A Way to Unite Everyone behind Climate Justice
A simple but brilliant idea is at the heart of Monbiot’s case.
Rich nations owe a massive climate debt to poorer nations for the devastating impacts of the fossil fuels we have burned. Yet they have no intention of paying for the loss and damage they have caused. Poor countries are deemed to owe massive financial debts to the rich nations, yet they cannot pay them without destroying their economies and their ecosystems.
Given this problem, the answer seems obvious: to simultaneously cancel both the climate debts and the financial debts. This will free up the money poorer nations need to take climate action. This is the proposal of the “Debt for Climate” initiative, which mobilises labour, social and climate movements in 28 countries. Their proposal has just been launched at the G7 summit in Germany.
The extent of the debt owed by the poorer nations in the “global south” is enormous: between 1990 and 2019, it rose on average from roughly 90% of their GDP to 170%, making them critically indebted. As Monbiot puts it, “the idea that the global south, looted and enslaved for centuries, should owe money to its exploiters is grotesque.” Today, foreign debt forces poorer nations to hand their assets, including raw materials, energy, land and labour to rich countries and multinational companies. Much of the apparent wealth of rich nations depends on systematically exploiting the poor in this way.
Poorer nations also bear the burden of the climate breakdown imposed on them by the rich. Jason Hickel, in The Lancet Planetary Health, argues that the former G8 nations are responsible for 85% of the CO2 emissions responsible for dangerous levels of heating. Yet the overwhelming majority of the deaths caused by climate breakdown happen in the global south.
“Debt for Climate”, says Monbiot,
calls on poor world governments to refuse to honour their debts, and to channel the money they would otherwise have had to pay into public services, climate adaptation and a just transition out of fossil fuels. It calls on activists in the rich world to demand the cancellation of debt and an end to austerity, both at home and abroad, and reparations for the devastating loss and damage caused by our greenhouse gas emissions.
In this way, climate campaigns are indivisible from global justice.
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Written by Wendy Morgan