There is a word that we are going to hear once COP28 gets underway in Dubai later this week: ‘reparations’. While US climate envoy John Kerry has tried to rule out any US agreement to pay reparations to countries affected by what he himself might claim were ‘climate-related disasters’, many developing countries are determined to put compensation top of the agenda, and push it far further than the agreement last year at COP27 to create a ‘loss and damage’ fund whereby developed nations hand out money to poor ones deemed to be affected by climate change.
The demands for reparations will be helped along the way by western academics and pressure groups. A paper published by a pair of British environmentalists in the journal Nature Sustainability earlier this year claimed that Britain owed £6.2 trillion in ‘compensation for atmospheric appropriation’ as a result of historic emissions. But that was based only on UK-based emissions. Now, the website Carbon Brief has found a new way of counting Britain’s historic carbon emissions, so that we are responsible for greenhouse gases in our colonies, too (though they don’t call for reparations) – including every puff of carbon dioxide spewed out in India between 1850 and 1947. That nearly doubles our historic emissions and moves us up to fourth in the table of the world’s biggest emitters, behind the US, China and Russia. Climate reparations, of course, will be on top of the £18 trillion we apparently owe in slavery reparations, as calculated by a UN judge Patrick Robinson last year.
It would be tempting to dismiss climate reparations as a rather silly parlour game carried out by left-wing academics. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that if anyone is expecting co-operation from developing countries on cutting carbon emissions, it is going to be accompanied by ever-more fanciful demands for handouts. And, true, if you are the president of a developing country being told by western governments that you mustn’t industrialise if it means relying on cheap and reliable coal power, why wouldn’t you want to screw an awful lot of money out of the governments telling you this?
The West has brought these demands for climate reparations on itself, through catastrophising the climate. Every time a UK government minister or official uses the word ‘crisis’, tells us we have ‘only five years to save the planet’, or lazily tries to blame every storm on climate change, they stoke the boilers of the reparations industry.
The West has brought these demands for climate reparations on itself
As I wrote here a year ago, John Kerry is one of the biggest offenders in this, trying to claim that 10 million people a year are being killed by excessive heat caused by climate change, which seems to have been based on a misreading of a paper that claimed 5 million a year die of extreme temperatures, 90 per cent of them from the cold. Climate change has long since shifted from reasoned debate into a crude morality tale of goodies and baddies, perpetrators and victims. Never mind that some of the countries backing the demands for reparations – such as China and India – are far bigger present-day emitters of carbon dioxide. Never mind that the fossil fuels emitted in UK colonies during the Empire helped lift those countries from pre-industrial poverty, extending life expectancy in India from around 25 in 1850 to 70 now. Britain must be put on trial for the industrial revolution.
Never mind, either, that the nation-to-nation transfers which the climate reparations movement demands make no sense from an ethical perspective – it would mean, for example, a transfer of cash from poor black Britons to wealthy tax exiles living in the Caribbean. The reparations demands are going to carry on growing so long as we try to force carbon reduction targets onto the developing world. The claimants, I fear, are not going to be satisfied with a few million to clear up after storms.
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