Unsustainable Inequalities by lucas Chancel

Author:lucas Chancel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Figure 5.1. Greenhouse gas emissions and national income for China, the European Union, and North America. China is responsible for 25 percent of current world greenhouse gas emissions (associated with industrial production) and 12 percent of historic emissions, and accounts for 20 percent of world national income. Sources and series: www.lucaschancel.info/hup.

At the Kyoto Climate Change Conference, in 1997, negotiators reached agreement on a principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR). This amounted to officially accepting that all countries are responsible for climate change, but that only those that historically have significantly contributed to it and that have high standards of living (“Annex I Parties”) are obligated to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol therefore distinguishes two categories: the Annex I Parties (consisting at the time of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries, together with so-called economies in transition), and the rest of the world. The Protocol therefore combines two notions of justice: responsibility based on historical and current emissions (corrective justice) and responsibility based on national income and the capacity to pay (distributive justice).

This dual approach to the question of responsibility is still being pursued today in international climate negotiations. The understanding of global climate justice formalized by the Kyoto Protocol lives on, for example, in the finance provisions of the 2015 Paris Agreement: only industrial countries are obligated to contribute to the fund of $100 billion to be reserved for adapting to climate change; others can contribute if they wish to do so.

The negotiators did not wish to explicitly call into question the principles agreed upon at Kyoto, for fear of derailing the entire process at a moment of mounting tensions among the parties. The Paris talks had reached an impasse in trying to come to terms with one of the outstanding facts of the world today: inequalities in standards of living are both considerable and increasing within countries. In that case, ought not wealthy South Africans, Chinese, Brazilians, Russians, and Indians likewise be called upon to help mitigate global warming in proportion to their contribution to current levels of pollution? In the scheme ratified at Kyoto, however, only national averages count, not variations among income groups within countries.

A few weeks prior to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21), which took place in Paris in late 2015, Thomas Piketty and I published a study that invited negotiators and the general public to put individual responsibility back at the heart of debate.3 It seemed to us that by exposing the fantasy of sustainable development a way could be found to put an end to the stalemate.

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