Environmental and Climate Debt: Who is Responsible?
Photograph Source: Mike McMillan/USFS – Public DomainLONG READ
The concepts of climate debt and ecological debt are central to successfully achieving the ecological bifurcation. The ecological debt owed by States – and in particular the wealthiest States and major corporations – of the North to the populations of the Global South must be recognized. That recognition must take the form of cancellation of the debt of the countries of the Global South and paying of reparations by the States of the North. The latter must compel the wealthiest interests to contribute and assume responsibility for climate disruption and for taking the actions that are urgently needed to limit its consequences and its aggravation to the maximum extent possible.[1]
Who is responsible?
During a trial in a court of law, the person responsible for an infraction or a crime is generally sentenced to pay damages. In a sense this means paying reparations in compensation for the consequences of an act that cannot be undone.
The countries of the North – in particular the wealthiest States and major corporations – have indeed committed several crimes. In the North, they have transformed the labour force through a process that stretches over several centuries and reached its culmination with the Industrial Revolution.
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, they did away with the existence of the Commons in the countryside; they deprived craftspeople of their tools, organizing a vast movement of dispossession of the working classes in order to force them to work in large factories.
The dominant classes of Western Europe set about to conquer the world beginning in the fifteenth century, forcing the acceptance of capitalist relations of trade by exterminating, reducing to slavery and exploiting, through colonialism, the peoples of the Americas, Asia and Africa. They destroyed numerous local industries, as in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under British domination, or in Indonesia under the Dutch. This led to the generalization of the Industrial Revolution in the Western countries of the North Atlantic in the first half of the nineteenth century. This movement extended to Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century. The working classes of the North were forced to work under conditions of over-exploitation throughout the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century as industries making massive use of fossil energy worked at full capacity and emitted greater and greater quantities of greenhouse gases (GHG).
The dominant capitalist groups exhausted resources and polluted the planet through the untrammelled use of fossil energy, overproduction and, since the 1980s, the imposition of a neoliberal globalization that is absurd from the point of view of the interest of the majority of citizens of the South and a large portion of those of the North and of the preservation the planet. This model of unsustainable development is based on intensive agriculture and extraction of raw materials oriented towards exportation and international trade via container ship and airplane, resulting in the production of enormous quantities of waste and greenhouse-gas emissions.
Just as at a trial in a court of law, those responsible must be recognized as guilty and required to pay damages commensurate with the harm that has been done.
The countries of the North are historically responsible for climate disruptions
The development of the globalized capitalist system by the countries of the North has been an enormously destructive process.
Chart 1.1. Historical emissions vs. “remaining carbon budget to limit global temperature increase” [2]
Not only have Europe and North America already emitted half of all the greenhouse gases released in the entire history of Earth, but by 2020 they had already emitted more than the “remaining carbon budget” – the amount below which global warming could be limited to 1.5 or even 2 degrees.
Chart 1.2. Historical (1850–2020) and current emissions, and population by world region (2019)
Source: wir2022.wid.world/methodology and Chancel (2021)
Chart 1.3. Average per capita emissions by world region in 2019
These charts[3] leave no room for doubt. Since 1850, North America and Europe, the two regions who have driven globalized, colonizing capitalism, have poured into the atmosphere the majority of the total emissions of greenhouse gases, which are the main cause of climate disruptions. This trend is still ongoing today, even if the integration of the countries of the South in globalized capitalism has attenuated it slightly.
In 2019, North America and Europe, which accounted for 12% of the global population, emitted nearly 30% of all emissions of greenhouse gases on Earth. China, which in 2019 accounted for 18% of the planet’s population, was the origin of nearly 25% of total emissions. We should point out that the data on which this chart is based use an approach based on carbon footprint. That means that emissions related to the production and shipping, for example, of a telephone manufactured in China for use by a European are accounted for in Europe’s emissions, and not China’s.
Africa, Latin America and Asia excluding China, the continents that have suffered most from colonization, account for two thirds of the world’s population but in 2019 only a little more than a third (38%) of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide. If we look at historical emissions (since 1850), those three continents (excluding China) account for less than 30% of total emissions.
Also note that together, sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia have emitted less CO2 throughout history than Europe alone or North America alone.
Another telling example is the fact that South and Southeast Asia, which represent a third of the world’s population today, account for less than 15% of total greenhouse-gas emissions.
The result is similar if we look at average emissions per person by major world region in 2019: North America is by far the most polluting region, with an average 20.8 tons of CO2 emitted per person per year – greatly in excess of the average of 3.4 tons per person per year needed to remain below 2 degrees of atmospheric warming or the 1.1 ton per person per year that would keep warming below 1.5 degrees. One citizen of the USA emits an average of 13 times the amount of CO2 as a sub-Saharan African. Only sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia have an average level of per-capita emissions that is low enough to attain the goal of 2 degrees of warming. All regions exceed the average level necessary to stay below 1.5 degrees.
The three regions with the highest average level of emissions are North America, Europe and the Russia and Central Asia region, followed by East Asia (Japan, South Korea) and then the Middle East and North Africa region.
Nevertheless, it is important to point out that this indicator – annual per capita CO2 emissions – has many limitations. For example, the Middle East–North Africa region is characterized by vast inequalities. It includes both extremely poor and ultra-rich people, in particular in the Gulf countries. Therefore, the measure of average yearly per-capita emissions is an inexact indicator. It shows that the people of the countries of the North, on average, emit much more CO2 than the peoples of the countries of the Global South, but it masks inequalities in terms of emissions within the major regions, and also within each country between the wealthy classes and poor families, especially in rural areas.
Thus it is very clear that the Western countries are largely responsible for climate disruptions and that they continue to be responsible for a very large share of total world greenhouse-gas emissions. As a result they owe an enormous climate debt to the peoples of the Global South. Nevertheless, these countries are characterized by enormous inequalities of revenue and assets that need to be stressed in order to point the finger at those who are really responsible for the destruction of life on Earth: the ruling classes and major corporations of the North and the predatory elites of the Global South.
The wealthiest individuals and major corporations are responsible for climate disruptions
Chart 1.4. Shares in total world CO2 emissions, 2019
Source: Chancel (2022)
Chart 1.5: Inequality of carbon emissions, 2019: Emissions by group
In 2019, the wealthiest 10% of the planet’s inhabitants emitted half of all the CO2 emissions in the world! That is almost as much as the poorest 90%.[4] Also, the wealthiest 1% pollute more than the poorest 50%. That means that 80 million people do more damage to nature than 4 billion individuals.
We see clearly that “raising the awareness” of the poorest and middle classes in the North as in the Global South and encouraging them to feel guilt is pointless if we do not go after the wealthiest 10%.
Now that the responsibility of the countries of the North and the wealthiest people on the planet is clearly established, we shall go into more detail by comparing the geographical criteria with criteria of wealth.
Chart 1.6. Per capita CO2 emissions worldwide in 2019
On average, the wealthiest 10% of the population of North America emit much more CO2 than all other categories in these charts.[5] They are the source of more than twice the average per capita CO2 emissions than the wealthiest 10% of Europeans. Still in North America, the poorest half of the population emit approximately as much CO2, on average, per year and per person, than the wealthiest 10% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, or the wealthiest 10% of South and Southeast Asians. North America therefore owes a major climate debt and bears enormous responsibility for meeting the challenge of limiting climate disruptions. These figures prove that the “American-style” capitalist lifestyle is not sustainable and that degrowth is a necessity.
Moreover, the average emissions of 90% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, as well of half of the population of Latin America, half the population of the Middle East and North Africa region and half the population of East Asia are below the threshold for 2 degrees of global warming (which is already too high).
Consequently, the burden of efforts to limit climate disruptions must be borne by the countries of the North (North America, Europe, Russia, East Asia), and in particular the wealthiest segments, major corporations and the ruling classes in general.
But that must not distract from the responsibility of the wealthy predatory and extractivist elites of the Global South (Middle East, North Africa, South and Southeast Asia), who must also be held to account.
Chart 1.7. CO2 emissions per year by population group in the DRC, Nigeria, Colombia, India, China, and the USA
If we look at the national examples,[6] we see the same tendencies. The enormous damage caused by the wealthiest 10% in the USA becomes apparent.
These various charts show where responsibilities for current climate disruptions lie, and throw light on the issue of climate debt in all its complexity. The burden must be borne by the wealthiest third, and possibly half, of the population in the North – and weigh most heavily on the wealthiest 10% – and on the wealthiest, most predatory and most extractivist classes of the regions of the Global South, such as the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region.
The imperialist countries of the North also owe an ecological debt due to their centuries of predatory extractivism
However an analysis in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions is insufficient because, whilst it can be used to measure climate debt fairly precisely (by pointing out who is responsible for global warming, caused mostly by emissions of greenhouse gases), it also masks a significant part of ecological debt: that related to the usurpation of resources through the predatory, destructive extractivism at the heart of the current globalized capitalist system. Those who profit from that system owe a colossal ecological debt which they must answer for.
The countries of the Global South have been plundered for centuries by the countries of the North, first via colonization, and then by the use of debt as a tool for subjugating and robbing their peoples.
To learn more about debt as a tool of subjugation: Maxime Perriot and Éric Toussaint, “ABC du CADTM et mise en perspective historique des dettes illégitimes” (A CADTM ABC and a Historical Perspective on Illegitimate Debt), CADTM, published 8 April 2024 (in French or Spanish), https://www.cadtm.org/ABC-du-CADTM-et-mise-en-perspective-historique-des-dettes-illegitimes
After colonization, and in particular after the debt crisis of the 1980s, numerous countries of the Global South were in payment default. To continue repaying their debts, they were forced to accept the conditionalities imposed by the IMF and the World Bank in exchange for loans from these two institutions.
These conditionalities, whose aim is to force the integration of countries of the Global South into neoliberal globalization, have driven them to increasingly specialize their economies in the exportation of one or several resources. That specialization had already begun from the very beginning of the forced integration of the countries of the South into international trade dominated by the Western European powers in the sixteenth century. After the African independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the weapon of debt replaced the former colonial relationship in ensuring that the new States maintained specialization of production. And the generalization of “structural adjustment” beginning in the 1980s has considerably reinforced that dependency.
Instead of producing what their people need, these countries’ economies operate to meet the needs of the most industrialized economies (including China) with exports of resources from agriculture, mining, fossil-fuel deposits, fisheries, forests, etc., as well as cheap labour – “human resources.” One result of this orientation towards intensive exploitation of living things and untrammelled extractivism has been to encourage these countries to abandon subsistence agriculture, which is a vector of food sovereignty, in favour of the development of extensive monocultures, which are synonymous with indebtedness for farmers, land-grabbing, intensive overuse of the soil and loss of biodiversity and traditional know-how. Specialization and unbridled exportation, or else attracting tourists by building luxury complexes which bring in the hard currencies needed to import goods not made in the country and to repay debt: such is the vicious cycle in which the governments and financial institutions of the North have trapped the peoples of the Global South, with the complicity of the local elites. This exploitation of natural resources, which makes sense only within the logic of debt – itself a prolongation of the logic of colonialism –, is an important aspect of the North’s ecological debt towards the South.
The total integration – as the dominated party – of the countries of the Global South into neoliberal globalization has profited only the few: the major corporations of the North, who have usurped the lands from the people of the Global South; the local elites who have glutted themselves thanks to the extractivist system; the major extractivist corporations of the South… These corporations are also guilty of biopiracy: they have stolen local knowledge, including in the realm of medicines. They have filed patents in order to ensure maximum profit at the expense of the peoples.
With the IMF, the World Bank and the development banks, the capitalist classes, in addition to their responsibility for greenhouse-gas emissions, are also responsible for the destruction of ecosystems and for the usurpation and impoverishment of land through monoculture. Their acts result in the destruction of life, the pollution of fisheries resources and of the soils and subsoil, the drying up of watercourses, impoverishment of the soil, and the endangerment of common citizens by taking away their food sovereignty. The local populations have become extremely vulnerable to the various external shocks that can occur. For example, the speculation arising from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the shock caused by CoViD-19 have plunged tens of millions into extreme poverty (see elsewhere).
The Capitalocene epoch
To encompass the destructive impact of the capitalist mode of production and exploitation on the living world, on biodiversity and on the climate, in place of the term “Anthropocene,” the concept of Capitalocene[7] should be used. The indigenous peoples of the Global South bear no responsibility for climate disruptions. As was explained at the start of this chapter, the peoples of the Global South, who were colonized and then forced to integrate into the process of neoliberal extractivism, cannot be held responsible. Nor can the working and peasant classes of the most industrialized countries of the nineteenth century, who were exploited in the mines and factories. Climate disruption is the result of the actions of major corporations, of the capitalist classes and governments of the North (and later of the South).
We should also stress the burden that debt represents on the budget of vulnerable countries on which astronomical interest rates are imposed. The countries most vulnerable to climate disruptions have never been as deep in debt as they are today at any time since 1990. According to Debt Justice,[8] the fifty countries most vulnerable to climate disruptions spend four times more on debt service than they did in 2010. A key example is Zambia, which went into payment default in 2000 and which has been suffering from a terrible drought since late 2023.
Unlike the countries of the North, who benefit from the trust of the financial markets and from interest rates that in 2024 varied between 1% and 5%, the countries of the Global South must pay interest rates of above 6%, and often above 9%, and rates of over 20% are not unheard of.[9] That is why many countries spend much more paying interest on their debt than on financing their health and education sectors, but also on initiatives for attenuating, adapting to or remediating the effects of climate change. As an example, in 2021 Ghana planned on allocating 77 million dollars per year for adaptation[10] – that is, on irrigation systems to deal with droughts, flood-level warning systems, etc. That same year, the country spent 4.8 billion dollars on debt service – an amount that is likely to attain 6.4 billion in 2025. This example is typical of an alarming number of countries.
We see, then, how debt serves as a tool for transferring wealth, both natural and financial, and how whilst it is at the root of environmental and ecological disasters it also smothers in the cradle any serious perspective for investment in the struggle against climate change and its effects.
Translated by Snake Arbusto in collaboration with Christine Pagnoulle.
1. This chapter is based on the data of the Climate Inequality Report 2023, co-ordinated by Lucas Chancel, Philipp Bothe and Tancrède Voituriez, and more generally on the database from the World Inequality Report 2022. Chancel, L., Bothe, P., Voituriez, T. (2023) Climate Inequality Report 2023, World Inequality Lab Study 2023/1, https://wid.world/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CBV2023-ClimateInequalityReport-3.pdf or Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Saez, E., Zucman, G. et al. World Inequality Report 2022, World Inequality Lab, https://wir2022.wid.world/www-site/uploads/2023/03/D_FINAL_WIL_RIM_RAPPORT_2303.pdf, accessed 16 October 2024. ↑
2. Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Saez, E., Zucman, G. op. cit. p. 117. ↑
3. Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Saez, E., Zucman, G. op. cit. p. 119. ↑
4. Chancel, L., Bothe, P., Voituriez, T. (2023), op. cit. p. 24. ↑
5. Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Saez, E., Zucman, G. op. cit. p. 19. ↑
6. Chancel, L., Bothe, P., Voituriez, T. (2023), op. cit. p. 135. ↑
7. A concept developed by Andreas Malm and taken up by Jason W. Moore and others. In an interview in January 2021, Malm stated: “Replacing the concept of Anthropocene with that of Capitalocene is a way of being more precise in showing that it is capital — as a process and a specific structuring of human interaction based on inequality and power — that has become a factor of destructive geological change, and not the human race as such. What has happened is not an outgrowth of our biological characteristics as Homo sapiens, but is rather a specific historical and social evolution.” Andreas Malm, “Pour mettre fin à la catastrophe, il faut s’en prendre aux classes dominantes” (To end the catastrophe, point the finger at the dominant classes”), interview by Reporterre, 14 January 2021, https://reporterre.net/Andreas-Malm-Pour-mettre-fin-a-la-catastrophe-il-faut-s-en-prendre-aux-classes-dominantes (translation CADTM). ↑
8. Debt Justice, “Climate vulnerable countries debt payments highest in three decades,” 3 June 2024, https://debtjustice.org.uk/press-release/climate-vulnerable-countries-debt-payments-highest-in-three-decades, accessed 16 October 2024 ↑
9. Rates are constantly changing. The Web site World Government Bonds provides an overview of rates for the great majority of countries on the planet: https://www.worldgovernmentbonds.com/country/puertorico/ accessed 13 December 2024. ↑
10. “Lower income countries spend five times more on debt payments than dealing with climate change.” Jubilee Debt Campaign, October 2021. https://debtjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Lower-income-countries-spending-on-adaptation_10.21.pdf, accessed 16 October 2024
No comments:
Post a Comment