| Climate
Change and Environmental Justice Issues:
Timothy
C. Weiskel
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Consider
the following documentary reports on hurricane Katrina... |
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What
can be said to be the "appropriate" response to the
issue
of "reconstructing New Orleans" in the light
of
what is now know about climate change?
Who
should decide questions of New Orleans reconstruction?
Who are the "stakeholders" in this issue?
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In
addition
We
need to consider as well the environmental justice issues that are revealed
in recent trends in fossil fuel "producing" areas like Equador,
Nigeria and Ethiopia. As we have already seen in previous class sessions
these relate directly to the environmental justice of "resource extraction." |
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There
is a marked and growing sense in inequity and injustice because
of the ways in which the fossil fuel-driven development of the West
has been engineered with the net effect of creating direct ecological
devastation in many parts of the world.
The
sense of environmental injustice is therefore at least 4-fold |
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1)
First, local ecological devastation has been the repeated
legacy of fossil fuel extraction in areas of the Third World. |
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2)
Second, the combustion of the fossil fuels -- undertaken
largely in the "global North" -- has engendered the system-wide
ecological destabilization that climate change represents. |
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3)
Third, those who will feel the first and most pronounced
impact of the global destabilization of climate are primarily the
agricultural economies in the "global South." |
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and
4) Finally, in trying to move beyond their agricultural
economies, countries in the "global South" are being told:
"..so sorry, you will have to learn to develop without fossil
fuels because that is bad for the global environment." |
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.In
addition, we ought to consider the IPCC - Group II - Report - Summary
for Policymakers issued in April: |
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Videos
of Week 13 Lecture 