Pakistan has not even used its fair share of safe emissions (since 1959, the country has contributed 0.4 percent to total greenhouse gasses) whereas countries in the Global North have exceeded their quotas by 90 percent. We also know that a hundred companies are responsible for 71 percent of emissions, while the top twenty polluters have caused one-third of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. The ghosts of the past are coming back to haunt those who played no role in nurturing them.
The time and spatial lag between the causes and effects of climate change is one of the primary reasons why it is easy for liberals to present such disasters as “humanitarian” issues, erasing the political roots of the tragedy. As Fredric Jameson reminds us, this amnesia is built into the logic of capitalism, as the accumulated exploitation of the past is deployed to control the present. But since this past is rendered invisible in the commodities exchanged on the market, it appears as if this exchange is equal. In other words, capitalism appears natural, but presupposes a history of violence and exploitation — a history that capital negates and suppresses in its own development.
The erasure, from public discourse, of polluters who are primarily responsible for the suffering of millions of people and for threatening planetary catastrophe, is itself part of this process of exploiting the time and spatial lag between greenhouse emissions and their deadly consequences. The result is an attempt to depoliticize this suffering and obstructing accountability of countries and companies in the Global North — giving the false impression that we are “all in this together” as one threatened human family.
#SOSPakistan #PakistanFloods #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #Politics #Environment #ClimateApartheid #TomorrowIsTooLate
https://jacobin.com/2022/09/floods-pakistan-natural-disaster-global-south-climate-crisis/
