By Mary Robinson
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018
Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, is undoubtedly sincere in her determination to fight climate change and 鈥減utting people at the heart of the solution鈥. Unfortunately, her new book shows that sincerity is not enough.
As well as heading her own climate justice foundation, Mary Robinson is the former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and UN Special Envoy on Climate Change. She is an insider in the rarefied world of elite climate negotiations.
She understands that 鈥渢he most disadvantaged across the world [are] suffering most from the effects of climate change鈥. For her, climate change mitigation and climate justice requires conquering 鈥減overty and inequality鈥 and 鈥渆mpower[ing] those who have been left behind and neglected鈥.
In Climate Justice, she tells some of their stories, along with accounts of the work of climate activists she has met through her involvement in UN climate conferences and related events.
Most of the book is devoted to heart-rending personal accounts of the hardships that indigenous and poor people are experiencing. She looks at the plight of fossil fuel workers who need to be 鈥減art of the struggle for climate justice鈥 as the world gradually shifts to renewable energy. Ken Smith, for example, is a tar sands worker in Fort McMurray, Alberta who is working for a 鈥渏ust transition鈥 by preparing his fellow workers at Suncor to for a decarbonised world.
She also tells of more privileged individuals who apply their skills to climate action. These include Vi Thi Hien, who left academia to work on Vietnam鈥檚 biodiversity, and Natalie Issacs, a Sydney socialite who abandoned her skin-care and beauty products company to encourage other affluent women to cut back their carbon emissions.
Admitting it is 鈥渇ragile foundation for action鈥, Robinson still believes the Paris Agreement is a 鈥渞esounding endorsement of the principles of climate justice鈥 that vindicates the work of these activists. She hopes that 鈥渃ountries will keep to their INDC targets primarily out of concern for the planet, and secondarily for the risk of being publicly shamed by their global peers as climate change footdraggers鈥.
Robinson places hope for climate change action in efforts such a climate change alliance of US cities, states, and businesses, and the C40 Cities Leadership Group. She believes that economic growth 鈥渂uilt on sustainable energy and land use鈥 will 鈥渟afeguard the lives of the most vulnerable from the effects of climate change and offer the best chance of lifting more communities out of poverty鈥.
What she does not address is how such objectives can be achieved without radical social and economic change. How can she reconcile a desire for environmental sustainability with her membership in the B-Team, a group of business leaders that includes Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactica project promises space tourism for the very wealthy?
Robinson acknowledges the need to reduce social inequality, but fails to confront the growing concentration of wealth in most countries in the world and the persistence of major social inequalities. Essentially, her book domesticates the notion of climate justice, reducing it to a moral problem that can be solved by persuading the rich to do better.
In the end, the main value of Climate Justice to ecosocialists and climate justice activists is as a cautionary tale about the willingness and ability of the capitalist class and its political allies co-opt progressive concepts and causes.
I don鈥檛 question Robinson鈥檚 good faith, but ultimately she is committed to the elite that dominates UN climate change conferences and the World Economic Forum. The climate activists whose stories are recorded in Climate Justice may be allowed to speak, but real change isn鈥檛 on the agenda.
[Reprinted from . Hans Baer is the author of.]