Earth Today | ‘The polluter should pay’

PROFESSOR OF sociology at Drexel University Mimi Sheller recently made the case for climate reparations for Caribbean countries, bringing back into sharp focus the issue of ‘historical responsibility’ and the ‘polluter pays’ principle in the global response to climate change.

“Colonialism is the founding moment of the contemporary climate crisis and it was generated by the system of plantation slavery,” she said.

Sheller was addressing last month’s symposium on ‘Climate, History & Responsibility: Climate Justice in the Caribbean’, hosted by collaborators from Rutgers University and The University of the West Indies in Kingston.

“The early modern sugar plantation and slavery complex was accompanied by such extensive primary deforestation that it first dawned on people that they were altering cloud formation and rainfall patterns, so strong were the environmental arrangements that produced contemporary extractive economies. They led directly to global warming,” she added.

All the while Sheller said, “the plantation and its accompanying rearrangements of life are produced through processes of land alienation, labour extraction and racialised violence”.

“We, therefore, speak of the coloniality of these disasters and the unnaturalness of these disasters and storms. Their uneven impacts and unfair distribution of vulnerability are grounded in the deeper historical trajectories that brought us to the current predicament of climate crisis,” she noted, referencing recent extreme hurricanes to devastate sections of the Caribbean.

According to Sheller, the situation is such that it necessitates a reimagining of what the future should look like and in the context of a changing climate fuelled by greenhouse gas emissions, and with impacts including not only extreme hurricanes but also rising sea levels and the associated risk to food and water security.

DEBT OWED

A climate debt, she maintained, is owed.

“The global north, in particular the US and the UK, which have been the largest contributors to greenhouse gases and to the plantation system, owe a debt to the peoples and countries that have been most harmed,” said Sheller, who heads the Centre for Mobilities, Research and Policy, and who is the author of some 14 books.

“If climate vulnerability and differential exposure to climate risk are the result of these long-standing conditions of coloniality, the unpaid debt of slavery reparations must remain relevant to the current debate about the threat of disaster capitalism and the need for a just recovery,” she added.

That debt recovery can take different forms, as evidenced by positions advanced on slavery reparations in the US, where the discussion has come to three essential elements:

- a national apology;

- a public payment in some form to descendants of enslaved Americans; and

- structural adjustment in the form of some sort of transfer of land or the means of production.

In the case of climate reparations, Sheller said, payment can take two principal pathways. The first is based on corrective justice, made between governments within an international jurisdiction.

“Here, the argument is that there is a collective argument for the moral responsibility for high greenhouse gas emitters to make financial recompense to their climate change victims,” she explained, noting that payments would be determined by “calculable and bearable shares of the harms of climate change” that would be worked out through, for example, international compensation mechanisms.

The other way is through tort litigation for loss and damage against the major fossil fuel companies, also known as fossil majors or fossil barons.

Whatever form compensation may take, however, Sheller said the key is to make it happen.

“I think we need to reinforce the argument that colonial history and, in particular, the demand for slavery reparations are crucial to making the case for climate reparations and climate justice today,” she said.

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