AMERIKA

“We Have to Act”: Taxpayers Suing Congressmembers for Funding Genocide Speak Out

Plaintiff Tarik Kanaana says the lawsuit “has given people something to rally behind and a renewed sense of hope.”

By Marjorie Cohn

January 4, 2025
Source: Truthout


Wikimedia Commons



On December 19, more than 500 federal taxpayers from 10 northern California counties filed an unprecedented class-action lawsuit against their congressional representatives. Seth Donnelly et. al. v. Mike Thompson, and Jared Huffman charges that the defendants — two Democratic congressmembers — illegally abused their tax and spend authority on April 20, 2024, when they voted for the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, which authorized $26.38 billion in military aid to Israel.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, alleges that Thompson and Huffman violated the U.S. Constitution, the Genocide Convention and several U.S. laws.

“I am a Palestinian Lebanese American, and I am suing my California congressman, Mike Thompson, for misusing my federal tax dollars and supporting the genocide in Gaza,” Maria Barakat, a class representative, told Truthout. “As a Palestinian and a person of conscience, Thompson has forced me to be complicit in the murder and genocide of my own people.”

Taxpayers who brought the suit come from a wide variety of backgrounds. They include young people, the elderly, educators, health care workers, Jewish and Palestinian Americans, and others. Members of the class are defined as: “All persons who were federal taxpayers during the year 2024 who reside within the federal Second or Fourth Congressional District of California and have suffered moral and emotional/psychic injury from being made complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
Congress Can Tax Only for the Common Defense and General Welfare

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution establishes Congress’s power to lay and collect taxes only for the common defense and general welfare of the United States. When taxes are collected and allocated for unlawful purposes, the general welfare is not served.

The complaint — the charging document in the lawsuit — notes that the $26.38 billion for which the defendants voted includes $3.5 billion for the procurement of advanced weapons systems, defense articles (items or technical data designed for a missile, satellite or other military use) and defense services; $1 billion for the production and development of artillery and critical munitions; and $4.4 billion to replenish defense articles and defense services provided to Israel.

As this article goes to press, more than 45,500 Palestinian people have been killed by Israel’s genocidal campaign using weapons provided by the U.S. government.

In Donnelly v. Thompson, the taxpayers cite violations of the Genocide Convention, which the U.S. has ratified, and the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, which establishes the crime of “complicity in genocide.” Customary international law, which is part of federal common and statutory law, also prohibits complicity in genocide.

The complaint alleges violation of the Leahy Law, which prohibits aid to foreign security forces that have committed a gross violation of human rights. In addition, it charges that the congressmembers violated the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Arms Export Control Act, which prohibit U.S. assistance to countries whose governments engage in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights. Lastly, the complaint alleges violation of the Conventional Arms Transfer policy, which prohibits U.S. weapons transfers if they risk facilitating human rights violations.
Class Members Asked Their Congressmembers to Halt Military Aid to Israel

Many class members repeatedly contacted their representatives, Thompson and Huffman, urging them not to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza — to no avail. “We have called and written our representatives for over a year begging them to halt military aid to Israel,” Barakat told Truthout. “Some of us call them every single day.” But both congressmembers voted for military assistance to Israel, knowing that it was committing genocide, the complaint asserts.

“We are inspired by the lawsuit Defense for Children International — Palestine v. Biden, filed in November 2023, that attempted to hold the Biden administration legally accountable for direct involvement in the genocide in Gaza,” class representative and lead plaintiff Seth Donnelly told Truthout. In the case against President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a federal district judge in Oakland, California, found that Israel’s conduct in Gaza amounts to a plausible case of genocide.

Although the Biden case was dismissed based on the “political question” doctrine, which reserves foreign policy decisions to the political branches of government (executive and legislative), not the judiciary, the two lawsuits raise different issues, attorney Dean Royer, who filed Donnelly v. Thompson, wrote in an email to Truthout: This case “is premised on taxpayers having their constitutional rights violated when their [c]ongressional representatives voted in favor of military aid to Israel despite knowing Israel was committing genocide and would continue to do so with the aid.”

The complaint in Donnelly v. Thompson cited the International Court of Justice’s January 26 ruling that some of Israel’s actions in Gaza appeared to constitute genocide. On March 24, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, published a comprehensive report which concluded that the Israeli government had unequivocally crossed the “threshold” and was actively committing genocide in Gaza. Her findings were also cited in the taxpayers’ lawsuit.
Taxpayers Described Moral Injuries They Suffered From the Vote to Arm Genocide

The taxpayers are asking the district court to certify the proposed class and declare that defendants Thompson and Huffman violated the Constitution’s tax and spend authority as well as federal statutes when they voted for the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act. They also ask the court to restrain the defendants from providing further military aid to Israel. And they are requesting compensatory damages for the emotional trauma, mental health problems and depression they have suffered as a result of the ongoing genocide.

Carol Bloom, a class member from Sonoma County, stated in a release for the Institute for Public Accuracy, “The moral injuries that I and countless other constituents of Representative Huffman have suffered resulting from his vote to arm the genocide in Gaza are immeasurable.”

In media statements, class representatives described the emotional and moral injuries they suffer as a result of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians:

“I have witnessed the destruction of parts of my history and parts of the beautiful culture which I am a product of. I have witnessed the bombing of hospitals and schools, churches, mosques, playgrounds and seaside promenades. I have seen the desecration of burial grounds and have seen the remains of forbearers being unearthed so that refugees have nothing to return to,” Tarik Kanaana, a Palestinian American who lives in Santa Rosa, said in the statement. “The United States is not only allowing this genocide to happen; but is an active participant in it.”

Pamela Brown from Humboldt County said, “My life emotionally and intellectually fell apart in October 2023. As I witnessed and read about the horror inflicted on innocent children, women, and men in Gaza over days, then weeks, then months, and now more than a year, I continued down a dark hole that my friends began to remark on. The distress and despondency I experience have been profound, unlike any other time in my life.”

“I feel I’ve been living in a traumatized state for over a year. I cry every day, multiple times a day, my heart is beyond broken, it’s shattered. I wake up each morning worrying about the genocide that is happening in Gaza, knowing that if it wasn’t for my government’s partnership with the Israeli government, this couldn’t continue,” said Leslie Angeline from Marin County. She tried in vain to meet with Rep. Jared Huffman on the 25th day of her hunger strike/fast, which she ended when the lawsuit was filed on December 19, after 31 days.

“It is literally breaking my heart day by day, night by night, to be complicit in this ‘collective punishment’ of Palestinians of both Gaza and The West Bank,” said Francesca Ciancutti from Mendocino County.

Linda Helland, also from Mendocino County, said, “The psychological distress and moral injury I experience from being forced to pay for genocide has caused me irreparable harm, manifested in depression, anxiety, distractions from work, lack of joy in daily activities, and inability to sleep peacefully.”

Helland, a public health professional, described images seen on phones every day:


Children shot in the head by Israeli snipers; Palestinian women who are too hungry and thirsty to breastfeed their babies because Israel uses starvation as a weapon; rotting babies in incubators after the Israeli military took over the hospital and turned off the electricity; teenagers burned to death still hooked up to their hospital IVs when the Israeli military bombed the hospital; toddlers crushed when Israel bombs schools; and parents collecting plastic bags of unidentifiable children’s body parts so they’ll have something to bury after Israel bombs refugee shelters.
One Struggle, Many Fronts

The taxpayers are clear-eyed about the challenges the lawsuit faces. But they are resolute.

“We see it quite clearly that there are legal and constitutional limits on what U.S. tax dollars can be used for, and our congressmen have broken the law,” Barakat told Truthout. “Our eyes are wide open about the federal courts. It’s an uphill climb, but we have to act. We are responsible to act.”

“I have no faith that the U.S. government will do what is right, especially after 15 months of … supporting Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, including financing and providing Israel with the political cover it needs,” Kanaana said in an interview with Truthout. “I am sure that the court will find a way to dismiss this case. If, however, it does continue and we get a ruling in our favor, it will have huge ramifications on what the U.S. can do to support Israel. That said, we have already achieved so much of what we set out to do.”

Kanaana added that the lawsuit “has given people something to rally behind and a renewed sense of hope.” Since the genocide started, the taxpayers have “been protesting in the streets, going in front of city councils and other political bodies to convince them to call for a ceasefire, protesting national politicians and university encampments (which were violently suppressed) and anything else we could think of to change our government policies.” However, Kanaana says, the situation in Palestine “is getting much worse.”

“This struggle will take sustained efforts on many fronts, with the lawsuit being a means to shine the spotlight on the role of U.S. tax dollars in the genocide. We anticipate a vigorous effort by the defendants to dismiss the case on various grounds and understand that the legal battle will be challenging but we believe we can ultimately succeed,” attorney Royer told Truthout. “While Congress has great latitude to decide how to spend tax money, the line is crossed when the spending results in complicity in genocide and human rights violations.”

Since the filing of Donnelly v. Thompson on December 19, “we have gotten media attention beyond what we had anticipated locally and nationally,” Kanaana told Truthout. As a result, “people and groups from around the country have been reaching out to us offering us support and, more importantly, to get information on how they can replicate our lawsuit in other areas against other Congress members who have shown support for Israel’s war crimes.”

“If we persuade the court that we are correct, this lawsuit could be replicated throughout the U.S. with other congressional representatives as defendants,” attorney Royer added. “In fact, there is already interest in the case by other constituencies in California and other states.”

Class members are encouraging all taxpayers in Marin, Sonoma, Solano, Napa, Lake, Yolo, Mendocino, Trinity, Humboldt and Del Norte Counties to sign onto the lawsuit.

Taxpayers Against Genocide NorCal, which organized the taxpayers’ lawsuit, will soon be offering a webinar for activists across the U.S. who want to replicate their action. For more information, interested parties can contact classactionagainstgenocide@proton.me.

“This unprecedented lawsuit gives these Congresspersons pause that their constituents, from all 10 counties in northern California, have joined together. Their power is seated in keeping us apart,” Anna Marie Stenberg, a long-time activist and key leader of the coalition, whose family is from Lebanon, told Truthout. “This coalition will also be invaluable over the next four years when the targets are put on immigrants and the LGBTQX communities.”



Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law, and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She sits on the national advisory boards of Veterans For Peace and Assange Defense and she is the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.

Opinion

Entering Jubilee 2025 with hope for our common home

(RNS) — When we are tempted to lose hope, we must remember that it is not a feeling or an emotion but a virtue.

(Photo by Porapak Apichodilok/Pexels/Creative Commons)
Joseph J. Tyson
January 3, 2025

(RNS) — The hope of a new year is here as the Catholic Church enters the 2025 Jubilee, a yearlong period of forgiveness and mercy whose theme is taken from Romans 5: “Hope does not disappoint.” The Jubilee also coincides with the 10th anniversary of “Laudato si’,” Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical on the environment.

The coming together of these events kindles in me a feeling of optimism for the future of our planet. The U.S. is currently on track to reach 80 percent or more of its emissions-reduction target under the Paris Climate Agreement, according to the Rhodium Group. While much work still needs to be done, this is progress. I am also encouraged by church leaders, led by Pope Francis, using their voices. Archbishop Timothy Broglio, as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), sent a powerful letter to Pope Francis thanking the Holy Father for his “consistent reminder on the need to address the climate crisis and experience ecological conversion.”

Archbishop Broglio acknowledged our current challenges in his message of gratitude, lamenting the suffering brought by natural disasters and noting that “devastating hurricanes and other events have leveled entire communities.” Acknowledging both our progress and how much we have to do gives me hope because we must be honest about where we are to truly see where we must go.

As a group, the USCCB has taken important stances on the climate crisis, asserting its voice with clear policy positions. Last year, I advocated for their climate positions as part of a delegation of Catholic leaders visiting the White House to amplify Pope Francis’ exhortation on climate, “Laudate Deum.” Archbishop John Wester, Bishop Edward Weisenburger, Sister Carol Zinn from Leadership Conference of Women Religious and Lonnie Ellis from In Solidarity made the trip together.

It was quite an experience to bring the pope’s message to the building where so much national policy takes shape. Within five months of our visit, the Environmental Protection Agency enacted all four of our policy stances — on mercury, methane, carbon pollution from power plants and emissions from heavy-duty vehicles. We weren’t the only people raising our voices — groups advocating for public health and the environment have long pushed for these protections. Being part of democracy in action gives me hope, too.

Yet as important as policy is, as a person of faith my hope ultimately resides in something deeper: the resurrection of Christ, and with it the restoration of all creation in the fullness of time. I think of Pope Francis’ message on the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation this past September. He linked our earthly and our eschatological hope: “Our Christian optimism is founded on a living hope: it realizes that everything is ordered to the glory of God, to final consummation in his peace and to bodily resurrection in righteousness, as we pass ‘from glory to glory.’”

Cardinal Rolandas Makrickas opens the holy door of the Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica in Rome on New Year’s Day, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025, one of the events starting the Jubilee of 2025. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Some may wonder whether hope, however we define it, is enough to combat our many intersecting crises. The climate crisis itself can at times feel insurmountable. When we also see the prevalence of war, poverty, migration, authoritarianism and the breakdown of social bonds and institutions, things can feel hopelessly beyond our capacity to change.

When we are tempted to lose hope, we must remember that it is not a feeling or an emotion but a virtue. Unlike emotions that come and go, virtues can be cultivated with purpose. The Holy Father touched on this in his message for the World Day of Prayer, when he defined hope as “the possibility of remaining steadfast amid adversity, of not losing heart in times of tribulation or in the face of human evil.” Hope animates our care for creation; it is both a first step and a final reward, an incentive as well as an intention. Let us enter the Jubilee year preparing to make St. Paul’s words our own: “For in hope we were saved.”

(The Most Rev. Joseph J. Tyson serves as Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Yakima in Washington state and as Episcopal moderator for Catholic Climate Covenant, based in Washington, D.C. The views represented in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Does a lack of faith lead to suicide? One study says yes. Scholars of secularism say no.

(RNS) — A new study by a Christian scholar found higher rates of suicide and campus sexual assault in states where more nonbelievers live. But others who study secularism say correlation doesn't prove the case.

(Photo by Akhil Nath/Unsplash/Creative Commons)
Bob Smietana
January 3, 2025


(RNS) — As an evangelical Christian, Philip Truscott is dismayed at the decline of religion in America, saying it is bad for the country’s soul.

As a social scientist, he says he has proof.

In a paper in the Journal of Sociology and Christianity, Truscott draws on data tracking crime on college campus and religious affiliation surveys to show that states with higher percentages of so-called “nones” — people who claim no religious affiliation in surveys — have higher rates of sexual assault on campus as well as higher suicide rates overall.

Truscott did most of the work on the study, entitled “Rape, Suicide, and the Rise of Religious Nones” while a professor of sociology at Southwest Baptist University in Missouri. He was inspired by previous research he had done that showed that the higher the percentage of nones in a state, the higher the suicide rate. That research, based on data from the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape report, also showed that the higher the percentage of evangelicals in a state, the lower the rate of sexual assaults on its college campuses.
RELATED: Who are the ‘nones’? New Pew study debunks myths about America’s nonreligious.

Truscott followed up on those findings by examining similar data from the Public Religion Research Institute and reported the results in a paper in the Journal of Sociology and Christianity in October. Truscott argues that the decline in religion can be tied to a loss of self-control and correlates that with more suicides and assaults.

Philip Truscott. (Photo via Southwest Baptist University)

While he falls short of claiming that loss of religion causes more suicides and assaults, Truscott has subsequently argued that his findings prove the need for more state vouchers for private schools, most of which are religious. Families that choose religious schools for their kids can play a role in reversing the decline of religion in America, Truscott told RNS in an interview, which he argues will reduce the rate of suicide and campus sexual assaults.

“That really helps everyone,” he said.

His fellow sociologists, particularly those who study the nones, are skeptical, saying Truscott’s study is flawed and that his conclusions don’t fit the evidence.

Ryan Cragun, a sociology professor at the University of Tampa, reviewed Prescott’s paper and said that, while it does show a correlation between the share of nones and rates of suicide and sexual assault, Truscott fails to prove that disbelief causes those higher rates. Cragun also said the paper ignores other data, such as that showing that states with higher murder rates are correlated to higher per-capita populations of evangelicals.

“If I were to use his logic, then I should be able to argue that evangelicals are more likely to kill people,” said Cragun, co-author with Jesse M. Smith of “Goodbye Religion: The Causes and Consequences of Secularization.”

Cragun also was skeptical of the argument that religion creates more self-control or that a lack of self-control can explain why suicides or sexual assaults happen, saying that the causes of both are more complicated.

David Speed, a Canadian scholar who studies the connection between atheism and health, said Truscott is asking an important question about the social effects of the decline of religion. But Speed, a professor of psychology at the University of New Brunswick in St. John, Canada, said Truscott failed to prove his claims.

David Speed. (Photo via The Religious Studies Project)

While Truscott did show that both secularism and campus sexual assault were on the rise in some states, said Speed, he did not show that one caused the other.

“It’s kind of damning by association,” said Speed, who is also working on his own research project about the effects of secularism on suicide rates.

Speed said it is common in the social sciences to find two unrelated topics that seem to track together over time. He pointed to a website called “Spurious Correlations,” which collects such convergences, including graphs that show, for instance, that as the name William has become less popular, the number of burglaries in South Carolina has declined. The first, Speed said, does not explain the second.

Proving a causal link between the loss of religion and rise in suicide rates or assaults, said Speed, would require a great deal more data and analysis. So far, he added, no other studies have suggested that atheists or other nonbelievers are more likely to take their own lives or to commit crimes like sexual assault. Truscott’s critics also argue there’s no evidence for his claim that more faith-based schools would lead to fewer suicides.

They also say these flaws in his reasoning explain why it took so long, as Truscott has said, for his paper to find a publisher. Truscott blames a liberal bias in academic journals.

In an interview, he claimed that if his research had linked greater incidences of suicide or sexual assault to more widespread religious belief, journals would have flocked to publish his study. “The social science journals, they lean to the left politically,” Truscott said. “They are very anti-religious.”

Truscott said that he is glad the paper is getting attention, even if it’s negative attention, and hopes it leads to more study about the social implications of the decline of religion.

To critics he simply says, “Prove that I am wrong.”

Environmental and Climate Debt: Who is Responsible?

Maxime Perriot – Éric Toussaint

 January 6, 2025

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Photograph Source: Mike McMillan/USFS – Public Domain

LONG 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