“Where are you from?”  I was often asked that question while growing up in Southern Indiana in the 1970s.  I didn’t look like anyone else in my white hometown and people had a hard time believing I belonged there. I hated the question, but for them it was a polite way of dealing with their confusion over how the hell a biracial Asian girl ended up in their community.

“Where are you from?” is the question I thought people were thinking when I sat through a Western Climate Initiative stakeholder meeting last spring, once again in a place where I didn’t look or sound like everyone else. Sitting next to me was a white guy in a starched, button-down shirt representing the petroleum industry.  Then there were other corporate types right out of central casting vying for their stakeholder interests. And finally a small cadre of passionate environmentalists who spoke in terms I didn’t yet understand, like “greenhouse-gas emissions,” “carbon offsets,” and “cap and trade.”     

I had spent most of my career fighting for economic justice, working with people of color and those with lower incomes.  Their struggle is to keep food on their tables, a roof over their heads, and access to social services, while clawing at their chance for the American Dream.  Back in the mid-1990s, I founded what became Washington state’s largest anti-poverty organization.  We mobilized thousands of people with low incomes to raise their voices for change and won significant victories.  

So why was I in this room discussing carbon emissions?  Because climate change is an economic-justice issue. Regardless of how our government ultimately decides to handle climate change policy, poor people will be affected.  They can be included in the new clean energy economy or they can be further pushed out in the cold. 

What do I mean by that?  Doing nothing on climate will only make things worse for the poor and people of color in this country.  The result of decades of inaction on this issue has already dramatically affected the lives of people: from more intense hurricanes that disproportionately hit people who cannot escape the rising tide, to the higher cost of food in a fossil fuel–driven economy, to heat waves that often trap the elderly in stifling apartments.    

Even doing something, unless done right, can be harmful. Because climate legislation is intended to provide market signals to encourage energy efficiency and the development of clean alternatives to fossil fuels, any effective legislation will necessarily result in higher prices for fossil-fuel energy and energy-related goods. Those higher prices, if left unaddressed, would hit low- and moderate-income households hardest, because necessities like gasoline, food, and home-heating costs take a much bigger bite out of their pocketbooks than those of wealthy households.  Low-income families are also less able to respond to higher energy prices by conserving energy because they do not have the capital to invest in more energy-efficient appliances and vehicles. 

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that without consumer relief, low-income households would see their costs increase by an average of $425 per year as a result of climate legislation.  This is money that families earning $16,000 a year simply can’t spare.  Unless these costs are offset, the purchasing power and living standards of these lower-income consumers could fall significantly over time.

Fortunately, the opportunities for people living in poverty are abundant if we design an effective and equitable climate policy.  Doing so will improve the lives of many in the U.S. and will better position the Obama administration to be a leader as our nation engages in an international discussion on addressing global warming in Copenhagen this December.   

The House of Representatives has already taken the lead by designing climate policy that would not drive low-income households further into poverty.  The bill that passed in the House established a key principle that low-income Americans as a group must be no worse off because of the higher prices associated with climate legislation.  On top of the relief all households—regardless of income—would receive on their utility bills, the House bill includes a climate rebate for families and individuals in the lowest income quintile that would compensate for increases in energy costs as well as other necessities.  These provisions send a strong message about the importance of protecting low-income households from the costs of climate legislation. The House bill takes an efficient and effective approach to making sure we reach the right people by using two existing systems:

Neither approach on its own is sufficient; however, in combination, they reach the overwhelming majority of the lowest-income households.  This direct relief must be in addition to any indirect compensation that may be provided through electric and gas utility companies.  Because the majority of the additional cost for people with lower incomes would come from areas other than home utility bills, relief solely through utility companies is inadequate.

As the Senate begins to take action on climate, it is critically important that, at a minimum, it maintains the same commitment adopted by the House to fully protect the lowest-income people from net cost increases.

In addition to protecting low-income consumers, climate change policy also provides the opportunity to make investments that can move people out of poverty.  Along this vein, there’s been a lot of attention paid to the term “green jobs” in the climate debate. And this is an exciting possibility for real change in our economy and for workers in the U.S.  However, for green jobs to live up to expectations, the jobs created must be unionized and pay a living wage, with focus on training and employing people living in poverty and people of color. 

Passing climate legislation this year is a necessary and crucial step in controlling greenhouse-gas emissions and encouraging the development of renewable-energy technologies that will create these green jobs.  As people living in poverty in the U.S. and around the globe are increasingly and disproportionately harmed by global warming, the obligation is on the democratically elected representatives in our rich nation to act with courage. 

As leaders from around the world gather in Copenhagen to tackle the challenge of reducing global-warming pollution, an important question they will want to ask each other is, “Where are you from?”  And because of the shared risks of climate change, all the answers should be identical:  “The same place as you: planet Earth.”

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We all know that the devil's in the details when it comes to legislation, and the American Clean Energy and Security Act, a.k.a. Waxman-Markey, is no exception. This 900-plus page proposal tackling climate change and clean energy is chock full of such fiendish facets.

We at Sightline Institute carefully studied the climate portion of the ambitious bill from Representatives Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts and prepared our new-and-improved Cap and Trade 101: A Climate Policy Primer to take a close look at what the bill proposes.

The primer will run you through the basic concepts of capping emissions and issuing tradable, carbon-pollution permits; it explains in (relatively) simple terms the moving parts involved in regulating carbon dioxide pollution; and it gives an assessment of Waxman-Markey's likelihood of tamping down emissions while investing in renewable energy and protecting American consumers struggling to pay rising fossil fuel prices.

Download a free copy of the primer or two-page executive summary here.

In brief, here's what we learned.

Waxman-Markey sets annual goals for US greenhouse gas reductions, calling for a decrease to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and a drop of 83 percent by 2050. We get there through a cap-and-trade program with these features:

Overall, the bill is a mixed bag of proposals we like and dislike. (Sightline director Alan Durning dissects and grades the bill in his blog post "14 Things I Love -- and 6 I Hate -- About Waxman-Markey"). What's next with the legislation? It was approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on May 21. The House Agriculture Committee held a hearing on the legislation last week, spending much time on the offsets issue. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi previously said she wanted the bill voted out of the relevant committees by tomorrow. And Politico is reporting that the White House wants action on Waxman-Markey by next week. 

But what will happen in the US Senate is far from clear. Point Carbon has reported that Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate environment committee, wants to propose amendments to the bill before the summer recess, which could be as early as August 3, while other senators don't expect the full Senate to vote on a bill before the end of the year. 

Nationals cap photo courtesy of Flickr user nonsooth under the Creative Commons license.

This post originally appeared at Sightline's Daily Score blog.

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Nick Stern is a relatively recent recruit to the battle against climate change, but he has rapidly become one of its most formidable champions. A former Chief Economist at the World Bank and top official at the British Treasury, Baron Stern of Brentford (to pay him due deference) is very much an establishment figure, far removed from the traditional environmental campaigner.

Nicholas Stern addresses the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change last March in the Danish capital.University of Copenhagen via FlickrShort, graying, bespectacled and compact -- with a tendency to talk in academic jargon -- he is, as the Guardian newspaper pointed out, the last person a film director would "cast as the rock star of the climate change movement." But since the publication of his groundbreaking Stern Review on the economics of global warming less than three short years ago, he has become that and much more. For when he speaks, governments listen.

So when he throws a new proposal into the melting pot of the negotiations on a new international climate change treaty, as he did just the other day, it is worth pausing to consider it. And this one is both controversial and a potential gamechanger. For it both breaks radically with the position of Britain and other developed countries, and could resolve a key deadlock threatening to prevent agreement at December's vital meeting in Copenhagen.

Put simply, Stern suggested -- in answer to a question after a speech to the Hay literary festival in Wales -- that Britain, the United States and other rich countries should take ownership of part of the greenhouse gas emissions of rapidly industrializing countries like China and India.

These have long been one of the chief stumbling blocks in the negotiations, a new bout of which opened in Bonn at the beginning of this week. These emissions are increasing fast; China's carbon dioxide emissions doubled in just ten years between 1996 and 2006, and the country is believed to have recently overtaken the United States as the world's biggest polluter. China announced in January that it planned to increase coal production by another 30 percent by 2015.

Though everyone accepts that the world's rich nations will have to make the biggest and earliest emission cuts, the climate simply will not be able to tolerate the increasing pollution from the rapidly industrializing world. Though both China and India have already taken some strong measures -- particularly in boosting the use of renewables -- the two countries say that there is a limit to what they can do. The Chinese regime even privately fears that really tough action could bring an end to the Communist Party's 60-year lock on power.

The rapidly developing nations point out that it was industrialized countries that caused the problem in the first place, and that their per capita emissions remain far lower than in the developed world. And they add that much of their pollution results from making goods for export to rich countries, and so they should therefore not be held responsible for them.

The first two of these objections is widely accepted and is among the principal reasons why even the fastest growing developing countries will not be required actually to cut their emissions under a new treaty. But the final one remains highly controversial and hotly contested.

Yet there is some justice to it. Up to a quarter of China's emissions result from manufacturing products for the United States and European markets, according to studies by the prestigious Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain and the New Economics Foundation.

And a report by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Sydney University, on behalf of the British government, demonstrated that when these manufacturing-related emissions and emissions from aviation and shipping are taken into account, the UK is responsible for 200 million tons more carbon dioxide than official figures show. Such fuller accounting reveals that instead of Britain's emissions of the gas dropping by 5 percent since 1992, as its ministers constantly boast, they actually rose by 18 percent.

Nick Stern's suggestion broke with the developing world's party line on emissions by accepting that the Chinese and Indian case is "very sound" -- "There is a definite responsibility with the consumer and not just with the producer," he said. And he suggested that since "both parties gain" from the process, the importing and exporting countries should take joint responsibility for the emissions.

The former long-serving Swedish prime minister, Goran Persson, has recently made the same point. Speaking in Beijing last month, he said that developed nations should shoulder some of the responsibility for developing country emissions since they "exported production of some energy-wasting goods to those economies."

It's early still, and there is a huge distance to travel in the six short months before the opening of the Copenhagen conference. But it just may be that Nick Stern has mapped a route to a successful conclusion, one that could allow for more forward movement than is likely to result from the talks that opened on Monday in Bonn.

--

Below, Lord Nicholas Stern discusses an April 2009 report by the Asian Development Bank on the economics of climate change in Southeast Asia.

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Forty-five million people go hungry or undernourished because of droughts and disasters wrought by climate change, according to a recent report by the Global Humanitarian Forum. Climate change leads to 300,000 deaths a year, the organization concludes, a toll that will reach 500,000 by 2030. Many of those who starve will be children. Of course, those numbers don’t begin to convey the human suffering that lies behind them. And so on and so forth.

Also, your family’s ski vacations could be completely ruined by climate change. If your taste leans tropical, your favorite beachside resort—the one with the awesome mojitos and coconut shrimp—could also be imperiled by rising sea levels and fiercer storms caused by climate change.

So which is more likely to prompt you to do something? What’s going to prompt the average American, or the average citizen in the developed world, to demand action?

Ski resorts or starving third-world babies—it’s a blunt and maybe crude way to put the question, but there’s a fundamental tension between these poles for how we tell the story of climate change. Whether they make their decision consciously or not, anyone who must communicate about climate—activists, politicians, journalists, anyone directly affected—must choose whether to appeal to altruism or to self interest.

I’ve been thinking about this after spending last Thursday and Friday at the Three Degrees conference on human rights and climate change, hosted by the University of Washington School of Law. If there was a central message from the diverse group of scholars, humanitarian aid workers, scientists and lawyers who spoke there, it was that climate change needs to be framed as a human rights problem.  The climate crisis is too big, the argument goes, to be viewed as a “nature” problem typecast as something for scientists and treehuggers to worry about. And it’s too morally significant to be a mere political issue.

Three Degrees speakers were squarely in the appeal-to-altruism camp. A panel of aid workers spoke of how climate change functions as a “stress multiplier,” worsening almost every problem they deal with. It heightens food and water insecurity, creates refugees, ramps up the potential for violent conflict, exacerbates tropical diseases, and leads to more disasters that demand urgent responses.

There was a lot of talk about future generations, who will bear the cost of our ecological behavior. I briefly mentioned Carolyn Raffensperger’s work to create formal guardians for future generations in the legal system, but it’s a fascinating idea that deserves real attention. (See guardiansofthefuture.org for more.) Several speakers argued this expands the appeal of a human rights approach to climate, as those who have trouble relating to coastal Bangladeshis or Somalis are more motivated to help their own grandchildren.

But does this approach accomplish anything? We already understand third-world health as a moral issue, but that hasn’t stopped millions of people from dying of preventable diseases, John Knox, a senior advisor to the Center of International Environmental Law and a Wake Forest University law professor, pointed out.

“If we’re not getting worked up about that, why are we going to care about the grandchildren of those same people,” he said on a panel on Friday. He went on to clarify: “I believe moral arguments have some purchase, otherwise I wouldn’t be working in human rights.”

The conference didn’t include a lot of talk about the strategic implications of telling the climate story as a human rights story, so here’s a stab at some:

Somewhere there’s a high school debate student calling me out for pitching a false dichotomy. Fair enough. You don’t have to choose only appeals to altruism or only appeals to self interest. And “selfish” reasons aren’t all as trivial as vacations. The first ways most Americans feel the effects of climate change may well include rising grocery prices because of droughts, rising home insurance rates because of increasingly severe and unpredictable weather, and other genuine day-to-day living concerns.

Still, framing a climate plan as a provider of, say, “America’s Clean Energy and Security” makes one sort of appeal. As a body of relief workers, legal scholars, wonks, and activists argued last week, it’s not the only method available -- and it may not be enough to spur the world to action.

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Courtesy of Three DegreesI’m spending this Thursday and Friday at the Three Degrees conference on climate change and human rights, hosted by the University of Washington School of Law. Some 40 speakers—mostly legal scholars, but also public health experts, NGO leaders, trial lawyers, and political organizers—are gathered to debate the future of the law as it applies to victims of climate change. The first day was thought-provoking, sobering, and occasionally bewildering. Oddly enough, the biggest moment of clarity for me was a story one of the speakers told about another conference.

Mary Robinson—former president of Ireland, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and a generally with-it public leader on climate change—spoke about attending climate talks in Bonn, Germany, in March. Young activists there wore t-shirts with the question, “How old will you be in 2050?” International delegates, said Robinson, realized there was something to the message and asked for t-shirts of their own.

OK, it’s not much of a zen moment, but something about the personal nature of the question—“How old will you be…”—carries more intimacy than a broad, sweeping slogan. Something about posing it as a question carries more weight than a statement. Something about leaving climate change’s countless uncertain, messy, and mundane implications packed up for the moment—there’s more punch to it that way.

I suppose there’s a place for unpacking what’s going to change, and the speakers at Three Degrees did a lot of that. Robinson, in a lively talk, said human migration is likely to be “the single greatest impact” of a changing global climate. She said 150 million people are expected to be displaced by 2050, driven by a combination of desertification, water scarcity, and fiercer storms and floods.

She laid out a vision of “climate justice” as an orientation that keeps human rights at the forefront of climate work. To her, that involves acknowledging that people are already suffering because of climate change, listening to under-heard voices, and taking “responsibility for our past as well as our current emissions.”

“We must stop pointing fingers,” she said. “Blaming China, for example, for having a large population and being a poor country that wants to develop. That’s not going to produce meaningful progress.”

Robinson's talk was timely, given today's release of a new humanitarian report on the human toll of climate change. The Global Humanitarian Forum, a group created by former UN chief Kofi Annan, says global warming is killing 300,000 people a year, a number expected to rise to 500,000 by 2030.  Also timely, the New York Times reports that the International Migration Organization is predicting growing numbers of climate refugees (PDF).

Aside from Robinson’s keynote, there were other highlights:

* An argument that future generations should have guardians in the legal system today, from Carolyn Raffensperger of the Science and Environmental Health Network in Ames, Iowa. There’s plenty of precedent for this, she said. Children who need representation in court are appointed guardians ad litem. Small businesses have their own ombudsman in the Department of Justice. For seven years, Israel had a Commission for Future Generations. Raffensperger suggested UW become the nation’s first law school to develop a certificate program for such guardians.

“Future generations cannot speak for themselves, but we can appoint guardians for them,” she said.

* Blunt assessment of the current legal system. “Our system is embarrassingly and unacceptably inaccessible” to those who need it most, said Bill Neukom, immediate past president of the American Bar Association. He led a panel that roundly agreed existing law isn’t up to the task of addressing climate change effects. Steve Berman, a trial lawyer who worked with the Exxon Valdez oil spill, gave an update from the Kivalina case, a suit against 24 oil, coal, and power companies by an Alaskan village under threat from climate change-driven coastal erosion.

The village, with Berman’s representation, filed not just a public nuisance claim but also a conspiracy claim, alleging the companies actively concealed information to avoid having to change their behavior. He likened it to a successful suit against tobacco companies who worked to conceal the health risks of using tobacco.

“Our claim is that they avoided regulation, they avoided being called on to reduce emissions, by creating the fiction that there was a debate in the scientific community,” said Berman, managing partner at the Seattle firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro.

The case is awaiting a decision from a federal judge in California. If the defendents' motions to dismiss are denied, it would the first case of its kind to make it to that point.

* Finally, on a completely different note, my biggest mistake of the day might have been arriving too late to hear the morning performance of Climbing Poetree, a spoken-word/artists-of-many-stripes duo. They were listed as “conference inspiration,” which I figured was an oxymoron. But I’m told they floored the 200 or so attendees. You just don’t hear many stories of people moved to tears at law school conferences.

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The Lancet and the University College London (UCL) Institute for Global Health have been engaged in a year-long research project on the health and social effects of climate change. The final report was just released.

The overall conclusion? "Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century." It's grim, grim stuff. So of course no one will pay attention.

Here's a short video introducing the project:

Here's more reading if you want to dig deeper:

Here is a summary of the five main challenges:

We are so unprepared for the shitstorm headed our way.

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Joel Hunter, important pastor.Dr. Joel Hunter, reputedly one of President Obama’s five favorit-est pastors, might have just gotten even more favorit-er.

The Florida megachurch pastor stars in a blitz of new ads on Christian radio stations intended to raise support for a climate bill like the one under consideration in the U.S. House. Hunter, a registered Republican, draws squarely on religious language in the 60-second spots (listen here):

The ads are part of a larger campaign by faith and military groups (an odd combination?) to support climate legislation and ensure that the government “prioritizes the most vulnerable at home and abroad,” according to a news release. The campaign wants a climate bill to include direct rebates to help offset increased energy costs for the American poor and international aid to help developing countries adapt to the effects of climate change.

The ads began airing yesterday in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Virginia, and Ohio – states with lots of religious voters. The ads are funded by the American Values Network (AVN), a faith-based advocacy group recently launched by Burns Strider, the faith outreach director for Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign.

“Addressing climate change is not just a matter of national security and sound economic policy, but a moral duty to care for God’s creation and to care for the needs of those who are contributing the least to climate change but bearing the brunt of its burden,” said Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.), who spoke on the conference call with reporters yesterday. “We need to ensure that this legislation fairly addresses the burden on low- and middle-income families, especially at a time when millions of Americans are out of work.”

AVN boasted it would be spreading its climate message via email to more than 5.3 million evangelicals and Catholics, which sounds like a page from the playbook of Religious Right groups like Focus on the Family. Strider has been an influential religious-voter strategist among Democrats; in tapping Rev. Hunter to speak in the ads, Strider chose a “new evangelical” leader who’s shown more interest in connecting his faith to climate change than to issues like gay marriage and abortion. (Read an interview with him from Grist’s God & the Environment series.)

The network says a number of religious groups have staked out the same position--insisting a climate plan must focus on help for the vulnerable: the Evangelical Climate Initiative, Southern Baptist Environmental Climate Initiative, National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, The United Methodist Church General Board of Church and Society, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), The Episcopal Church, and Redeem the Vote.

It also claims that three military groups -- Veterans Alliance for Security and Democracy, the Truman National Security Project, and Veterans Green Jobs -- share their climate action principles.

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Joshua Kahn Russell, the grassroots actions manager at Rainforest Action Network and a lead organizer of March's Capitol Climate Action in Washington, DC, has written a great assessment of the climate justice movement and its emerging goals.

Looking back at the historic protest at the Capitol Power Plant, which ultimately forced congressional leaders to come clean on the use of dirty coal, Josh notes:

We organized the Capitol Climate Action because we saw an opening to connect these struggles more publicly, help build momentum around them, and “supercharge” the energy to keep the exponential increase rising.

This struggle has transcended single-issue organizing. The varied efforts to stop coal have brought diverse stakeholders together. Stemming from the people of color, working class, and women-led Environmental Justice movement, Climate Justice has become a political banner for the climate crisis’ intersecting racial justice, economic equity, community health, and environmental quality issues, of which elements of “no coal struggles” are a part. It is useful to think of campaigns against coal as one strand of a robust frontline-led Climate Justice movement.

Josh examines the Capitol Action's three main goals and outcomes -- change the national conversation on climate, press the new administration and Congress for bolder climate policy in 2009, and build the climate justice movement and legitimize non-violent direct action and civil disobedience -- and then discusses the role of direct action in the growing anti-coal movement. He writes:

The seeds are planted for decentralized actions against coal across the United States, integrated with varied campaigning tactics on multiple fronts. Should we be successful at networking efforts, this network must weave itself into a broader Climate Justice movement (whether or not it uses that name). If we hope to win, the movement must be relevant enough to relate to, and help create, a broad-based progressive majority that is unafraid to build unlikely alliances across the political spectrum, while maintaining a principled anchor of its left wing.

Groups helping anchor the left wing of this formation are tying conditions to participation. These conditions currently center around economic empowerment and social uplift for communities of color and other impacted peoples, led by a compelling, if potentially co-opt-able, call for green jobs. Climate Justice organizers can build their leverage in this new political terrain through increased demonstrations of power. The Capitol Climate Action sought to test our limits, and found that we’re ready for more. So let’s push further.

Indeed, let's push further.

Read the complete article on Josh's blog or a shorter version in Z Magazine. 

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

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President Evo Morales of Bolivia never shies away from a scuffle. He was elected as Bolivia's first indigenous president after toppling the previous government with massive street protests, and he has since legalized the coca leaf, nationalized the mines, and tossed out the U.S. ambassador.

Bolivian President Evo Morales makes an offering to the "Pachamama" (The Mother Earth) during a ritual at the sacred Aymara site of Tiwanaku, Bolivia. Morales has called for rich nations to take on the problem of global warming, noting that the worst effects fall on poor nations.Photo: Noah Friedman-RudovskyThe one-time coca farmer and llama herder is now wading into the ring of global climate negotiations to embark on his grandest crusade to date. His twenty-point list of demands on international climate policy represents the toughest line taken by any national leader, including a call for developed countries to contribute one percent of GDP -- close to $700 billion per year -- to a compensatory adaptation fund for poor and vulnerable nations.

"Western development has created a deathly wound to our Pachamama," says Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca, using the Aymara term for Mother Earth. "Industrialized countries need to assume their responsibilities."

If the United States agreed to finance Bolivia's proposal based on its 2008 GDP, it would owe roughly $146 billion -- over 11,000 times more than America spent on international adaptation in the 2008 fiscal year.

It's just the kind of uphill battle that the Bolivian government likes best.

"We think even this figure is small," says Juan Pablo Ramos, Vice-Minister of the Environment, "when we consider the $700 billion bailout for the U.S. financial crisis."

Bolivia's case rests on an argument that is rapidly gaining ground in poor countries -- that climate change must be addressed as a fundamental threat to development. Economic losses that can ultimately be traced back to industrialized nations' carbon emissions, they maintain, must be compensated with the same urgency that these countries have discovered in confronting their own financial crises.

Instead of talking about the ecological footprint of Bolivian development, Ramos is concerned with "the ecological footprint on our development" -- and worries that his country is getting squashed.

Gisela Ulloa, coordinator of Bolivia's Clean Development Office, says that the nation has "lost a large percentage of GDP in the last couple of years from climatic events" that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has linked to global warming, including flooding disasters in its Amazonian lowlands and the melting of Andean glaciers critical to water supply. Adaptation funding, in Bolivia's view, should address both the costs of these present-day damages and the opportunity costs of foregoing Western style industrialization.

This North-South perception gap about the nature of the threat posed by climate change is widely unrecognized by government and environmental leaders in developed nations.

"In the industrialized countries, climate change is seen as an environmental issue and not a development issue," says Adil Najam, lead author of the sustainable development section of the 2007 IPCC assessment. "For most of the people of the world, it is and will remain a development challenge."

The Bolivian government believes that it can shift the very framework of the global debate on climate change. The nation's "fundamental strategy," says Ramos, is to develop third-world block positions at Copenhagen and beyond to redefine the world's approach to climate policy. At treaty negotiations this April in Bonn, Bolivia had gathered a trio of leftist Latin American allies to demand compensation for the "climate debt" -- Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

Global environmental institutions, he argues, should see their primary obligation as serving the world's poorest nations, who contributed least to the problem and whose chances for development face profound environmental barriers.

The international approach that Bolivia envisions would start with a greater emphasis on adaptation, which they say is the primary challenge facing third-world states. It would reject market mechanisms, which Bolivia claims reward polluters rather than victims of climate change, in favor of aid to developing countries. Governments could access these funds through streamlined procedures instead of submitting formal proposals to the Global Environment Facility, a process that often takes years.

For their part, industrialized nations would cut carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2020 and 90 percent by 2050. They would eliminate all subsidies for fossil fuels, end patents on green technologies, and directly finance avoided deforestation in the poor world.

"Radical measures are needed to produce massive results," says Vice-Minister Ramos.

Bolivia is facing long odds. The climate adaptation financing proposals Bolivia's leaders want are not only exponentially greater than what Western governments are currently paying, they're well beyond the range of what Western NGOs are recommending. Oxfam, for example, has issued an influential report calling for rich countries to spend $50 billion per year on adaptation - almost fourteen times less than the Bolivian proposal.

Heavy rains caused major flooding in Bolivia in 2007 and 2008, where large portions of the country, like the Beni region, were under water for months. President Evo Morales has called on wealthy nations to shoulder the burden for global warming.Photo by Noah Friedman-RudovskyBolivia's emphasis on the poorest nations, exemplified by its demand to restructure the Clean Development Mechanism to serve least developed states rather than industrializing giants, is also unlikely to be taken kindly by developing world heavyweights such as China, India and Brazil.

All told, Adil Najam isn't holding his breath for a third-world climate policy revolution.

"Part of me wishes that was going to happen, but it ain't going to," he says. "Wake me up when it does."

Nevertheless, the gridlock on adaptation financing has recently given signs of easing. Industrialized nations have pledged to include adaptation assistance in the Copenhagen climate treaty, and U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern has called for "substantial funds" for adaptation in the developing world to be incorporated in a U.S. cap-and-trade bill. Two of the leading climate proposals in the last Congress, the Lieberman-Warner and Markey bills, called for roughly $1 billion and $2-2.5 billion per year, respectively, for adaptation assistance.

This range would represent an increase on the order of a hundredfold in U.S. support for adaptation -- though still about ten times less than Oxfam recommends, and a hundred times less than Bolivia demands.

Adele Morris, an expert on climate change economics at the Brookings Institution, is concerned that a radical stand on financing on could endanger the prospects of a new treaty.

"The challenge will be getting a consensus in Copenhagen that's also ratifiable in Congress," she says. "You would hate to see the U.S.' ability to reach agreement torpedoed by overly ambitious demands from Bolivia."

An official in Bolivia's National Climate Change Program indicates that the country is likely to sign any agreement that emerges from Copenhagen. But the government insists that the current debate on adaptation funding amounts to shifting deck chairs on the Titanic. At the Poznan negotiations last December, delegates from rich and poor nations stalked out unable to reach agreement over a single percentage point in the rate of proceeds from global carbon markets that would be dedicated to adaptation.

"We were fighting for around $80 million for so many countries, but that's not going to save Tuvalu," says Gisela Ulloa, who represented Bolivia as a delegate. "It was a disaster. It was almost a waste of time."

Bolivia is convinced that this can only be resolved when developed nations fundamentally change their understanding of the role of adaptation. And until this occurs, Bolivian officials promise that we'll be hearing a whole lot more from them.

Bolivian officials says they will form a coalition of underdogs, including indigenous groups, social movements, and the world's most vulnerable states, into a pack so large that their case can no longer be denied.

"We are going to make our point more forcefully in the coming months," says Juan Pablo Ramos. "So that it is not an isolated voice, but a global demand of various nations and various peoples that eventually becomes a requirement."

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