Environment and Development -- Eleventh Class: China, India, and Climate Change

This week in my Environment and Development course (ERST-IDST-POST-SAFS 3602H), we examined international climate politics.  An interesting feature of the recent history of climate is the prominence of China and India in advocating for action.  This is especially striking now, given the vacuum created by the near-absence of the United States, but it predates Trump's election.  So that was one reason I thought it worthwhile to include climate change in this course.  A second is that the topic provides an opportunity to consider a different perspective on the central theme of this course: the environmental implications of inequality.

I began by noting the frequent framing of climate change as a global challenge, implying the undifferentiated responsibility of humanity: a view embodied in images of the earth from space, and in ecological footprint analysis.

Then, I examined this framing from a variety of critical perspectives, noting that it's necessary to examine the political dimensions of apparently apolitical measures of CO2 and other greenhouse gases; that climate change represents the largest scale of environmental injustice, with those who are most vulnerable to the problem being the least responsible for it, and those who are most responsible being best able to adapt and carry on; and that climate change itself is a challenge rooted in the history of development and of environmental colonialism.  Vulnerability is itself not something simply presented by nature (as with small island states imperiled by sea level rise, for example), but has itself been produced through the particular pathways followed by development -- such as urbanization and industrial agriculture.

Next I turned to the history of climate negotiations, and examined the evolving role of inequality in these negotiations, from the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 to the Paris Agreement of 2015.  Finally, I profiled recent Chinese and Indian climate initiatives, and how they are framed in terms of various domestic political and economic imperatives.