The path to a livable future by Stan Cox

Author:Stan Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Bookstore

The thorniest issue, given the huge disparities among countries in their quantities of fuel reserves, their energy needs, and their economic status, is the question of burden sharing. How could the treaty determine, for such disparate nations, their permitted fuel extraction and required rates of reduction? Treaty advocates Peter Newell and Andrew Simms of Sussex University have suggested three principles: that the burden of action should be borne primarily by wealthier nations; that nations creating the most greenhouse gas emissions from their own fossil fuel reserves should act first; and that emissions should be reduced most rapidly by nations that have the greatest historical use of fossil fuels.113 Based on those criteria, they recommend that the wealthy nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) plus Russia take the lead in setting short-term targets and timetables, and start phasing out fossil fuels quickly. Next would come large countries with high current emissions but much less historic responsibility for climate change, such as China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia. Finally, meeting fossil fuel reduction targets in low-emitting, low-income countries, they write, will depend on lots of international aid to build up their nonfossil energy capacity and meet other development needs.

Any effort to come to global agreement on eliminating fossil fuels involves an international analogue to our domestic just transition: What to do about the nations around the world, from Nigeria to Ecuador, that are deeply dependent on revenue generated by fossil fuels for maintaining their people’s living standards and preventing widespread poverty. The nonprofit groups Oil Change International and Stockholm Environment Institute have declared, “The need for a just transition—and the management of other social costs—should be taken into account to determine not the pace of transition [which must be fast], but the manner in which it is implemented and the resources devoted to it. Neither driving a rapid transition, nor making it just, should be used as an excuse for not delivering on the other.”114 Principles of environmental justice, they write, dictate that fossil fuel extraction should be ended first and fastest where local communities and their environments are harmed by fossil fuel extraction more than they are helped by the use or sale of the fuels. The next criterion would be to reduce extraction most rapidly where dependence on fossil fuels for jobs or tax revenue is low, and after that, where economies and institutions have the highest capacity to absorb the costs and difficulties of the transition away from fossil fuels.

Achieving global adoption of any agreement to end fossil-fuel extraction is a daunting prospect. To get around the typical “You go first!”/“No, you go first!” standoffs among high-emitting nations, some treaty supporters are suggesting, as I have above, that smaller alliances of nations (“clubs”) get together to work out their own joint fossil-fuel reduction plans as a proof of concept, and then at some point clubs and nations could coalesce into a movement toward a global nonproliferation treaty.

BEYOND FOSSIL FUELS

THE ORIGINAL Cap and Adapt proposal was tightly aimed at one threat to the Earth: greenhouse gases coming from one source, fossil fuels.

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