The leaders of big oil companies should get behind the scheme of contraction and convergence, as it might be their only chance of avoiding nationalisation.
It should have been a wake up cry for big oil when UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon announced (1) that the tragedy of Darfur was caused by global warming. You would think that the horror of a country collapsing into civil war under environmental pressures would be enough. But I suspect that the really frightening thing for oil bosses is the techtonic shift in opinion that means a Secretary General will say this despite American disapproval. The world is changing,and so are the political dynamics that go with it. Indeed, on closer examination, the situation in Darfur reveals how profound these changes are.
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Tagged with Aid, Anthropology, Climate Change, Development, Environment, Environmental Justice, Global Commons, risk, Uncategorized
Unless we approach climate change as a risk that needs to be managed collectively, the rich will be most able to buy their way out of trouble, whilst the poor will face the injustice of being most affected by the smoke of consumption.
One of the main differences between a private and public approach to managing problems is the way in which risk is distributed. The welfare state is seen as a ’safety net’ for good reasons, acting as a form of social insurance, spreading risks like unemployment and ill health as a cost to be borne by the taxpaying population rather than by private individuals.
The ethic of personal responsibility, supposedly leading to good conduct and efficient use of resources, is used to justify privitisation as an ethical and political move. However this ethic operates precisely because individuals are required to take on board and manage more risks. This shifting of the balance of risk, in order to try and instill ‘responsible’ conduct in populations and amongst decision makers in institutions , is what a lot of the recent debates about welfare have hinged around, in Europe and elsewhere.
But this kind of moralising looks ridiculous in the face of the huge injustice that is climate change. How can we preach individual responsibility, when we have collectively allowed the behaviour of the rich world to impact so brutally on the lives of the poor?
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Tagged with Climate Change, Environment, Global Governance, Justice, Polity, risk
