SELF-SERVING FRAMING OF CLIMATE JUSTICE
However, an important new CarbonBrief study casts grave doubt on this self-serving framing of climate justice. By including the historical emissions from land use change and deforestation, it has dramatically overturned the previous picture in which the developed north is the world’s largest contributor to existing warming.
While the United States is still the world’s largest historical emitter by far, China, Russia, Brazil, and Indonesia are second, third, fourth and fifth. Germany is sixth and India seventh. Developed nations take up the next six places, with Australia thirteenth due to its coal dependence and enormous emissions from land clearing. Argentina, Mexico, and South Africa then follow.
When we then consider that China is now responsible for 30 per cent of annual world emissions, twice that of the United States, and add concern about future global heating, there is a broad equality of responsibility for preventing catastrophe.
Not only is the LMDC’s framing of climate justice untenable, it ignores the terrible human toll of ongoing fossil fuel burning, deforestation and climate chaos, which falls heaviest on the world’s poorest people.
Just in the last decade, violent cyclones have killed tens of thousands of people and caused billions in damage in the Philippines, Fiji, Mozambique, the Caribbean, and the southern states of the United States.
CUTTING EMISSIONS NOW
Four million Bangladeshis were displaced by extreme weather and sea-level rise in 2019. Climate activists and environmental defenders campaigning against deforestation, mining and oil extraction are being murdered in their hundreds annually.
And air pollution from coal-fired power, motor vehicles and household burning kills as many as 8 million globally every year, many of them in India and China.
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