How much
destruction is needed for us to take climate change seriously?
Kate
Aronoff
Whether
human civilization stays intact amid this worsening weather depends on
recognizing our shared humanity – and designing policy accordingly
‘We have
more than enough money to fight the climate crisis, at home and abroad. It’s
just going to all the wrong places.’ Photograph: Noaa/AFP/Getty Images
@KateAronoff
Tue 3 Sep
2019 12.54 BST Last modified on Tue 3 Sep 2019 13.20 BST
News of
Hurricane Dorian’s first casualty came early on Monday morning from the Bahamas
Press. A seven-year old boy named Lachino Mcintosh drowned as his family
attempted to find safer ground than their home on the Abaco islands. Dorian is
reportedly the strongest hurricane to have ever hit the Bahamas and the second
most powerful Atlantic storm on record. Five deaths have been reported so far,
and more are likely. The Bahamian MP and minister of foreign affairs, the
Honorable Darren Henfield, offered a bleak update form the area he represents
to reporters: “We have reports of casualties, we have reports of bodies being
seen.”
Rising
temperatures don’t make hurricanes more frequent, but they do help make them
more devastating. Each of the last five years have seen Category 5 storms pass
through the Atlantic, brewed over hotter than usual waters. How many more
people have to die before political leaders treat climate change like the
global catastrophe it is?
Donald
Trump has been rightly criticized for golfing as Dorian devastated the Bahamas
and drifted toward the US. But it’s as good a metaphor as any for the way
elites across political lines have approached the crisis they have helped
create and continue to fuel. One of the cruelest realities of global warming is
that the people whohave done the least to contribute to it tend to be among the
first and worst hit. Nations like the United States have amassed tremendous
wealth both by burning fossil fuels and exploiting land and labor from the
places most threatened by rising temperatures through slavery, colonialism and
their living legacies. Similar inequalities play out within nations, including
in the US, where most people’s own carbon footprints are dwarfed by those of
the billionaires and fossil fuel executives best equipped to insulate
themselves from heavy weather.
Internationally,
climate-vulnerable countries have for decades made the case that more ambition
is needed, focusing policymakers’ concerns on to issues of equity. The Bahamas
is part of a group within the UN known as the Alliance of Small Island States
(Aosis), comprising countries already being hammered by climate impacts who
have got comparatively few financial resources to deal with them. The Aosis
chair and Maldives energy minister, Thoriq Ibrahim, argued at COP 24 last year
that it would “be suicide not to use every lever of power we have to demand
what is fair and just: the support we need to manage a crisis that has been
thrust upon us”.
That
support has not been forthcoming. In its special report released last year, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that keeping warming below 1.5
degrees Celsius – a level already dangerous for low-lying states – would
require an annual investment in decarbonization of $3tn through 2050. And
that’s just to mitigate warming. Trillions more will be required to adapt to
the climate impacts already locked in, ensuring that when hurricanes like
Dorian do hit they do less damage. Repairing the loss and damage of storms and
other disasters is expected to cost $300bn a year by 2030, jumping to $1.2tn a
year by 2060. As the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases and
its biggest economy, the United States has both the ability and an outsized
responsibility to decarbonize rapidly and make it possible for countries do the
same – a climate debt.
Back in
2009, industrialized nations pledged to mobilize $100bn toward mitigation and
adaptation efforts by 2020, a response to persistent demands from climate
justice organizers. As of last September, only $3.5bn had actually been
allocated to the fund and just $10.3bn pledged to the multilateral body that’s
supposed to be the main vehicle for dispersing that money, the Green Climate
Fund (GCF). Before he left office, Obama promised $3bn toward the GCF. Just
$1bn of that ever materialized before Trump withdrew that vow. That’s a
fraction of the estimated $15bn a year the federal government spends
subsidizing fossil fuel development. At the end of August, the US Import-Export
Bank approved $5bn in financing for a natural gas project in Mozambique. We
have more than enough money to fight the climate crisis, at home and abroad.
It’s just going to all the wrong places.
Greenhouse
gases don’t fit neatly within borders. Efforts to curb them can’t either. Like
other wealthy countries, the US has a responsibility to pay its fair share for
the damage it’s caused to the planet – not through predatory loans or
disastrously managed charity but through solidarity. Bernie Sanders’ plan for a
Green New Deal pledges $200bn to the GCF, makes climate a centerpiece of
American trade and foreign policy and ends fossil fuel financing through
institutions like the Import-Export Bank. An extensive, recently released
blueprint of a Green New Deal for Europe lays out a rapid and just transition
away from fossil fuels, accounting for the emissions rich countries export
abroad through trade and the need for a thoroughly democratic response to the
climate crisis that doesn’t let the governments who have engineered this crisis
call all the shots on how the world handles it.
It’ll be
tempting, as Dorian drifts toward Florida, for observers in the US to forget
the death and destruction it has left behind elsewhere. That would be a
mistake. Jeff Bezos’s escape plans notwithstanding, we’re all stuck on this
warming planet together. Whether human civilization stays intact amid all this
worsening weather depends on recognizing our shared humanity – and designing
policy accordingly. Platitudes for the planet won’t cut it.
Kate Aronoff
is a freelance journalist covering climate change and US politics
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