There is a new book out on climate and justice: DEAD HEAT. The authors
make both a frightening case about the future and a powerful argument
for justice. One of the authors furnished the following precis:
"Dead Heat argues that the battle against global warming is key to the
larger battle for global justice, and that the outcome of this battle
may be as decisive politically as it will be ecologically. It argues,
moreover, that there can be no workable climate-control regime without a
historic compromise between the rich world and the poor, a compromise in
which the two come rapidly to share the Earth’s limited atmospheric space.
The problem is time. Today, the global average surface warming is only
.6 degrees Centigrade, and already the climate is changing fast. But the
latest science shows that any future in which we hold the warming to a
maximum of 2º C (and 2º C would likely mean massive suffering and
destruction) would require decisive global action; something like a
“global Marshall Plan” but tuned, particularly, to sustainable energy
development.
It comes to this: the emissions trajectories and climate sensitivity
indexes show, in mercilessly numeric terms, that even if we move quickly
to cap global carbon emissions, the “impacts” of the warming will soon
become quite severe, particularly for the poor and the vulnerable, and
that in the more pessimistic case, the one where the fossil-fuel
cartel remains in power, the impacts will verge on the catastrophic.
Dead Heat argues that justice -- not rhetoric and “aid” but real
developmental justice for the people of the South -- is going to be
necessary, and surprisingly soon. It argues, more particularly, that
such a justice must involve a phased transition from the Kyoto Protocol
to a future climate treaty based on equal rights to emit greenhouse
pollutants.
Dead Heat makes the case for climate justice, but also insists that
justice and equity, for their ethical and humanitarian attractions, must
also be seen as the most “realistic” of virtues. In the end, our limited
environmental space will itself show that it’s the dream of the
"business as usual" future that is naive and utopian."
published by Seven Stories Press. In bookstores or call (800)
596-7437. For review copies fax request on letterhead to (212) 226-1411
Gene Coyle
