Are developing countries justified in demanding that developed countries take responsibility for their historical contributions to climate change, and therefore reduce their greenhouse gas emissions before the developing countries do?
A simple answer is - Yes, you break it; you have to fix it. It’s a powerful moral truth that resonates with even the most hard-hearted or morally misguided.
The planet’s poor and vulnerable, particularly in rural Asia and Africa, will be the first to suffer from global warming caused by the historical industrialization and deforestation of developed countries. Those now living on the edge of survival will suffer the most, even though they have contributed the least carbon output. Their basic survival securities -- health, hunger, and shelter are already being affected by rising temperatures.
- The livelihoods of roughly 450 million of the world’s poorest people are entirely dependent on managed ecosystem services; about 2.6 billion people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. (Cameron et al, 2013)
Scarcity brings political instability and with it further suffering – repression, terrorism, and genocide. Meanwhile, those of us in countries that have over the last two centuries increasingly used carbon output to build comfortable lives, argue among ourselves and pose arrogantly as failed former President G.W. Bush did in 2000, when he set the tone and temper that the Republican party follows fourteen years later:
- “I’ll tell you one thing I’m not going to do is, I’m not going to let the United States carry the burden for cleaning up the world’s air, like the Kyoto treaty would have done. China and India were exempted from that treaty, I think we need to be more even-handed.” (G.W.Bush, 2000)
It is obvious that rural Africans, Indians and South Asian villagers don’t have the skills or tools needed to solve the complex problem of global warming, although they will be the first to suffer its consequences. Its just as obvious that developed countries should take the leadership initiative in reducing carbon emissions because they alone have the money, resources, and advanced technological infrastructures to find effective solutions that can be used to reduce carbon emissions in both developed and developing countries. Why haven’t they? Why haven’t massive tax-funded programs to solve the problem been started?
Here in America two factors interact with each other to produce inaction - The usual basic human faults: greed, hatred, and ignorance, and a complacency based on a misguided faith in last minute technological miracles - It’s gonna be OK, technology will find a solution.
Americans are paralyzed in a debate fueled by vast amounts of greed - corporate energy company money and the Republican party. Climate Change Believers vs. Climate Change Deniers - the noise of the debate leaves no middle ground for rational action or the creation of effective policy. Most deniers, except for the real crazies, secretly believe the science. The vast majority on both sides, wouldn’t say it out loud, but their plan for a solution to climate change is to stop watering the lawn and turn the air conditioner up. That’ll probably work just fine for their family, too bad about some family in an African village. They have always had it rough anyway.
Our greed prevents any thought of cutting consumption to reduce carbon output. President Reagan, among his many “gifts” to the American people introduced the term, “Tree-hugger” -- branding anyone concerned about the environment over production and consumption as an Un-American wimp. Americans are a “I buy therefore, I am” nation. Do we really firmly intend to continue shopping and the rest of the planet be damned?
We think we’ll be okay, because we believe that our cities and our way of life will somehow be saved by our wonderful technology and not by our poorly funded science programs. Back in the sixties Star Trek predicted that we would take five-year voyages to discover distant worlds, communicate with tiny hand-held devices and talk to each other on giant screens. It did warn us that bad decisions can generate disasters on a planetary scale, but it also gave us a fictional confidence that push a few buttons and technology can solve our problems instantly without the need to dedicate large amounts of tax money, effort, and resources to solutions that can be applied globally in developed and developing countries.
Meanwhile, the temperature is rising, and those of us who are rational are forced to confront the fact that something has gone terribly wrong with the process of creating and implementing solutions to real dangers. Below are two headlines from this week - May 6 - illuminating our paralyzed condition:
U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods
“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the scientists declared in a major new report assessing the situation in the United States.
GOP rejects grim White House climate change report,
Republicans vowed Tuesday to fight back against the Obama administration’s regulatory agenda, dismissing the White House’s massive new climate change report as nothing more than a “political document intended to frighten Americans.”
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