What Is Our 'Political Tipping Point'?

The chaos of Hurricane Dorian has climate writer, Kate Oronoff, asking how much destruction will it take for our leaders to treat climate change seriously.

Donald Trump has been rightly criticized for golfing as Dorian devastated the Bahamas and drifted toward the US. But it’s as good a metaphor as any for the way elites across political lines have approached the crisis they have helped create and continue to fuel. One of the cruelest realities of global warming is that the people whohave done the least to contribute to it tend to be among the first and worst hit. Nations like the United States have amassed tremendous wealth both by burning fossil fuels and exploiting land and labor from the places most threatened by rising temperatures through slavery, colonialism and their living legacies. Similar inequalities play out within nations, including in the US, where most people’s own carbon footprints are dwarfed by those of the billionaires and fossil fuel executives best equipped to insulate themselves from heavy weather. 

Internationally, climate-vulnerable countries have for decades made the case that more ambition is needed, focusing policymakers’ concerns on to issues of equity. The Bahamas is part of a group within the UN known as the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis), comprising countries already being hammered by climate impacts who have got comparatively few financial resources to deal with them. The Aosis chair and Maldives energy minister, Thoriq Ibrahim, argued at COP 24 last year that it would “be suicide not to use every lever of power we have to demand what is fair and just: the support we need to manage a crisis that has been thrust upon us”. 

That support has not been forthcoming. In its special report released last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius – a level already dangerous for low-lying states – would require an annual investment in decarbonization of $3tn through 2050. And that’s just to mitigate warming. Trillions more will be required to adapt to the climate impacts already locked in, ensuring that when hurricanes like Dorian do hit they do less damage. Repairing the loss and damage of storms and other disasters is expected to cost $300bn a year by 2030, jumping to $1.2tn a year by 2060. As the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases and its biggest economy, the United States has both the ability and an outsized responsibility to decarbonize rapidly and make it possible for countries do the same – a climate debt. 

Back in 2009, industrialized nations pledged to mobilize $100bn toward mitigation and adaptation efforts by 2020, a response to persistent demands from climate justice organizers. As of last September, only $3.5bn had actually been allocated to the fund and just $10.3bn pledged to the multilateral body that’s supposed to be the main vehicle for dispersing that money, the Green Climate Fund (GCF). Before he left office, Obama promised $3bn toward the GCF. Just $1bn of that ever materialized before Trump withdrew that vow. That’s a fraction of the estimated $15bn a year the federal government spends subsidizing fossil fuel development. At the end of August, the US Import-Export Bank approved $5bn in financing for a natural gas project in Mozambique. We have more than enough money to fight the climate crisis, at home and abroad. It’s just going to all the wrong places.

Word to the wise. When your government spends more subsidizing fossil fuels than it spends on climate change mitigation and adaptation, your government is not working for you but against you and your future.

Jeff Bezos’s escape plans notwithstanding, we’re all stuck on this warming planet together. Whether human civilization stays intact amid all this worsening weather depends on recognizing our shared humanity – and designing policy accordingly. Platitudes for the planet won’t cut it.