Recharting the why of global emissions

COPs are fascinating. With your climate action hat on, they can seem a complete farce. In the context of all else going on in the world, their mere existence can seem a small miracle of global cooperation. I strongly believe that both can be true at the same time, and that both thoughts should always be held simultaneously. Having said that, the more important of the two positions is of course the first, as the distance from where we started is of less note than that from where we need to get. It is here that things are clearly not going well, and here that I would like to propose my first Reframing of this rekindled blog.

Currently the international climate governance regime is built around nation states. We debate historical responsibility and assign future budgets, targets, and financial commitments, but always at the level of the nation state. This makes perfect sense. Our world has, since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, been run on this basis, and states are the primary actors with the power to create and enforce laws. Significant moments of global progress have been achieved through such cooperation, from the Paris Peace Treaties to the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty and the directly (but imperfectly) climate-comparable Montreal Treaty on ozone depletion and CFC gases. Each of these achieved relative success in solving the problem set. The 2015 Paris Agreement, by contrast, has not, despite its signature by 194 countries and the European Union. There are many complex explanations for this failure, to which myriad books have been dedicated, but one which I increasingly feel is understated is the foundational fact that states may not be the optimal unit of focus for such a wicked problem.

Why?

Firstly, by focusing on nation states we get fed an imprecise picture of where emissions occur, and more importantly why they occur. It is all too common to hear ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’ within climate circles (usually those populated by gilets, LinkedIn QR codes, and CSR litter picking days), but we seem to have forgotten this foundational - if sometimes frustrating – principle at the international level. When we assign emissions by nation, we do so using the ‘territorial’ method, accounting only for emissions produced within its borders. This gives service-based economies such as the UK a massive free pass on all their essential goods produced elsewhere. One of the key flaws in the ‘what about China’ argument is ‘what about everything that we consume?’ Looking at where emissions are produced in this way obscures the fundamental why, which is key to their abatement. Similarly, analysing where through the prism of the nation state is like using a football goal to catch fish. It is far too broad a category to truly understand what is going on. Rural farmers in Behar bear no resemblance in terms of their impact on climate change to the Ambani family residing in their 27 storey tower in Mumbai (or in Dubai, New York, or Buckinghamshire).

It is easy to point out such theoretical flaws in hindsight. It is not inconceivable that states could have solved the problem, despite the issues highlighted above. Practically, however, calculating emissions at the level of the state has a further issue - it contributes to the collectivisation (and thus diffusion) of responsibility. Viewing climate change as everyone’s problem is of course to some extent true, but it also plays into the hands of big polluters, the same companies which came up with the idea of the carbon footprint, and rebrand as ‘energy providers’ to place responsibility squarely at the hands of the consumer. As decades of work in behavioural psychology and related studies of social practice have shown, however, consumers are fundamentally constrained by the social and physical infrastructure around them. To blame a postman in Liverpool for a heatwave in Southern Europe is morally contentious and practically useless.

States then may not be the optimal unit for assigning responsibility for the problem. What about their important role in solving it? Here, they still seem of prime importance, not least for their ability to pass laws. However, some Reframing is in order here too, for the power of states to take decisive action on emissions reduction is declining. No one needs an obscure attempt at a blog to tell them that there is increasing division in many of today’s societies, and concern for climate change has been a prominent casualty of this trend. As we move past actions that can be achieved primarily away from the public eye (such as switching from coal to renewables in the UK, for no one really cares where their electricity comes from as long as the lights turn on and their wallet stays healthy), climate policy is being co-opted and weaponised during mainstream debate, with a chilling effect on ambition. Even before this trend, much scholarship has highlighted the hollowing out of the state since the neoliberal turn of the 1970s. As the doctrine has developed and morphed, power, responsibility, and capital have all slipped away from the state to a point where standard parlance in climate circles is to talk of ‘governance’ rather than ‘government’ to account for the wide range of non-state actors with decision-making power. It is these actors which now demand more focus for climate action to be successful. While the balance of power has shifted, our mechanisms for problem solving have not kept up.

So?

So, where are we? Focusing on nation states can obscure both the where and the why of emissions and places expectation on actors that simply do not have the capacity to match it. So how can Reframing help us to resolve this impasse? Rather than focusing on societies, states, and governments as the key protagonists of the climate crisis, I wonder whether we can hone in more directly on the centres of emissions. This means a focus on corporations, class, and power. In order to actually prevent the release of greenhouse gases, we must understand specifically who is making money from it, and where. In other words, what is the landscape of accumulation by emission. Through this lens, action is less about national climate targets or blunt North-South financial transfers (although both remain important), and more about specific sanctions, targeted wealth redistribution, and direct action protest.

A useful example of this shift is to consider the Just Energy Transition Partnership between a group of rich European governments and South Africa. A transfer of funds is intended to facilitate the decommissioning of the latter’s coal fleet, and stimulation of a renewable energy industry to replace it. It sounds a great idea, and in many ways is. People in Europe benefitted from coal, South Africans should be compensated and supported if they are not allowed to do the same. But who is that coal REALLY benefiting? And who reaps the rewards of the incoming money? In South Africa, there is a well-document nexus of power between the energy and mining industries, the ruling party, and an outsized portion of the country’s financial resources. If we focus on these landscapes of power, this transfer could be seen as UK taxpayer money simply compensating an elite network which has itself benefitted from coal to the detriment of the rest of the population, and should thus be funding this transition itself. This is perhaps an overly cynical viewpoint, and there are undoubtedly positives to the partnership, but it is important at least to ask whether the finance (a resource in increasingly short supply) could have been better used elsewhere.

Indeed, money seems in short supply everywhere at the moment. Climate finance is perennially lagging, development aid is being ransacked, and governments across Europe are making impossibly difficult budgetary decisions. Asking European taxpayers to stump up money to fund climate initiatives around the world, or even to vote for regulations with short term financial losses, is thus understandably very difficult. But there is money around. A trivial reference perhaps, but as a sports fan this is all too evident at the moment. The owners of Indian conglomerates are on a crusade to capture every blank space in cricket’s global calendar, while Saudi Arabia makes a bid for golf, and billionaires continue to vie for ownership of Premier League football teams. Much of this wealth comes either directly or indirectly from emissions. The clearest example of this is the ExxonMobil Guyana Global Super League T20, born as the petro-giant courts the cash-strapped Guyanese government. While maps of global territorial emissions are important, I would propose an alternative visualisation for my Reframed approach, the famous elephant graph of changing income distribution during the heyday of globalisation. 

By comparing this graph with a plot of emissions over the same period (hint, they have gone up), it is possible to begin to discern a more complex portrait of responsibility. We can keep trying to squeeze money out of the middle classes in Europe, middle classes who have seen their income decline in recent decades and who rightly or wrongly feel increasingly left behind, or we can look to the Mukesh Ambani’s, Taylor Swifts, or even Ben Van Beurens of this world. Ideally of course, both parties play their part. But the part of one is currently being under emphasised, with significant implications both for justice and for real economy emissions reduction. Tech billionaires are an interesting consideration for this argument. Many (including me) believe there should be more wealth redistribution full stop. For the purposes of this Reframing, however, the focus is squarely on those who makes money from emissions, where they make it, and where it goes.

And?

So what does this Reframing mean in practice? What does climate action through a lens of accumulation by emission look like?

• For policymakers?
  • Governments are of course still key players in this Reframed world, but crucially they are not the be all and end all, and their role should be accurately contextualised. Policies should incorporate an explicit justice element, targeting centres of accumulation by emission through taxation and regulation, and funds should be redistributed to support those losing out from the climate policies which are inevitably regressive. International networks should be built with other policymakers in order to target global value chains of accumulation, and prevent emissions leakage.
• For activists
  • Unfocused protest making general calls for more government action becomes less useful. Instead, the focus should be on power. In some cases, the government has the power to tackle centres of accumulation, and activism should be targeted accordingly. In other cases, focus should shift directly to these centres of accumulation. This means not just an oil well or the headquarters of a big polluter, but the networks of marketing companies, consultants, tax accountants, and offshore havens that support their accumulation of wealth. Just as parts of Britain were built on slave money, so climate change can be read not just in the geological record but through the built environment and cultural landscape of the country, from Belgravia’s beaming facades to Newcastle United’s Carabao Cup triumph. Shining a light on this network could be fruitful ground for bold activism, building popular support by connecting emissions to inequality.
• For climate finance?
  • Climate finance should not be seen so simply as North-South transfers, but rather transfers from those who have made money from emissions to those who have not, and particularly those who stand to lose out further during mitigation efforts. While they will predominantly be North-South, they could legitimately be North-North, South-South, or perhaps even South-North, acknowledging the vast colonial legacies which make this unlikely. Novel sources of finance can be explored, such as a tax on private jet use or bilateral debt-for-nature swaps.

This blog merely scratches the surface of multiple complex and interlinked topics and is hopefully the start of a longer period of personal exploration of the links between climate and class. There are likely to be many angles and examples I have not yet considered, and I would love to hear any thoughts on the topic. If you're still here and looking for more Reframing, the next piece will highlight the need for more, not less, politics in climate change. Thank you as always for reading.

All images are my own.