The Achilles Heel of COP 27, Part II: Loss and Damage

The top five historical emitters—the US, China, Russia, Brazil, and India—together have caused $6 trillion in damage since 1990. So who pays?

In 2022, six insurance companies that had written policies on Florida beachfront property declared bankruptcy. Those that got out early were lucky. Losses from Hurricane Ian could exceed $60 billion. “And the biggest driver of that loss is not climate change;” wrote New York Times columnist Andrew Revkin, “it’s human change. It’s where we build.”

If you can’t imagine any insurance company moving to Florida and writing policies now, try to imagine anyone agreeing to indemnify residential and business property along the Indus River in Pakistan.

And yet, that is exactly what the parties to the Paris Agreement demand. To get the Agreement, the US and other overdeveloped countries had to make an offer the underdeveloping world could not refuse. Hillary Clinton penciled a number onto the back of an envelope Barack Obama carried into the tiny back room where China was meeting with South Africa, Brazil and India. That number? $100 billion per year. There’s a sucker born every minute, as P.T. Barnum is said to have said. The BRICs bought it. Financiers (Clinton thought the bribe money would come from the private sector) demurred. Some token millions changed hands, mostly from Nordic soft-hearts. Years passed. COPs came and went. The can got kicked. Damage piled up. Tensions rose.

In every COP (Conference of Parties), the “Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage” (WIM) gets revisited. Protestors from civil society raise banners, march en masse, and block traffic. The aggrieved nations walk out of Blue Zone meetings. In 2013, the “Fiji Clearinghouse for Risk Transfer” was established. Two years later, the US eluded the clutches of the angry mob at COP25 by offering the “Santiago Network” of insurance pools directed solely towards payments for loss and damage. COP26-Glasgow pumped more helium into that idea and pledged COP27-Egypt would finalize the “institutional arrangements.” The WIM is supposed to be retooled at COP30 in 2024 to reflect this new framework about to be negotiated.

There’s always been enough blame to go around, and researchers are getting better at pinpointing who deserves it. The top five historical emitters—the US, China, Russia, Brazil, and India—together have caused $6 trillion in damage since 1990, or about 11% of average annual global gross domestic product. US emissions, according to the research, are responsible for at least a 1% decline in Pakistan’s potential GDP—equivalent to about $33 billion.

— Bloomberg Green

“Loss and Damage” has everything the South loves and the North hates. It is a finger-pointing game with deep historic roots. “Why is there such disparity of wealth between hemispheres?” a precocious child might reasonably ask. One tries to trace the transfers of advantages. Technology prowess? Military prowess? But where does those come from? Maybe they come from energy inputs—slaves from Africa, peat from Ireland; coal from Wales; oil and gas from the Transjordan and Azerbaijan, then Nigeria. The genocide of indigenous populations in Africa and the Americas transferred resource wealth from the peripheries of empire to the capital cities and family aristocracies in both the “Old” world and “New.”

Ninety percent of historic emissions now wrecking the climate were spewed by the lavishly spendthrift countries that gained their resources by mass murder and theft. They stole from the countries they conquered and beggared and built their monumental city-states. That is how the US and EU became so overdeveloped, the South says. It wasn’t intelligence or hard work. It was organized crime. Thus, the underdeveloping world says, “Hey, we are not giving up fossil energy until we get our share of the wealth!” and moreover, “You owe us.”

Neither of those propositions has a ghost of a chance of accomplishing anything other than near-term human extinction. In game theory, they end in a null sum. Everyone loses.

Negotiators like the US’s John Kerry are determined not to cave in to any of those narratives. There is enough historic guilt to go around. Should the Hebrews be compensated for being tossed out of Egypt by the Pharaohs? Should Africa be reimbursed by the descendants of Arab slavers? Should Israel get out of Palestine? Should Canada, Mexico, and the US give back North America? What does United Fruit owe the royal family of Hawaii?

As silly as these ideas may seem, they are deadly serious roadblocks at UN climate conferences. Deadly is exactly the word I intend. Pakistan is going to Sharm El Sheikh loaded for bear. They will passionately demand reparations for their historic heatwaves and floods. Same for the island nations sinking into the Pacific and Indian oceans. Ditto the displaced indigenous people of the Amazon.

The issue rose to the top of the political agenda at the Cop26 climate talks. Developing countries put forward a proposal for a funding facility dedicated to loss and damage, which was blocked by the US and the EU.

—Climate Home News 2/24/22

Last December in Glasgow the aggrieved let their oppressors kick L&D down the road to Egypt where “relevant organizations and stakeholders [will] discuss the arrangements for the funding of activities to avert, minimize and address loss and damage associated with the adverse impacts of climate change…” the UNFCCC website says. During 2022 Climate Week, the G-7 countries signaled they have no intention to pay. They have plenty of losses themselves, and more in the pipeline. Reference: Ian, Florida.

I watched a 60 Minutes story about a family returning to their home on Sanibel Island after Ian. Sanibel is a barrier island, a spit of sand thrown up by wave action just a few hundred yards from the coastline. Building McMansions there was insane, but rolling the dice for a century or more, the odds of that sand spit being submerged by a storm might be only once in a hundred years. And yet, this family was utterly shocked and weeping. They had been there ten years and it had been paradisaical. Now their house, and their life’s savings, were in ruins. The sea had washed away all the McMansions. How could such a thing ever happen? they asked.

The biggest driver of that loss is not climate change; it’s human change. It’s where we build.

—Andrew Revkin

Last year the average amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased at its fifth-fastest rate since record-keeping began in 1958. The global annual average reached 414.7 parts of CO2 for every million parts of atmosphere, the highest level in at least 2 million years. Glaciers shrank for the 34th year in a row, ocean temperature set a record, sea levels rose faster than the long-term trend, and a record 32% of land around the world experienced drought. The hotter atmosphere has already locked in almost a foot of global sea-level rise from Greenland alone. And two scientists suggested that the most important metric of all—the imbalance between the Earth’s incoming and outgoing energy— wasn’t even being measured directly.

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Researchers now predict that five of the 16 tipping points they’ve identified may be crossed even at today’s temperatures. They include the death of coral reefs, the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica, the thawing of permafrost, and shifts in North Atlantic ocean patterns. Two authors of that paper also contributed weeks earlier to an analysis of unlikely but not impossible “catastrophic climate change scenarios” that could trigger societal collapse. They called these worst-case scenarios “a dangerously underexplored topic.”

— Bloomberg Green

In early 2022, the UN’s climate science authority, the IPCC, dodged politics as best it could in its 18-chapter report on climate prospects at 1.5-degrees but minced no words in saying that projected “losses and damages” will escalate with every increment of warming and “become increasingly difficult to avoid.” The US delegation had wanted “losses and damages” replaced with “impacts” in the draft but IPCC hung tough.

It is a silly children’s game being played. The fate of humanity has been reduced to finger-pointing, preventing support from reaching the most vulnerable, closing borders to climate migrants, and everyone playing victim. Whether we have enough time left to grow up is the larger, existential question.

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Towns, villages and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road is helping these places grow their own food, and raising money to acquire farm machinery and seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

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The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

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