Zero Carbon Caravan

By Nicholas Dearden

Last week’s G8 meeting presents a worrying model of how climate talks
will play out in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit in December.

While rich countries fail to grasp the scale of the solution required to deal
with climate change, larger developing countries are blamed for a lack
of ambition.

While the very richest can’t agree on meaningful, let alone ambitious,
targets for reducing their own emissions, one of Ed Milliband’s key
challenges for the year is to get developing countries to “move away
from business as usual”.

The hypocrisy springs from an inability or unwillingness to grasp the
nature of the environmental problem. Meanwhile, countries like Bolivia
are proposing real solutions, and ones which terrify Western leaders:
you can’t, they believe, deal with climate change unless you accept that
rich countries are in significant debt to the poorest and embrace the
concept of redistribution.

Their argument is simple and based on a premise which isn’t disputed.
The rich world has gobbled up far more than its fair share of the
earth’s atmosphere in order to develop. In essence, industrialised
countries colonised the atmosphere, in the same way they did other
resources.

Those rich countries now owe poorer countries a two-fold ‘climate debt’:
first for over-using the Earth’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases and
thereby denying atmospheric space to those who need it most. Second for
the destruction that those emissions are causing.

The solution: rich countries need to ‘pay’ through redistributing a
fairer share of limited atmospheric space, as well as helping poorer
countries adapt to the mess they find themselves in. Environmental
justice is little different from other forms of economic justice –
redistribute resources so that those who’ve lost out from a specific
model enjoy the same benefits as those who’ve done well from it.

But ‘those who’ve done well’ often don’t see things in the same way. The
limited and hazy agreements made by the G8 go nowhere near a fair
distribution of the earth’s atmosphere. Right up to 2050, even if an 80%
cut in emissions were to be implemented, the G8 will consume far more of
the earth’s limited resources than they deserve, such is the scale of
their current over-use.

The G8 could get away with cutting emissions by less than they should
because they are demanding steep developing country cuts as well –
recognising the need for overall emissions to shrink. In effect
developing countries would ‘subsidise’ the necessary reduction which
rich countries should really be taking, thereby preventing the
developing world accessing the environmental space they need to build
decent standards of living.

The climate debt of the rich world would just keep getting bigger. But
rather like the banks who gambled with the future of millions of people,
the richest propose that many of their debts to the poor simply be
written off.

Payment of the other part of the debt – to help clean up the mess – is
even further ‘off track’, with tiny amounts of money committed to
helping developing countries adapt and develop (or share, through
relaxed intellectual property rights) new technologies to help their
lower-carbon growth. Instead, proposals on the table to date include
large quantities of new loans (so the real creditors become the debtors
in economic terms) run through the World Bank, an institution which has
championed high carbon growth for decades.

So the battle lines are drawn. Developing countries will not sit idly by
while the rich go on consuming their dwindling chances for development
and justice. They don’t see why they should make the first move –
sacrificing their own development before the rich pay off their debts.

That’s why Bolivia has received substantial support for its proposals
from a range of developing countries. It has also received support from
civil society across the world, especially the Climate Justice Now
Network, an umbrella covering groups like Friends of the Earth, World
Development Movement, People & Planet and Christian-Aid.

Developed countries will spend the next six months in the run-up to the
Copenhagen summit trying to marginalise these countries – doubtless with
a good bit of bribery and arm-twisting along the way, helping them to
meet the ‘ambition’ the rich feel that the poor somehow owe them.

Of course, achieving a just outcome would not be easy. Predicting the
future impacts of climate change is very difficult. Moreover, it would
mean big changes to the way those who currently run the world live, and
more political vision than we’ve seen for many decades. But the
principles are clear: that the polluter pays for the excessive
consumption of the rich, not the poor, and that in a civilised society
redistribution is a critical way of righting historical injustice.

The developing world has set out its ambitious agenda. It’s for us to
move away from business as usual if we’re to come close to meeting it.

Nick Dearden is director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which is part of
the Put People First platform.