by Naomi Klein
As we have seen, emissions in North America and Europe still need to come down dramatically but, thanks largely to the offshoring of production enabled by the free-trade era, they have pretty much stopped growing. It’s the fast-rising economies of the Global South—with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa leading the pack—that are mostly responsible for the surge in emissions in recent years, which is why we are racing toward tipping points far more quickly than anticipated.
The reason for this shift in the source of emissions has everything to do with the spectacular success multinational corporations have had in globalizing the high-consumption-based economic model pioneered in wealthy western countries. The trouble is, the atmosphere can’t take it. As the atmospheric physicist and mitigation expert Alice Bows-Larkin put it in an interview, “The number of people that went through industrialization the first time around is like a drop in the ocean compared to the number of people going through industrialization this time.” And to quote President Obama in late 2013, if China’s and India’s energy consumption imitates the U.S. model, “we’ll be four feet under water.”40
The truth is—and this is a humbling thing for cultures accustomed to assuming that our actions shape the destiny of the world to accept—the real battle will not be lost or won by us. It will be won or lost by those movements in the Global South that are fighting their own Blockadia-style struggles—demanding their own clean energy revolutions, their own green jobs, their own pools of carbon left in the ground. And they are up against powerful forces within their own countries that insist that it is their “turn” to pollute their way to prosperity and that nothing matters more than economic growth. Indeed, citing the rank unfairness of expecting developing countries to bear the bulk of the burden for humanity avoiding climate catastrophe has become an enormously effective excuse for governments of the Global South to shirk their own responsibilities.
For this reason, if we accept the scientific evidence that we need to act fast to prevent catastrophic climate change, it makes sense to focus our action where it can have the greatest impact. And that’s clearly in the Global South. To cite just one example: about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings (heating, cooling, and lighting them). Building stock in the Asia Pacific region is projected to grow by a dramatic 47 percent by 2021, while remaining relatively stable in the developed world. This means that, while making existing buildings more energy efficient is important wherever we live, there is nothing more important than helping ensure that new structures in Asia are built to the highest standards of efficiency. Otherwise, we are all—the North, South, East, and West—in for catastrophic emissions growth.41
Tipping the Balance
There is, however, much that can be done in the industrialized north to help tip the balance of forces toward a model of development that does not rely on endless growth and dirty fuels. Fighting the pipelines and export terminals that would send fossil fuels to Asia is one piece of the puzzle. So is battling new free-trade deals, reining in our own overconsumption, and sensibly relocalizing our economies, since plenty of the carbon China is burning is going toward making useless stuff for us.
But the most powerful lever for change in the Global South is the same as in the Global North: the emergence of positive, practical, and concrete alternatives to dirty development that do not ask people to choose between higher living standards and toxic extraction. Because if dirty coal is the only way to turn on the lights in India, then that is how those lights will be turned on. And if public transit is a disaster in Delhi, then more and more people will keep choosing to drive cars.
And there are alternatives—models of development that do not require massive wealth stratification, tragic cultural losses, or ecological devastation. As in the Yasuní case, movements in the Global South are fighting hard for these alternative development models—policies that would bring power to huge numbers of people through decentralized renewable energy and revolutionize urban transportation so that public transit is far more desirable than private cars (indeed, as discussed, there have been riots demanding free public transit in Brazil).
One proposal receiving increasing attention is for a “global feed-in tariff,” which would create an internationally administered fund to support clean energy transitions throughout the developing world. The architects of this plan—economist Tariq Banuri and climate expert Niclas Hällström—estimate that a $100 billion annual investment for ten to fourteen years “could effectively help 1.5 billion people gain access to energy, while taking decisive steps toward a renewable energy future in time to prevent all our societies from suffering from climate catastrophe.”42
Sunita Narain, director general of one of the most influential environmental organizations in India, the New Delhi–based Centre for Science and Environment, stresses that the solution is not for the wealthy world to contract its economies while allowing the developing world to pollute its way to prosperity (even if this were possible). It is for developing countries to “develop differently. We do not want to first pollute and then clean up. So we need money, we need technology, to be able to do things differently.”43 And that means the wealthy world must pay its climate debts.
And yet financing a just transition in fast-developing economies has not been a priority of activists in the North. Indeed a great many Big Green groups in the United States consider the idea of climate debt to be politically toxic, since, unlike the standard “energy security” and green jobs arguments that present climate action as a race that rich countries can win, it requires emphasizing the importance of international cooperation and solidarity.
Sunita Narain hears these objections often. “I’m always being told—especially by my friends in America—that . . . issues of historical responsibility are something that we should not talk about. What my forefathers did is not my responsibility.” But, she said in an interview, this overlooks the fact that those past actions have a direct bearing on why some countries are rich and others are poor. “Your wealth today has a relationship with the way society has drawn on nature, and overdrawn on nature. That has to be paid back. That’s the historical responsibility issues that we need to confront.”44
These debates are, of course, familiar from other reparations battles. In Latin America, progressive economists have long argued that Western powers owe an “ecological debt” for centuries of colonial land grabs and resource extraction, while Africa and Caribbean governments have, at various points (most notably the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa) called for reparations to be paid for transatlantic slavery. After receding for more than a decade after the Durban conference, these claims were back in the news in 2013 when fourteen Caribbean nations banded together to make a formal reparations claim to Britain, France, the Netherlands, and other European countries that participated in the slave trade. “Our constant search and struggle for development resources is linked directly to the historical inability of our nations to accumulate wealth from the efforts of our peoples during slavery and colonialism,” said Baldwin Spencer, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, in July 2013. The goal of reparations, he argued, was to break the chains of dependency once and for all.45
The rich world, for the most part, pretty much ignores these calls, dismissing it all as ancient history, much as the U.S. government manages to disregard calls for slavery reparations from African Americans (though in the spring of 2014, the calls grew distinctly louder, thanks to breakthrough reporting by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, which once again rekindled the debate).46 But the case for climate debt is a little different. We can debate the legacy of colonialism, and we can argue about how much slavery shapes modern underdevelopment. But the science of climate change doesn’t leave much room for that kind of disagreement. Carbon leaves an unmistakable trail, the evidence etched in coral and ice cores. We can accurately measure how much carbon we can collectively emit into the atmosphere and who has taken up what share of that budget over
the past two hundred years or so.
On the other hand, all of these various suppressed and neglected debts are not separate from one another but are better understood as different chapters in the same, continuous story. It was planet-warming coal that powered the textile mills and sugar refineries in Manchester and London that needed to be fed with ever more raw cotton and sugarcane from the colonies, most of it harvested by slave labor. And Eric Williams, the late scholar and Trinidad’s first prime minister, famously argued that profits from slavery directly subsidized the growth of industrialization in England, a process that we now know led inextricably to climate change. The details of Williams’s claims have long been vigorously debated, but his work received additional vindication in 2013 when researchers at University College London released a database collecting information on the identities and finances of British slave-owners in the mid-nineteenth century.47
The research project delved into the fact that when the British Parliament ruled to abolish slavery in its colonies in 1833, it pledged to compensate British slave owners for the loss of their human property—a backward form of reparations for the perpetrators of slavery, not its victims. This led to payouts adding up to £20 million—a figure that, according to The Independent, “represented a staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury’s annual spending budget and, in today’s terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £16.5bn.” Much of that money went directly into the coal-powered infrastructure of the now roaring Industrial Revolution—from factories to railways to steamships. These, in turn, were the tools that took colonialism to a markedly more rapacious stage, with the scars still felt to this day.48
Coal didn’t create structural inequality—the boats that enabled the transatlantic slave trade and first colonial land grabs were powered by wind, and the early factories powered by water wheels. But the relentless and predictable power of coal certainly supercharged the process, allowing both human labor and natural resources to be extracted at rates previously unimaginable, laying down the bones of the modern global economy.
And now it turns out that the theft did not end when slavery was abolished, or when the colonial project faltered. In fact, it is still in progress, because the emissions from those early steamships and roaring factories were the beginning of the buildup of excess atmospheric carbon. So another way of thinking about this history is that, starting two centuries ago, coal helped Western nations to deliberately appropriate other people’s lives and lands; and as the emissions from that coal (and later oil and gas) continually built up in the atmosphere, it gave these same nations the means to inadvertently appropriate their descendants’ sky as well, gobbling up most of our shared atmosphere’s capacity to safely absorb carbon.
As a direct result of these centuries of serial thefts—of land, labor, and atmospheric space—developing countries today are squeezed between the impacts of global warming, made worse by persistent poverty, and by their need to alleviate that poverty, which, in the current economic system, can be done most cheaply and easily by burning a great deal more carbon, dramatically worsening the climate crisis. They cannot break this deadlock without help, and that help can only come from those countries and corporations that grew wealthy, in large part, as a result of those illegitimate appropriations.
The difference between this reparations claim and older ones is not that the case is stronger. It’s that it does not rest on ethics and morality alone: wealthy countries do not just need to help the Global South move to a low-emissions economic path because it’s the right thing to do. We need to do it because our collective survival depends on it.
At the same time, we need common agreement that having been wronged does not grant a country the right to repeat the same crime on an even grander scale. Just as having been raped does not bestow the right to rape, or having been robbed the right to steal, having been denied the opportunity to choke the atmosphere with pollution in the past does not grant anyone the right to choke it today. Especially because today’s polluters know full well the catastrophic implications of that pollution in ways that early industrialists did not.
So a middle ground must be found. Fortunately, a group of researchers with the think tank EcoEquity and the Stockholm Environment Institute have attempted to do just that: they have developed a detailed and innovative model of what a rigorously fair approach to emission reductions might look like on a global scale. Called the “Greenhouse Development Rights” framework, it is an attempt to better reflect the new realities of wealth and carbon pollution moving to the developing world, while firmly protecting the right to sustainable development and recognizing the West’s greater responsibility for cumulative emissions. Such an approach, they believe, is precisely what’s needed to break the climate deadlock, since it addresses “the vast disparities found not only between but also within countries.” Northern countries could be assured that the wealthy of the Global South will do their part now and in the future, while access to what is left of the atmospheric commons would be properly safeguarded for the poor.49
With this in mind, each country’s fair share of the global carbon-cutting burden is determined by two key factors: responsibility for historical emissions and capacity to contribute, based on the country’s level of development. In an illustrative scenario, the United States’s share of global emissions cuts needed by the end of the decade might be something like 30 percent (the largest of any single country). But not all of those reductions would need to be done at home—some could be met by financing and otherwise supporting the transition to low-carbon pathways in the South. And according to the researchers, with every nation’s share of the global burden clearly defined and quantified, there would be no need to rely on ineffective and easily gamed market mechanisms like carbon trading.50
At a time when rich countries are crying poor and slashing social services for their own people, asking governments to make those kinds of international commitments can sound impossible. We barely do the old kind of aid anymore, let alone some ambitious new justice-based approach. But there are, in the immediate term, plenty of affordable ways for Northern countries to begin to honor our climate debts without going broke—from erasing the foreign debts currently owed by developing countries in exchange for climate action to loosening green energy patents and transferring the associated technological know-how.
Moreover, much of the cost does not need to come from regular taxpayers; it can and should come from the corporations most responsible for driving this crisis. That can take the form of any combination of the polluter-pays measures already discussed, from a financial transaction tax, to eliminating subsidies for fossil fuel companies.
What we cannot expect is that the people least responsible for this crisis will foot all, or even most, of the bill. Because that is a recipe for catastrophic amounts of carbon ending up in our common atmosphere. Like the call to honor our treaties and other land-sharing agreements with Indigenous peoples, climate change is once again forcing us to look at how injustices that many assumed were safely buried in the past are shaping our shared vulnerability to global climate collapse.
With many of the biggest pools of untapped carbon on lands controlled by some of the poorest people on the planet, and with emissions rising most rapidly in what were, until recently, some of the poorest parts of the world, there is simply no credible way forward that does not involve redressing the real roots of poverty.
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I. Renewables are, in fact, much more reliable than power based on extraction, since those energy models require continuous new inputs to avoid a crash, whereas once the initial investment has been made in renewable energy infrastructure, nature provides the raw materials for free.
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THE RIGHT TO REGENERATE
Moving from Extraction to Renewal
“Stop calling me resilient. I’m not resilient. Because every time you say, ‘Oh, they’re resilient,’ you can do something else to me.”
&n
bsp; —Tracie Washington, New Orleans–based civil rights attorney, 20101
“That woman is the first environment is an original instruction. In pregnancy our bodies sustain life. . . . At the breast of women, the generations are nourished. From the bodies of women flows the relationship of those generations both to society and to the natural world. In this way is the earth our mother, the old people tell us. In this way, we as women are earth.”
—Katsi Cook, Mohawk midwife, 20072
At the beginning of this book, I wrote about how becoming a mother in an age of extinction brought the climate crisis into my heart in a new way. I had felt the crisis before, of course, as all of us do on some level. But for the most part, my climate fears expressed themselves as low-level melancholy, punctuated by moments of panic, rather than full-blown grief.
At some point about seven years ago, I realized that I had become so convinced that we were headed toward a grim ecological collapse that I was losing my capacity to enjoy my time in nature. The more beautiful and striking the experience, the more I found myself grieving its inevitable loss—like someone unable to fall fully in love because she can’t stop imagining the inevitable heartbreak.