Environmental justice? I doubt it.
A persistent theme in much writing about the coming decades is the need for global agreements that go a good deal further than the technical questions of environment management. Typically commentators mention three goals:
The results must be effective (as opposed to political gestures).
The means must be efficient, keeping costs down at least to the extent of not undermining economies (though this is often an unspecified aim).
Any global deal must be equitable regarding abilities and responsibilities, reflecting both the historic causes (i.e., national responsibilities for atmospheric carbon, etc.) and future effects (i.e., focusing on who suffers worst).
Everyone seems to say as much, and as a statement of how we ought to approach the coming decades it is hard to contradict.
I just don’t believe it will happen. In fact I suspect that the most we can realistically expect is that the actions we take will be moderately effective. Civilisation will probably not collapse in its entirety. But as for efficiency and equity, what is it in our performance to date that would lead anyone to expect either? I doubt that, whatever the deals we collectively agree too, our collective response will be anything of the kind. There are far too many countervailing forces for that to happen.
The efficiency of any future global strategy is almost certainly out of the question. As everyone admits, we are faced with global problems. But we do not have global systems in place to deal with them. On the contrary, our systems are not only fragmented but also full of conflict and antipathy between individual nations. There is also a profound conflict of interest between the owners and senior management of global corporations – the other most powerful economic players on the planet – and the rest of us.
Of course, in some profound sense we are all in this together, and completely failure will be fatal for all of us. But between here and complete failure there are many decisions to be made, each of which will benefit some and burden others. Reluctant though I am to say it of my fellow human beings, those who control the decision-making at each of these branching points will, more often than not, make sure that the decision is made in their own favour. That is to say, they will be decisions which are efficient for them. They will be ‘keeping costs down’, and this may mean keeping down the costs for humanity at large. But it will almost certainly involve minimising the costs of those who control the decisions. If this means increasing the ‘costs’ – the poverty, the danger, the hunger, the misery, the disease, the fear, the agony – for everyone else, then that will be presented as the best – or at least the least bad – alternative. Those who do not control these decisions will take the consequences. Which, in many cases, will be fatal.
As for equity, we have never taken this seriously in the past and I believe it will be a lot harder to take seriously in future. In the current (relatively) stable and affluent industrial world, only a handful of the most wealthy nations ever fulfils its public commitments on aid. We announce and re-announce help for long-term development and short-term disaster, but then fail to live up to either. Given that the sums involved – typically 1% or less of GDP – are so small that we would not miss them if we paid them in full, what can we expect of decisions about disasters that are not yet even visible? In a future world of successive environmental crises, mass migrations, resource wars and much else, there will be far less concern for, let alone commitment to, equity. On the contrary, most of humanity will not even show up on the radar screens of the key decision-makers.
Why then should we expect equity from any future arrangements to curb climate change, resource depletion, ecosystems degradation, population growth and other environmental threats? I suspect that the real fount of future ‘equity’ is likely to be what it has always been – the economic power that the BRICS+ and other less impoverished countries are starting to wield.
The United States Treasury has long since eyed nervously China’s enormous dollar holdings – they currently hold nearly $1 trillion in US Treasury bonds, whose manipulation could easily hole the West’s economy. These are people we will treat ‘equitably’ – because they come to the negotiating table as near-equals, not to mention rivals. But the hundred-plus countries that are each smaller than all of the world’s hundred largest companies? If GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco Systems and Wells Fargo are unlikely to be granted a seat at the top table, what can lesser economic entities like Estonia, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Trinidad and Tobago, Ivory Coast, Panama, El Salvador, Tanzania, Bahrain, Jordan, Iceland, Bolivia, Ghana, Paraguay, Zambia, Uganda, Botswana, Honduras and the many other yet smaller countries expect?
But not even the effectiveness of any future ‘global deal’ can be taken for granted. Or, more precisely, there are degrees of effectiveness. I would suggest three levels of outcome from our current position: a setback comparable to a (non-nuclear) world war; an impact on our civilisation as a whole comparable to the fall of the Roman empire; and a threat to civilisation as such, comparable to a new ice age. I do not know which we are really facing, but for all the reasons that we should expect neither efficiency nor equity, we should expect the effectiveness of our actions to be limited too – perhaps to the point where the next hundred years go down as the worst in history.
More precisely, we should expect rich and powerful countries that are situated in relatively cool regions to do as little as possible until they have no choice but to act in their own interests. That is after all what they have always done about global problems and what they have done so far about our current environmental threats. Even if they have the foresight to recognise that disaster in developing countries now will mean disaster for them later – especially in the form of mass migration – they will almost certainly do only what is needed to forestall the disaster to themselves. This will certainly be much less than preventing or remedying the disaster to developing countries – no doubt accompanied by a great deal of hand-wringing, protestations of good intentions and endless dishonest claims to be taking ‘appropriate’ action, with the real focus being exclusively on deflecting the negative consequences for the rich and powerful. Again going by our experience of aid and under-development, the West will even find opportunities to benefit from the suffering of developing countries. Again, we always have. And then millions and millions of people will die.
The upshot of all this is simple. Simply continually asserting that our approach must be efficient, effective or equitable, all the while implicitly assuming that nothing about our global political or economic systems needs to change, will result in none of these being attained. If we want our response to the many environmental threats we face in the twenty-first century to be any of these, we must take a very firm and explicit decision that nothing will be allowed to stand in our way. More than that, we must create global organisations and institutions of humanity at large – which is to say, representing people rather the most powerful corporations and nation-states and the socio-economic systems that feed them.
It is hard to imagine what such a world would look like. After all, none of our existing systems operate at that level. But then, I can still think of no compelling reason to expect any such institutions to be created even if they could be easily described, and the chances of their coming into existence recede faster and faster as the real problems caused by 2°, 3° and 4° increases in temperature start to hit us, as the global economy starts to unravel and whole populations start to move in the face of poverty, hunger, disease and war.