We at Rights CoLab hope that Simon Glynn’s comment of 29 May may start an important discussion. We agree that he has recognised a serious problem, but disagree with his analysis and his proposed solution.
Mr Glynn’s piece, “When we reset, let’s separate climate action from social justice”, argues that the conflation of social justice with climate action has held back progress. Whenever investors position climate change as “a progressive, left-wing issue integrated with social justice”, he said, they alienate the political right.
We agree that this positioning has come back to bite those who wish to stop climate change in its tracks. Mr Glynn therefore advocates that we disassociate the goals of social justice from our discourse about ameliorating global warming.
The main drawback of this view is that separating social justice from climate action also holds back climate progress. Climate mitigation necessarily implicates changes to society and impacts upon people: climate progress needs a social licence to operate. In this regard its record is quite mixed.
Each week brings news of popular resistance to another green effort. Recently we have learned of grass roots opposition to a utility-scale solar power project in Indonesia; protests against a Spanish mill producing “carbon-negative” cellulose insulation; an Indigenous-led lawsuit against a transition mineral mine in the US; and an attempt by Brazilian prosecutors to annul a carbon offset scheme supporting conservation of the Amazon basin, because the state government had failed to consult traditional communities.
The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre is tracking 95 lawsuits, and counting, filed against transition minerals and other renewable energy projects based on allegations of human rights or environmental abuses.
Resistance is often successful — a study of the Environmental Justice Atlas database found that environmental defenders were able to stop one quarter of the projects they opposed, through protest, litigation and other forms of popular mobilisation. When we separate considerations of social justice from climate mitigation, climate projects often fail, so much so that we may even consider social justice a precondition for climate success.
Mr Glynn is correct that there is no inherent reason for the political right to oppose climate action, despite the current reality, due to its “objective urgency and importance”. He contrasts this characteristic with social justice, another reason for separation.
But there is objective urgency and importance for aspects of social justice as well, particularly socio-economic inequality. Worsening inequality increases the probability of financial crises. Current imbalances that remind us of the pre-2008 period make this relationship one of immediate concern. Inequality also diminishes economic potential. Who on the right opposes stronger economic growth, or staving off impending financial instability?
Finally, issues within social justice interact with climate, another reason that we cannot separate them. Inequality and wealth concentration affect climate in several ways. One notable study found that political backlash to climate change occurs mainly when inequality is at an elevated level.
Moreover, the richest among us are also the highest emitters. Since 1990, the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population has produced 16 percent of total emissions growth, but the top 1 percent has been responsible for 23 percent. While per capita emissions from low and middle-income groups within rich countries have declined since 1990, those of the global top 1 percent have risen.
In another respect, social injustice in the form of institutionalised discrimination generates the conditions that allow high emissions to continue.
An example is when companies construct polluting facilities in sacrifice zones – the areas where segregated communities facing discrimination (depending on the geographic context, Indigenous Peoples and other historically marginalised racial, ethnic and religious groups) live and work.
Corporate capture of regulatory and legal bodies often deprives these communities of the agency to resist corporate power. Companies can lower political resistance, and thus the cost of their emissions by locating in sacrifice zones, thereby incentivising polluters to emit more than they otherwise would.
If either conflating climate action with social justice, or separating them, both potentially set back climate efforts, then what is to be done?
This is where the financial materiality of environmental and social systemic risk becomes a useful concept. Responsible asset owners have increasingly recognised the salience of systemic risk to the macroeconomy, their investment portfolios and their beneficiaries. As such, the systemic financial risks of inequality and other social issues are receiving heightened attention.
A key defining concept of our global system is that systemic risks are interrelated. Inequality affects climate change, and climate change affects inequality. Inequality has been shown to interact with risks such as food insecurity, antimicrobial resistance, political polarization and corruption, which dampens climate progress on its own.
All these risks, often rolled into an inclusive “polycrisis”, tax economic resources such that any citizen of any political persuasion should be concerned. It would be better if society accepted the validity of social justice efforts for their own sakes; but if that is not the world we currently live in, then a systemic risk lens can feed two birds, progress on social justice and progress on climate, with one scone.
We urge advocates for climate action and advocates for social justice to unite under the banner of minimising systemic risk.
Paul Rissman is co-founder of Rights CoLab and founding partner of the Taskforce on Inequality And Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD)
