Introduction on Background
Concerning the readings, Dr. Mahathir as Malaysian prime minister was one of the Global South’s leading politicians and spokesmen for a generation. (He retired in the early 2000s, but then returned for a leadership cameo in the midst of Malaysia’s still on-going 1MB scandal, which you may read more about in the US financial pages recently in conjunction with Goldman Sachs’ apparent settlement of the related civil litigation for U$3+ billion.)
1/4 Which is the best way to approach climate change or biodiversity issues and why, Flood Woman’s moralism, Goldman Sachs Carbonomics’ economic analysis of coming changes, or Dr. Mahatir’s political analysis of the split between interests of the developed and developing world?
Ask yourself how Dr. Mahathir’s view of international environmental law matters expressed just prior to the 1992 UN Rio Conference on Environment and Development (informally known as the Earth Summit, which yielded the Greenhouse Gas Convention, the Biodiversity Convention and the Rio Declaration) compares to the contemporaneous views of states or environmental NGOs from industrialized countries (NGOs means non-governmental organizations, for example Greenpeace)? What do you think changed, if anything, in the late 1980s to early 1990s?
Does the average US or European environmental activist then or now see things the same way as Dr. Mahathir, and is Dr. Mahathir right in portraying environmentalists in the developed world as shills for “Global North” timber companies (a conspiracy view)?
When you read the Linnan piece written for a Christian-Muslim interreligious book as a presentation of differing perspectives on “development,” note the general focus on economics, but also the bridge to environmental considerations that changed as documented in the World Bank reports between the early 1990s (environmental concerns are about exhaustion of resources, impoverishing developing countries’ future) and the early 2000s (environmental concerns are about “sustainability”). How do the concerns and timeline on the development side fit either Dr. Mahatir’s views, or those of environmental activists then or now in the developed world?
You need to understand that ideas about distributional justice may drive the climate change narrative on the developing world side, since in practical terms it queered the Kyoto Protocol (an amendment in effect to the Greenhouse Gas Convention to allocate “carbon emission rights” among countries), and arguably thereafter US participation under the Paris Agreement. The modern terminology for “distributional justice” concerns in the environmental sphere would be “environmental justice,” which currently is touched on in the cross-over between BLM activists and the discussion of “green” programs generally, mostly on the progressive political side (e.g., why Columbia will never site a municipal incinerator in the Shandon neighborhood, as opposed to Northeast Richland County). As a general matter, how should/can we address distributional claims in either the domestic or international environment and climate setting? Are they the same or different in nature?
2/4 How do you interpret the Porter & Brown global environmental politics piece’s emphasis on NGO involvement in international environmental law, the role of differing state groups (north-south divide, etc.), plus the underlying point in Dr. Mahathir’s speech that the Global South as relatively poor wishes to become rich through economic development so that it perceives attempts to limit economic growth as attempts to keep them “poor & barefoot”? From the Global South perspective, they are not asking for a hand-out. Instead, they are being constrained from using their own resources in the same fashion as the developed world did 50-100-150 years ago, in the course of becoming wealthy and sophisticated industrialized countries. Is that the way Bill Gates sees matters?
3/4 Look to the 1995 world map by GDP. Does that map look the same or different now 25 years later? Why, and if it has changed, how would it look now? Understand that GDP is traditionally a rough proxy for energy use/carbon generation in industrialization, which moves the discussion smoothly towards climate change. This is a more graphic way of looking at how the pie was divided in 1995, which is not too long after Dr. Mahatir speaks in 1992, and not too long before the Bush Administration declined to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in the early 2000s. How can you deal with the idea that developing countries see their future in increasing economic growth, while environmental law is typically perceived as slowing or impeding growth (the jobs for pollution equation traditionally)? What do the biodiversity maps tell you about the geographic concentrations of biodiversity globally, and what is the connection to climate change as such? Is Bill Gates more concerned about climate change or biodiversity, and why?
Looking back to the Porter & Brown piece, if global environmental politics are so complicated, what do you think the law will look like, and how will it be made? In fact, our international environmental law course will largely be about how the law is to be made (largely by treaty) because there are relatively few areas of environmental concern where the law currently exists in a well-developed state and is generally accepted as working (e.g., the Basel Convention on Hazardous Waste has been a step forward, but by no means addresses all our issues; meanwhile, traditional ideas of sovereignty render it difficult to address issues via customary law, etc.). How can all the competing interests be balanced, and what approach to law makes the most sense (human rights-based, treaty negotiations stressing state interests, litigation against individual polluters, etc.)?
4/4 Finally, what do you make of the Sulistiawati & Linnan Singapore ST editorial (SE Asia’s NYT equivalent) to the effect that contrary to popular belief, instead of COVID-19 displacing environmental concerns, it should be understood as a dress rehearsal for climate change difficulties? True or false, why or why not? And does it make a difference that the latest economists’ attempts to develop a better cost model for climate change demonstrate increasingly higher but disparate costs (more heat-related deaths in developing countries, as in the Roston, Murray & Dottle article)? What is the connection between Bressler’s piece on the “true” cost of carbon emissions incorporating mortality effects, whether you ask the question about whether Flood Woman, Carbonomics, or Dr. Mahatir’s approach is the best for the issues, or what the revised carbon cost numbers may imply for Goldman Sachs’ economic analysis? [Red-hots may wish to look at Carbonomics: The green engine of economic recovery (Goldman Sachs Equity Research 06/16/20, as redacted) in working the carbon price incorporating mortality numbers, with a view to the effects of such revised numbers in the assumptions embedded in the Goldman report).
Copyright 2020–21 © David Linnan.