CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Case for Global Climate Reparations

Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

To combat climate change, the entire world has to make the transition away from fossil fuels. If a major emitter like the United States or India doesn’t substantially reduce its emissions, it will doom the entire enterprise. As never before in human history, richer and poorer must work together.

But what will that joint action look like?

The industrial revolution, which coincided with peak colonialism, enriched the Global North at the expense of the Global South. In the process of spewing out vast quantities of greenhouse gasses, richer countries also racked up an enormous climate debt beginning in the nineteenth century. Now, the richer countries—and the richest individuals wherever they might live—must pay back this debt by funding the clean energy transition of poorer communities.

Paying reparations in this way is not just an act of justice. It is indispensable to the saving of the planet.

In theory, that’s what the Just Energy Transition Partnerships are all about. South Africa’s JET-P, for instance, is designed to finance the country’s shift away from coal-fired power plants to renewable sources of energy. Currently, 83 percent of South African electricity is generated by fossil fuels, with 58 percent coming from the dirtiest source, coal.

The JET-P for South Africa, which it launched with a consortium of richer nations in 2021, has marshaled around $12.4 billion. This money has been earmarked for building out solar and wind capacity, expanding the electricity grid to support that buildout, and setting up programs for retraining workers, particularly those in the coal sector.

“It’s a big fund,” notes University of Johannesburg sociology professor Patrick Bond, “and it should allow us to close down our coal-fired power plants early. And to the extent that we need to import turbines for wind or solar panels and batteries and inverters, then we can make that transition.”

After five years, however, the project is still in its early stages.

“We are talking about replacing 88 coal-fired power units that produce just under 50GW of electricity,” explains Roland Ngam, Project Manager for Climate Justice at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s South Africa office. “If it has taken a half decade just to put the bureaucracy in place, you can imagine how long doing the brick-and-mortar work will take. Replacing these coal-fired units and expanding green capacity also means laying 14,000 kilometers of high-voltage transmission lines – and that will cost $26 billion to complete. If we throw the global political climate into the mix, one begins to see how this thing can take at least a few decades to complete.”

It’s not just the timeline that’s problematic. Most of the funding comes in the form of loans—92 percent—rather than grants. And while the interest rate for the loans is rather low, it still adds to the country’s already sizable debt burden of around $350 billion. South Africa spends nearly $22 billion each year just to service that debt, which is considerably more than what the government spends on public health. Also, the outlays so far have gone to “the consultancies,” Patrick Bond adds, “these big firms, the KPMGs, the Ernsts and Youngs, all the big boys who do this work, instead of local environmental justice groups.” He points out that the same firms were complicit in looting the South African state by facilitating widespread corruption in the 2010s.

There are ways to push the JET-P more in the direction of climate justice. “For example, rural populations should be empowered with the infrastructure and funds to set up microgrids,” Roland Ngam suggests. “That will unlock a lot of opportunities and help draw many workers from the coal sector. Right now, most rural communities have zero benefit from the dozens of solar power stations that big business is building everywhere. Second, instead of focusing on power stations, why not empower thousands of young people with the skills and resources to install rooftop solar, windmills, etc. and through that, make the rest of the population see the benefits of solar and wind?”

Climate justice, especially as it’s discussed in international fora like the annual Conference of Parties (COP), can sound abstract, at least in terms of the dollar amounts demanded by countries most affected by climate change and the considerably smaller sums offered by rich countries. South Africa’s JET-P illustrates the concrete challenges faced by poorer countries that want to shift to a clean energy economy and the specific methods by which the richer countries continue to shirk their responsibilities.

The notion of climate reparations—a debt that the rich, for once, owe to the poor—is a powerful but still marginal part of the official climate debate. “Climate reparations as such hasn’t really been acknowledged or even desired in the formal policy space,” observes David Williams, head of International Climate Justice Program at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in New York. “So, actually, in my view, there isn’t a big greenwashing of the term yet.”

Climate reparations, then, present a way to mobilize poorer countries and extract real commitments from the richer ones. As with reparations in the African American community and the landback movement among Native Americans, such arguments are moving from the periphery of debate to the very center of discussions about the path forward.

The famous “hockey stick” graph, formulated by climate scientist Michael Mann and popularized in the documentary The Inconvenient Truth, demonstrates that the sharp increase in levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coincided with the use of fossil fuels to expand industrial manufacturing and stimulate a consumer boom in the early twentieth century. Although climate changes do come in cycles, the graph definitively shows that the current warming of the planet stems from human activity—and that human activity has taken place predominantly where industrial manufacturing and industrial-strength consumerism have been concentrated.

“Much of the historical emissions are due to the Global North, particularly the United States and Europe and even Japan,” notes Meena Raman of the Third World Network in Malaysia. “And a lot of the impacts that are being witnessed today are being borne by the Global South,” with some of the largest impacts felt in India and China.

Another way of thinking of this inequitable distribution of responsibility is through the concept of a “carbon budget”—the overall amount of carbon that can be released into the atmosphere before global temperatures rise above either the 1.5 degree or the 2 degree centigrade mark (over pre-industrial levels) that the scientific community has established as red lines. “What the Global North is doing is overusing its atmospheric space,” David Williams says. “A sort of atmospheric appropriation is happening.”

There’s almost no carbon left in the budget. “Today, we are already at a 1.4 degree temperature rise,” reports Meena Raman. “We are really close to breaching the 1.5 degree centigrade limit, and whether we will even limit temperature rise within 2 degrees is highly questionable.”

The Paris agreement, negotiated in 2014, was supposed to prevent this scenario, with countries committing voluntarily to limits that have become increasingly stringent. However, only 15 countries have even submitted their plans to meet the latest benchmarks.

The world thus faces two clearly demarcated paths forward. If countries ignore their commitments, withdraw from the Paris agreement, and continue to use fossil fuels unabated—as the United States has done under the Trump administration—the temperature could rise above a catastrophic 4 degrees centigrade by 2100. If, however, countries recommit to global cooperation and a rapid shift to renewable energy, the rise could be brought back down, after a terrifying overshoot, to 1.8 degrees by the end of the century.

This global cooperation requires a major transfer of funds to poorer countries so that they, too, can make the transition. Not only do most countries in the Global South not have these funds, they are struggling with high amounts of financial debt. Worse, the bill for debt service has recently risen to its highest level since 1994.

“Over 60 percent of Global South countries are suffering from illegitimate and completely unsustainable debt, and there’s really no chance of their ever paying it........

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