(Continued from last day’s section)
To put the brakes on global warming, the richer countries of the world need to provide the funds necessary for the poorer countries to make the transition to a post-fossil-fuel future. This, Meena Raman points out, is not just an ethical or moral issue. It is a legal commitment.
“The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement: these are legal instruments,” she explains. “The Global North is legally committed to provide resources to the developing world.”
But what is the price tag for this transformation and what are the mechanisms to effect this change?
First, the richer countries have made commitments. In 2010, they promised to reach $100 billion per year in climate financing. “The number was plucked from a hat,” Meena Raman reports. “It was not based on what developing countries needed.” By 2021, the richer countries claimed to have mobilized around $80 billion, but in reality the figure was, as Oxfam estimates, about one third that much. “So, the $100 billion goal was shifted in 2021 to delivery by 2025,” she continues, noting as Oxfam does that the developed world counts even loan and insurance as part of that 100 billion.
Another mechanism of paying off the climate debt is the Green Climate Fund, an initiative pushed by the Group of 77 and based in Incheon, South Korea. “Since 2014, it has delivered only $13.9 billion, which is very little in terms of the scale,” Raman reports. The Adaptation Fund, created in 2001 under the Kyoto Protocol, has committed only $850 million.
Compare these numbers—under $100 billion a year—with the scale of the challenge. According to one research report last year, the world needs to spend $5 trillion by 2030 in climate finance to meet the Paris goals by 2030. But as Raman points out, this figure is based on only 30 percent of the costs. Meanwhile, on the adaptation side, the UN Environment Program estimated in 2016 that $140 to $300 billion a year was necessary to cover adaptation costs in the developing world (which it placed closer to the upper range in its 2021 report).
These numbers don’t take into consideration the loss and damage costs. According to one study, the developing world will be paying somewhere between $290 billion and $580 billion per year by 2030 to deal with the consequences of climate change.
“We have to put the scale of the crisis in proper context,” Raman concludes. “It’s not about there being no money but about the political will. The movements for climate justice and debt justice have to go together. So, we need to talk about debt cancellation as part of reparations.”
The original loans, Acosta notes, were often taken by autocratic governments that wasted the money in corruption. Debt repayment, moreover, has forced countries not only to cut social programs but to increase their mining and extraction. In this way, the foreign debt directly drives carbon emissions.
In addition to the compensation for loss and damage are the opportunity costs associated with keeping fossil fuels in the ground. “What about compensation to countries like Ecuador that possess fossil fuels but refrain from extracting these resources?” Athanasiou asks. “How do they receive it? And do the big Middle East oil producers get compensation for not continuing to pump out their oil and how much, and who pays? Is the liability for those compensations the same as for global loss and damage?”
Other costs would include those associated with climate refugees forced to resettle because their homes have become uninhabitable. “Even if we determine what should be paid, who will pay?” Athanasiou asks.
The bottom line, Athanasiou concludes, is that “with so many governments going neo-fascist, it’s not really very likely we’ll get tens of trillions from central bankers in the next several years. You can’t just print that money. It has to come from the rich. It’s complicated how it will be done. But it’s extremely important that the luxury consumption of the super-rich be made a big issue on this planet. And there’s no way of doing that except by taxing it. Such a tax will not in and of itself solve the problem. But to create a sense that a just world is being built, there has to be a sense that the rich are being reined in.”
Other Mechanisms
In 2020, the world subsidized fossil fuels to the tune of nearly $6 trillion (in both direct and implicit subsidies). Of that figure, the G7 countries shell out around $88 billion a year in direct subsidies, which they recently pledged to phase out by 2025. “This is a wasted resource,” Meena Raman points out, “which could be redirected to the developing world to address both the climate crisis and the development crisis.”
A second mechanism for raising money is, as mentioned before, taxes. In addition to a tax on luxury emissions, a tax on financial transactions (also known as a Tobin tax) has been long discussed as a generator of funds to address climate change. Such a tax has been introduced in a watered-down version in the European Union, but a stronger global version could help finance a just global transition, as Albert Acosta has suggested. He also recommends going after tax havens, which have cost governments around $500-600 billion annually in lost revenue (with poorer countries losing around $200 billion of that amount).
A third mechanism would be for the international community to pay countries to keep their fossil fuels in the ground. Acosta, who created an initiative for Ecuador to raise money internationally to keep oil beneath the Yasuni rainforest preserve, believes that “rich countries have to pay more to preserve the equilibrium of the planet. We have to keep underground two-thirds of all fossil fuel reserves, whether oil, gas, or coal. If we don’t, global temperatures will increase past the 1.5-degree limit.”
Another mechanism for redirecting resources southward would be the “special drawing rights” or SDRs that the IMF issues. During the pandemic, when the global economy teetered on the precipice, the IMF issued $650 billion in SDRs. “These went to rich countries,” Meena Raman reports. “The IMF can do this, but it’s not doing it for the developing world.”
The prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, is attempting to change this situation. She has called for redirecting $500 billion of these SDRs to the developing world annually for decarbonization. “We in civil society have to push for this as well,” Raman urges.
At the same time, any number of “false solutions” to the climate crisis have been proposed. “Beware of green colonialism,” Alberto Acosta warns. “Beware of carbon markets and the mercantilization of human rights.”
Through carbon offsets, as Meena Raman explains, “you can continue to emit a ton of carbon if you sequester another ton through planting trees.” Ultimately, the polluting enterprises continue to operate as before. No net decarbonization takes place, and the same economic and energy system remains in place.
“Elites in the north, in cooperation with corporations, are now looking at geoengineering, the removal of emissions from the atmosphere through technical ‘solutions,’” she continues. “How do we veer away from false solutions to protect systems that are still intact? The last frontiers in indigenous communities are now under threat of land grabs. Free trade agreements allow corporations to sue governments for doing the right thing through investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms.”
On the other hand, some leaders are coming to the fore, like Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez in Colombia. “These new leaders are talking about new development models, post-extraction and post-fossil-fuel solutions,” she adds. “But it’s not easy having to fight to dismantle structures and proposing alternatives like canceling the debt.”
Making Connections
To address climate change effectively, countries have to work together across any number of divides: north and south, east and west, rich and poor, and those rich in fossil fuels and those rich in sustainable energy sources. That is the challenge facing the annual Conferences of the Parties or COPs, the latest of which just took place in November 2022 in Sharm al-Sheikh in Egypt.
This imperative to cooperate extends to civil society as well. “We need to find solutions that connect all of our movements from north and south,” urges Meena Raman, “to fight the same system that is creating the climate crisis, the inequality crisis, and the development crisis.”
She continues, “We need to have a longer conversation about how to connect progressive movements. In the Global South, we can do what we can, we can bring progressive governments to power. But if the northern governments maintain the current mechanisms, we won’t have real change here. So, change has to come in the north. We need massive progressive solidarity movements in north. These movements are working in your interests in the north and in our interest too. That’s the motto for Friends of the Earth International: mobilize, resist, and transform for real system change.”
(Concluded)
John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article originally appeared.
Source: CounterPunch
