Blog Post 1: Global South vs. Global North Environmental Responsibilities

In class we talked about many different ideas on how government can handle environmental policies. Among these being emission charges, emission standards, command and control regulation, permits systems and more. We also discussed the reoccurring issue of if developing countries should have to bear the same amount of burden in decreasing pollution as developed countries. However, we never explicitly argued about the morals behind this dilemma. In this blog I will argue that Global South countries should not have to bear the same responsibility as Global North countries until they reach the point of becoming developed.

To put this issue in perspective, let us realize where the problem behind environmental policies begins. To start with, the main players to be seemingly influencing global environmental policies are the leaders of each nation. It is easy to blame these individuals for not enacting proper policies, but is it actually their fault? These leaders are for the most part being elected by the citizens of their nation or by a governing body. Because of this we can infer that their primary goal is getting themselves into these positions of power and then retaining their power. Therefore they will be fairly responsive to what their constituents want from them.

The issue is that most citizens don’t make improving the environment a priority. I myself can admit to this. Sometimes I don’t recycle that one water bottle I had in my backpack and sometimes I choose to drive my car even though the food place I’m going to is a 10 minute walk away. While these individual occurrences are not solely responsible for the pollution we have in this world, the mentality behind them is crucial for understanding why we have seemingly irreconcilable environmental issues.

It all stems from the fact that yeah, environmental issues are bad, but it’s not as bad as other things. Most Americans have their own day-to-day worries that take priority over some facts that a scientist across the country released. As humans, we react to things we can physically see for ourselves and consider these our “immediate” problems. Since we don’t necessarily see the environmental degradation and because it is happening on a relatively slow scale compared to our daily lives, we are not fully realizing its eventual impact.

This is why other things, such as economic growth and development, normally have a stronger influence over policy. Additionally, this is a main reason why there is so much conflict about coming to an agreement on environmental policy. However this is especially true in developing countries where their standard of living is much lower compared to the United States and other developed countries. In these countries citizens may have a difficult time finding life essentials such as food, water, clothing and shelter. Because of this having them give up, for example, the same levels of CO2 emissions is simply unfair.

While maybe adopting environmentally friendly habits is inconvenient and even annoying to some citizens of developed countries, it is much more humane than expecting developing countries, where many live in poverty, to further give up technology that could significantly increase their standard of living. This ideology is often referred to as “Greenhouse Development Rights”. On their website the organization states that its “framework is designed to support a global emergency climate mobilization while, at the same time, preserving the rights of all people to reach a dignified level of sustainable human development free of the privations of poverty”.

However one issue with this idea is that often times states do not care about the wellbeing of other states. In other words, why should one state give up something so another state can be better off, even though they are still worse off in the first place? Besides morals, which often do not go hand-in-hand with politics, there are not many other reasons. Perhaps a need for a more developed, technologically innovated world, which could allow for more effective trade of goods and ideas. However this does seem like a far-stretched idea that is hard to predict. Therefore, I do not know if I see this idea as likely to happen, only that it is my belief that it should.

Another issue, as we discussed in class, is that it is hard to determine what is developing and what is developed. For example, China claims to be developing even though they have the second biggest economy in the world, but they also still have very high poverty rates. So how do we distinguish between these two categories? This is something that needs to be determined in an international agreement in order to make it fair for all parties. Again this may be difficult and infeasible, as it seems most things are with environmental policy.

Sources:

Greenhouse Development Rights <http://gdrights.org/>