Climate Justice: Past, Present and Future
The following is based on a talk given by NailsworthCAN’s Education lead, Richard Erskine, on Climate Justice: past, present and future to a Stroud Young Greens MissingEd event on October 2022, which was concerned with climate change and the experience of indigenous people. The full talk includes slides and illustrations, and was part of a conversation following this and other talks. If you would be interested in hosting an event to hear the full illustrated talk (including discussion / Q&A), please contact us at our email nailsworthcan@gmail.com. Other talks are also available.
I want to take you on a journey through the long history of climate injustice, recognising that it is inevitably linked to how indigenous people have been treated in the distant past, and continue to suffer.
Racism is as old as the Greeks
Aristotle said (in his Politics) that people in warm climates were “wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery.”
He also argued that human societies depend on environmental conditions, that were fragile and continually changing.
In terms of a modern narrative it is very true that climate has “always changed” (as climate deniers love to remind us), but mostly this has been due to cycles or events unconnected with human activities. Nevertheless there have been changes in climate in the past due to humans prior to the industrial revolution.
Forest clearing deemed healthy
Back in 17th century people like John Evelyn - who was a co-founder of the Royal Society - thought that clearing forests improved the climate and healthiness of a region [1]. This belief was passed on down through generations so that Thomas Jefferson certainly thought this was true, as he wrote about, in his Notes on the State of Virginia.
Alexander von Humboldt
Alexander von Humboldt met with Jefferson and argued against this belief.
Many people - certainly in the English-speaking world - are now unfamiliar with Alexander von Humboldt. He was an absolute icon of his age, who unwittingly became the original father of the environmental movement. He invented the concept of nature as we understand it today, and the web of life [2].
He identified man-made climate change in 1800 as a result of the clearing of forests.
Rachel Carson
It took until Rachel Carson in the 1960s to re-awaken a global environmental movement, starting in the United States. She was a scientist who studied the oceans but was made famous by her book ‘Silent Spring’.
Dorothy Freeman - a ‘wise woman’ and love of her life - was worried that the chemical companies would go after Carson, relentlessly and viciously. Carson reassured her that she had taken that into account, but that, “knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent.” Needless to say special interests still attack her 60 years on.
I love this quote of hers:
“The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the Earth. When we are wise enough, perhaps we can read in them all of past history.” Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (1950)
She is referring to sediments on the ocean floor, and indeed, within a few years scientists were able to look back into the deep past by looking at sediments from the ocean floor and also from the ice sheets, using the new science of isotopic paleoclimatology.
Historic colonialism and climate change
Relatively recently it has been discovered that the European settlement of the Americas following 1492 resulted in the deaths of 90% of the indigenous population of 60 million particularly amongst advanced civilisations such as the Inca by about 1600. This was through a combination of war, violent resettlement, disease and neglect. It seems appropriate to me to refer to this decimation of indigenous people as genocide [3].
What the research showed was a fingerprint in the climate record of this genocide. Due to the farm land of the indigenous people being unattended, forests grew over them sucking out significant quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and thereby lowering the global atmospheric mean temperature (note that this is opposite to the impact of Europeans observed later where forests in the Americas were cleared for European agriculture and settlement).
Historic colonialism and genocide
American Progress is a morally repugnant painting of 1872 by John Gast that actually celebrates the displacement of the indigenous people.
Eunice Foote
Relatively recently it was discovered that the first scientist to actually conduct an experiment showing the heat trapping properties of different gases was the American Eunice Foote, in 1856. She showed that carbon dioxide was a very effective heat trapping gas (which we now call a greenhouse gas) and she speculated on the possible role this must have had on past climate. The ice ages had been identified just 2 decades before this [4].
200 years of science: we know what, why, when & who!
Now, 200 years of climate science has shown us that we are in an extraordinary situation where the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen higher than at any time in the last 2 million years and are now 1/3rd higher than pre-industrial levels. The global mean surface temperature has been rising accordingly, and at a rate that has never been seen before, even during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 56 million years ago [5].
I wrote another essay that placed the advance of climate science in context of science in general [6].
Growth in average energy footprint worldwide
If we look at the average energy footprint of humanity on Earth it has risen from about 4 hundredths (0.04) of a kilowatt-hour (kWh) per person per day in 1800 to today's figure of about 30 kWh; an increase of 700-fold. Over this time the population of earth has increased from 1 billion to about 8 billion, and so the total energy footprint of humanity has increased by about 5,600 in the space of just over 200 years. The rise in footprint has been far more significant than the rise in population [7].
Birth rates in countries like Bangladesh have fallen from about 6 to just over 2 (the replacement rate), and so the world’s population is expected to peak before the end of the century. However, carbon emissions continue to rise and there is no sign of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide levelling off (as evidenced by the Keeling Curve).
Accompanying the increase in humanity’s energy footprint has been much needed social development, including hospitals, schools and much else that we now take for granted.
However, this has been done at a cost, because it has been fuelled by coal, oil and gas, that have had - unbeknownst to humanity for most of this time - serious impacts on the world’s climate.
The challenge for humanity is to improve the social development of the poorest while not further damaging our common home in the process.
The obvious answer is to decarbonise all forms of energy production and use, but we have left it so late that it's now very challenging to achieve this goal within the time period and carbon budget we have left, to limit the damage within acceptable limits (but acceptable to whom?).
What is history?
Much of this history I'm telling you is not widely known, and is not taught in schools.
There is a deeper question here: ‘what is history and who writes it?’
This is what Hilary Mantel had to say about it [8]:
“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.”
She eloquently reveals that there is no single history of the world; no canonical version. Often it is the history written by the winners or those with the resources and power to write their version of history. So displaced indigenous people; slaves; women; and innumerable others are often left out of this history.
Extreme Carbon Inequality
Oxfam’s Extreme Carbon Inequality Report [9] showed that the top 10% most wealthy people on Earth were and remain responsible for 50% of carbon emissions, while the lowest 50% were responsible for just 10% of the emissions. A grossly unfair asymmetry.
Carbon dioxide is a long-lived greenhouse gas, so historic emissions count.
This is an injustice that lies at the heart of our current climate emergency, but is not the whole story.
Youth climate movement
In a photo of Greta Thunberg and three other young European climate activists at the Economic Forum in Davos in 2020, Associated Press cropped the original, to remove Vanessa Nakate, the climate activist from Uganda.
She said “you didn't just erase a photo, you are erased a continent”.
Vanessa Nakate
Vanessa Nakate is an inspiration and has gone on to be a leading voice for Africa on climate. She has written a book - A Bigger Picture: My fight to bring a new African voice to the climate crisis - which I highly recommend [10].
Vanessa Nakate’s voice is at the centre of Christian Aid’s #HackTheAgenda campaign.
The pressure for justice is being heard in some places. The EU Parliament voted on 20th October 2022 on a strong resolution on #COP27 on:
Finance to address #LossAndDamage
Adaptation finance
Climate finance
Fossil fuel subsidies & mitigation
World weather attribution
The new science of extreme climate weather attribution [11] is now able to tell us whether or not an extreme event has been made more likely by global heating, and by how much.
The heat wave in India and Pakistan during the spring of 2022 was 30 times more likely than would have been the case without human carbon emissions [12].
The impact we see from climate change often impact the poorest and those who have had the least responsibility for the emissions that are causing it.
The injustices are analogous to those seen during the Covid pandemic where again it was often those who are the poorest who are the most impacted. Those who cannot choose to work from home or are the key workers in society.
Whereas those with the highest incomes, with the highest consumption, can easily isolate themselves from the worst impacts.
Climate justice won’t happen in isolation from social justice
So we see that climate justice won't happen in isolation from social justice:
Firstly, we have to have fair and equitable economic development alongside decarbonisation, across all sectors.
Secondly, we must have sustainable planetary boundaries including climate, ocean acidification, freshwater use, and more.
Thirdly, we need to restore and sustain as far as is now possible the ecosystems on which we depend.
Professor Saleemul Huq
The brilliant Professor Saleemul Huq - who is a Professor in Bangladesh - talks very much from the point of view of Bangladesh and how they have been adapting to the impacts of climate change very successfully. He rather admonishes the West for framing his country as helpless victims. On the contrary he believes that Bangladesh can teach the west a great deal about how civil society, scientists and governments can work together to adapt to the climate emergency [13].
Climate change is everything change
Finally, this is a quote from Gaia Vince, the author of the book Nomad Century. She says
“climate change is everything change”
and this is very true.
Everything has to change, but if we are to have a ‘just transition’, it's not merely a question of substituting A with B e.g. petrol cars with electric vehicles (EVs), crucial as this is. We need system change.
For example, today the UK has 30 million petrol/diesel cars on the road. What if in 2050 we had 10 million EVs, many shared not owned, and brilliant EV buses and trains, increased mobility and bike use, and much more, as part of an integrated and people centred transformation of transport?
This is about involving all parts of society to envisage possible futures that challenge the structural injustices that have existed for so long and are exposed and amplified by climate change.
Decarbonising our energy generation and use is a necessary strand of a just future, but it is not sufficient on its own.
Injustices can easily remain in the future if climate solutions lock-in existing structural and racial inequalities.
Perhaps the climate crisis has a silver lining, if we use it as an opportunity for radical system change.
Thank you.
References and Further Reading
Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, James Rodger Fleming
The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt the lost hero of science, Andrea Wulf
Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492, Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, Simon L. Lewis, Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019) 13-36
There is a good discussion of Eunice Foote’s role in the context of the slightly later work of John Tyndall in: The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian scientist, mountaineer, and public intellectual, Roland Jackson
On the point about the PETM, here is an essay exploring how it compares to the current warming: Is 2°C a big deal?, Richard Erskine, 14/10/2021, https://essaysconcerning.com/2021/10/14/is-2c-a-big-deal/
A Climate of Consilience (or the science of certitude, Richard Erskine, 2/5/17, https://essaysconcerning.com/2017/05/02/a-climate-of-consilience-or-the-science-of-certitude/
How The World Really Works, Vaclav Smil, 2022
Why I became a historical novelist, Hilary Mantel, 3rd June 2017, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/03/hilary-mantel-why-i-became-a-historical-novelist
Extreme Carbon Inequality, Oxfam, https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/research-publications/extreme-carbon-inequality/
A Bigger Picture: My fight to bring a new African voice to the climate crisis, Vanessa Nakate
Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change, Friederike Otto
Climate Change made devastating early heat in India and Pakistan 30 times more likely, World Weather Attribution, 23 May 2022, https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/climate-change-made-devastating-early-heat-in-india-and-pakistan-30-times-more-likely/
Hope or Despair? Reflections on the film ONCE YOU KNOW, Richard Erskine, 15/7/22, NailsworthCAN, https://www.nailsworthcan.org/blog/hope-or-despair-reflections-on-the-film-once-you-know