from the rot at the centre of the system – it also obscures the nature of the problem from those who suffer it. Charity can detract from people’s ability to directly challenge the forces that degrade them in the first place and strips them of their political agency. By smoothing over the contradictions of a deeply flawed system, it allows the system to continue a little bit longer. Usually this is unintentional on the part of the humanitarian. But sometimes charity is specifically designed with this end in mind. Some scholars have pointed out that food aid from the West, for example, is carefully calculated to prevent the worst famines, to ensure that people receive at least enough calories to stay alive, because otherwise the injustices of the global economic system would become so apparent that its legitimacy would collapse and political upheaval would almost certainly ensue. To avoid this outcome, the more cynical among the rich are happy to channel some of their surplus into charity.
On this point Wilde makes another critical intervention: ‘It is immoral to use private property to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property,’ he writes. ‘It is both immoral and unfair.’ Here he draws our attention to yet another problem with the charity paradigm. To the extent that charity is enabled by the accumulation of surplus wealth it can never be a
meaningful solution – for the very processes by which wealth is accumulated are those that produce poverty in the first place.
When I graduated from university, many of my friends opted to pursue high-paying careers. Whenever they discussed their choice of work, they would almost invariably offer a moral justification: if I am able to earn millions – as a banker, for example – I will have more money to give away to improve people’s lives. On the face of it, this makes perfect sense. Indeed, it is the approach that high-profile philanthropists like George Soros and the Rockefellers have taken: make mountains of money during the day, and in the evening give a bit away to improve the lives of the poor. But we have to ask the difficult question: where do their riches come from in the first place? Much of Soros’ wealth comes from currency speculation, which played a direct role in the 1997 Asian financial crisis that pushed millions of people into poverty. The Rockefeller Foundation won its riches from monopolies in the fossil fuel industry. In almost every case we can find that the accumulation that sustains charity comes from processes that cause the very problems they purport to solve.
Starbucks has given charity to help improve the health outcomes of poor people in Ethiopia’s coffee-growing communities, but it bears noting that in the past the company has been accused of dramatically underpaying Ethiopian coffee growers. Coca-Cola gives a bit of charity to help impoverished communities in Guatemala, but the firm has been accused of engaging in violent campaigns against trade union organisers in order to prevent wages on its Guatemalan sugar plantations from rising. Fairness is better than charity. In the absence of fairness, charity carries the whiff of a scam. The same argument applies to official Western aid. If the US government wants to reduce global poverty, perhaps instead of doling out aid it should work to end structural adjustment, the tax evasion system and unfair trade laws – some of the major forces that cause poverty in the first place.