Climate change blackmail

Mary Robinson, former Irish president and ex-UN commissioner for human rights, will make a speech this evening at London's Chatham House discussing how climate change has become an issue of global justice.

'We can no longer think of climate change as an issue where we the rich give charity to the poor to help them cope,' she is expected to say. 'Climate change has already begun to affect the fulfilment of human rights and our shared human rights framework entitles and empowers developing countries and impoverished communities to claim protection of these rights.' The theme of how global warming is really a problem of equity between rich and poor countries is becoming a more common one. The argument is that changing weather patterns have a disproportionate impact on developing nations while being caused by developed industrialised countries.

There are parallels in the tactics behind this discussion with the debate about passive smoking. When the argument was about the health of smokers themselves, or people who chose to drink in smokey pubs, those lobbying for a change in the law seemed to make limited headway. However, when the health of service-sector workers like bar staff and waiters became the issue, the argument was made that this was unfair, that such workers didn't have a choice and needed to be protected. The same technique is now being applied in relation to climate change: we may not want to change our affluent lifestyles, but think about the poor people in Africa when the rains don't come (or when the floods do). Unable to convince us that we have a material interest in accepting their initiatives, campaigners and leaders blackmail us about the harm we do to others.

Calculated those these arguments may be, they ignore a very obvious point. The reason that rich nations are relatively untroubled by the prospect of climate change is precisely because they are rich. As such, they have the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. People living in subsistence, on the other hand, are vulnerable to change from weather, disease or crop failure. Which begs the question: why have the likes of Mary Robinson so clearly given up on development in favour of lecturing relatively affluent countries about their wicked ways?

Rights focus sought over climate, BBC News, 11 December 2006