Climate Reparations

In case there was any doubt that ‘Climate Change” was not communism, here is an article in Foreign Policy that will remove it.

The Case for Climate Reparations

The world’s poorest will bear the worst consequences of the climate crisis. Redirecting international resources to address entrenched inequalities provides a way out.

NICOLÁS ORTEGA ILLUSTRATION FOR FOREIGN POLICY

BY OLÚFẸ́MI O. TÁÍWÒ, BEBA CIBRALICOCTOBER 10, 2020, 6:00 AM

Current estimates put the world on track for as much as a 5°C temperature increase by the end of the century, reshaping the places that humans have lived for thousands of years. Island states such as Haiti, Cape Verde, and Fiji face “existential risks” from sea level rise and extreme weather events. By as soon as 2050, large parts of Mumbai, Ho Chi Minh City, and New Orleans may be underwater.

Over the next 30 years, the climate crisis will displace more than 140 million people within their own countries—and many more beyond them. Global warming doesn’t respect lines on a map: It will drive massive waves of displacement across national borders, as it has in Guatemala and Africa’s Sahel region in recent years.

The great climate migration that will transform the world is just beginning. To adapt, the international community will need a different approach to politics. There are two ways forward: climate reparations or climate colonialism. Reparations would use international resources to address inequalities caused or exacerbated by the climate crisis; it would allow for a way out of the climate catastrophe by tackling both mitigation and migration. The climate colonialism alternative, on the other hand, would mean the survival of the wealthiest and devastation for the world’s most vulnerable people.

It’s filled with goodies such as:

Climate colonialism is like climate apartheid on an international scale. Economic power, location, and access to resources determine how communities can respond to climate impacts. But these factors are shaped by existing global injustices: the history of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism that enriched some countries at the expense of others. Global warming has exacerbated these inequalities, and the climate crisis will lead to new divisions between those who can mitigate its impact and those who cannot.

It’s for the greater good Comrade

Unless these powerful entities abandon financial and political self-interest in favor of the greater good, the pursuit of elite interest in a world where power is distributed so unevenly guarantees climate colonialism—that is, if society survives at all. 

It’s all about redistribution;

But to mitigate climate change effectively and fairly, the international community needs to broadly redistribute funds across states to respond to inequalities in resilience capacity and the unjust system underpinning them. As Mohammed Adow, the director of the Nairobi-based think tank Power Shift Africa, explains, the international community has already designed a mechanism that could perform this task: the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which is the largest international fund aimed at helping developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate impacts. 

Read the full article here.

HT/Steve Milloy