Climate Fairness/Climate Debt – Eco Justice for Poorer Nations

July 13, 2009 By Michael Ricciardi

**“Worldwide, less than 8% of folks are responsible for 50% of emissions”, according to Professor Stephen Pacala of Princeton, co-author of Stabilization Wedges.**

This group has a higher annual income than even the average American. But the US has the highest per-capita energy consumption rate of any nation, out-consuming the five most populated nations combined. Quite recent studies have confirmed what many already knew: that more affluent people consume more energy, and generate more green house gas (ghg) emissions. Thus, making significant cuts in ghg (to slow warming trends and mitigate climate change) without big cuts in this group’s ghg emissions is a major challenge.

The impact of greenhouse gases on global warming in the short term, and the possibility of severe climate change in the medium to long term, promise to create significant and lasting hardships for everyone. But these hardships will fall hardest on the world’s poorest, who are the ones least responsible for ghg-induced climate change. Currently, all cap-and-trade and carbon taxing results in a flat tax on carbon usage. This will of course impact the poor the most. This reasoning has been used as a justification for not imposing carbon caps and taxes, as well as not implementing other environmental regulations–such as shifting to alternative forms of energy which, in the short term, may be more costly to low-income consumers (as opposed to cheap, but highly polluting, fuel sources like oil and coal). If you make energy more expensive to use, so the argument goes, this will inconvenience everyone to some extent, but it’ll be much less of a problem for more prosperous people.