Climate Justice Under Trump

If we’re both smart and lucky we may be able to slingshot into a mobilization that we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to achieve

Was it Al Gore who began the climate-movement tradition of incessantly quoting Winston Churchill? In any case, “We are entering a period of consequences,” and that’s a fact. But rather than rush beyond “consequences” to even darker conclusions, let me make a few claims.

John KerryPhoto by Chris Bentley/The GroundTruth ProjectUS Secretary of State John Kerry addressing the COP22 climate talks in Marraksh, one week after the Trump’s election. US leadership in climate negotiations has not been an unambiguous force, and there are many people around the world who would object even to the term.

Trump’s Election Did Not Cost Us 2°C

Before Trump there was Paris, and its celebrated goal of “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C” while pursuing efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” So here’s a question: When Dave Roberts, one of America’s key climate bloggers, posted a post-election reaction piece called “Trump’s election marks the end of any serious hope of limiting climate change to 2 degrees,” was he right?

I say he wasn’t.

Note that there’s a bit of nuance in Roberts’ argument. Here’s how he described the strategy that, in his view, Trump’s election had blown out of the water:

“The truth is, hitting the 2-degree target (much less 1.5 degrees) was always a long shot. It would require all the world’s countries to effectively turn on a dime and send their emissions plunging at never-before-seen rates.

It was implausible, but at least there was a story to tell. That story began with strong US leadership, which brought China to the table, which in turn cleared the way for Paris. The election of Hillary Clinton would have signaled to the world a determination to meet or exceed the targets the US promised in Paris, along with four years of efforts to create bilateral or multilateral partnerships that pushed progress faster.

With steady leadership, the US and China would exceed their short-term goals. Other countries would have their willpower fortified and steadily ratchet up their commitments. All this coordinated action would result in a wave of clean energy innovation, which would push prices down lower, which would accelerate the transition.”

Is this a more or less accurate telling? I think it is, though it’s also radically incomplete. For one thing, “US leadership” has not been an unambiguous force, and there are many people around the world who would object even to the term. More importantly, there’s the bit where countries “steadily ratchet up their commitments.” This is a reference to the Paris push for (jargon alert) an “ambition ratchet” or “ambition mechanism,” and it’s critical, because the Paris pledges of action — still the basis of the global action plan out to 2030 — are far too weak to deliver the Paris temperature targets.

The pre-Marrakesh report of the Civil Society Equity Review, “Setting the Path towards 1.5°C,” tells us that:

“even if all the commitments in the current NDCs [national pledge of action] are met — an uncertain prospect, given the lack of financial and technological resources from wealthier countries — they would lead to a warming of about 3°C.”

This is not an outlier position. Go to the report (full disclosure: I’m one of the authors) and follow the footnotes, and you’ll see why we chose to highlight the 3°C figure, though 3.5°C could wind up being closer to the mark. You’ll also see that all the important studies agree on the figure. This is a case of “everybody knows.” The Paris pledges were only a first installment. But as the (pre-Trump) story went, this was OK, or at least not an utter disaster, because we were building ambition mechanisms that would strengthen the pledges in time.

But that was then. This is now, and Roberts argues that, after Trump’s election, the transition push simply won’t get strengthened in time.

parched ground and skyPhoto by Richard Dixon/Friends of the Earth ScotlandEven before Trump, we never had the kind and scale of transition finance needed if we’re to cut over, in time, to a cleaner global economy.

It’s a tidy story, but it’s wrong. It’s wrong because there’s no evidence that the world-in-political-crisis that we inhabited before Trump’s election was ever going to deliver stronger pledges, or stronger action on the necessary scale. It’s wrong because we did not, with Trump’s election, lose our last “serious hope of limiting climate change to 2 degrees.” We didn’t lose it because we never had it to lose. We never had it because we never had a functioning ambition mechanism, because the parts of the mechanism are glaringly missing. Most importantly transition finance, of the kind and scale needed if we’re to cut over, in time, to a cleaner economy, just wasn’t on the table. And it wasn’t going to be either, not in time.

Paris was a Breakthrough, and Must Be Defended

I’m not here to add my voice to those who say that Paris was a failure. (If, last year, you read some of the ultra-left criticism of Paris, you know what I’m talking about.) On the contrary, I long ago concluded that the Paris compromise really does rate as a breakthrough, and, after Trump’s election (aka “the catastrophe”) it’s obvious that it came not a moment too soon. One excellent way of seeing this is that, after Paris, we actually have something to defend. Something that Trump’s people are going to attempt to delay, derail, or destroy — whatever they can get away with.

In saying this, I’m just repeating what we already know. Defense is the first and more pressing of the post-election imperatives. From the pipeline and export-terminal battlefronts, to the trench warfare that will define Washington politics, to the post-election climate negotiations, these next years will be harsh and dangerous. And unlike the pain and suffering on other fronts — immigrant rights, criminal justice, race relations, the court, taxation, regulation, medical care — much of the damage on the climate front will be irreversible, at least in human-relevant timescales. When it comes to the climate, delay can be indistinguishable from defeat.

Still, defense can’t be the whole of the story. We also need to prepare for 2020, and do our best to make Trump a one-term president, and ensure that, in the optimistic but not unlikely case where we succeed, we’re ready to crank the ambition ratchet fast and hard. To that end, we need a Big Think, and it had best be an honest one, because it has to result in a plan that’s grand enough to give us a fighting chance at the Paris temperature targets. This won’t be easy, but it wouldn’t have been easy before Trump’s election either. It’s extremely important that we remember this.

To be clear. Clinton’s election would have staved off the catastrophe that we now face, and brought progress by small degrees. We would take it today, almost all of us. But, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that this terrible new position of ours is not without its possibilities. We’re falling into a dark and terrifying hole, but if we’re both smart and lucky we may be able to slingshot out of it into a mobilization that we would not otherwise have been able to achieve. This, at least, has to be our goal.

But if this or anything like this is to happen, we’re going to have to be brave enough to take justice seriously. Among much else, we’re going to have to work out what the pretty phrase “climate justice” actually means.

The Negotiations Could Go Either Way

This year’s climate summit, in Marrakesh, began on November 7, and America’s election day came one day later. The results were not welcome. There was no wailing and gnashing or teeth, not exactly, but there was vertigous shock, and some actual tears, and a somber mood. And then, thankfully, there were encouraging developments. The Chinese made it clear that they were still on board, and even considering leadership moves. The French talked of trade sanctions against the US. The Germans readied themselves to hold the line.

flooded landscape with little boyPhoto by DFID / Rafiqur Rahman Raqu The declaration by the Climate Vulnerable Forum — a group of 47 poor and climate vulnerable countries from around the world — that its member nations would try to switch to 100 percent renewables by 2050 took on a special force at Marrakesh. For one thing, it signaled that we’re not doomed to spend the next four years in defensive crouches.

The problem, of course, is that Marrakesh was still under Obama’s watch. The Trump people will soon be arriving, and when the next negotiating session opens, in Bonn in May 2017, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that they’ll come to play nice.

How will the world’s negotiators finish the Paris rulebook? How will they build out its institutions? How will we (I’m including civil society activists in this one) manage any progress on the Big Questions — finance, differentiation, equity — that must absolutely be advanced if the ambition ratchet is ever to start spinning in earnest? The answer, I think, is that when it comes to the global negotiations, as it is here on the home front, we could use a bit of strategic optimism. This is a long game, and what we’re playing for, right now, is our 2020 position. A lot can change between now and 2020.

In fact, Marrakesh saw a major move, and it was a good one. On the final day, the “Climate Vulnerable Forum” (CVF) — a group of 47 poor and climate vulnerable countries from around the world — formally announced that its membership would, “in partnership with and with the support of the international community,” update their pledges before 2020, and that their renewed pledges would “strive to meet 100% domestic renewable energy production” by 2050, “while working to end energy poverty and protect water and food security.”

The forum’s 100 percent renewables declaration, coming at the end of the Trump-shock summit, took on a special force. For one thing, it signaled that we’re not doomed to spend the next four years in defensive crouches. Rather, we’re going to see some real action, and real drama. The next Big Moment is already on the calendar. It’ll come in 2018, with the publication of the IPCC’s Special Report on 1.5°C and, simultaneously, the first real “facilitative dialogue,” a formal convening in which the governments, with civil society breathing down their necks, review the collected Paris pledges of action, relative to the Paris temperature goals and the latest science.

And now, because the CVF counties will be updating their pledges in 2018, there’s an even heavier agenda. After all, if the CVF countries strengthen their pledges, all the world’s countries will be free to join them. This will happen, moreover, in the context of (I devoutly hope) an international defensive alliance against Trump’s America, and right alongside the US Congressional elections. Who knows, the stars could align.

The CVF countries — which include Ethiopia, Haiti, Nepal, Sudan, and Tuvalu, and dozens of other countries on the climate frontlines — don’t exactly represent the global elite, but their move couldn’t have come at a better time. They’ve placed a challenge before us, because their new pledges, as suggested by the polite diplomatic phrase “with the support of the international community,” will not define actions that they can make on their own. Not if they also define “a new era of the pursuit of development, ending poverty, leaving no person behind, and protecting the environment.”

Nor was the CVF’s declaration the only big move. There was also the African Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI), which aims to immediately deliver 10 GW of new and additional renewables, and to scale up to 300 GW by 2030, thus providing one billion people, in less that 15 years, with their very first access to steady electricity. With Paris “banked” and the focus moving to on-the-ground action, there are ideas everywhere, and opportunities. But there’s just one wee little problem – finance.

CVF and AREI-style mitigation initiatives, like so many of the others embodied in the Paris pledges, need lots of support. Much of it can come as private investment, of course, but not all of it. There’s also a pressing need for public finance, and if you consult Oxfam’s Climate Finance Shadow Report 2016, you’ll see that the world’s wealthy countries are still relying on smoke and mirrors to meet their commitment — the one they made back in Copenhagen in 2009 by Hillary Clinton — to provide $100 billion in international climate finance. Basically, all they’ve offered to dole out by 2020 is (the central estimate) $26 billion, of which $14 billion is for mitigation activities in developing nations, and $12 billion for adaptation.

people replanting mangrovePhoto by Ikhlasul Amal Replanting mangroves in West Java, Indonesia. Mangroves help mitigate climate impacts by sequestering carbon dioxide and protecting coastlines from storm surges. Mitigation measures like this mean building out renewable infrastructure, which is obviously essential, but adaptation is a challenge of the first order, and not one that can be met with private investment.

Don’t ever allow yourself to think that mitigation is the whole of the story, not if you want a just climate mobilization. Mitigation means building out renewable infrastructure, and it’s obviously essential, but adaptation is a challenge of the first order, and not one that can be met with private investment. The 2016 Adaptation Finance Gap Report says that by 2030, adaptation costs for all developing countries will reach $140 to 300 billion annually, with the potential to be five times greater by 2050.

How’s this all going to go? Let me put it this way – the situation is difficult, and it calls for flexibility and good will on all sides. Sums like the ones we need are mobilized all the time — during wars, that is — and there are plenty of options, or would be, in a world that actually had a functioning governance system. Instead, of course, we have Donald J. Trump. And Brexit before him. And the harrowing of Greece before that. And so on, and on. The point — I must repeat it — is that these are not failures that we can put down to Trump. Better to say they are expressions of the same political failures that led to Trump in the first place.

But this, too, could change.

To Act Globally, We Need Justice in America

women marching for climate justicePhoto by maisa_nyc/Flickr The climate transition, if we really want it, has to stand not for bucolic localism, but for a world in which there’s a place for everyone, a real place, one with at least a modicum of dignity.

This election demonstrated yet again that a fearful people, anxious about disappearing opportunities, and furious beyond words at endless indignities, is easy prey to demagoguery and narrow, simple-minded nationalism — exactly the poisons that we don’t need if we’re to have any real chance of stabilizing the climate system. And that the climate transition, if we really want it, has to stand not for bucolic localism, but for a world in which there’s a place for everyone, a real place, one with at least a modicum of dignity. And that unless we manage to make this so, and soon, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of actually holding the warming down to a manageable level.

The climate transition will demand trillions of dollars. We have the money, which is to say that the rich have the money. 2016 was the year in which, for the first time in modern history, the richest one percent of the global population owned half for everything, and it’s basically impossible to imagine a successful way forward in which all that money lies safely tucked away in global tax havens, and the climate transition bills, whatever they turn out to be, are delivered unto the ordinary people.

This is a real problem, particularly in countries like the United States where stark, demoralizing divides between prosperity and poverty have become the defining facts of public life. Given this, how are we to even imagine the internationalism that the climate mobilization demands, one in which wealthy nations pay their fair share in a transition that will not actually be cheap, not if it’s fair enough to actually work?

Here, too, “everybody knows” the answer. The Ur-message of the climate movement, the one you immediately think of, has to be that we’re all in this together. Thus, the jargon, which tells us that we need a “just and inclusive transition,” or something to that effect. The problem is that, as we in the US have just rudely learned, this jargon does not ring in a way that everyone can hear.

The core problem, I think, is that we climate people have long focused on technical goals (e.g. a challenges of designing, and winning, a distributed and robust low-carbon power sector), and have contented ourselves to believe that such goals, properly pursued, would then deliver real equity benefits. But that simply isn’t good enough.

Just before Marrakesh, I attended a strategy meeting in New York. The focus was on the Paris “implementation agenda,” on “long-term strategy” and “deep decarbonization” planning at the city, state, national level. It was all absolutely essential stuff — there’s no way we’re going to make the turn without detailed planning — but not a word was spoken about finance or other “means of implementation.” By which I mean to say that, even though Brexit had already issued its early warning, at least some of the climate movement’s realist agenda-makers were still affirmatively downplaying the equity agenda.

Today, the mood may have shifted. It’s too early to be sure, but the “just transitions” challenge may now, suddenly, be seen as salient even by first-order realists. Moreover, the term is now being understood in broad terms, as not limited transition assistance for displaced coal miners and other discrete groups of fossil-fuel workers, but as Emmanuel Guérin, a key climate foundation officer put it after Trump’s election, “all the social issues related to the transition to a low-carbon economy, a low-carbon society more generally.”

It’s about time.

It’s also a perfect opportunity to say that the “climate justice” challenge must be taken in equally capacious terms. It might be useful, just for starters, to think of the CJ movement as having three major wings. Call them (I’m grossly simplifying here) the “grassroots resistance,” “just transitions,” and “fair shares” wings, and note that while we’re all more or less familiar with the first two, the third is not well known within the US, in large part because US environmentalists have always avoided it like the plague. Which would be understandable, I suppose, given the realities of political life in American, were it not disastrous. This is because the climate crisis is fundamentally a global commons problem, and commons problems can only be solved if all parties are seen to be doing their fair shares.

Moreover, a movement that had fair shares clearly on its agenda would be in a far ahead of the game, when it comes to the Trumpist challenge. It’s not, after all, the American working poor who’ve been shirking their fair shares, but rather the American rich, and the rich everywhere, who have, with a few honorable exceptions, been doing their very best to cocoon themselves away from the sorrows that now threaten to overcome us all.

Still, there are good moves to make, lots of them. What’s key is that, when they’re taken together, they express not only resistance but solidarity as well, and begin to break down the walls between the American crisis and the global crisis. It would for example be excellent if at least some US states (California might want to step forward here) went beyond sending delegations to the international talks, and sent some money as well. It wouldn’t have to be much, not nearly a true fair share, but direct “solidarity payments” from US states, sent to the very climate funds (e.g. Least Developed Countries Fund) that Trump’s people will be trying to suffocate, would send a clear message.

The lessons are clear. Don’t listen it me, listen to Thomas Piketty, the author of 2014’s surprise best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, who began a piece on Trump’s election with the flat statement that “Trump’s victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this,” and went on to immediately make the global connection: “The main challenges of our times are the rise in inequality and global warming. We must therefore implement international treaties enabling us to respond to these challenges and to promote a model for fair and sustainable development.”

Indeed, and we haven’t got much time left. And we haven’t got a chance unless we begin, as the Paris Agreement assumes we will, in a bottom up, “nationally determined” manner. We haven’t got a chance, that is, unless we find our way to internationalism, and we haven’t got a chance of doing so unless we realize that internationalism begins at home.

We are not doomed. We have the technology to save ourselves, and the money, if we can find the will to mobilize it. There is no trade off between solar revolution and economic justice. They are two sides of one coin, and both sides must be in wide display. If this doesn’t happen, and soon, well let’s just say that it’s becoming easier every year to look into the future and see not renewal and inclusiveness but rather division and fatal deadlock. The green agenda, without a justice agenda, isn’t going to make the difference. Teslas are great, but national health care would be better.

Realism is a very good idea. But realism is not a matter of accepting political limits as we find them. Not if we imagine substantive cooperation, and engaged, far-sighted citizens who are willing to embrace the uncertainty and disruption that the 100 percent renewables transition will most assuredly bring.

This has to be a just transition, or it won’t happen at all.

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