What unites these four recalcitrant nations? One key characteristic stands out: The United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait all just happen to rate among the world’s most unequal nations.
Just a coincidence? Absolutely not, suggests a new analysis from the Civil Society Equity Review coalition, a worldwide initiative that counts in its ranks the Climate Action Network International, 350.org, and scores of other global, regional, and national groups committed to averting a climatic cataclysm.
Limiting global warming to 1.5°C — the goal the global scientific community now sees as the absolute least we ought to be striving to achieve — will require, the Civil Society Equity Review analysis explains, “disruptive shifts” and heighten “anxieties about loss, displacement, and social insecurity.”
People will tolerate these disruptions, the analysis continues, but only if they believe that everyone is sharing in the sacrifice, the wealthy and powerful included.
Over recent years, environmental policy makers have essentially defined the wealthy at the level of the nation state. The focus has been on the relationships betweenwealthy nations and developing nations still struggling to amass wealth. Wealthier nations, the climate change consensus has come to understand, have a responsibility to help poorer nations meet the environmental challenges ahead.
But the new Civil Society Equity Review report — After Paris: Inequality, Fair Shares, and the Climate Emergency — argues that we need to expand our focus from inequality between nations to inequality within nations as well.
“If we are to achieve the critical outcome of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C, the wealthy (individuals and companies) in all nations must take the greatest action to both reduce their own emissions and to support the global transition,” After Parisstresses. “The wealthy must not be able to hide from their responsibilities.”
The more unequal a wealthy society, the greater the power of the rich — and the corporations they run — to do that hiding. And the inequality their wealth engenders, After Paris adds, also has “much to do with the dark character of the current political moment,” the growing levels of xenophobia and racism that make serious environmental aid from developed to developing nations ever less likely.
“The greatest effort of the climate transition must ultimately be borne by the people who have the wealth,” the new Civil Society Equity Review analysis concludes, “and this has to be true both within countries and between them.”
The wealthy and their corporations, left to their own devices, would for the most part rather not bear any sort of significant transitional sacrifice. How best to get them to meet their responsibilities — and help lighten the “dark character of the current political moment”? One stab at that necessary political project has just come from Thomas Piketty, the world’s most famous inequality analyst, and over 50 other economists, historians, and former elected leaders from throughout Europe.
These thought-leaders have issued a “manifesto for the democratization of Europe” that sees the current institutions of the European Union stuck in “a technocratic impasse” that benefits only the rich. The manifesto — published earlier this month in seven major European media outlets — calls for a new European Assembly with an $800-billion annual budget financed via increased taxes on corporate profits and the income and wealth of the EU’s most affluent, plus a new tax on carbon emissions.
Steps like these could help ease the way for a serious offensive against the ravages of climate change. But many more such steps will be necessary, as Basav Sen, the climate justice director at the Institute for Policy Studies, reminds us.
“Addressing climate change effectively and justly,” sums up Sen, “requires us to transform the unjust social and economic systems that gave us climate change in the first place.”
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Reposted from Inequality.org
