By Isaiah Ritzmann
Published September 2023
Canada’s fair share of climate action is greater than what our governments are promising, let alone doing. In fact Canada’s fair share of climate action is greater than our society’s capacity. The amount we would need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to be fair to other nations is greater than our ability to do so, technically and physically. The gap between what we should do and what we can do becomes what we owe – our climate debt – to those countries whose fair shares we are, in effect, borrowing. The realities of our tight climate timelines means that more emissions from some means less emissions for others. In this zero-sum situation when we take more than our fair share we take from other nations the time and opportunity to develop. What we owe in return is financial reparations.
This, of course, begs many questions. Let’s start at the beginning – our unyielding climate timelines. We know that to have a reasonable hope of avoiding catastrophic warming we need to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 and get to net-zero by 2050. This will be an immense challenge – even more so with the many wasted years of inaction. This requires switching from coal and oil to wind and solar as fast as we can. At the national level it means massive home retrofits, more heat pumps, better building standards, more electric vehicles but less cars overall – with more walking, biking, and taking the bus. It means less meat-eating, more shopping at farmers markets, but less shopping overall. At the global level it means immense, unprecedented cooperation and coordination. It means real emergency action. We need all nations to act like our house is on fire, because it is. Yet not all nations are equally responsible for climate change. Neither do all have the same needs. How do we take these differences seriously? And can we realistically expect the cooperation we need when some nations – especially those most responsible – aren’t doing their fair share?
Globally we have a collective carbon budget of about 300 GT (gigatonnes) of C02 we can burn and still have a chance of remaining below average warming of 1.5˚C. The key question is how do we allocate this budget fairly among all people given our very real, and very relevant, differences? Afterall 300 GT of carbon isn’t just an abstraction. It means something concrete. For one nation having less carbon to burn may mean the end of private jets. For another, it may mean the end of warm winter nights.
Think about a group of five people who have a budget of $1,000 dollars for a month. How would you divide the money? Would you give each person $200? Or would you consider differences in need and responsibility? Let’s say the group has only $1,000 because one member wasted $3,000 last month – would they get the same as everyone else this month? And let’s say one or two members have expensive, life-saving medication they take every day. Should they only get $200? That doesn’t seem fair given their needs. This metaphor gives you a good picture of the moral complexities of climate change. We need to act, but some of us need to act more quickly. We all need to cut our collective emissions in absolute terms, but some of us need to cut our emissions drastically.
What does climate justice look like between nations? Specifically, how do we think about each nation’s fair share of our carbon budget? Perhaps we could divide the 300 GT based on the number of nations. But that won’t do. It seems fair that countries with bigger populations get a bigger allocation than others. China, with a population of 1.4 billion people, would get a bigger allocation than smaller countries like Canada. Yet even this is too simple as such proportioning ignores important distinctions. The world is already facing over 1˚C of average warming above pre-industrial levels. More warming is locked in at this point, no matter what we do. Who, historically, is most responsible for this warming? Those most responsible should bear the greater burden of reducing emissions. Likewise, we need to consider what countries are doing with their carbon budgets. Some nations spend their budgets on basic needs like housing and food. Other nations, like Canada, spend our budgets elsewhere.
In 2015 an international network of civil society organizations came together to compare each nation’s fair share of climate action to their promised action (NDCs – National Determined Contributions) under the Paris Agreement. The network, called the Civil Society Equity Review (CSER), produced a standardized framework with which they could quantify each nation’s fair share based on historic responsibility, present development, and capacity to adapt to climate change. In this framework wealthier, western countries are required to do more to respond to climate change. Wealthier, western nations, afterall, are more responsible for the crisis and have less to lose than the rest of the world. Differentiated responsibilities and needs means each country’s fair shares are weighted differently.
This framework shows quite clearly that justice requires that countries like Canada will need to cut our emissions much faster than our governments are currently promising. In fact, justice requires us to cut emissions more than we actually can. That is to say we are morally obligated to reduce emissions faster than we physically are able to do so – a capacity limit that the Civil Society Equity Review calls “mitigation potential.” Whatever the gap will be between Canada’s fair share and our actual emissions is what we will owe as climate debt. For what it’s worth, under the CSER framework Canada would need to lower its emissions by over 90% by 2030 to align with its fair share – or triple our current pledges.[1]
Some of this is not physically possible. On the bright side, the corresponding climate debt we owe would amount to about $1,400 per Canadian.[2] This is a manageable debt relative to our GDP and to the costs of inaction.
Knowing about this climate injustice is one thing. Knowing what to do about it is quite another. What can we do as citizens of a country abdicating its moral responsibilities? Afterall if systems transformation were easy or straightforward we wouldn’t need to transform the system, it would already be done. Nevertheless here we are. In our current context what can we do to raise awareness, to advocate, to act on international climate justice? Here are a few initial ideas:
Educate yourself. Understand what Canada’s fair share of climate action would look like both abstractly (measured in tonnes of C02) and concretely (how society would look different if implemented).
Educate others. Find opportunities for conversations at work, with family, and in community settings.
Advocate. Find ways to urge elected politicians to acknowledge both Canada’s fair share and the fact that we will owe climate debt.
Financially support (when able) groups in Canada and abroad working towards international climate justice.
Organize. Join with a small group of other citizens who are committed to work for climate justice. Small group action is more sustainable than individual action. As the saying goes “if you want to go far, go together.”
Climate change is marked by profound inequality. This profound inequality exists not only between nations but also within them. What does climate justice look like across class differences? In Canada we already see great class inequality, even without considering the climate crisis. We have cities where thousands of people own multiple homes while thousands more are unhoused. We have billionaire grocery store owners who make record profits as food banks see record numbers of people who are food insecure. While Canada may have a greater responsibility to reduce our collective carbon emissions, it is not true that each Canadian has the same fair share. In this article I explored the inequality of responsibility and ability that exists between nations. In the next issue I explore what climate justice looks like between groups of people.
1. https://calculator.climateequityreference.org/
2. Ibid.
