[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the relentless march towards an uncertain future for planet earth. Dedicated to COP27.For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages. Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.
Just for starters, do not be fooled
–Climate change is the greatest intergenerational injustice ever inflicted by one generation of humans upon the next. (Mordecai Bromberg)
1. CO2, which is responsible for global warming, remains in the atmosphere for many thousands of years. It is estimated that 40 percent of the CO2 emitted by humans since 1850 remains in the atmosphere today. (2020 International Global Carbon Budget Study) So, although China is the largest emitter of CO2 today, the fact is that, if we look at the CO2 emissions data for 1750 to 2019, Europe was responsible for 32 percent of emissions, the U.S. for 25 percent, China for 13 percent, Africa for 3 percent, and South America for 3 percent of the total emissions during that period. Given the cumulative emissions debt, Europe has rung up over the course of 269 years. (Deutsche Welle)
2. While the Europe and other high-income countries are ‘net exporters of greenhouse gases-related climate damages’, most other low-income and lower-middle-income countries are unwilling net importers. Countries rendered rich thus ought to bear their fair share of the attributable costs of climate adaptation, emergency response, and recovery in countries that played little to no role in causing today’s calamities. Too often, these countries deny their historical responsibilities for climate damage. The developing world will not forget the leading role that countries rendered rich at the expense of poor countries have played in creating today’s worldwide climate disasters. (Jeffrey Sachs)
Climate damage has a lot to do with the unpromising and non-delivering green revolution
3. In the global supermarket, we have moved from a ‘ship-to-mouth’ pre-green revolution freighter traffic to a ‘ship-to-farm-to-mouth’ post-green revolution situation. The green revolution has not made the ships disappear, but merely replaced the contents of the ships from food to fertilizer –and synthetic fertilizers are not a renewable resource. The world is talking about renewable energy, but not about renewable plant nutrition. Urea is made from natural gas and we will run out of urea when we run out of fossil fuels.* Studies also show that we will face peak phosphorous shortages in the latter half of this century. In the long term (certainly in the lifetimes of today’s youth), not just India and China, but all the countries in the world will be forced to grow more sustainably.
*: Policymakers in many parts of the developed and developing world still fail to grasp the urgency of the moment. They continue to perceive fossil-fuel-powered development as the highway to economic wealth.
4. Countries today thus need to slowly transition towards a more sustainable, renewable energy and plant nutrition paradigm. Imagine a country foolhardily cuts its fossil fuel supplies overnight and asks its residents to transition to renewable energy. And this disastrous decision was then used to create a narrative about how renewable energy is wrong and that the world should safely continue to use fossil fuels without concern.(?) One can immediately see what is wrong in this narrative and this analogy describes what has happened in many a country. Without providing proper context, an uninformed reader will probably draw misplaced conclusions from the way the facts are presented.
5. For example, the way Sri Lanka abruptly transitioned away from synthetic agricultural inputs was wrong and is a lesson in how not to do it. But it was a step in the right direction. It was the correct thing done in the wrong way. Unfortunately, rather than criticizing the manner of the transition, the experience is being used by agribusiness to reinforce the seeming inevitability of the use of synthetic inputs. An uninformed person will probably draw the wrong conclusion (and agroindustrial corporations are pushing the Sri Lankan case to show how moving away from synthetic inputs bodes disaster).
6. Make no mistake, sooner or later, everyone is going to face the dilemma that Sri Lanka faced with respect to synthetic fertilizers and, unless we start preparing-for and gradually transition towards that future –and not stick our collective heads in the sand– we will all face a dire situation eventually in the next few decades. (Nachiket Udupa)
7. The signs of the times force us to think about two types of global transitions: the transition from democracy to dictatorships-of-a-new-type; and the epochal transition from the paradigm of unlimited exploitation of natural resources (‘nature belongs to us’) to a paradigm that promotes social and ecological justice, both among humans and between humans and nature (‘we belong to nature’). The first transition points to a profound crisis of democracy, while the second points to the profound crisis of the economic-social development models that have dominated the last five centuries. They are transitions of opposite sign because, if the first transition is consummated, it is difficult to imagine that the second can occur for the rights of nature to prevail. It is good to keep this in mind, because whoever aspires to the second transition towards respect for the rights of nature must fight to prevent the first one from happening.
8. One of the main lines of fracture within the political forces usually considered left-wing are between:
a) those who want to maintain the neo-extractivist model under the pretext of generating resources that improve the living conditions of the majority of the impoverished population; and
b) those for whom this model not only destroys the already precarious survival of the populations in the regions where the resources are exploited, but also perpetuates the power of the elites, further aggravating social inequality and producing ecological disaster.** (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
**: In Europe, the debate seems to be limited to something else, namely the modalities of the energy transition. Changing consumption patterns is not on the horizon. It is an ecology of those rendered rich that is satisfied with electric cars, as long as each middle-class family continues to have two cars, forgetting, moreover, that the batteries of electric cars use non-renewable mineral resources (lithium). What democratic majority decided a path in that direction?? (B. de Sousa Santos)
9. An uninformed person can indeed incorrectly feel that business as usual is what we need for a food secure future –wither the right to food and the rights of nature.
Climate justice cannot be offered retroactively
10. States do have extraterritorial obligations with regards to climate change Not least obligations to protect the collective rights of children. Their ‘futurity’ has be brought into the legal conversation around climate change specifically citing the failure of the states to ensure intergenerational justice for children. Recent climate justice cases brought before the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) have important implications for climatizing human rights. In fact, the new generation of human rights activists have much to teach us about transnational and intergenerational rights claims. The argument they are making is in multiple temporalities: you are violating our right to futurity now, and you (will be) violating our future rights if you do not act now. “We have no time to wait”. The urgency is now, even if the demand for rights is future-oriented.
11. Yes, climate justice cannot be offered retroactively. There is no adequate redress, no retributive, no restorative or transitional justice for the climate crisis. When they are only framed as a crisis-oriented-discourse, the demands of rhetorical-claims-staking regarding climate justice push the discourse of human rights to its temporal limits. Reframing human rights toward everyday violence against nature offers us an opportunity to recognize different kinds of violence operating within future-oriented rather than retroactive temporalities thus calling on us to act now to prevent future violence –think COP27…*** (Belinda Walzer)
***: ‘They’ cuddle themselves in continuous world summits from which spring whirlwinds of useless declarations of which they take pleasure in changing a few adjectives and/or moving a few commas from the dozens of previous similar declarations. Our denunciation aims first of all to tell ‘the dominant’ that they are directly responsible and personally guilty, and that it is not true that we must all individually and collectively change our actions and behavior to save the life of the planet and build social justice from below. It is too easy for them to argue such a thesis. It is up to them, instead, to stop being the lords and masters of the world, to dominate and impose their predatory choices and the defense of their own interests of power, domination and enrichment. Therefore, every democracy and justice system that considers that it belongs to citizens to rise up against the power that reigns, that discriminates, excludes, destroys common goods essential to life, does not respect universal rights and kills is licit. The aim is to regenerate the dimension, the sphere of the ‘public’, the ‘we’, and to (re)invent the political and planetary politics of life for peace, justice, freedom and common security. The dominant think they can buy everything with money and dominate everything with weapons. They are wrong. It is their basic fault. (Agora of the Inhabitants of the World)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
-In his inaugural speech, Gustavo Petro (Colombia) stated: “I will protect our soil and subsoil, our seas and rivers. Our air and sky (…) And, therefore, I will not allow the greed of a few to put our biodiversity at risk. We will confront the uncontrolled deforestation of our forests and promote the development of renewable energies. Colombia will be a world power of life. Planet Earth is the common home of human beings. And Colombia, from its enormous natural wealth, will lead this fight for planetary life”.
-There is never a lean season if you know how to fish. (Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari) Yes, but what about if the pond where those rendered poor could go to fish is privately owned …and is contaminated?