The world of Greenhouse Development Rights, in other words, is not merely a world divided between North and South. It is also a world in which both North and South are divided between rich and poor. Which has a very particular implication: developing countries must curb their emissions, but the global consuming class – the elites within the industrialized world and within the developing countries as well – must cover the costs and provide the resources necessary to enable an emergency global transition to a low-carbon economy. More particular, the Greenhouse Development Rights framework lays out an effort-sharing framework that is based upon a straightforward accounting of national responsibility and capacity, an accounting that takes explicit care to define both responsibility and capacity with respect to a “development threshold” that excuses the poor, wherever they may live, from any responsibility to bear the burdens of the climate transition.
The above is the shortest explanation of the Greenhouse Development Rights framework proposed by EcoEquity, an approach to climate change that takes into account equity, by differentiating the rich elites in the South, from the poor citizens must be protected from any burden sharing.
Chris Carlsson spoke with Tom Athanasiou about this set of proposals which is getting some traction.
The interview:
Tom Athanasiou: “My issue, the one I specialize in, is how we’re going to get the rich world to meet its obligations in the context of a global crisis. Because if it doesn’t we’re toast right?
My claim is that we can’t talk about North and South. No, we live in a twice divided world. We have North/South and we have Rich/Poor. In the north we have Rich/Poor, and in the south we have Rich/Poor. You cannot tax the poor in the rich world and have any of that money go to the rich in the poor world. Because if there’s any kind of transfer like that the Glenn Becks in the world will tear you up.
CC: Plus, it’s fucked up!
TA: Yeah! In that context these questions matter. What Greenhouse Development Rights [GDRs] is, the secret is, it’s a mildly progressive capacity-and-responsibility tax that is embedded in the international climate regime. You design an international climate regime by attending to the science, working out the size of the global cap, and distributing it by way of a mildly progressive capacity-and-responsibility tax, distributing the effort to meet that mitigation gap by way of this mild tax.
It has this overarching virtue: It makes sense! It’s still physically possible to avoid a global climate catastrophe. No, no it’s very important to realize that it’s still physically possible to do it. We have the money, the technology and just barely the time. What this means is it’s only a political problem which means it’s solvable. That’s the way I like to look at it.
How can we make a step change, institutionally and structurally, so we can begin to build a global system?
Then that’s when the equity question comes in, but only as a North/South question. And it’s huge at that level. That’s where we come in, and there’s a problem: how do you share the burden? Who has to do what?
That’s what GDRs is. GDRs is the best burden sharing proposal yet, and I say this in all honesty. And we know all the competition, we’ve studied all the competing proposals. It’s not rocket science. The sacred text in the UN says that “each country must act within its historic responsibility and within its differentiated capabilities.” Now you tell me which quote from Marx that echoes? From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. This is what it comes down to, the only deal that can possibly work is a deal that is based on that principle. I’m willing to argue this point in a completely realist key. I will put my personal preferences aside. I think it’s a social emergency.
Because of the fact that we’re not yet doomed, because we still have the possibility of stabilizing the situation, we’re morally obligated to attempt to do so. So if you think the only way we can do that is by operationalizing this kind of an equity principle then you have to do it. It becomes a moral imperative in Kant’s terms. All we do is take the concept of historical responsibility and the concept of national capability and quantify them in a rigorous way that takes account of internal income distribution within countries. In other words, we introduce class into the equation.
In that context, fall back to what happened with Tuvalu [an island nation threatened by rising sea levels]. What they said is they want 1.5 [degrees Centrigrade as a maximum temp rise] because otherwise we’re going to cease to exist. Our existence rights will be violated, our most basic rights.
That’s interesting too, because it goes into the hierarchy of rights as its evolved in the human rights community. GDRs is constituted as a social and economic right, which asks the question what is the right to development, what is the right to sustainable development, what kind of development or consumption rights do people have in a climate constrained world? Where must the global poor be set?
But Tuvalu said ‘fuck development rights, fuck social and economic rights, we have existence rights. This is well established in human rights law. You can’t kill me.’
Someone just used the term yesterday ‘benign genocide’… ‘inadvertent genocide’ would be more accurate. What Tuvalu said was we want a deal that actually drives emergency decarbonization and we’re not going to agree to anything else. Because the large developing countries like India and China will not agree to anything like that, it implicitly divides the G77 negotiating bloc. The G77 is actually 128 countries including everyone from little Tuvalu to China, which has modeled a new kind of capitalist development predicated on an ENORMOUS plume of carbon.
So it’s extremely controversial. Tuvalu and the U.S. want the same thing. The U.S. wants the Kyoto Protocol to die. There’s a new crew in Washington and they’re actually adults. John Holdren is Obama’s science advisor, and he’s a panicking scientist. This guys knows! He knows how deep the shit is.
The issue is it has to do with the legal form of the Copenhagen agreement. Is it going to be a single agreement, or a two-track agreement?
A two-track agreement would maintain the Kyoto Protocol for the Annex 1 countries, and create a Convention Track for all the other countries to go in to. The problem is that the large developing countries don’t want to go into any kind of formal convention track because it would start taxing them, ideally in proportion to their responsibility and capacity, but less ideally in some ham-handed fashion in which the rich countries try to deny the fact that they owe anything to the poor and try to sweep ecological debt under the table. Ecological debt is a big part of this.
CC: The Africans revolted over the so-called “Danish text” [a draft secret agreement among leading industrial countries to among other things, fix unequal carbon emission rights]….
TA: Which was fair enough, but was not the big event. The Big Event is going to [be] the technical paper that justifies the African negotiating position—[it] has been completed, and what it shows is that Africa is uniquely fucked. If you want to look at the world in terms of spatially differentiated winners and losers, Canada is the winner and Africa is the loser.
African representatives want a real deal. A Real Deal is hundreds of billions in adaptation assistance and extremely stringent global carbon targets. So the question is tied up with the legal form, it’s tied up with the two tracks, and also with the idea that the African bloc might walk out. [Which they did for a half day on Monday, Dec. 14.]
My claim would be that we’re never going to get the American state to make international financial transfers on any significant scale if those transfers are structured as money going in as taxes to the U.S. treasury and then leaving as American payments to China.
CC: We already do that all day long!
TA: The cap-and-trade models allow you to do all sorts of clever shit where no one ever has to write a check. The whole point of this is to defeat the political problem. You have to hide the transfer in a market…
[The best scenario is] you collect the money using transnational multilateral institutions, but you disperse the money through social networks. In fact that’s the only thing that will work. If Botswana gets its cut, which is supposed to be clean energy subsidies and adaptation support, as a check to the Botswana government, guess where it’s going to go! [Nowhere.] So it has to go to social movements and they have to be organized enough, and disciplined and transparent enough that they can accept the money and do the right thing with it. The big model is the AIDS fund.”