Climate Debt

The preposterous Naomi Klein has an unbelievable article in the current Rolling Stone, not yet online, on December’s UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen:

Among the smartest and most promising – not to mention controversial – proposals is “climate debt,” the idea that rich countries should pay reparations to poor countries for the climate crisis…

Sharon Looremeta, an advocate for Maasai tribespeople in Kenya who have lost at least 5 million cattle to drought in recent years, puts it in even sharper terms. “The Maasai community does not drive 4×4s or fly off on holidays in airplanes,” she says. “we have not caused climate change, yet we are the ones suffering. This is an injustice and should be stopped right now.”

The obvious problem with reparations is the Maasai will not use their new found wealth to replenish cattle, but will instead drive 4×4s and fly off on holidays in airplanes.

Quoting Angelica Navarro, the chief climate negotiator for Bolivia:

Millions of people – in small islands, least-developed countries as well as vulnerable communities in Brazil, India and China, and all around the world – are suffering from the effects of a problem to which they did not contribute”…

And Navarro’s solution:

Rich countries need to pay the costs associated with adapting to a changing climate, make deep cuts to their own emissions “to make atmospheric space available” for the developing world, and pay Third World countries to leapfrog over fossil fuels and go straight to cleaner alternatives.

The cost for her Marshall Plan for the Earth: “as much as $600 billion a year over the next decade.”

Our response:

Todd Stern, the chief U.S. climate negotiator, has scoffed at a Chinese and African proposal that developed countries pay as much as $400 billion a year in climate financing as “wildly unrealistic” and “untethered in reality.”