The real reason greenhouse gas emissions keep rising
"Rising emissions" and "overcoming poverty" are two ways of saying the same thing
You grew up on a farm. Maybe it was in Nigeria, maybe it was in Ecuador, or Bangladesh, or China. That doesn’t much matter. What matters is that you were poor, and it was hot. You had no electricity at home. You hardly ever travelled. Hunger was an ever looming threat. Meat was a rare and treasured treat. You lived in a house your parents had built with their own hands. It kept the rain out, some of the time. It looked something like:
Your parents farmed a small plot of land. They worked themselves to the bone to make it yield enough food for you and your siblings, enough to sell to make the bit of money it took to send you to school. They went through a lot for you. Not every harvest was good, not every meal was enough.
People in rich countries love to romanticize your experience, but you know how much it sucked. There was never enough of anything.
You were determined your parents’ sacrifice wasn’t going to be for nothing. You went to school, and did well. You graduated, and you went on to a technical school. You learned things no one in your family had ever known, and qualified for the kind of job no one in your family had ever been able to get.
And you’ve done well. Well enough you can send some money back home, to help your folks out now that they’re getting old. Well enough that you can afford the things they never could. Meat, even when it’s not a holiday. Trips back home to see them once or even twice a year. Maybe you even bought a little window air conditioner, on installments, to take the edge off of those days when it gets really hot — which come more and more often.
Now you have a city job in Lagos, or Guayaquil, or Dhaka, or Chongqing. After years in a tiny cramped apartment, you even qualified for a mortgage. Your house now looks something like this:
You’re nobody’s idea of a rich person. You’re one work accident away from being right back where you started. But you’re definitely not poor like your parents were. You’re upwardly mobile. You sleep on a foam mattress you bought at a store, not on a pile of straw like they did. Your clothes don’t have big holes on them. Things get tight towards the end of the month, sure, but your kids don’t know what it’s like to cry themselves to bed hungry at night.
Listen, we want to be on your side. You’re the little guy, the underdog. We want you to do well. We want asshole oil executives to be the perps in the little climate morality tale we’ve built for ourselves. When we say Just Stop Oil, we mean just stop the fat cats signing the billion-dollar exploration deals. Not you.
They’re easy to hate.
You’re not.
Here’s the thing, though. You’re one of billions. There are people like you in every corner of the developing world. Individually, your lifestyle generates greenhouse gas emissions that are a small fraction of what the average person in a rich country generates. But it’s not just you. It’s billions of you.
And, collectively, you’re the reason this chart looks like this:
We’re not ready to face up to what your rise in the world means.
We’re not ready to accept that for people like you, in the global lower middle class, salaries are always stretched. That you can only afford the very cheapest source of energy. That nine times out of ten that’s going to be energy extracted by burning things: natural gas if we’re lucky, coal if we're not.
We’re not ready to face the fact that you-being less-poor and you-emitting-more-carbon are two ways of saying the same thing.
And we’re certainly not ready to accept that globally, the rise of people like you is certain to overwhelm the modest reductions in emissions people in the developed countries are able to make with our solar panels and our nuclear power plants and our fancy shmancy LED bulbs.
Of all the things we in the first world climate commentariat are in denial about —and there are many— this is what we’re most in denial about: that the story of rising global emissions is the story of you getting less poor.
They’re not two stories, they’re two ways of telling the same story.
We’re desperate for this not to be so. We long for a baddie we can properly hate. We’re ready for Climate Justice to be a feel-good matter of sticking it to a bunch of capitalist pigs.
We’re not ready for a reality as morally unsatisfying as this one: that emissions are rising because hundreds of millions of children of the world’s poorest people live lives incomparably better than their parents’ were.
This is very important to understand, I believe. Both for the reality of where CO2 emissions are coming from, and for helping us understand how our own psychological tendencies influence how we see the problem .
OMG! Where to begin?
Well, these "two ways of saying the same thing," omit SO MUCH abpit the essential nature of the beast of modernity. Why? because the framing is entirely constrained by linear thinking (as is most of the commentary).
I am reminded of the old saw, "blaming the victim." Is the kid who climbed out of poverty to blame for participating in the system designed to afford him the income to purchase a few fossil-fueled industrial consumer products and services?
Oh, but clearly--if the graph is correct--the "poor countries" are clearly 'emitting more' carbon than the rich ones. So, of course, very large numbers of people consuming at barely above the 'poverty line,' emit more than a much smaller number of affluent people emitting vastly more carbon per capita.
Not only is the kindly--almost forgiving--tone of this essay offensively patronizing, it implies complete ignorance and acceptance (at the same time) of the historical and present condition of the political economy (and military enforcement) of the dominator culture of "industrial civilization." It also attempts to absolve the very system that has produced the global spread of carbon emissions, as the many are handed out a pittance of personal energy consumption-as compared with the profligate energy waste by the well-trained consumers in the rich countries.
Not a hint of the systemic nature of the extremely distorted distribution of energy and materials TO the rich countries, FROM the poor countries--for CENTURIES, right up to the present. It is not that the 'facts' presented are technically inaccurate; it is that they distort by omission.
The characterization of "rising emissions" offered has the implicit implication that either, the poor should stop producing so many consumers, or that growing global emissions are their fault. While the writer feigns a seeming moral neutrality, being kindly in his wording, the onus is nevertheless put upon the poor for having 'caused' rising emissions.
No, in fact the globalized political economy of endless industrial growth--however inequitably distributed--is the 'cause' of globally rising emissions, not the relatively moderate personal emissions of the latest participants in that system.
From the start of the industrial age, materials and energy have moved from what we used to call the "developing' nations (originally colonies) to the 'developed world.' The hierarchy of domination/subordination was, and is, clear, and clearly at the heart of the matter of global exploitation and oppression.
Despite the 'kindly' wording (as if the protagonist were a victim of his own behavior, having the temerity to participate in the global industrial-consumer system) this essay clearly blames the victim-population of poor nations--poor because of their subordination to the industrial-military might of the Western powers over centuries.
While this 'story' may intend merely to suggest that there are too many people in the world, well, fine, there certainly are. And those who were not born into the centers of global power have no less right to imbibe in the plush products of fossil-fueled industry. But neither do the rest of us have any more right to our hyper-consumerism than they do to their nascent consumerism.
In sum, the either/or linear mentality offers no solution to global over-production-consumption and the pollution it causes, driving the Earth System ever more rapidly toward catastrophic chaos and many-species extinction. The linear thinking of the dominator culture of 'industrial civilization' offers no solution. Any real solution must involve two things (and it will be a very bumpy road at best):
1. A New Great Transformation of all societies to create ecological communities, which do not rely on fossil fuels, but instead utilize existing low-tech tools (and invent new ones) to do NECESSARY work to produce what we need for survival, intellectual engagement, and artistic expression. (Hedge funds must go.)
2. Equitable distribution of resources to achieve democratic organization of communities and their relations with one another. Whether the nation-state has a role in this configuration is an open question. But if it is to have a role, it cannot be on the traditional model of hierarchic domination.
Finally, I would not worry much about over-population--not because the world is not overpopulated, but because given the trajectory of Earth System destabilization we are now on, even if we get everything right, we are unlikely to avoid mass starvation, migration, and armed conflicts over scarce sources of survival. That forces us, if we have a scintilla of humanity left, to focus attention on minimizing suffering by sharing globally, not by projecting blame on the historic victims of the system that could not recognize planetary limits to its golden calf of endless economic growth for the sole purpose of capital accumulation for the world's dominators.