Photo by Alice Pasqual

Imagine you are a low-income country. You suffer from a heavy debt burden. You’ve been trying to catch up to the more affluent countries for decades, but you’ve been unsuccessful, mainly because of that debt hanging around your neck like a giant millstone. And you are spending more and more of your precious resources dealing with the effects of climate change, from rising waters to superstorms, a crisis that you played only a small part in creating in the first place.

You face a terrestrial version of the three-body problem. These three “bodies”—debt, development, and climate change—impact your country in difficult-to-predict ways. More importantly, just like in Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem and the Netflix series of the same name, those interactions have led to one disaster after another.

The rich world offers its own solution to this three-body problem. The international community has decided that all countries must cut their carbon emissions. Primarily for its own energy transition away from fossil fuels, the rich world has also negotiated with countries that possess significant deposits of “critical raw materials” to prioritize the delivery of those minerals to its battery factories and solar panel manufacturing sites.

Meanwhile, wealthy nations have offered very little debt relief, although they have developed new “instruments” like “debt-for-climate” swaps to achieve the goal of lower carbon emissions. Although potentially useful, these instruments don’t significantly reduce emissions (because the countries involved are not major emitters) or debt (since the money involved so far is relatively modest).

Based on this particular solution to the three-body problem, you, as a low-income country, won’t see much relief. Meanwhile, if you rely heavily on fossil fuels and associated infrastructure, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to use those instruments to jump the development gap while adhering to voluntary pledges to achieve carbon neutrality by around 2050.

Perhaps you have some of the minerals, such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt, that are in high demand for the “clean energy” transition in wealthy nations. You can make some money there, but only as a raw material extractor. The rich world has been using free trade agreements and intellectual property protections to limit technology transfer and restrict your ability to rise higher in the value chain by processing ores or making your own lithium batteries and electric vehicles.

You’re stuck. You can’t break into the new “clean energy” economy, except at the bottom floor, and you are constrained from using old-fashioned fossil fuels. Meanwhile, you’re drowning: figuratively in debt and literally in the rising waters of climate change.

“Rich countries have a monopoly on decision-making in the World Bank and IMF, they hold most of the bargaining power in the World Trade Organization, they use their power as creditors to dictate economic policy in debtor nations, and they control 97 percent of the world’s patents. … The [wealthy nations] and corporations leverage this power to cheapen the prices of labor and resources in the… [poor nations], which allows them to achieve a net appropriation through trade,” stated a 2021 Opinion piece in Al Jazeera.

In Liu Cixin’s universe, people dehydrate themselves to survive successive planetary crises. That’s not an option in our world. However, as a low-income country, you have other alternatives.

Working Within the System

It’s time, UN Secretary General António Guterres announced in June 2024, for “the godfathers of the climate chaos” to use their money toward solving the problem they created, mainly by paying a “windfall tax” on their profits. Going after oil, gas, and coal companies makes a lot of sense. Addressing the climate crisis will require trillions of dollars. Oil and gas companies collectively make hundreds of billions of dollars, so it’s a no-brainer to follow bank robber Willie Sutton’s advice and go “where the money is.”

However sensible it might be, this approach is not transformative. A windfall profit tax will redistribute some of the money made by these companies, but it won’t reduce their production of toxic substances. Indeed, it might even prompt these companies to pump out more oil and gas to maintain high profit margins. Also, it seems counterproductive to associate your monetary solution to the problem of rising carbon emissions with the success of the very businesses committed to increasing emissions.

A windfall profit tax won’t drive these companies out of business or even cause them to shift to a different kind of business. However, coupled with stricter industry regulations, such as severely limiting the carbon emissions of the oil and gas facilities and products or restricting where and how they conduct their operations, it could have a favorable effect.

The challenge facing the international community today isn’t the result of a few bad actors, such as oil companies, or even a few bad policies. It is a systemic crisis that derives from a particular type of manufacturing and agricultural practice, an addiction to extraction, and patterns of overconsumption by rich nations. It’s hard to imagine such a system reforming itself, any more than a car can fix its engine as it barrels down the road.

Still, a proposal like the fossil-fuel windfall profit tax can at least generate some funds to ameliorate the situation. As does another proposal that has gathered support from several low-income countries, which Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados has put at the heart of her Bridgetown Initiative—a call for urgent and decisive action to reform the international financial architecture.

This proposal involves the distribution of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), “an international reserve asset created by the IMF to supplement the official reserves of its member countries.” The last SDR distribution in 2021 injected $650 billion into the global economy. Of the 105 participating countries, 104 were low- and middle-income countries. These countries could use the SDRs to address the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, pay their debts, invest in renewable energy, or use them for any other purpose, since there were no conditions and no loans to repay.

The IMF, in issuing loans and imposing austerity conditions, has more often been part of the problem rather than the solution. However, an SDR issuance designed to help indebted countries reallocate funds to address climate change could be a welcome policy.

The IMF might reply that it has already designed a specific initiative to mitigate the climate crisis: the

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