A number of things are now obvious. The shape of the future is not among them.
We know, for example, that Donald J. Trump is likely to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement (and maybe even the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), and this despite the terrifying, and rising, instability of the climate system. To pick one horror from among thousands – we now know that the AMOC, the Atlantic Overturning Meridional Circulation, is far more likely to collapse than was hitherto projected, and soon, and with “devastating and irreversible” consequences.
There is much to say, about Trump, about the political crisis, and about the climate reckoning. I will hazard just one claim – the “neoliberal order,” as historian Gary Gerstle calls it, is clearly behind us, and though we are still trudging through Gramsci’s interregnum, there are signs that it, too, is ending. The order, or disorder, that replaces it will have everything to do with the planetary boundaries we’re now crossing, and with the political and equity challenges they present. Its precise nature will be defined by how, and how successfully, we face these challenges.
Since I’m writing this during COP29, the “finance COP,” I’ll say a few words about money. I particularly want to note 2024’s Civil Society Equity Review, which I helped to write (there were about six principle authors) and which we’ve called Fair Shares, Finance, Transformation: Fair Shares Assessment, Equitable Fossil Fuel Phaseout, and Public Finance for Just Global Climate Stabilization. I’ve been working on the annual Equity Review since 2015 – the Paris year – but I’m particularly pleased with this new report. You’re no doubt too busy to read it, but you should try to take a look. It’s probably worth your time.
Our key message is that stabilizing the climate quickly enough to prevent catastrophe is going to be expensive, but that we nonetheless have the money. Or, rather, the global rich have the money, and – one way or another – they are going to have to pay, as per Foreign Policy’s rather inelegant formulation, to “help fix the planet”.
The 2024 Civil Society Equity Reviews includes:
An updated look at fairness, and unfairness, of the current NDCs , out to 2035
- A concise overview of the equity challenges posed by the unavoidable need for a rapid global fossil-fuel extraction phaseout
- A quick survey of the key barriers to climate mobilization — the protracted inaction of the global North, the organized obstruction of the fossil-fuel industry, and the parasitism of the global rich.
- An overview of the most obvious possible sources public climate finance on the necessary scale — hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars.
- The discussion of the need to begin with large scale, short-term finance reforms, while preparing the ground for the system change that will be needed to fully transition away from the inequitable, fossil fuel dependent society we have today.
The finance challenge
How much would it cost to save ourselves and our civilization? You’ll find plenty of details – and footnotes – in the report. What I will say here, and what climate policy activists around the world are stressing, is that the figure is denominated in trillions, not billions, of dollars a year, and that a good deal of this must come as public finance. This latter necessity – the need for the new global finance goal, the “New Collective Quantified Goal”, to have a large grant and grant-equivalent public finance core – is now, finally, at the center of the UN climate negotiations.
Trillions of dollars in public finance, obviously, are not yet on offer. Indeed, with authoritarian populism on the main stage – and not just in the US – the battle for public finance for the public good is mired in the myths and agenda of the right. Instead of fighting a long-term battle for a new international finance architecture, one fit for the purposes now before us, we are forced to engage in endless short-term battles to prevent further tax cuts for the rich, further attacks of our social safety nets, further deregulation, further militarism, further dismissals of any fundamental sense of global solidarity. All that said, this last year has nonetheless seen an explosion of work designed to show that we have the money.
Here for example, is a table from Fair Shares, Finance, Transformation:
The Civil Society Equity Review is not alone in making this case. See for example here, and here, and here, and here, and here. But the 2024 Civil Society Equity Review report is notable for the deliberate manner in which it lays out the path forward, for the way it names and quantifies the barriers to decarbonization and for its careful, explicit distinction between finance sources that are immediately available, given only political and economic reforms, and more fundamental transformations that will require deeper system change.
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We’re moving now into a new phase in the climate battle, and because it has so much to do with finance, it is important to stress that there is more on the table than just money. Think of the global South’s overwhelming international debt, which can never be repaid. Think of our massively unbalanced and unsustainable international trading system. Think of the planetary divide between the rich and the poor, and how the global rich exploit it at every turn.
Still, we have the money, or could, and this is extremely good news – to stabilize the climate system in time, we’re going to need a “global just transition”, and it’s not going to be cheap. This is the main point here, but we also have to realize that there’s a danger in focusing too tightly on finance. Doing so can create the impression that finance is the key to a future that can, in effect, be seen as a lower-carbon version of business as usual. But this is not the case. Sure, climate transition must begin here in the “real world,” but there’s no such thing as climate-friendly business as usual. If we pretend there is, we will only find that other elements of business as usual will undermine effective climate action.
Fortunately, the situation is fluid, and filled with possibility. People everywhere are concluding that we’re at a tipping point, and perhaps we are. The climate negotiations, certainly, are heading for crisis. Perhaps the finance showdown will lead to clarity, and break the deadlocks that have mired the negotiations now for decades. That said, superficial reforms will not be enough, precisely because equity is a prerequisite of rapid decarbonization. Nor will equity as a mere principle suffice. We also need equity as a nexus of political realism, for it is quite impossible to imagine collecting, or releasing, the trillions of dollars that the global finance transformation will demand unless this is done in a manner that is very widely – and internationally – seen as fair.
Rapid planetary decarbonization will only be possible if the global North pays its fair share of the cost. This is only possible if the rich, everywhere, do the same. Nor is this an exorbitant demand – a trillion dollars a year in public climate finance would be enough to get things moving. It is not much, but it is an implacable necessity. That’s the point.
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Also, note that the Fair Shares, Finance, Transformation report has received some nice publicity in the US.
Wen Stephenson, who recognized its importance, invited me to do a Q&A session about it and its core arguments for The Nation. It was a lively exchange, and you can read Wen’s synopsis of it here.
And Bill McKibben has quoted it, and me on it, in his substack newsletter, The Crucial Years. Bill has a good eye for a punchy quote,, and notes that the report decries the “organized obstructionism of the fossil fuel industry and the parasitism of the global rich.”