Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif joined the many voices calling for climate justice, though perhaps at the wrong time. With a climate change denier elected to the White House, it seems unlikely that the world’s worst polluter will step up and admit its responsibility for a very expensive crisis, Even though the US representative spoke for the Biden Administration, there was no guarantee that President-elect Trump would not tear up any commitment made by the USA at COP 29. After all, the previous Trump Administration had resiled from the 2015 Paris Accord, the result of the COP21, with President Trump saying that climate change was merely a Chinese conspiracy against the USA. He had been on the side of the oil and gas interests, with the new Environmental Protection Agency Director he announced on Tuesday likely to sanction new and invasive drilling and exploration.
An important aspect Mr Sharif highlighted was the debt trap. Justice demands that the developed world pays for the consequences of the climate change they have caused. It is to be remembered that climate change damages impact the Third World disproportionately, without regard to its inhabitants ever having contributed to climate change in a big way. The money, which he said would reach $6.8 trillion by 2030 (barely six years away), is not so much needed for improving infrastructure so that it could withstand the challenges of climate change, as for building infrastructure to replace that lost to the depredations of climate change. Mr Sharif rightly pointed out affected countries were already burdened by debt, and that polluting countries were not paying for the damage, except as more loans. Even those loans, apparently, they are not putting up. There is also an unfortunate tendency, mostly among finance bureaucrats, to regard these payments as just another source of foreign exchange.
While Pakistan must not desist from efforts to obtain climate justice, it should realize that no one is going to help. Developing nations are going to face a new kind of neo-colonialism, with not just money on offer, but orders on how it to be spent, and even on how the country should be governed. Another problem that Pakistan faces is the need for cooperation with neighbours. The smog crisis, which needs Indian help to resolve, is a case in point. And behind all this will be the insidious danger of the oil lobby, which is presently fighting to stop the adoption of renewables.
