Will capitalism survive climate change?

Walden Bello, March 29, Bangkok Post

There is now a solid consensus in the scientific community that if the change in global mean temperature in the 21st century exceeds 2.4 degrees Celsius, changes in the planet's climate will be large-scale, irreversible and disastrous. Moreover, the window of opportunity for action that will make a difference is narrow - that is, the next 10 to 15 years.

Throughout the North, however, there is strong resistance to changing the systems of consumption and production that have created the problem in the first place and a preference for ''techno-fixes,'' such as ''clean'' coal, carbon sequestration and storage, industrial-scale biofuels, and nuclear energy.
Globally, transnational corporations and other private actors resist government-imposed measures such as mandatory caps, preferring to use market mechanisms like the buying and selling of ''carbon credits,'' which critics say simply amounts to a licence for corporate polluters to keep on polluting.

In the South, there is little willingness on the part of the southern elite to depart from the high-growth, high-consumption model inherited from the North, and a self-interested conviction that the North must first adjust and bear the brunt of adjustment before the South takes any serious step towards limiting its greenhouse gas emissions.

Contours of the Challenge

In the climate change discussions, the principle of ''common but differentiated responsibility'' is recognised by all parties, meaning that the global North must shoulder the brunt of the adjustment to the climate crisis since it is the one whose economic trajectory has brought it about.

It is also recognised that the global response should not compromise the right to develop of the countries of the global South.

The devil, however, is in the details. As Martin Khor of Third World Network has pointed out, the global reduction of 80% in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2050 that many now recognise as necessary, will have to translate into reductions of at least 150-200% on the part of the global North if the two principles - ''common but differentiated responsibility'' and recognition of the right to development of the countries of the South - are to be followed.

But are the governments and people of the North prepared to make such commitments?

Psychologically and politically, it is doubtful that the North at this point has what it takes to meet the problem head-on.

The prevailing assumption is that the affluent societies can take on commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions but still grow and enjoy their high standards of living if they shift to non-fossil fuel energy sources.

Moreover, how the mandatory cuts agreed multilaterally by governments get implemented within the country must be market-based, that is, on the trading of emission permits.

The subtext is: techno-fixes and the carbon market will make the transition relatively painless and (why not?) profitable, too.

There is, however, a growing realisation that many of these technologies are decades away from viable use and that, in the short and medium term, relying on a shift in energy dependence to non-fossil fuel alternatives will not be able to support current rates of economic growth.

Also, it is increasingly evident that the trade-off for more crop land being devoted to biofuel production is less land to grow food and greater food insecurity globally.

It is rapidly becoming clear that the dominant paradigm of economic growth is one of the most significant obstacles to a serious global effort to deal with climate change.

But this destabilising, fundamentalist growth-consumption paradigm is itself more effect rather than cause.

The central problem, it is becoming increasingly clear, is a mode of production whose main dynamic is the transformation of living nature into dead commodities, creating tremendous waste in the process.

The driver of this process is consumption - or more appropriately overconsumption - and the motivation is profit or capital accumulation: capitalism, in short.

It has been the generalisation of this mode of production in the North and its spread from the North to the South over the last 300 years that has caused the accelerated burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil and rapid deforestation, two of the key man-made processes behind global warming.

The South's Dilemma

One way of viewing global warning is to see it as a key manifestation of the latest stage of a wrenching historical process: the privatisation of the global commons by capital. The climate crisis must thus be seen as the expropriation by the advanced capitalist societies of the ecological space of less developed or marginalised societies.

This leads us to the dilemma of the South: before the full extent of the ecological destabilisation brought about by capitalism, it was expected that the South would simply follow the ''stages of growth'' of the North.

Now it is impossible to do so without bringing about ecological Armageddon. Already, China is on track to overtake the US as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and yet the elite of China as well as those of India and other rapidly developing countries are intent on reproducing the American-type overconsumption-driven capitalism.

Thus, for the South, the implications of an effective global response to global warming include not just the inclusion of some countries in a regime of mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, although this is critical: in the current round of climate negotiations, for instance, China, can no longer opt out of a mandatory regime on the grounds that it is a developing country.

Nor can the challenge to most of the other developing countries be limited to that of getting the North to transfer technology to mitigate global warming and provide funds to assist them in adapting to it, as many of them appeared to think during the Bali negotiations.

These steps are important, but they should be seen as but the initial steps in a broader, global reorientation of the paradigm for achieving economic well-being.

While the adjustment will need to be much, much greater and faster in the North, the adjustment for the South will essentially be the same: a break with the high-growth, high-consumption model in favour of another model of achieving the common welfare.

In contrast to the Northern elite's strategy of trying to decouple growth from energy use, a progressive comprehensive climate strategy in both the North and the South must be to reduce growth and energy use while raising the quality of life of the broad masses of people.

Among other things, this will mean placing economic justice and equality at the centre of the new paradigm.

The transition must be one not only from a fossil-fuel based economy but also from an overconsumption-driven economy.

The end-goal must be adoption of a low-consumption, low-growth, high-equity development model that results in an improvement in people's welfare, a better quality of life for all, and greater democratic control of production.

It is unlikely that the elite of the North and the South will agree to such a comprehensive response. The farthest they are likely to go is for techno-fixes and a market-based cap-and-trade system. Growth will be sacrosanct, as will the system of global capitalism.

Yet, confronted with the Apocalypse, humanity cannot self-destruct.

It may be a difficult road, but we can be sure that the vast majority will not commit social and ecological suicide to enable the minority to preserve their privileges.

However it is achieved, a thorough reorganisation of production, consumption and distribution will be the end result of humanity's response to the climate emergency and the broader environmental crisis.
Threat and Opportunity

In this regard, climate change is both a threat and an opportunity to bring about the long postponed social and economic reforms that had been derailed or sabotaged in previous eras by the elite seeking to preserve or increase their privileges.

The difference is that today the very existence of humanity and the planet depend on the institutionalisation of economic systems based not on feudal rent extraction or capital accumulation or class exploitation, but on justice and equality.

The question is often asked these days if humanity will be able to get its act together to formulate an effective response to climate change. Though there is no certainty in a world filled with contingency, I am hopeful that it will.

In the social and economic system that will be collectively crafted, I anticipate that there will be room for the market.

However, the more interesting question is: will it have room for capitalism? Will capitalism as a system of production, consumption and distribution survive the challenge of coming up with an effective solution to the climate crisis?

Walden Bello is Senior Analyst at Focus in the Global South, a programme of Chulalongkorn University's Social Research Institute.

Rich countries owe poor a huge environmental debt

January 21, The Guardian

The environmental damage caused to developing nations by the world's richest countries amounts to more than the entire third world debt of $1.8 trillion, according to the first systematic global analysis of the ecological damage imposed by rich countries.

The study found that there are huge disparities in the ecological footprint inflicted by rich and poor countries on the rest of the world because of differences in consumption. The authors say that the west's high living standards are maintained in part through the huge unrecognised ecological debts it has built up with developing countries.

"At least to some extent, the rich nations have developed at the expense of the poor and, in effect, there is a debt to the poor," said Prof Richard Norgaard, an ecological economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study. "That, perhaps, is one reason that they are poor. You don't see it until you do the kind of accounting that we do here."

Using data from the World Bank and the UN's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the researchers examined so-called "environmental externalities" or costs that are not included in the prices paid for goods but which cover ecological damage linked to their consumption. They focused on six areas: greenhouse gas emissions, ozone layer depletion, agriculture, deforestation, overfishing and converting mangrove swamps into shrimp farms.

The team calculated the costs of consumption in low, medium and high income countries, both within their borders and outside, from 1961 to 2000. The team used UN definitions for countries in different income categories. Low income countries included Pakistan, Nigeria and Vietnam, and middle income nations included Brazil and China. Rich countries in the study included the UK, US and Japan.

Striking disparities

The magnitude of effects outside the home country was different for each category of consumption. For example, deforestation and agricultural intensification primarily affect the host country, while the impacts from climate change and ozone depletion show up the disparity between rich and poor most strikingly.

Greenhouse emissions from low-income countries have imposed $740 billion of damage on rich countries, while in return rich countries have imposed $2.3 trillion of damage. This damage includes, for example, flooding from more severe storms as a result of climate change.

Likewise, CFC emissions from rich countries have inflicted between $25 billion and £57 billion of damage to the poorest countries. Increased ultraviolet levels from the ozone hole have led to higher healthcare costs from skin cancer and eye problems. The converse figure is between $0.58 and $1.3 billion.

The team publish their results today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."We know already that climate change is a huge injustice inflicted on the poor," said Dr Neil Adger at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, who was not involved in the research, "This paper is actually the first systematic quantification to produce a map of that ecological debt. Not only for climate change but also for these other areas."

"This is an accounting tool that allows you to say how much the high-income world owes the low-income world for the environmental externalities we impose on them," he said.

The team confined its calculations to areas in which the costs of environmental damage, for example in terms of lost services from ecosystems, are well understood. That meant leaving out damage from excessive freshwater withdrawals, destruction of coral reefs, biodiversity loss, invasive species and war. So the researchers believe the figures represent a minimum estimate of the true cost.

"We think the measured impact is conservative. And given that it's conservative, the numbers are very striking," said co-author Dr Thara Srinivasan, who is also at Berkeley.

Debt burden fuelling climate change – ‘double injustice’

Practical Action, World Development Movement and WWF, 13 July 2007, Jubilee Debt Campaign

New figures released today by Jubilee Debt Campaign reveal that rich countries owe 27 times more in ‘carbon debt’ than poor countries pay in debt repayments to wealthy nations.

The world’s poorest countries are forced to repay over $100 million daily in often illegitimate debts to rich countries, those same rich countries produce a daily ‘carbon debt’ worth an estimated $2.7 billion per day, which remains unacknowledged, unpaid and hits the poorest countries hardest and first.

The briefing, produced jointly with World Development Movement, Practical Action and WWF highlights that unlike the richest countries, poor countries are currently in ‘carbon credit’. But the unjust and unpayable financial debt is increasingly forcing poor countries into environmentally destructive practices that drive climate change and deprive poor countries of the resources they need to adapt to the rapidly changing climate. The real cost of the ‘carbon debt’ in terms of lives and livelihoods lost is impossible to quantify in financial terms, but for the first time these figures show clearly the debt owed by the rich to the poor.

Benedict Southworth, Director of World Development Movement said:

“The rich world bears a heavy responsibility for creating the twin crises of unpayable debts and looming climate chaos. The impact of these crises include starvation, migration, disease and death. It is crucial that the governments of the richest countries take urgent action to cancel illegitimate debt and reduce their carbon emissions.”

Trisha Rogers, Director of Jubilee Debt Campaign said:

“It is poor countries and poor people who are paying with their lives. We need radically to rethink our perception of who is in debt to whom, and take urgent action to tackle this double injustice.”

The research revealed that:

• Rich countries owe poor countries an enormous ‘carbon debt’ – on the basis of per capita carbon emissions beyond a global ‘fair share’. The rich world owes an estimated annual carbon debt of more than $1 trillion – nearly $870 billion of it coming from G8 countries.
• Poor country debt burdens are contributing to climate change and wider environmental destruction by driving the depletion of natural resources through deforestation, oil and gas extraction, mining, and intensification of agriculture.
• Countries like Kenya and Bangladesh are being denied debt cancellation on the basis that their debt is considered ‘sustainable’. Meanwhile, they are already experiencing the frontline effects of climate change, such as desertification or flooding.
• Developing countries need an estimated $50 billion every year to adapt to climate change but the poorest countries are still making debt repayments of $43 billion a year.