http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/10/18/14437/451

Climate equity: Tom Athanasiou

Justice requires fair burden-sharing

Posted by David Roberts on 19 Oct 2007

On climate equity
1. Danielle Deane
2. Andrew Pendleton
3. Tom Athanasiou
4. Wolfgang Sachs

This is a guest essay by Tom Athanasiou. Athanasiou is a long-time left green, a former software engineer, a technology critic, and, most recently, a climate justice activist. He is the author of Divided Planet, co-author of Dead Heat, and the director of EcoEquity.This essay is part of a series on climate equity.

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"Climate equity" names an almost impossible problem with no easy answers. For one thing, it's too late for easy answers; the climate crisis is now a climate emergency. For another, this is a world so mired in its own injustice that it can barely move, let alone abruptly change course. It's a situation with which readers of Jared Diamond's Collapse will be all too familiar. The only good news is that this time around we know what's happening. If change comes only when it must, then now's the time.

The place to start is with the climate emergency. And, sorry, but it is. Even if you place it against other world-class threats -- global energy war, billions of people faced with endless humiliation and poverty, extinction and environmental decay on a terrifying scale -- the climate emergency quite holds its own. What other word is there when catastrophic levels of sea level rise are now being "locked in," even as global emissions (and, for that matter, the rate of increase of global emissions) are continuing to rise? When the science tells us that, to have a high probability of holding total warming (since pre-industrial) to 2C degrees -- a widely endorsed maximum, but by no means a "safe" one -- global emissions must peak somewhere around 2015? When the more we overshoot 2C the faster we'll need to pull down post-peak emissions, if, that is, we want to keep the warming to "manageable" levels? When, to quote John Holdren's bitterly precise summary, "We already know the future, and it's some combination of mitigation, adaptation, and suffering"?

In such a situation, we don't really stand much of a chance of preventing "dangerous climate change," not unless people everywhere give it their best shot. But why would they? That's the real question here, and the answer has to be short-term as well as long. It has to be that people, all sorts of people, come to know that by acting against climate change they make their lives immediately and palpably better -- that emergency mobilization (to use an inescapable military metaphor) makes sense in terms of the daily architecture of ordinary lives.

The "realists" talk about "interests" as if they were simple things, as if the richest and the poorest of a country's citizens had congruent interests. But it's easy to see that they don't, particularly when things go to hell. No matter the emergency, some people live far from the sorrow, while others -- imagine being dirt poor in a future Southern megacity -- will experience tomorrow's world pretty much as they experience today's, as a daily emergency. The difference would be real -- think widespread, semi-permanent water shortages -- but the suffering, finally, would not be anything new.

Climate equity is just a piece in the puzzle, but it's a critical piece, and maybe a decisive one. The climate emergency makes even "the crisis of development" and "the crisis of poverty" salient in new ways. What this comes down to, and I hesitate to use this word because it sounds so vague, so abstract and banal, is cooperation. But cooperation, within divided nations and across this divided planet, is a precious thing, and it has no acceptable substitute. We're either going to act like we're in this together, or we're not going to make it.