Climate Justice Becomes Contentious Issue

The question of “climate justice” is becoming a contentious issue in relation to the Paris climate change negotiations.
According to The Week:

You wouldn’t know it from the happy spin emanating from the Oval Office, but a Third World revolt in Bonn, Germany, this week almost derailed the Paris climate change negotiations in November. Although peace has been restored for now, it only happened by papering over this fundamental conundrum: The world can either avert climate catastrophe or seek “climate justice,” not both.
 
The revolt was triggered when 130 developing nations including India and China noticed that the draft action plan that is supposed to serve as the blueprint for the Paris negotiations had omitted their most important conditions about the “fairness and financing” of the final deal — in other words, who is going to take responsibility for the warming and who should pay to reduce it? The South African delegation condemned the omission as “apartheid” that would penalize poor countries for the sins of the rich.
 
It has a point.
 
The Paris negotiations are supposed to be the mother of all climate negotiations. It was convened to impose binding emission reductions on all countries — not just the West, as was the case with the 1995 Kyoto protocol — to hold global temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels. To this end, each country has been asked to submit its own good faith reduction plan that includes both how much it will cut emissions and its plan for getting there. Once finalized after a review in Paris, the plans will be legally binding — although how precisely they will be enforced is anyone’s guess.
Setting that aside, negotiations will boil down to an essential question: How much should each country cut and therefore whose idea of “climate justice,” as Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi has termed it, should prevail?

Click here to read the full article on The Week.