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Sancho's Election Toolkit: Global Warming

 
Background
 
From studies of other planets, we now understand that the Earth’s natural conditions represent a precarious balance of the elements needed to support life. Since the industrial revolution, humans have risked disturbing that precarious balance in a number of ways.
 
The most serious potential disturbance concerns the emission of greenhouse gasses into the earth’s atmosphere. According to the theory of the greenhouse effect, the sun’s infrared radiation heats up the earth during the day. At night time, that heat is re-radiated out into space, much as a hot potato will give off steam until it cools down. But not all the heat is lost during the nighttime; greenhouse gasses act as a kind of protective shield keeping some of that heat inside the earth’s atmosphere. This act of keeping some warmth in during the nighttime cooling off period is called the greenhouse effect.
 
The greenhouse effect has been a natural part of the Earth’s functioning since its early history. A problem arises when there are significantly higher atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses, especially over a short period of time. Much of our recent history of industrialization has been driven by carbon-based fuels – coal, petroleum, and natural gas. When these are burnt in factories or in engines, they give off Carbon Dioxide (a greenhouse gas) and sometimes other greenhouse gasses (methane, water vapor). As a result, greenhouse gas levels have been steadily rising for as long as they have been measured, and recent evidence shows that the earth has steadily warmed during this period, as would be expected from the increase in greenhouse gas.
 
A sensible response to this situation might be to take multilateral measures to curb the global use of greenhouse gasses, while at the same time continuing scientific research aimed at undoing some of the damage that has already been done, and moving to protect communities that have already been affected. Unfortunately, most of the multilateral solutions that have been suggested, including the Kyoto Protocol suffer from two types of problems. The first is that major greenhouse gas producing countries, especially the United States, refuse to acknowledge the problem or to sign onto such treaties. In the case of the U.S., the administration of Gearge W. Bush backed out of the Kyoto agreement even though it had largely been the product of U.S. negotiations. Other countries, including China, Australia, and India have similarly refused to go into such multilateral agreements, citing the U.S. position as one reason for their hesitancy.
 
The other set of problems arising from the multilateral negotiations is that they tend to underestimate the seriousness of the crisis, and are therefore prone to “false solutions”. One such “false solution” is the World Bank’s carbon trading mechanism which offers perverse incentives for developing countries to set up carbon producing industries, in an apparent attempt to shift pollution from the North to the South. The global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is zero, but the trade in carbon credits appears to be good for business, especially for the World Bank itself. (For more info on carbon trading, click here.)
 
While carbon trading is probably the most glaring example of a false solution, it is not the only one. Even the most ambitious targets set by countries to cap greenhouse gas emissions would probably involve a global increase in temperatures of about two degrees Celsius. Such global warming would probably be enough to melt the artic icecap in Greenland, destroy the Amazon rainforest, and submerge untold small islands in the South Pacific and elsewhere.
 
In practical terms, solutions to the global warming crisis must involve serious changes in the global economy, on at least two levels. First, while people are struggling to survive they are unlikely to make decisions based upon what may be good in the long term, whether that long term is in 50 or 150 years. Haiti, for example, is a country that has been suffering collective punishment for its gall in declaring an independent Black republic in 1804. Its population has been impoverished by wars, by debt and by continuing colonial ties to France and to the United States, and is by most measures the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere. As a result of the poverty and the resulting drives to sell timber and use all available land for crops, Haiti no longer has any forests, which are crucial to maintaining clean air and may be part of the climate change solution.
 
The case of Haiti shows that extreme poverty must be made a thing of the past in a sustainable global ecosystem. But another striking fact about the current environmental crisis is that it is largely the product of a few nation states. Globally, 2% of the world’s population controls about 50% of the wealth, and while the blame for climate change is perhaps not directly proportional to wealth, it is almost certainly related. What this means is that the developed countries (and the rich within developed countries) have created economic systems which maximize their own wealth while destroying the global commons – clean air, clean water, and in this case, a clean atmosphere. A just solution to the climate change problem would involve ensuring that those who have made the most money from polluting pay the most damages towards making things right.