Sunita Narain
It was a trade exhibition abuzz with the restrained chatter of busy suited executives at company stalls making contacts and finalising deals. Nothing out of place except that this trade was about renewable energy technologies, which have unconventional reasons for growth. First, these technologies are seen as the most economical and feasible source of energy for millions of people unconnected to the electricity grid and having no electricity to light their houses or cook their food. This energy poverty is disabling and needs to be eradicated. Introduction of decentralised and improved technologies paves the way to catapult the poorest of the households into the most modern systems. Secondly, these technologies—from wind and solar to biomass—provide cleaner low-carbon energy options to combat climate change. These are future systems critical for survival of all.
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Martin Khor
It’s been a full year since Japan’s triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, and the reverberations are still being felt.
The tsunami of 11 March 2011 caused around 19,000 deaths (16,000 known dead, 3,000 missing), and 320,000 were made homeless. The nuclear disaster alone created 100,000 nuclear evacuees, a new tern created to describe those who had to leave their homes to escape radiation.
The lesson, only still partially learnt in Japan itself, and hardly learnt yet in other countries, is that natural disasters can come in different and unexpected forms, and governments must put aside considerable resources and facilities to prepare for and manage them.
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Patrick Bond
(also available in Portuguese at INESC)
To be sure, it’s a difficult period for imposing new environmental taxes, given ongoing financial sector power over public policy. With the entry of European Union airlines into the region’s fast-collapsing Emissions Trading Scheme, a group of non-European countries led by the Chinese is revolting against paying higher air fares to and from Europe.
There are bad and good arguments about carbon taxation here. According to a China Daily report, “Europe’s compulsory charges are set to have great impact on China’s aviation industry, and more profound influences may be found in the export sector. China therefore strongly opposes the EU’s unilateral action, viewing the EU’s move as violating the United Nations Climate Change Framework Convention and related regulations of the International Air Transport Association.”
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Sunita Narain
The United States has always been the climate change renegade. For the past 25-odd years, since negotiations for a global agreement to combat the threat of this potential catastrophe began, the US has been the naysayer, pushing against a deal, weakening the draft and always hiding its inaction behind the legitimate growth of emissions in countries like China and India.
This much we know. We also know that this issue has lost so much traction in that fuel-guzzling country that Barack Obama, who came with a promise of change, has backed down on any discussion on climate change. In 2008, after he was elected on a promise of change in the climate change policies of the Republican government, Obama announced, “this is the moment when the rise of oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”. But since then, little has happened to cut emissions at the scale and pace needed. In the current elections, Obama does not mention the C-word and climate change is a non-issue. The US has no interest in taking the lead in this matter. But, as I said, this is what we know. There is a new development afoot that could push the US to ‘clean energy’ but the zillion-dollar question is if this will be good or bad for the future.
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Martin Khor
Climate change is also a human rights issue, as indicated by the seminar organized by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva last week.
Bangladesh’s foreign minister Dr Dipu Moni described the devastation caused by climate-linked disasters which threaten its people’s rights to food, water, health and housing.
The Philippines is in an equally precarious situation. Its Commissioner for Climate Change, Mary Lucille Sering, spoke of how many storms and floods killed many hundreds of people last year and the country has to spend or find US$8 billion to rebuild damaged areas and property.
The two-day meeting arose from a resolution of the Human Rights Council last September reiterating concern on how climate change poses an immediate threat to people and has adverse implications for the full enjoyment of human rights. It called for a seminar to clarify the issues.
A major question is how the interface between the climate issue and human rights should be framed.
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Matías Vernengo
It has been common for certain progressive groups to suggest that better income distribution and no growth, or even degrowth more recently, would be better than the capitalist driven consumerist growth process [for a critical review of this literature go here]. Several different strands of thought are involved in this view, and it would probably be worthwhile to disentangle them all.
First, there is an obvious Malthusian flavor to this view, going back to the dire predictions by the Club of Rome in the early 1970s, as a result of limited availability of non-renewable resources. Peak oil has been predicted a few times since. And yes it may very well happen in the near future, but somehow I doubt it. Remember that we moved away from coal and steam engines to oil and combustion ones, not because coal disappeared or became truly scarce, but simple because technological change made it less important as a source of energy (and yes we still burn a lot of coal).
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Martin Khor
A group of 26 countries are organising themselves to retaliate against the European Union for its move to charge airlines for the greenhouse gases they emit on flights into and out of Europe.
This seems to be the start of a trade war fought over climate change.
Many countries whose airlines are affected – including China, India, Malaysia, Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Brazil and the United States – consider this to be unfair or illegal or both.
This is the first full-blown international battle over whether countries can or should take unilateral trade measures on the ground of addressing climate change.
Developing countries in particular have been concerned over increasing signs that the developed countries are preparing to take protectionist measures to tax or block the entry of their goods and services on the ground that greenhouse gases above an acceptable level are emitted in producing the goods or undertaking the service.
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Edward B. Barbier
(also available in Portuguese at INESC)
The survey by Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick on what happened during the 2008-9 financial crisis, “Getting Up To Speed on the Financial Crisis,” to be published by the Journal of Economic Literature, focuses on an important cause of this crisis: global imbalances in the world economy. As Gorton and Metrick suggest, such imbalances include the “institutional cash pools” caused by sovereign wealth funds and the “global savings glut”.
While the United States has been amassing large current account deficits, China, Japan, other Asian emerging market economies and some oil exporters have been generating trade surpluses. Similar structural imbalances were occurring within major regional economies, such as the European Union, where the large current account surpluses of France and Germany were offset by deficits in Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. The result was that economies with chronic trade deficits were receiving large and sustained capital inflows from surplus economies seeking new asset investments. These massive credit flows precipitated the bubble and subsequent bust in financial markets, and the persistence of such global imbalances continues to add to the uncertainty and instability of the world economy.
Understanding how the global imbalances caused the financial crisis and subsequent recession is important. But addressing these imbalances in the world economy will need a much more profound change in global economic development.
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Fander Falconí
The recent upholding of the ruling against Chevron Corporation by the Provincial Court of Justice of Sucumbíos, Ecuador, comes as an inevitable reminder of the decades-long situation in Nigeria, Africa, with the Shell Oil Company – the one with the sea-shell logo. In Nigeria, the consequences have been disastrous.
It is worth pointing out that inhabitants of Ecuadorian Amazonia, organized in the Amazonia Defense Coalition, state that Texaco, acquired by Chevron in 2001, is responsible for social and environmental damages caused by oil-related activities carried out over the past 26 years. The company was sued for damages and a judgment was pronounced. Although Chevron appealed this decision, the ruling has been fully upheld and the company is now to pay a USD 18 billion damage award. This is a case involving Ecuador. Not the government but the judicial system is responsible for determining the socio-environmental liabilities of the company.
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Sunita Narain
Many years ago, in a desperately poor village in Rajasthan, people decided to plant trees on the land adjoining their pond so that its catchment would be protected. But this land belonged to the revenue department and people were fined for trespass. The issue hit national headlines. The stink made the local administration uncomfortable. They then came up with a brilliant game plan—they allotted the land to a group of equally poor people. In this way the poor ended up fighting the poor. The local government got away with the deliberate murder of a water body.
I recall this episode as I watch recent developments on climate change. At the recent Durban climate change conference small island nations—from the Maldives to Granada —believed, rightly so, that the world has not delivered on its promise to cut emissions and is jeopardising their future. But they do not have the power to fight the powerful. So, this coalition of climate victims turned against its partner developing countries, targeting India, for instance, for inaction. These nations pushed for India to take legal commitments to reduce emissions, dismissing its concerns of equity as inconsequential.
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