Consider Bangladesh, one of the nations most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. By 2050, some 27 million people are expected to be at risk from rising sea levels. But the average Bangladeshi’s greenhouse gas emissions are just a fifth of the global average, and one-sixteenth of those of a typical US resident.
Low-income countries, women, children and indigenous peoples are all already disproportionately affected by climate change. Within wealthier nations, existing inequalities within countries are also exacerbated. Those already disadvantaged are more likely to be exposed to climate hazards and have less ability to cope with and recover from the damage.
“Low-income countries, women, children and indigenous peoples are all already disproportionately affected by climate change.”
In recent decades, those with the most power and influence to deal with climate change have failed to fully address its many interconnections with inequality. “It almost existed in a separate political sphere,” says Tim Gore, head of policy, advocacy and research for Oxfam International. “But if we don’t get the emissions down fast enough then nothing else really counts.”
But a more nuanced approach to dealing with climate change is emerging that recognises the climate crisis cannot be justly resolved without also addressing inequality. “We’re going to tackle those two things together or not at all,” says Gore.
A solely technocratic approach to cutting emissions will fail to fully deal with the problem. A surge of initiatives and proposals — from taxing those with the highest greenhouse gas emissions to low-carbon jobs — are gaining ground. These ideas offer hope for a future where green policies could both reverse climate breakdown and create a fairer world.
Carbon taxing
There are already some forms of carbon tax in place, like the UK’s ‘carbon floor price’ which has been credited with the country’s massive reduction in coal use over the past seven years. But not all carbon taxes tackle inequality to the same extent. “It’s worth remembering that energy and carbon-related activities are actually a higher proportion of the incomes of poor people than those of rich people,” says Tim Jackson, ecological economist and author of Prosperity without Growth.
One way to tackle this could be to tax those who use more than their allotted share of carbon. This would see everyone given a ‘carbon right’, an allowance of emissions that would cover their basic living needs, after which they would pay increasing rates of tax on the carbon they emit. “That has a progressive impact on society and on income, and it would actually help to reduce both carbon and inequality,” says Jackson.
Looking more globally, the climate damages tax, proposed by campaign group Stamp Out Poverty, outlines a system where a tax on fossil fuel extraction would aid vulnerable countries facing the worst climate impacts. Most proceeds would go into an international fund for vulnerable countries, although a portion would also go back to the country where extraction happened to help pay for the fair transition to cleaner energy.
This idea challenges the status quo, in which the fossil fuel industry is permitted to make trillions of dollars in profit from a natural resource that forms part of the commons, while the rest of society pays for the true cost of their product. “The idea of the climate damages tax is to try and address that,” says climate change consultant Julie-Anne Richards, “to make it clear that the fossil fuel industry should pay for their damage, not the rest of us.”
Making soil carbon a commodity:
The proposal is in some ways similar to a carbon cap and dividend, whereby to burn fossils fuels, firms would have to pay a fee that would be distributed equally to all citizens. This measure has been proposed as a simple, fair way of taxing carbon that could garner popular support. The Citizens’ Climate Lobby, one advocate in the US, says its proposed system would see around two-thirds of Americans receive more in dividends than they would pay in higher prices.
But Richards says the climate damages tax is actually a fairer proposal. “If you are just distributing it straight across everybody in society then that’s going to have a political benefit but it’s not necessarily going to address the people who are facing [climate] impacts,” she says.
Carbon taxes in their many forms will likely continue to play a role in how we deal with climate change. But a crucial part of any carbon tax must be that it comes embedded in a plan to phase out fossil fuels completely. “There is no tax in the world that will cover all the damage that will happen from burning all the fossil fuels,” says Richards. “We must make sure that it’s not used as an excuse not to phase them out.”
Greener employment
A comprehensive green employment plan was first set out almost a decade ago by the Campaign Against Climate Change. It proposed that the UK government hire 90,000 workers a month to do additional “climate jobs”, from building wind farms to insulating buildings. “In a year we will have a million new jobs,” said the campaign’s updated 2014 report.
In addition to jobs in green energy, large parts of our economy will need to be transformed to make them less polluting, while those currently working in carbon-intensive jobs will need to be retrained in greener work to maintain their livelihoods. Coal workers could be retrained in renewable energy trades as their mines are phased out and shut down.
This supports the idea of a “just transition”, a concept developed by the trade union movement, that argues for a range of social interventions to secure workers’ jobs as we make economies less dependent on fossil fuels. The concept has gained some political traction: it was a key theme highlighted by the Polish presidency at the annual UN climate negotiations last December. The Scottish government has also set up its own Just Transition Commission.
But just transition has never captured the public imagination as much as another proposal dealing with government investment: the Green New Deal. Advocated for most famously by US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, this envisions a wide-scale public investment programme in things like renewable electricity and mass energy efficiency retrofits to both decarbonise the economy and provide decent jobs. The plan has provoked fierce debate among climate advocates, some of whom have criticised it as unfeasible. Others say its ambition is exactly what makes it so compelling.
Financing the carbon phase out
The need for international “climate finance” to flow from richer countries to poorer countries has long been acknowledged as a key tenet of climate justice at UN climate negotiations. This finance currently takes two forms: support for poorer countries to cut their emissions and support to help them adapt to the negative effects of climate change already locked in, such as droughts, floods and extreme weather. The former currently receives far more investment than the latter.
“It’s very much an obligation tied to the principle that the polluter pays,” says Liane Schalatek, associate director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America and expert on climate finance. “Those that have caused the harm should help those that are most affected by the harm.”
Those that have caused harm have yet to commit sufficient funds to the task. The current collective pledge, set in 2009, is $100bn per year by 2020. But “hundreds of billions to trillions might be needed when you look globally at what needs to be done,” says Schalatek. A new goal is likely to be set in the future, but negotiations have yet to begin.
While climate finance solutions may sound positive, benevolent even, it’s important to understand that funds aren’t given to poorer nations for free. Instead, much of it is transferred in loans that will ultimately have to be repaid. “It’s not just a matter of how much money you are giving, but also in what form you are giving, so the quality of finance,” says Schalatek. “Loans and grants are not equal.”
Schalatek argues in particular that providing loans for adapting to climate impacts is comparable to someone destroying your house and then offering a high-interest loan for the repairs. “Particularly if it’s to be serving the poorest people in the poorest countries for their most basic survival, giving something like that in the form of loans is just unconscionable,” she says.
While progress is being made holding the governments of developed nations to account for their contributions to climate breakdown, Gore argues we should also be asking what contribution multinational companies (some of the biggest polluters) should be making. “There is no doubt a question about how multinational companies need to take their responsibility in their liabilities to communities that are worst impacted by climate change,” he says.
Empowering women
Another crucial aspect of ensuring climate finance reduces inequality is making sure it is actually reaching those most impacted by climate change. Women are disproportionately affected by climate change, and women in poverty are far more likely to be impacted than men.
It is often the women in families who grow food on small plots for local consumption and fetch water for daily use: both activities affected by climate change. But women farmers often have very low access to education about how to grow food better, says Schalatek. “Agricultural extension services are usually biased towards talking with the man of the family,” she says.
At the same time, such women have valuable knowledge which could be helpful in adapting to climate change, such as traditional, high-yield and weather-resistant seed varieties that may be more culturally appropriate and cost effective than a high-tech solution. To uncover such knowledge requires that women are allowed a seat at the decision-making table.
New economics
Referred to by phrases such as ‘regenerative economics’, ‘resilient economics’ or ‘post growth’, a growing collection policy ideas suggest that societal success and wellbeing should be measured against other yardsticks than GDP growth. Some countries have already taken notice: in its budget this year, New Zealand put social wellbeing indicators ahead of GDP when it comes
to spending decisions.
These ideas are also important for the low-carbon transition. “Not being scared about the impact we have on growth is one of the precursors to having a successful transition to a net zero economy,” says Jackson, who argues that some of the changes needed to cut emissions could damage the output of certain sectors and reduce the productivity of the economy.
But this means we have to design the transition to ensure that inequality is fully taken into account. “The last thing that you’d want to do is to put into place a series of policies, even if you’re tackling climate change, if they create greater inequality than we’ve got,” he says.
“Not being scared about the impact we have on growth is one of the precursors to having a successful transition to a net zero economy.”
Jackson also talks about a “sweet spot” of work in the economy that produces the quality of life that we want without the carbon impacts that we don’t. But to reach this sweet spot would require redrawing the entire values system of a capitalist economy, so that the work most useful to a just society was fairly rewarded.
Another way of visualising how the ecological crisis interacts with inequality comes from Kate Raworth, senior visiting research associate and lecturer at The University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, and a key figure earlier in this issue.
Raworth criticises conventional economic thinking, and argues that tackling inequality is essential to return humanity to within the limits of social and planetary boundaries — an idea she exemplifies with the image of a doughnut. The doughnut is the optimum place where essential needs such as food, income and gender equality are met, but where we also stay well within the planetary limits of our natural resources, enabling ecosystems
to thrive.
“We have barely set out on this adventure in rethinking economics,” Raworth writes. “Join the crew!”
