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Climate Justice

Climate Justice
— by Lee Pitts

Just when you think the world can’t get any nuttier something comes along that proves that it can.

Have you ever heard of climate justice? To me climate justice would be if ranchers who are trying to feed their families and the world, would be able to turn the rain on and off like a faucet.

You’d have climate justice if it didn’t snow while you were trying to pull a calf and if there was no black ice on the roads for truckers. It would be climate justice if it was nasty weather when politicians left Washington for Hawaii to vacation. Or if the air conditioning would go out and their computers would crash when bureaucrats had meetings on ways to destroy your way of life. Now that would be climate justice.

Sadly, that’s not what the phrase means. What it refers to is the biggest land grab in history and redistribution of wealth worthy of a Venezualan dictator or a Cuban communist.

Shame On You

The Mobilization of Climate Justice says climate justice is “a vision to dissolve and alleviate the unequal burdens created by climate change.” In other words, because land owning, carbon-creating Americans like you are the primary reason for global warming, you owe the poorer countries of the world. And they want reparations in cold hard cash.

A plethora of dark green organizations with names like the Global Justice Ecology Project, Focus On Global South, Alliance of Wastepickers, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, Rising Tide, Climate Justice Action and Climate Justice Now believe you have filled your pockets with gold at the expense of the world’s poor. You are also destroying their lives and the biodiversity of their overpopulated countries by increasing global warming. It is because you have created this climate crises that their lands are barren and their people hungry. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything they might have done.

Climate justice is part of the environmental justice movement and those who believe in it say it is an ethical issue because those least responsible for climate change experience its most horrifying impacts. They also contend that climate change is humanity’s greatest challenge, a crisis that must be rapidly addressed if catastrophe is to be averted and of course that will require a complete remodel of global society.

According to a coalition of these American socialists, the best way to avoid this crises should chill you to the bone: There must be an equal distribution of all economic resources and those who have caused this crises must be made to pay. That would be you.

Climate Racism

There’s a battle brewing between the North and the South, except in the case of climate justice, the North are those countries above the equator and the South are those below. It’s Europe and America versus poor Africa and South America.

The greenies, climate crazies, and the United Nations believe the blame for “climate change” clearly lies with the North. According to the Global Justice Ecology Project, “The historical responsibility for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions lies with the industrialized countries of the Global North. Even though the primary responsibility of the North to reduce emissions has been recognized in the UN Climate Convention, the production and consumption habits of industrialized countries like the United States continue to threaten the survival of humanity and biodiversity globally. It is imperative that the North urgently shifts to a low carbon economy. At the same time, in order to avoid the damaging carbon intensive model of industrialization, countries of the Global South are entitled to resources and technology to make a transition to a low-carbon economy that does not continue to subject them to crushing poverty.”

In other words, while the Global South may still use carbon based energy in order to catch up with us, we must destroy our cattle feedlots, gene technology, tree plantations, oil wells, coal industry and more. Much more. We owe it to third world countries as a penance for past sins. We especially need to do this to atone for past grievances against aborigines, peasants, fisherfolk, and especially the women of the third world whom we have discriminated against by causing flooding, water scarcity, and a rise in sea-level.

You’d think that all this malarkey was being dreamed up by the “climate disadvantaged” but , sadly, it is mostly emanating from the United States, led by professors in American universities. For example, Robert D. Bullard is a sociology professor and director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. He says that the environmental/climate justice movement has its roots “in economic exploitation, racial oppression, the devaluation of human life and the natural environment, and corporate greed.” The professor says that although the environmental justice movement has its roots in the United States “in just two decades, this grassroots movement has spread across the globe and “the call for environmental justice can be heard from the ghetto of southside Chicago to the Soweto township in South Africa.”

The Climate Justice crowd are not above playing the race card and they say the low-income communities and communities of color are likely to be particularly vulnerable to the “predicted” impacts of climate change. Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network calls it “climate racism.”

Climate Debt

Climate debt is a concept which has been submitted to the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change by over fifty countries, including 49 of the world’s poorest. These countries contend that wealthy countries have grabbed more than their fair share of the Earth’s limited resources.

Another professor, this time from New York, Andrew Ross, wrote in a publication called Dissent that the North owes a big ecological debt to the Global South because of “the plunder of resources by extractive industries, and all of the associated pollution and biodiversity damage, to the loss of populations from the slave trade and colonial wars, to biopiracy of genetic resources from plants and agriculture.”

To arrive at how much money we owe they use a complicated formula based on atmospheric emissions estimates. According to Ross, “The belief that such measurements could be made with a degree of accuracy helped build confidence in the movement to hold rich nations to account. Evidence that atmospheric global warming was already taking its toll on the poor countries also bolstered the case for climate debt repayment,” wrote Ross.

According to one such formula over a quarter of the climate debt in the world is owed by the U.S. But surely our bureaucrats surely wouldn’t buy into this nonsense? Would they?

Prior to a gathering of the greens in Copenhagen in 2009, the U.S. State Department lead negotiator, Todd Stern, “rejected the idea that the U.S. was retroactively responsible for a problem that could not have been predicted,” Stern said, “For most of the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, people were blissfully ignorant of the fact that emissions caused a greenhouse effect. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon.”(And also an unproven theory.) According to Ross, Stern then suggested a “much narrower window for making repayment claims—on the basis of emissions since, say, 1990, when a verifiable link between atmospheric CO2 and climate change was established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s first assessment.”

In other words, our own U.S. negotiator bought into the concept that we owed reparations to poorer countries because of the damage we created with global warming!

According to Professor Ross, “To date, the preferred response of high emitters such as the United States is to offer “climate aid.” In Copenhagen, rich countries promised $30 billion as part of a fast-track, three-year aid package, with an eventual goal of $100 billion by 2020. So far the United States has paid $7.5 billion of our climate debt.

Climate Wars

According to Professor Ross, “Another kind of climate debt involves the plight of environmental migrants, forced off their land and deprived of their livelihoods by climate change.” He says, “Their numbers were in the tens of millions globally by 2000, and estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 2006 Stern Review, and other sources predict that climate change will generate from two hundred million to as many as one billion migrants by 2050”. Whereas Columbia University’s International Earth Science Information Network predicted that by 2050 the world would have 700 million climate refugees. It all depends on which faulty formula you use.

Ross asked, “What is owed to them when they cross borders into more affluent countries, with high-carbon lifestyles, as refugees? Surely they are owed sanctuary at the very least, but other forms of reparation could be brought to the table on their behalf.”

Is the professor suggesting we hand each illegal alien $10,000 upon entering our country as down payment on our climate debt?

Ross says to consider Arizona, “ground zero for U.S. nativist sentiment. Much of the state is in the bull’s eye of climate change, heating up and drying out faster than any other region in the Northern Hemisphere, but the impact of the decline in precipitation on soil erosion in northern Mexico has also been significant. Studies predict that regional rainfall could decrease by 70% by century’s end. Thus, a significant portion of the Mexican border-crossers to Arizona should probably be classed as climate migrants. Arizona’s bitter fight over immigration may be one of the first skirmishes in the “climate wars” to come, when the threat of global warming will be used increasingly to shape immigration policies that conserve rich nations as resource islands.”

Who Owes What To Whom?

The less developed countries who have borrowed billions of dollars over the years from the likes of the U.S. are now using global warning as a way to skip out on their debts. Ross asks, “How did these debts to foreign creditors compare with the North’s liabilities for environmental impacts from early colonization onward? Were the South’s claims as an eco-creditor just as valid as those of North American and European banks? Who owes what to whom? Many argued that the obligation to repay recent high-interest loans had to be weighed against moral and economic liabilities from the more distant past, and that any estimate of the balance of payments would lend itself to cancellation of all external debts.”

To address all the damage from climate change the warming theorists say we must go on a “carbon budget”. We must find out how much carbon the Earth’s natural systems can absorb without climate change occurring, and divide that equitably among all countries. For example, because the greens say that cows are a major contributor to global warming we must get rid of them because they are not in our carbon budget.

An Old Agenda

To stop the Global North from exploiting the Global South the World Bank has come up with a scheme they call “Climate Smart Agriculture”. This program is designed to introduce soils and agriculture into the carbon trading market so Al Gore can get richer.

Rachel Smolker of BiofuelWatch explains: “Climate smart agriculture will put a dollar value on the carbon in dirt so it can be sold on the market.” In other words, if a feedlot was found to be a source of greenhouse gases they could buy offsets from a farmer or rancher who left carbon in the ground for credits. A rancher would get these credits by getting rid of his cows and letting the land lie in an undisturbed state without any methane being produced. The same principle would apply to farmers who let their fields lay fallow. Yet no one asks how many more third worlders will perish from starvation as a result.

The Indigenous Environmental Network says that Americans must redefine our relationship with the sacredness of Mother Earth by leaving our fossil fuels in the ground.

There’s only one little problem with all this socialist eco-blather and globaloney. The climate crises the dark greenies speak of is a myth. Mother Nature simply is not cooperating with the theory of global warming. According to Lord Christopher Walter Monckton in Winter’s copy of RANGE magazine, “There’s been no net warming in 17 years 10 months.  (Now over 18 years.) Sea levels fell from 2003 to 2008. Hurricane levels are at a low. Droughts have declined over the last 30 years.”

You’d think the alarmists would be just a little embarrassed that the earth got a chill about the time they were telling folks we’re all gonna fry and die. But this is just the tip of an enlarged  iceberg, so to speak. The environmental justice movement also includes food justice, housing justice and transportation justice. What all these groups want to do, according to Monckton, is abolish free markets, and impose huge taxes on the developed countries. “Warming is just the latest excuse for a very old agenda,” he says.

This would all be hilariously ridiculous if you didn’t have the IMF and the World Bank buying into the concept; if a group such as Labor Network for Sustainability wasn’t raising support for climate justice among the ranks of organized labor; or American teachers weren’t preaching this green religion from their classroom pulpits. Or, according to Monckton,  “if 95% of all global warming “science” wasn’t funded by government agencies and tax funded government grants.”