Biden’s bill includes $60bn for environmental investments, but groups that would benefit most face hurdles in accessing funds
By Adrien Salazar
The Progressive Magazine
The global climate crisis is fundamentally a crisis of inequality. It is fueled by the historic emissions of industrial countries and fossil fuel corporations, yet the impacts are borne most heavily by the nations and peoples who have contributed least to the crisis.
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assessment report (IPCC AR6) made a historic acknowledgment that variations in vulnerability to climate impacts are the result of historic inequities in socioeconomic development, marginalization, governance, and histories of colonialism.
These historic processes have directed social, material, and environmental harms toward some groups—such as people in poverty as well as Black, Indigenous, and other people of color—and away from others. If societies and governments want to confront climate change in a serious and just way, they must confront the drivers of climate inequality.
The global climate crisis is fundamentally a crisis of inequality . . . . the impacts are borne most heavily by the nations and peoples who have contributed least to the crisis.
If we consider the countries and populations bearing disproportionate climate burdens to be injured parties, then a climate reparations policy framework proposes that the countries responsible for the vast share of historic greenhouse gas emissions that have caused climate change should take steps to redress the harms of the climate crisis on these populations.
International climate reparations aim to attend to these inequities through the transfer of resources from countries responsible for the majority of historic greenhouse gas emissions to countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis. Given that environmental inequalities exist at every scale, a climate reparations framework can be similarly employed to address disparate climate burdens within the United States. Such reparations should be designed to directly address intertwined historical racial, economic, and environmental inequalities.