webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

climate justice

===

NEGLECTED? comes up evet COP, there are pledges of money?

===

TRUTHOUT 12 24

RSS Circle Icon

THE

International Court of Justice (ICJ) has just completed hearings on the climate crisis in a case that could have critical consequences for the survival of future generations. From December 2-13, more than 100 states and organizations argued before the ICJ in landmark litigation that began five years ago when Pacific Islander law students initiated a grassroots movement that persuaded the UN General Assembly to request an advisory opinion from the ICJ.

“In The Hague, most of which lies below sea level, this has been a momentous two weeks,” environmental attorney Richard Harvey, who works for Greenpeace International and watched the historic proceedings, told Truthout. “The Cold War divided the world into East and West but climate change divides it into North and South: corporate petrostates against the Small Island Developing States and the rest.”

“Never before have the U.S., Russia, China, U.K., Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and OPEC [the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] lined up so explicitly against those who suffer the most from their greed,” Harvey said. “Corporate petrostates shamelessly asserted that peoples’ rights to self-determination, to life and to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment are, in essence, trumped by their right to fossil fuel profits.”

On March 29, 2023, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 77/276 that recognized “climate change is an unprecedented challenge of civilizational proportions and that the well-being of present and future generations of humankind depends on our immediate and urgent response to it.” The resolution directed the ICJ to render an advisory opinion on:

The campaign in the General Assembly was spearheaded by Vanuatu, a constellation of 83 small islands in the South Pacific and one of the states most vulnerable to climate change. The measure that was introduced by Vanuatu and co-sponsored by over 130 states took aim at the primary emitters of fossil fuels, of which the United States is the leading culprit.

Related Story

News Analysis

|

War & Peace

US Militarism Is a Leading Cause of the Climate Catastrophe

US military interventions are not just wars on people — they’re also wars on the climate.

By Marjorie Cohn , TruthoutSeptember 10, 2024

“Today, we find ourselves on the frontlines of a crisis we did not create ⎯ a crisis that threatens our very existence and that of so many other peoples who have come in unprecedented numbers to be heard by this Court,” Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate change and environment, told the 15 judges. “The outcome of these proceedings will reverberate across generations, determining the fate of nations like mine and the future of our planet.”

The Climate Crisis Is “Existential” for Many Developing Countries

Many states, including Tuvalu, characterized the climate crisis as “existential.” Despite producing less than 0.01 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, Tuvalu is on a trajectory to be the first country completely lost to rising sea levels due to climate change. The Solomon Islands have already lost five islands and others face severe erosion. Several states cited extreme weather events, many quite recent, that have had disastrous consequences for their people.

“The cost of fossil fuel subsidies from States reached an all-time high of US$7 trillion in 2022,” more than 23 times the amount that developing countries strived to secure for climate finance at the recent COP29.

Elizabeth Exposto, chief of staff to the prime minister of Timor-Leste, which is acutely vulnerable to climate change, said, “The climate crisis that we face today is the result of the historical and ongoing actions of industrialised nations, which have reaped the benefits of rapid economic growth, powered by colonial exploitation and carbon-intensive industries and practices.” She also noted, “These nations, representing only a fraction of the global population, are overwhelmingly responsible for the climate crisis, and yet, the impacts of climate change do not respect borders.”

But Margaret Taylor, legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State, dismissed the idea that the worst offenders were most responsible for taking actions to remedy the harm they are causing to the developing states. She asserted that, “States’ current obligations in respect of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions do not vary based on differentiation between categories of States, such as those characterized as ‘developed’ and ‘developing.’”

Like other major emitting states, Russia contended that the 1.5 degrees centigrade temperature limit in the Paris agreement is not legally binding, international responsibility is only triggered at the moment the climate treaties came into force for each state, causation by a single state is impossible to prove, and the primary emitters are not responsible for harm that future generations will suffer.

Even though Palestine is responsible for less than 0.01 percent of global emissions, it suffers severe climate impacts that are intensified by Israel’s illegal occupation. It has led to “the violation of the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to control its territory, to have sovereignty over its resources and to be in command of its climate policies,” Ambassador Ammar Hijazi, permanent representative of the State of Palestine to International Organizations in the Netherlands, told the court.

Palestine’s representatives raised the significant linkage between occupation, militarism and climate justice. “Climate scientists have determined that the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip was responsible for emission of between 420,000 and 650,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in just the first 120 days, which is the period for which there is published data,” Kate Mackintosh argued for Palestine. “This is equivalent to the total annual emissions of 26 of the lowest-emitting States.”

“Although the occupying Power has a legal obligation to protect the environment and to conserve the natural resources of the occupied territory for the benefit of the protected population, this obligation is often violated, as the Court has already concluded in relation to Israel’s occupation of Palestine,” Mackintosh added. She was referring to the ICJ’s advisory opinion issued in July which concluded that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal.

Representatives from the Dominican Republic said that damages from climate change violate the fundamental right to survival — a right recognized by the ICJ in its advisory opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons.

The Risks of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Have Been Known Since at Least the 1960s

Regenvanu from Vanuatu emphasized that “the unprecedented risks created by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have been known since at least the 1960s,” citing an address by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson in 1965: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”

Referring to the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Regenvanu noted, “For many peoples, including in Vanuatu, the prolonged and systematic failure of the COP process has cost them their well-being, their cultures and even their lives. There is an urgent need for a collective response to climate change grounded not in political convenience but in international law.”

Jorge Viñuales from the Melanesian Spearhead Group stated that emissions of greenhouse gases have increased more than 50 percent since 1990. He cited a report by the International Monetary Fund that “the cost of fossil fuel subsidies from States reached an all-time high of US$7 trillion in 2022,” more than 23 times the amount that developing countries strived to secure for climate finance at the recent COP29.

Fossil fuels account for 80 percent of global primary energy. Nearly 80 percent of historical greenhouse gases have come from the Group of 20 (G20), while developing countries contributed only 4 percent.

In its directive to the ICJ for an advisory opinion, the General Assembly resolution referenced several relevant sources of international law, including the UN Charter; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; UNFCCC; the Paris Climate Agreement; the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea; the duty of due diligence; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the principle of prevention of significant harm to the environment; and the duty to protect and preserve the marine environment.

The Leading Greenhouse Gas Emitters Tried to Narrow Climate Change Law

Nevertheless, the leading greenhouse gas-emitting states argued that their international legal obligations did not go beyond those set forth in the UNFCCC and Paris agreement, an international treaty on climate change adopted by 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in 2015 and entered into force in 2016.

But the overwhelming majority of states told the court that international law governing climate change also includes customary international law and human rights law.

“As the majority of the submissions have highlighted, for islands like Samoa, climate change is more than an environmental issue,” Peseta Noumea Simi, chief executive officer in Samoa’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said. “It is a health, food security, economic, social, cultural, human rights and security concern. As large ocean States, it fundamentally affects our ability to draw sustenance from the pristine oceans and seas that surround us.”

The Solomon Islands called for international legal protection for refugees displaced by climate change under international refugee law.

Some, like Ecuador, maintained that states which have significantly harmed the climate system, including harm caused by private contractors under its jurisdiction, must also be held accountable.

The Union of Comoros argued that breaches of the legal obligations owed to the international community as a whole (erga omnes) require reparations, including cessation of illegal acts, compensation for damage and loss, and financial support. Many of the states agreed that reparations must be paid, including restitution, compensation and satisfaction (for moral damages such as mental and emotional suffering). Some, including the African Union, mentioned debt cancellation (or at least debt relief) and structural reparation. Vietnam, which continues to suffer the effects of the U.S. military’s spraying of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, suggested restorative measures for the national environment.

A Favorable Advisory Opinion From the ICJ Would Carry Great Moral Weight

During his first term, President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris agreement. President Joe Biden then rejoined the treaty in 2021. Now, Trump is preparing once again to leave the Paris agreement and has promised to increase fossil-fuel production.

Although an advisory opinion from the ICJ is not legally binding, it carries great moral weight. It could help climate activists hold polluting states accountable by providing legal support for climate litigation against their governments. Politicians could cite it to support the imposition of sanctions against states that fail to comply with their legal obligations. And diplomats could use it as a minimum standard in the next global climate change negotiations.

“The ICJ’s opinion will be published in 2025, just as the court celebrates its 80th birthday,” Harvey told Truthout. “I sincerely hope our colleagues threatened by rising sea levels, unbreathable air and deadly temperature increases will find its opinion a cause for celebration.”

On the last day of the hearings, Vishal Prasad, director of Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change, presented the ICJ with the “People’s Petition: A Collective Climate Justice Call for the ICJ,” which quoted a young woman from the Micronesian island of Kiribati: “The ocean, once a nurturing mother, has become a vengeful giant, swallowing the land it once cradled. It no longer only gives life — it now takes it, inch by inch. Where it once offered sustenance, it now brings destruction, its rising tides a cold and unrelenting force that pulls homes, cultures, and futures into its depths.”

Prasad invoked the memory of his ancestors, who were guided across the Pacific islands by the stars, telling the judges: “Just as the wayfinders of the Pacific held the wisdom to guide us through the vast ocean to safe harbour, you hold the knowledge and the responsibility to guide the international community to ensure the protection of our collective future. And you can do this simply by applying international law to the conduct responsible for climate change.”

Indeed, Vanuatu’s Regenvanu told the ICJ, “Let us not allow future generations to look back and wonder why the cause of their doom was condoned.”

==

DEC 13, 2019

COP25: Developing Countries Charge Ahead with Bold Climate Plans as Rich Countries Drag Their Feet

 this year’s United Nations climate summit wraps up in Madrid, Spain, many activists, scientists, indigenous and grassroots climate leaders say that rich countries most responsible for the climate emergency have spent the talks dialing back ambition and blocking progress. This comes as deadly droughts, flooding, cyclones and wildfires rage around the world. This week, more than 70 developing countries have announced they will accelerate their climate plans, and 72 countries have signed onto goals to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. But major emitters Australia, China, India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia have made no such promises, while the U.S. is slated to pull out of the Paris Agreement entirely by next year. For more on the negotiations at COP25, we speak with Saleemul Huq, climate scientist and the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. He is advising the bloc of Least Developed Countries in the climate talks.

GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we broadcast from inside the U.N. climate summit here in Madrid, Spain, in its final days.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: “While deadly droughts, flooding, cyclones and wildfires rage outside the conference center, the rich countries most responsible for the climate emergency have spent the talks dialing back ambition and blocking progress. That’s what activists, scientists, indigenous and grassroots climate leaders are charging in the last days of this year’s climate conference as two weeks of negotiations wrap up without crucial commitments from the countries most responsible for global emissions.

AMY GOODMAN: This week, more than 70 developing countries have announced they’ll accelerate their climate plans, and 72 countries have signed onto goals to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. But major carbon emitters Australia, China, India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia have made no such promises, while the U.S. is slated to pull out of the Paris Agreement entirely by next year.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Meanwhile, a new study finds that the climate crisis is already leading to a massive increase in the number of refugees being displaced around the world.

In Berkeley, California, we’re joined by a policy analyst with the Global Justice Program at the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s the co-author of the new report, “Climate Refugees: The Climate Crisis and Rights Denied.”

AMY GOODMAN: And here in Madrid, Spain, we’re joined by Saleemul Huq, climate scientist, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, advising the bloc of Least Developed Countries in the climate negotiations.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Saleemul Huq, let’s begin with you. I mean, you have, as so many have said, these climate emergencies taking place around the world right now. You have got the wildfires in Australia. You’ve got the floods. You’ve got the droughts. You’ve got climate migration at a level we haven’t seen. What is happening here? Is this a cop-out? And what role is the U.S. playing?

SALEEMUL HUQ: Well, I think the year 2019 will, in hindsight, be seen as the tipping point, when human-induced climate change became reality. We can now attribute many of the things you just said, the magnitude of them being way over anything we’ve seen before. And that can now be attributed to the fact that we have already increased global temperature by well over 1 degree centigrade, and that is already having impacts. And we’re headed for 3 degrees and nowhere near the one-and-a-half degrees that we want to do.

So, what we are seeing in reality is that the impacts are causing damage. They’re causing loss of life, loss of biodiversity. And what we need the Conference of Parties to do is step up to that challenge that has been given from the rest of the world, particularly the young children of the world who were out here in Madrid, a half a million of them last Friday. But I don’t see a lot of signs of the negotiators responding to that. And the U.S. has been particularly difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the U.S. doing? I mean, on the one hand, Trump is pulling the U.S. out of the climate conference. But they are also, as each day goes by, working to dilute any kind of lead-up to next year, the evaluation of the Paris climate accord.

SALEEMUL HUQ: So, the specific technical point here in Madrid, in the 25th Conference of Parties, is something called the review of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage. The developing countries have a united front here. We want that review to take it forward with an implementation arm and a finance arm. And the finance part is something that the United States is completely against. And so far we haven’t got a decision on that.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain finance.

SALEEMUL HUQ: Funding for loss and damage, as opposed to funding for adaptation and mitigation.

AMY GOODMAN: Right. That’s a lot of U.N. speak.

SALEEMUL HUQ: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Most people don’t really get it.

SALEEMUL HUQ: All right. So, basically,giving some funding to the victims of the impacts of climate change that we are now seeing,allowing funding to be raised for the victims.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, you know, Saleemul, if you could just give a broader sense? I mean, we’ve been coming to the climate summit for many years, as indeed have you. Many people argue that even though the pace of change is very, very slow, it’s an important venue for developing countries to be able to express, in solidarity, their position to the richer countries. What do you see is the significance of these annual meetings, where it seems every year very little gets achieved that’s in the interest of the people who have been suffering the most from the effects of the climate crisis?

SALEEMUL HUQ: Well, we live in an unjust and unequal world. And as the vulnerable poor countries, the Least Developed Countries, that I advise — 47 of them in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, including my country, Bangladesh — this is the only game in town where we have a seat at the table, where we can actually say something and hope that the other side will listen. A lot of the time they don’t listen, but sometimes they do. We’re hoping in Madrid we will get them to listen within the next few hours that we have left here.

AMY GOODMAN: Describe what’s happening in your own country of Bangladesh.

SALEEMUL HUQ: So, my country, Bangladesh, is one of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. We are a delta — live on a delta of two of the major rivers of the world, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. We have a population of 160-plus million people living in less than 150,000 square kilometers, so a population density of over a thousand per square kilometer — very vulnerable, very generally poor, but nevertheless one of the most resilient countries. We have found — we have one of the best cyclone warning and shelter systems in the world. We can warn and evacuate more than two-and-a-half million people. We recently had a major cyclone where we did that. And so, we are struggling, but we are rising to the challenge of dealing with the impacts of climate change. But there’s a limit to what we can do. One-and-a-half degrees, we can manage. Three degrees, we can’t.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to a break, and then we’re going to come back to this discussion, and we’re going to talk about this massive crisis of climate migration. We’re talking millions and millions of people, the numbers only promising to grow. We’re with Saleemul Huq from the Bangladeshi climate movement, a climate scientist. Joining us also will be Hossein Ayazi at the University of California, Berkeley, who just left [sic] but did a report here on climate refugees.

==

==

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/why-a-green-new-deal-might-not-be-enough-and-we-could-leave-developing-countries-with-an-ugly-choice/

Why a Green New Deal might not be enough — and we could leave developing countries with an ugly choice

Written by Vijay Prashad / Independent Media Institute December 3, 2019

In Madrid, Spain, the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference—known as COP25—began on December 2. Representatives of the world’s countries gathered to discuss what is decidedly a serious problem for the planet; no one, except dangerous political forces in the neofascist right, denies the reality of climate change. What prevents a transfer from carbon-based fuel to other fuels is not the stubbornness of this or that country. The main problems are three:

The right wing that denies climate change;

Sections of the energy industry that have a vested interest in the continuation of the use of carbon-based fuels;

The refusal by the Western advanced countries to admit both that they have caused the problem and that they should use their vast wealth to finance the transfer from carbon-based fuels to other fuels in countries whose wealth has been siphoned off to the West.

The first two blockages—the right wing and sections of the climate industry—are related, since it is often money from the climate industry (the Koch brothers, for instance) that finances the climate deniers and sows confusion about the immense reality that confronts us.

The third blockage is serious, and it has prevented the United Nations process from bearing fruit. At the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, the countries of the world negotiated a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In that document—which was ratified at the General Assembly two years later—the governments agreed to a key principle, namely that the impact of colonialism cannot be divorced from discussions of the climate crisis.

“The global nature of climate change,” the parties wrote, “calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions.”

Common and Differentiated Responsibilities

The main phrase here to consider is “common but differentiated responsibilities.” This means that the problem of climate change is something that is common to all countries, and that no one is immune to its deleterious impact; at the same time, the responsibility of countries is not identical, and some countries—which benefited for centuries from colonialism and carbon fuel—have a greater responsibility for the transition to a less damaging energy system.

There is little scholarly debate on the fact that certain countries—the West—benefited inordinately from both colonialism and carbon fuel. A look at the data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center’s Global Carbon Project shows that the United States of America—by itself—has been the largest dispenser of carbon dioxide emissions since 1750. The main carbon emitters were all colonial powers, namely European states and the United States of America. From the 18th century, these countries have not only dispensed the bulk of the carbon into the atmosphere, but they also continue to exceed their share of the Global Carbon Budget.

Carbon-fueled capitalism—enriched by the wealth stolen through colonialism—enabled the countries of Europe and North America to enhance the well-being of their populations. The extreme inequalities between the standard of living for the average European (742 million people) and the average Indian (1.4 billion people) is as stark as it was a century ago. The reliance by China, India, and other developing countries on carbon—particularly coal—is high; but even this use of carbon has not raised the per capita emissions of China and India above that of the United States, whose per capita emissions are almost twice as much as China’s per capita emissions.

Green Climate Fund

The Framework Convention recognized the importance of colonialism, the geographical divergence of industrial capitalism, and its impact on the carbon budget. That is why the countries at Rio agreed to create a Green Climate Fund. The West was asked to make substantial contributions to the fund, whose capital would then be used to assist developing countries to “leapfrog” carbon-fueled social development.

It was hoped that the fund would draw in $100 billion—at a minimum—by 2020. The United States pledged $3 billion but has only contributed $1 billion. Trump has blocked any further contributions to the fund (Bernie Sanders, in contrast, said he would pay $200 billion into the fund, while the UK’s Jeremy Corbyn pledged to use his country’s leverage over the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds toward “climate justice for the Global South”). Australia and Russia have also paused contributions. No real appetite exists to expand this fund; there is little expectation that it—or the concept of leapfrogging—will be taken seriously at COP25.

The $100 billion figure is very conservative. The International Energy Agency suggests each year in its World Energy Outlook that the actual figure is in the trillions. None of the Western powers has intimated anything like a commitment of that scale to the fund.

Attack on Coal

It is far easier to attack China and India, and other developing countries.

In early November, UN Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the press after his participation in the UN-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) meeting in Bangkok, Thailand. He mentioned neither the concept of “common but differentiated responsibility” nor the Green Climate Fund.

Tellingly, the secretary-general made three proposals, each of which says nothing to the main principle of “differentiated responsibility”:

Taxes must be placed on carbon emissions.

Trillions of dollars of subsidies for fossil fuels must end.

Construction of coal-fired power stations must end by 2020.

None of these proposals per se would raise eyebrows. In fact, given the gravity of the reports coming in from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there is no doubt that action is necessary.

But what kind of action? These three proposals would directly strike at the energy sources for countries that have not yet provided electrification for their populations, or where their people are far from the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Southeast Asia, where Guterres made these remarks, only anticipates full electrification of the region by 2030.

Advanced industrial states—such as the United Kingdom and Germany—have said that they will phase out coal by 2040. These are countries that have created the Powering Past Coal Alliance (backed by the Bloomberg New Energy Finance, one of the major capital funds that seeks to make money off the Green New Deal). There is money to be made here for venture capitalists; they are not going to contribute the billions needed for the Green Climate Fund. No philanthropy by the billionaires will be willing to donate their money into the fund; the tax-free money they make on the “green transition” will eclipse the tiny amounts of money they will donate for a non-carbon future.

Ugly Choice

Meanwhile, developing countries have an ugly choice before them: to forgo carbon, the cheapest fuel, and then forgo social development for their populations; or to continue to use carbon and threaten the planet. These are the only choices if the advanced industrial states refuse to fund the Green Climate Fund, and if they refuse to transfer technology for wind and solar to countries without any financial obligation.

A Green New Deal in the West is not going to be sufficient if this deal does not include trillions of dollars into the UN’s Green Climate Fund and the transfer of technology as a social practice and not for profit.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

===