By Elizabeth Cripps, Illustration: Happy Pictures/Adobe Stock, Yes!, May 5, 2022
Whatever justice may positively require, it does not permit that poor nations be told to sell their blankets in order that the rich nations may keep their jewellery. —Henry Shue, 1992
On June 11, 2001, President George W. Bush refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty on climate change. Standing against lavish greenery and an American flag, he announced that the United States wouldn’t be part of a policy that wasn’t based on “global cooperation.” He was crying unfairness: China and India, major (but poorer) polluters, were exempt from Kyoto, and he objected to the U.S. having to take on burdens if they didn’t.
His decision was politically expedient; it was also morally wrong.
We have seen what climate injustice looks like: Human rights are undermined, the prospects of future generations are erased. People of color, women, Indigenous communities, and other species pay a terrible price for a way of life from which a rich elite reap the benefits.
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