While recent heat waves were causing thousands of deaths, the Trump administration was busy dismantling policies that regulate greenhouse gases on the theory they don’t harm human health.
Meanwhile, the international community appears to be getting serious about climate change, as evidenced by a new ruling by the International Court of Justice that countries harmed by climate change can sue those responsible.
The ruling, triggered by a group of Pacific Island students facing inundation of their homes from sea level rise, opens a pathway to financial compensation from countries that emit the most greenhouse gases, as well as assistance in restoring ecosystems and infrastructure damaged by climate change.
The ICJ ruling comes amid the planned evacuation of the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu, with 80% of its 11,000 residents seeking climate visas to emigrate to the Australian mainland. Island nations like Tuvalu and Vanuatu, which led the ICJ case, stand to suffer the most from climate change.
The ruling is an acknowledgement that those who bear most of the responsibility – especially the richest 1% of humanity who generate 66% of GHG emissions – should share more of the costs.
Reparations from high-emitting countries are a first step toward climate justice, a partial remediation of wildly uneven distribution of the wealth and harms of global economic growth, which has caused emissions to skyrocket. Billionaires’ net worth climbed by $2 trillion in the past year, while the number of people in poverty has changed little since 1990.
Climate change compounds the misery of those left behind in this system. They will comprise many of the one to two billion displaced or killed by climate change this century.
Globalization and endless economic growth was sold with the promise of alleviating poverty for billions of people. Yet the majority of the benefits flow to the few at the top, leaving less than 10% of wealth for the bottom 50%. The rest flows to the global middle class, set to grow to 5.3 billion by 2030, with most of that growth concentrated in Asia.
This rapidly growing class of consumers means rapidly growing demand for fossil fuels, transportation, appliances, processed and packaged foods, and meat-centric diets, all of which spell enormous increases in greenhouse gases.
This explains why population growth and accompanying global consumption growth account for most of the increase in carbon emissions since 1990, according to the International Panel on Climate Change. It cancels out most of the reduction in emissions from clean energy, efficiency, and alternative technologies.
The hundreds of millions of people emerging from poverty deserve a better standard of living. But the middle-class lifestyle marketed to the world through globalization spreads at the cost of diverse, traditional, more Earth-centered lifeways. Its spread is not a simple “development” success story; it demands redressing unsustainable levels of consumption across all socioeconomic classes and the vast inequalities that remain.
There is no greater inequality than ecological overshoot, where we use resources faster than Earth can regenerate, and our pollution, including climate pollution, surpasses what warming oceans, disappearing forests, and degraded ecosystems can absorb. This year, July 24 marked Earth Overshoot Day, the date past which that capacity is exceeded for the rest of the year. It comes earlier each year as our consumption and waste accelerate, signifying we are increasingly stealing from future generations by destroying planetary life support systems they and all other species need to survive.
Climate reparations are a step toward climate justice for people alive today, but do nothing about the profound intergenerational and interspecies injustice of ecological overshoot. To address that, there is no escaping the need to scale back our economies, our consumption, our waste production, and our numbers.
Finally, after decades of economic and population growth at the expense of the future, contraction may be on the horizon. Unrestrained extraction has brought our economic system to a point of diminishing returns. From fossil fuels to fresh water to trace minerals used to build renewable energy systems, resources are running short, and we can expect this to limit future economic growth.
Given these realities, global fertility declines should be cause for celebration, yet recent news about record low fertility rates of 1.6 children per woman in the United States has been met with alarm by political leaders and wealthy interests who benefit from perpetual growth.
But those who care about the well-being of humanity and the planet ought to welcome declining population growth in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. It is a partial reprieve for the climate, and a relief valve for growing inflationary pressures from resource scarcity.
Climate reparations and broader conversations about climate justice are necessary but not sufficient. Protecting and restoring our planet’s climate and ecosystems will require fundamental re-ordering of our economic system, away from endless growth, ecological overshoot, and enriching a few, towards rational contraction, operating within Earth’s limits, and providing for the basic needs of all.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kirsten Stade is a conservation biologist and Staff Writer and Editor for the NGO Population Balance.
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