The world is facing a climate breakdown. There is no doubt about it. The evidence is all around us. But who is really responsible for the climate breakdown?
This is a question not many want to ask. Not because it is a complicated question, but because it will unquestionably point to the culprits.
To Dr Jason Hickel, a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology and Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, it is a critical question to be addressed. His findings published in Lancet Planetary Health, a journal, is unsurprising but telling.
They are the usual suspects and they are mostly in the West. Writing an op-ed piece in Al Jazeera, he says climate breakdown is a consequence of atmospheric colonisation and it's playing out along colonial lines. Little wonder there is no support for making climate crimes a part of the Rome Statute. Why are we not shocked? Yet the lame United Nations continues to be the world's talk-only workshop.
Hickel and the many social movements have long been pushing the international community to view climate breakdown as a process of atmospheric colonisation because that is what it is. And so have climate change negotiators from the Global South.
But the geopolitically mighty have hand waved them off for the longest time. The atmosphere is a shared commons. Our existence depends on it. "If we are not attentive to the colonial dimensions of climate breakdown, then we are missing the point," argues Hickel. He has a point.
To him there is a straightforward case for reparations here. He is right. Scientists have defined a fair share planetary boundary for each nation-state to be 350 parts per million (ppm) concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Hickel's study indicates this boundary was crossed in 1980 and it is possible to identify which countries are most responsible for the excess emissions that are presently causing climate breakdown.
Heading the list of overshooting countries, nations that have gone past 350ppm, is the United States. In Hickel's language, the US was single-handedly responsible for 40 per cent of excess global CO2 emissions. Like in colonialism, the European Union and Britain are close culprits, being together responsible for 29 per cent excess CO2 emissions. This isn't the complete list.
Together with the rest of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Japan, the Global North are collectively responsible for no less than 92 per cent excess CO2 emissions. And what about the Global South, a term widely accepted to refer to Asia, Africa and Latin America? A mere eight per cent excess CO2 emissions. And that too from a handful of countries, such as around the Gulf.
A vast majority are within the 350ppm limit, including India, Indonesia and Nigeria. China, though, has overshot the limit in recent years. Yet these nations suffer the consequence of climate breakdown disproportionately. "If you look at a map showing countries by emissions overshoot alongside a map showing countries by climate vulnerability, you'll see that the two are almost exact inversions of each other," Hickel writes in Al Jazeera. The disparities can't be more stark.
But this does not mean only the Global North should work on climate mitigation. As Hickel says, all hands must be on the deck. Decarbonising is every nation's job, be it the coloniser or the colonised.