Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal by Noam Chomsky;Robert Pollin; & Robert Pollin & C. J. Polychroniou

Author:Noam Chomsky;Robert Pollin; & Robert Pollin & C. J. Polychroniou
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)

There’s a growing literature linking climate change to economic inequality. What exactly is the link between climate change and inequality, and how would a Green New Deal help to reduce economic inequalities on a global scale?

RP: There are several ways in which climate change and inequality interact. We should begin with the question: Who is responsible for causing climate change, or, more specifically, who is responsible for putting the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are causing climate change? The short answer to this question is that, if we focus on CO2 emissions, and trace back the burning of fossil fuels over the full industrial era—that is, roughly from 1800 to the present—then virtually the entire blame for causing climate change falls on the US and Western Europe. These are the regions of the world that, through at least 1980, were responsible for nearly 70 percent of all cumulative emissions. Considered on a per capita basis, the discrepancy in the contributions through 1980 is even more extreme. For example, as of 1980, the average annual emissions in the United States was about 21 tons per capita, fourteen times greater than the 1.5 tons per capita figure for China that year and forty-two times greater than India’s figure of 0.5 tons per capita.16

But even these comparisons by country do not give us a full picture of the relationship between emissions levels and inequality. This is because, of course, the average levels of fossil fuel energy consumption, and thereby emissions, within any given country are also highly unequal according to people’s income and overall consumption levels. Considering the global population as a whole by income levels, as of 2015, the richest 10 percent of the global population was responsible for nearly half of all emissions tied to personal consumption, while the poorest 50 percent of the population was responsible for only 10 percent of total consumption-based emissions.17

It is true that, with China having experienced a historically unprecedented pace of economic growth since the early 1980s, it is now the largest emitter of CO2 emissions, at 9.8 billion tons in 2017 (27 percent of global emissions), compared with the United States at 5.3 billion tons (15 percent of global emissions). However, even here, on a per capita basis for 2017, China’s emissions, at 7.0 tons per capita, are still less than half the US figure of 16.2 tons per capita.

A second critical way in which we need to think about inequality and climate change is in terms of impact: Who is paying the price of climate change, and who will increasingly pay the price as climate change intensifies? My University of Massachusetts colleague Jim Boyce has done outstanding work on this question for a long time. As a brief overview, he writes as follows:

Rich countries burn more fossil fuels than do poor countries, generating more carbon dioxide emissions. And within any given country, richer people benefit more from the fossil-fuelled economy by virtue of the fact that they consume more goods and services.

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