Apportioning responsibility for climate change

The Glasgow climate summit is over. In the last hour or two, the final agreement got diluted. India made demands that neutered a key provision(s). Funding a facility for pay poor countries got changed to talking about it. Poor countries are increasingly demanding payment for damage that rich countries have caused and are increasingly causing. A New York Times article published before the summit ended considered the issue of national responsibility.

The NYT writes: 

One of the biggest fights at the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow is whether — and how — the world’s wealthiest nations, which are disproportionately responsible for global warming to date, should compensate poorer nations for the damages caused by rising temperatures.

Rich countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan and much of western Europe, account for just 12 percent of the global population today but are responsible for 50 percent of all the planet-warming greenhouse gases released from fossil fuels and industry over the past 170 years.

At the summit, Sonam P. Wangdi, who chairs a bloc of 47 nations known as the Least Developed Countries, pointed out that his home country of Bhutan bears little responsibility for global warming, since the nation currently absorbs more carbon dioxide from its vast forests than is emitted from its cars and homes. Nonetheless, Bhutan faces severe risks from rising temperatures, with melting glaciers in the Himalayas already creating flash floods and mudslides that have devastated villages.

“We have contributed the least to this problem yet we suffer disproportionately,” Mr. Wangdi said. “There must be increasing support for adapting to impacts.”

A decade ago, the world’s wealthiest economies pledged to mobilize $100 billion per year in climate finance for poorer countries by 2020. But they are still falling short by tens of billions of dollars annually, and very little aid so far has gone toward measures to help poorer countries cope with the hazards of a hotter planet, such as sea walls or early warning systems for floods and droughts.

“Lots of people are losing their lives, they are losing their future, and someone has to be responsible,” said A.K. Abdul Momen, the foreign minister of Bangladesh. He compared loss and damage to the way the United States government sued tobacco companies in the 1990s to recover billions of dollars in higher health care costs from the smoking epidemic.

At the same time, some of the world’s biggest developing economies are beginning to catch up on emissions. China, home to 18 percent of the world’s population, is responsible for nearly 14 percent of all the planet-warming greenhouse gases released from fossil fuels and industry since 1850. But today it is the world’s largest emitter by far, accounting for roughly 31 percent of humanity’s carbon dioxide from energy and industry this year.

At the climate summit, the United States and the European Union have argued that the world will never be able to minimize the damage from global warming unless swiftly industrializing nations like India do more to slash their emissions. But India, which recently announced a pledge to reach “net zero” emissions by 2070, says it needs much more financial help to shift from coal to cleaner energy, citing both its lower per capita emissions and smaller share of historical emissions.

An article from April of 2021 reported an economic analysis that estimated annual global economic loss would be as much as $23 trillion by 2050. The US and other wealthy Western nations could lose between 6 percent and 10 percent of their potential economic output. Most poor nations are projected to fare much worse. If the increase in global temperature is held to two degrees Celsius, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand would each see economic growth 20 percent below what they could otherwise expect by 2050.

Questions: 

1. Do wealthy polluting nations owe financial aid to poor low polluting countries, assuming that at least about 75% of the aid actually goes to mitigate climate impacts, less than ~25% being siphoned off by corrupt politicians and other kinds of crooks and kleptocrats? What about a roughly 50:50 split, e.g., ~47% for climate mitigation and ~53% for crooks, or vice versa? 

2. Some critics immediately criticized the final agreement as just another a greenwash, while at least some major world leaders hailed it as a significant step forward.  Based on past international failures to agree on significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, but in view of increased public global concern for climate change, what is likely to be closer to truth about the impact of this agreement, (i) mostly reasons for reasonable pessimism, (ii) mostly reasons for reasonable optimism, or (iii) something closer to the middle? 

3. Will industries, companies and countries that profit heavily from selling oil and gas, e.g., Exxon-Mobile and Saudi Arabia, probably continue to publicly spout concern for climate change, while quietly and behind closed doors continue opposing, undermining and slowing the global response to climate change, just as they and their lobbyists and paid propagandists have been doing for decades?