Climate change is a looming, apocalyptic crisis akin to the COVID pandemic that can only be mitigated by rich G7 countries redistributing their wealth to undeveloped nations, modeling the Chinese economy and developing a one-world government, a panel of “climate diplomacy veterans” warned ahead of the Group of Seven Nations Summit.
The global economic lockdown and nearly universal compliance of mask and vaccine mandates ushered during the coronavirus pandemic has set a precedent for similar regulations to be imposed to deter the existential threat posed by climate change, Dr. Rachel Kyte, dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University in Boston, argued Wednesday in a G7 Summit briefing, “Rich Countries and Their Climate Promises”
The climate justice “hook is provided by the pandemic. We have learned that you can’t protect yourself unless you protect everyone, we’ve learned that in our communities in the developed world,” Kyte explained. “Still, we struggle to manage the pandemic with policies that really reflect that piece of learning. That same learning is at the heart of the climate crisis.
“We cannot protect ourselves if emissions are still coming up from anywhere in the world. This truly is a race where everybody has to cover, has to complete the race. Everybody has to follow the – get over the finish line.”
Implementation of so-called “climate justice” relies on the G7 nations’ ability to vaccinate its populace and distribute their vaccines to undeveloped nations, explained Kyte, the World Bank Group’s former special envoy to the Paris Agreement negotiations and a former special representative of the United Nation’s Secretary-General.
“I don’t see how you engage in a global negotiation on climate change if the North will not share its vaccines,” she said. “How many vaccines will you put on planes in the next seven days? Because I think you can’t strip out success on climate negotiations from what’s going on for people around the world.”
Kyte implored G7 leaders must capitalize on the pandemic and incite global panic over greenhouse gas emissions with an unprecedentedly aggressive climate justice campaign to finally achieve climate justice.
G7 leaders must “indicate that the developed world will actually share its vaccine surplus and share it now, so that countries can actually improve their performance against the virus, and that the whole world starts to move through,” she said. “Otherwise, we’re just going to have variants and mutants coming back and coming back, and we’re just never going to escape.
“This is a microcosm of the same dynamic of climate change. Unless we can wean the entire world off of coal, until we can move everybody into systems where they can get affordable, reliable, clean energy, there’s no way that we are going to do okay.”
Director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, who trained diplomats from the Global South who inserted the 1.5 C goal in the Paris Agreement, blasted the leaders of G7 nations for not forming a one-world government, warning wealth redistribution amongst the biggest economies to undeveloped nations is crucial to curtailing the pandemic and achieving sustainable climate justice.
“Effectively, we don’t have a global government. We have the United nations with 200 countries meeting, talking, discussing things, but that’s not government,” Huq lamented. “Unfortunately, what these leaders have demonstrated so far is they see themselves as the leaders of their own countries, and protecting their own budgets and their own citizens. This is starkly evident in the COVID-19 situation, where they’re vaccinating their own populations and they don’t care about the rest of the world.”
“To me, the greatest person that we need to be thinking of and listening to is the 16-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden, who is putting this point to her parents and her elders, are you going to be able to deal with this global problem or not? So far, they’ve failed the challenge. I’m still hoping that they might be able to rise to it in the next few days.”
Huq railed against former President Donald Trump for refusing to bow to climate alarmism during his tenure in the White House.
“The President of the United States of America, four years ago left the Paris Agreement and caused us to go backward on the issue of climate change. We are much worse off now, four years after Mr. Trump,’ he said. “Now, it’s very good that Mr. Biden is back in the White House and that he has rejoined the Paris Agreement, but there’s a lot of catching up to do by the United States of America. It was the President of the United States of America who took the US out and caused a lot of damage to the rest of us. Never forget that.”
Reports of China being the most polluted country in the world are premised on misinformation, the panel claimed.
“Who is number one in cumulative emissions? The United States of America. So, when we talk about these kinds of issues of the $100 billion and who has to do how much on mitigation and so forth, do not fall into that trap of saying China is the biggest polluter and the US is second. It’s actually the reverse and that puts a different framework on all of these discussions,” claimed Mark Hertsgaard, executive director at Covering Climate Now and environment correspondent for The Nation magazine.
In addition to a one-world government, achieving climate justice requires the establishment of a multilateral banking system while $100 billion is allocated annually from advanced economies to developing countries, Kyte asserts, because, “We only have one planet, so everybody’s got to be in the same journey.”
“[Undeveloped nations] need to have access to aid and technical assistance bilaterally, but also they need a multilateral development bank system that is pushing all in one direction. They need to signal what else they’re going to do to relieve countries of their debt so that countries can manage their way through one threat in plain sight, which is already here, which is the pandemic, and the one that’s already here and will come – will be even worse, which is climate change.”
Climate justice is explicitly on the agenda at the annual G7 Summit Friday in Britain, where leaders of the seven richest per-capita nations on earth are meeting.
The historic climate justice push comes after a report published in October by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development warns of an imminent “climate emergency lockdown.”
“The world may need to resort to lockdowns again – this time to tackle a climate emergency,” reports Mariana Mazzucato, founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. “Under a ‘climate lockdown,’ governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban the consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.
While a single individual has yet to die from climate change, the WBCSD, like the climate diplomacy veterans, conflates climate with the manufactured COVID pandemic.
“Many think of the climate crisis as distinct from the health and economic crises caused by the pandemic,” the report states. “But the three crises – and their solutions – are interconnected.”
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