Climate change is a universal menace, threatening hardships for everyone. But it's not an egalitarian menace: everyone will not suffer equally. Perversely, those people and nations least to blame for causing it are most vulnerable to its impacts.
Climate disruption heaps misfortune on the less fortunate, whether in low-lying Bangladesh, the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, or the flood plains around Chehalis, Wash. In the aftermath of climate change, the less you have, the more you're likely to lose.
"The division of labor among nations," wrote historian Eduardo Galeano, "is that some specialize in winning and others in losing." Those left behind in the global economic race will suffer the most from climate change too. Poor nations with tiny carbon footprints are those most threatened. Hundreds of millions of people in Bangladesh, island nations such as the Philippines and Indonesia, and drought-prone Africa will bear the brunt. Their homelands will become uninhabitable; unlike better-off people, they lack the wealth to move or adapt.
In Cascadia, too, climate change promises to widen the gap between economic winners and everyone else. Here it's working families, particularly in rural areas, who face the worst climate insecurity. Low-income families are most likely to live in flood plains or fire-prone forests. (Or, I should say, if they have a home in the woods, it's their only home, not a second home). Like Bangladeshi peasants, they're unlikely to have the means to move to safer ground. What's more, they are least likely to have health insurance to protect themselves from diseases spreading from the tropics.
Woods workers in British Columbia are already losing jobs from the climate-induced plague of pine beetles laying waste to the forests. Reservation-dwelling Native Americans and First Nations are vulnerable because of their dependence on fisheries, forestry, and agriculture. Immigrant farm laborers -- among the poorest workers in Cascadia -- also face disproportionate hardship. Dwindling supplies of irrigation water will squeeze harvest jobs, and crop failures from increasingly variable weather will post "not hiring" signs across farm counties.
This epic injustice gives the lie to the argument that stopping climate change is "just" an environmental issue. Indeed, it makes arresting climate change as much a social priority as an environmental one.
And it argues for climate solutions that are not only efficient and effective, but also fair. A certain amount of climate change is already unavoidable. Inevitably, it will punish the blameless. Because climate change takes disproportionately from the poor, we should design our climate solutions to help the poor disproportionately. In other words, climate solutions should make working families and poor nations economically whole.
How to do this? I'll write about this next time.
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Comments
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Pompey Road Posted 10:08 am
25 Jan 2008
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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Sam Wells Posted 2:48 pm
25 Jan 2008
OK, we need two things. First, a long-range plan to reduce man-made CO2 inputs, with all the attendant greenhouses gases. Second, we need to help some people with some rather serious problems happening already.
And you know, we might start working on the second part because all kinds of new bugs are going to start growing the more it warms up. I'm serious, stuff like as tiger mosquitoes and dengue fever are headed up north. So we have to plan for stuff like that.
From my disco days: "do it, just do it man."
Onward through the fog
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:13 pm
25 Jan 2008
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johnmcc793 Posted 12:25 am
26 Jan 2008
Having reached the end point with my Wall Street focus, along comes the great international credit crunch and panic. And, wow. Wall Street saddled up and became the search and rescue team on steroids. Maybe it is too late to stave off serious and long-term economic recession in the US and non-commodity export nations but there is a lesson here. Wall Street will act in its collective self-interest and the better we understand whom those self-interest are, the more likely we can affect their behavior.
The many billions of shares traded every hour around the globe are not the work of day-traders sitting at the kitchen table. Pension and mutual funds are the major betters and day traders hang out t the $2 window.
Putting an increasingly higher price on carbon and making bettors understand the risk of betting on carbon-overweight stocks will eventually have a desired effect because share earnings will diminish as production costs increase faster than consumer income.
Imagine midwestern electric customers having to absorb a 10 cent/kilowatt-hour charge--bringing those customers into line with prices paid by New England customers (supplied mainly by gas/oil/hydro and nuke sources). The Midwesterns would revolt and either the US economy would collapse or non-carbon electric power sources would come streaming into that market region. Capital for the new low/no-carbon generating equipment would be derived either by borrowing at likely high ROR rates or by shareholder equity.
It is hard for me to imagine "Global Wall Street" operating in any other way.
John L. McCormick
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Sam Wells Posted 3:16 am
26 Jan 2008
Which is precisely how we got got into the current fix, along with a shrinking dollar and a housing bubble. My conclusion is that a carbon tax wouldn't change things very much, other than to pass through costs to the ultimate consumer. Wall Street is not there to absorb any of those costs, but simply to bet by placing a short or long position on anything.
But if consumers react, watch out because over a third of the US economy is simply driven by consumers. In other words, Wall Street had little societal benefit to anybody besides some very rich traders themselves.
Many economists thing we're already in a recession and their numbers prove it. With tightening budgets, less money is available for nice Climate Change programs. Those opposing forces, shrinking liquidity and expanding need for Climate Change action, is a tough topic to predict.
But if calamities happen, the people consumers pay for it if they can see it. Incidents like Bhopal really get people. An example of "Bhopal" incidents would be the remarkable growth in wildfires out west. As we run out of money to fight the fires, more people are building in sensitive fire zones! Obviously, climate change will have an impact there, since we can't afford to keep [literally] burning our money in a senseless way.
Discussion of disasters linked to Climate Change are pouring in every day. The only exception, as I have noted before, is that there is no clear proof that hurricanes are getting worse. Amazing though, with less hurricane risk over the last two years Wall Street has jacked up coastal insurance by approximately a factor of two.
Let's face it, Wall Street is in la-la land and is no longer relevant to consumers except when it bites them in the butt.
-sam
Onward through the fog
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SMLowry Posted 3:21 am
26 Jan 2008
And we need to be more compassionate. When I read some of the "solutions" and attitudes in some Grist posts toward the so-called general populace, especially when referring to people in the US, I admit I cringe at times. For instance, there's a certain arrogance when one talks about rising food prices due to high energy costs, corn for fuel, whatever the reason, and then saying something like, "Well, it might help the obesity epidemic". As if fat people were the problem and making it harder for them to buy food was a good thing. Those attitudes are not endearing.
Fact is, we're all going to have to get used to paying more for things we had come to rely on being cheap. Like food and gas and heating oil. This is the way it is now. Fact also is, if we're going to be good and compassionate people we're going to have to figure out a way that these rising costs don't unfairly hit poor people, in other countries and in our own. And we need to wake up right now and realize that they already are, that people are freezing and going hungry and losing their homes or apartments and eating less nutritious food and not all of these are those we would have labeled "poor" even two or three years ago.(And they're not all fat either.) Times are changing very quickly and we need to deal with the reality of it now.
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Bulkee Posted 6:00 pm
13 Mar 2008
[If people's needs for ecological value can't be converted into practical profits, then it is unthinkable that every participant should exert himself to gain ecological profits.]
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