The Climate Debt the U.S. Owes the World

Another variation of the dying polar bears theme.  Environmentalism has become nothing more than a sentimental guilt trip.  The nonproductive activism of justice warriors will still leave Blanca Costa collecting garbage with a horse drawn cart.

The United States provided the world the means to decarbonize in the 1950s with atomic energy.  Environmental activists killed that chance.  Now we are stuck with an intractable threat to us all because environmentalists 'saved us'.

Today we are inundated with glowing environmental messages of the marvels of alternative energy.  These environmentalists completely ignore that electronics manufacturing is one of the most environmentally unfriendly activities we could pursue.  Once again these nonproductive activists are sending us down a path that will lead to intractable threats to us all.

Climate change is a self correcting problem.  Humans are causing climate change.  And a changing climate will begin killing humans.  The consequences removes the cause.  And Blanca Costa will continue to collect garbage with a horse draw cart until the end.  

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Central America has been through a wet version of Hell these past few weeks, as first a Category 4 and then a Category 5 hurricane crashed into the same part of Nicaragua's Caribbean coast, dumping crippling amounts of rain on that country, Guatemala, and Honduras. Delphine Schrank opened an account of the toll on Honduras's second-largest city, San Pedro Sula, for the Washington Post with this anecdote: "Blanca Costa crouched on a wooden cart with her three daughters under a highway bridge. . . . The cart was the one possession Costa was able to save when they clambered out [of their flooded house]. The three horses that pulled it, enabling her to earn money as a trash collector, were gone. It would take years, she said, to save enough to buy another one."

It goes without saying that Costa and her daughters had done nothing to cause the increase in global temperature that, in turn, allowed massive late-season hurricanes to form in their corner of the Atlantic. And it goes without saying that Honduras will now have an even harder time paying for a changed energy system to help it convert to clean energy, as its commitments set in the Paris climate accord envision—its cobbled-together reconstruction plan is unsurprisingly focussed on rebuilding the bridges and roads that the storms destroyed.

Such intuitions about blame and responsibility have usually been offered in airy moral terms, but a new report released on Wednesday puts them into numbers. The analysis, from the activist group U.S. Climate Action Network, draws on the work of Tom Athanasiou, at a California-based nonprofit called EcoEquity, and his colleagues at the Climate Equity Reference Project. It tries to calculate how much of the burden each country should be bearing, based on its historical contribution to the cloud of greenhouse gases and its "capacity to pay"—a reflection of how rich the nation became during the fossil-fuel era. The report finds "that the US fair share of the global mitigation effort in 2030 is equivalent to a reduction of 195% below its 2005 emissions levels, reflecting a fair share range of 173-229%." That is, we can't meet our moral and practical burdens simply by reducing our own emissions; we've already put so much carbon into the air (and hence reduced the space that should rightly go to others) that we need to make amends. Of this hundred-and-ninety-five-per-cent reduction, Athanasiou says, seventy per cent would be made domestically, by building solar panels, rolling out electric cars, and insulating buildings. "This is about the maximum achievable by 2030, though cuts of this magnitude would require a full Green New Deal war footing," he notes. "The rest—the other 125%—would come by way of financial and tech support for adaptation and rapid decarbonization in poor and developing countries."

For the past year, nations (and companies) have been announcing plans to reduce their emission levels to zero by mid-century. As Athanasiou says, that's a welcome development, but, he adds, "Not one of these countries has made anything like an adequate move to support ambitious decarbonization and adaptation plans in the developing world. Or even, despite lots of talk, to significantly cut fossil subsidies. In fact, as I'm sure you know, a lot of the COVID recovery money has gone to the fossils."

A country like Honduras has not used anything like its fair share of the planet's carbon budget. By decarbonizing, it will be doing far more than its fair share—and it won't be able to, unless countries like the United States help foot the bill. That is the only honorable, and only sensible, course: they don't call it global warming for nothing, and you can't control it anywhere without controlling it everywhere. Our political debate has poisoned the idea of foreign aid in recent years, and it will be a hard lift for the Biden Administration to come close to meeting the requirements of justice. But it won't be as hard a lift as Blanca Costa is facing these next few years, pulling a trash cart without her horses.