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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
70 — village July - August 2012
Is protecting the
environment
incompatible with
social justice?
Promoting the interests of corporations and the
ultra-rich under the guise of concern for the poor is
an effective public relations strategy
GEORGE!MONBIOT
I
T IS the stick with which the greens are
beaten daily: if we spend money on protect-
ing the environment, the poor will starve, or
freeze to death, or will go without shoes and
education. Most of those making this argument do
so disingenuously: they support the conservative
or libertarian politics that keep the poor in their
place and ensure that the 1% harvest the lion’s
share of the world’s resources.
Journalists writing
for the corporate press,
with views somewhere
to the right of Vlad the
Impaler and no prior
record of concern for
the poor, suddenly
become their doughty
champions when the
interests of the pro-
prietorial class are
threatened. If tar sands
cannot be extracted in
Canada, they maintain,
subsistence farmers
in Africa will starve.
If Tesco’s profits are
threatened, children
will die of malaria.
When it is done cleverly, promoting the interests
of corporations and the ultra-rich under the guise
of concern for the poor is an effective public rela-
tions strategy.
Even so, it is true that there is sometimes a
clash between environmental policies and social
justice, especially when the policies have been
poorly designed.
But while individual policies can be bad for
the poor, is the protection of the environment
inherently incompatible with social justice? This
is the question addressed in a discussion paper
published by Oxfam earlier this year.
Oxfam, remember, exists to defend the world’s
poorest people and help them to escape from pov-
erty. Unlike the rightwing bloggers, it is motivated
by genuine concern for social justice. So when it
investigates the question of whether concern for
the environment conflicts with development, we
should take notice. Kate Raworth, who wrote
the report, has created an essential template for
deciding whether economic activity will help or
harm humanity and the biosphere.
She points out that in rough terms we already
know how to identify the social justice line below
which no one should fall, and the destruction line
above which human impacts should not rise.
The social justice line is set by the eleven pri-
orities listed by the governments preparing for
this year’s Rio summit. These are:
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The destruction line is set by the nine plane-
tary boundaries identified in Stockholm in 2009
by a group of earth system scientists. They iden-
tified the levels beyond which we endanger the
earth’s living systems of:
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We are already living above the line on the
first three indicators, and close to it on several
others.
The space between these two lines is the “safe
and just space for humanity to thrive in”. So what
happens if everyone below the social justice line
rises above it? Does that push us irrevocably over
the destruction line? The answer, she shows, is
no.
For example, providing enough food for the
13% of the world’s people who suffer from hunger
means raising world supplies by just 1%.
Providing electricity to the 19% of people
who currently have none would raise global car-
bon emissions by just 1%.
Äò®ÙÊÄÃÄã
Just as
mistaken
green policies
can damage
the poor,
mistaken
poverty relief
policies can
damage the
environment
¨
71
Bringing everyone above the global absolute
poverty line ($1.25 a day) would need just 0.2%
of global income.
In other words, it is not the needs of the poor
that threaten the biosphere, but the demands of
the rich. Raworth points out that half the world’s
carbon emissions are produced by just 11% of
its people, while, with grim symmetry, 50% of
the world’s people produce just 11% of its emis-
sions. Animal feed used in the EU alone, which
accounts for just 7% of the world’s people, uses up
33% of the planet’s sustainable nitrogen budget.
“Excessive resource use by the world’s richest 10%
of consumers,” she notes, “crowds out much-
needed resource use by billions of other people.”
The politically easy way to tackle poverty is to
try to raise the living standards of the poor while
doing nothing to curb the consumption of the
rich. This is the strategy almost all governments
follow. It is a formula for environmental disaster,
which, in turn, spreads poverty and deprivation.
As Oxfam’s paper says, social justice is impossi-
ble without “far greater global equity in the use
of natural resources, with the greatest reductions
coming from the world’s richest consumers”.
This is not to suggest that all measures
intended to protect the environment are socially
just. Raworth identifies the evictions by biofuels
companies and plantation firms harvesting carbon
credits as examples of the pursuit of supposedly
green policies which harm the poor. But before the
sneering starts, remember that the fight against
both these blights has been led by environmental-
ists, who recognised their destructive potential
long before the libertarians now using them as evi-
dence of the perfidy of the green movement.
But there are far more cases in which poverty
has been exacerbated by the lack of environmen-
tal policies. The Oxfam paper points out that
crossing any of the nine planetary boundaries
can “severely undermine human development,
first and foremost for women and men living in
poverty.” Climate change, for example, is already
hammering the lives of some of the world’s poorest
people. You can see the consequences of crossing
another planetary boundary in the report just pub-
lished by the New Economics Foundation, which
shows that overfishing has destroyed around
100,000 jobs.
Just as mistaken green policies can damage
the poor, mistaken poverty relief policies can
damage the environment. For example, where fer-
tiliser subsidies encourage farmers to use more
than they need, as they do in China, money sup-
posed to relieve poverty serves only to pollute the
water supply. Development which has no regard
for whom or what it harms is not development. It
is the opposite of progress, damaging the Earth’s
capacity to support us and the rest of its living
systems.
But extreme poverty, just like extreme wealth,
can also damage the environment. People without
access to clean energy sources, for example, are
often forced to use wood for cooking. This short-
ens their lives as they inhale the smoke, destroys
forests and exacerbates global warming by pro-
ducing black carbon.
With a few exceptions, none of which should
be hard to remedy, delivering social justice and
protecting the environment are not only com-
patible: they are each indispensable to the other.
Only through social justice, which must include
the redistribution of the world’s ridiculously con-
centrated wealth, can the environment and the
lives of the world’s poorest be defended.
Those who consume far more resources than
they require destroy the life chances of those
whose survival depends upon consuming more.
As Gandhi said, the Earth provides enough to sat-
isfy everyone’s need but not everyone’s greed.
This article first appeared in the Guardian’s Blog;
www.monbiot.com
RIO+20: FIDDLING WHILE
PLANET IGNITES
The gathering was called Rio+20, in reference
to an important environment conference in
the city in 1992 which produced important
global agreements on combating climate
change, protecting biodiversity and engaging
communities in their own development.
Although on June 23 over a hundred national
leaders agreed a 283-point agreement
negotiated in advance by their envoys, the
agreement was choc-a-bloc with weasel words
and fudges. By the reckoning of WWF, a big
green group, a preliminary version of the draft
agreement included the word “encourage” 50
times and the phrase “we will” just five times;
“support” appeared 99 times, but “must” only
three times. Once the draft agreement was
approved, on June 19th, the EU’s climate-
change commissioner Connie Hedegaard
tweeted: “nobody in that room adopting the
text was happy. That’s how weak it is”.
“The Future We Want” committed only
to devise new environmentally-friendly
benchmarks for development, in areas such as
renewable energy and food security, to replace
the millennium development goals, which
expire in 2015. Mikhail Gorbachev accurately
said the summit was hiding its inertia behind
the “fig leaf of the green economy”. It also
gave a small boost to scrapping fossil-fuel
subsidies, which have rocketed in recent years,
to an estimated annual cost of over $400
billion. The International Energy Agency
considers that eliminating these by 2020
would cut carbon-dioxide emissions by nearly
6%, though oil producers buried this in
caveats, making it effectively meaningless. The
draft agreement merely invited governments
to “consider rationalising inefficient fossil
fuel subsidies…in a manner that protects the
poor and the affected communities”. It was
a disastrous result for a summit billed “once
in a generation” chance to save the planet.
Greenpeace said it was “an epic failure [with] a
‘common vision’ of a polluters’ charter that will
cook the planet”.
