CETRI
William Kapp came up with the idea of a cost-shifting success in his ahead-of-its-time book The Social Costs of Private Enterprise.1–2 A cost-shifting success is when the costs of producing something are successfully shifted to other people and places, while the company that makes it keeps the profits.3 Cost shifting is when it’s easier to dump toxic waste into a river, making people – often Black and Brown – pay downstream, in another jurisdiction or country. On a planetary scale, cost shifting happens when whole regions are turned into sacrifice zones for polluting industries, when a company sells products that contain ‘forever chemicals’ that poison our bodies and groundwater, or when oil companies see massive profits even as society and Earth’s life support systems pay for climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels.4–9 It’s called a cost-shifting success because so-called externalities cannot meaningfully be internalised. The poor have little power in a market-based economy because they don’t have money that they could use to, say, lobby politicians or pay for lawyers. So while polluters cash in, the poor pay with their lives, their health, their homeland.10
Cost-shifting successes can be painted green. A new million-square-foot ‘sustainable’ headquarters for France’s largest bank, BNP Paribas Fortis, in Brussels has been adorned with a massive green roof and innumerable photovoltaic panels as well as four Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of stored water to warm the building in winter.11 But not only has this bank been one of the world’s major investors in the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon for €5 billion soy and palm oil deals with major agribusinesses (chiefly Cargill), but its ‘green’ makeover of its headquarters demands specialised mineral extraction for rare earths like neodymium, tellurium and gallium as well as lithium, copper and nickel. Mysteriously, the labour conditions that directly result in the construction of this so-called green building are not considered in the advertising material. This includes the labour of (especially migrant) workers in Belgium as well as the labour of the supply chains well beyond Europe’s borders that are required to extract raw materials, process them, manufacture them, transport them and assemble them.
Branding stolen value from racialised people as ‘eco-friendly’
None of this is new, even if it has been recast with ‘green’ bells and whistles. Since Columbus set sail for the ‘New World’ in 1492, European powers started a process of slavery and Indigenous genocide on a global scale unprecedented in human history. The transatlantic slave trade involved the exportation of labour to power the economies of the countries where they were forced, on pain of death, to work.12 Insatiable European appetites needed cheap (dark-skinned) hands and vast plantations to provide the raw materials for subsequent stages of industrialisation.13 Nothing, not even humiliating peanuts for wages, was paid back in return for this stolen labour value.
Today, labour and nature continue to be stolen systematically. One study calculated that 25% of total consumption in the United States, Canada and Western Europe is provided for free from countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. By free, the authors mean that it is not compensated in terms of equivalent trade. In the year 2015 alone, wealthy countries in Europe and North America grabbed 13.2 billion tons of raw materials, over 2 billion acres of land, 3.4 billion barrels of oil and 392 billion hours of work (or 188 million person-years of labour) from Latin America, Asia and Africa. The grabbing of resources and hours continues year after year and the scale is growing over time.14 This is so great that traditional development aid is absolutely meaningless ; for every $1 richer countries give to poorer ones, they receive $80 in return, while for every $1 that poor countries receive, they lose $30 in land, labour and resources.15 Either this can be understood as downright theft or it can be understood as a conscious gift to Western Europe and North America. But when Elon Musk states – in referring to the lithium needed for ‘green’ electric vehicles from countries like Bolivia – ‘We can coup whoever we want ! Deal with it,’ we know we’re not talking about gifts.16
And the labour stolen isn’t just between rich and less-rich countries. It happens even within the population of a single country. In the United States, $47 trillion was obtained from 90% of the population of working people between 1980 and 2018 and channelled to the top 10%.15 If that $47 trillion were distributed equally to the whole population, every American would get $140,000 extra in their bank account. This is money obtained, or rather stolen, from all of our work hours. If this money wasn’t being used to build someone’s fifth (LEED-certified) mansion, we might be able to imagine future generations living on this planet.
Economists call the unequal distribution of labour and resources ‘uneven trade’. Uneven trade is a kickback from the colonial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries – except now the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Israel and Singapore are in on it, too – as well as a handful of elites in every other country.
What is perhaps most striking is the way labour is treated. Why, for instance, should labour in Canada, the United States, Australia or Western Europe receive higher wages than the same labour carried out in Mexico, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam or Peru ? Manual labour, processing, engineering, transport and logistics tend to characterise labour demands in these countries, while end-of-chain labour (e.g., design, advertising, retail, delivery) often falls to the richer countries.17 In both cases, labour productivity is generally the same, so why the wage disparity between these regions ? You might point to the cost of living, but this doesn’t come out of a vacuum. How, for instance, has a happy, warm-and-fuzzy (through indoor heating, not because of climate) and eco-friendly – yet expensive – life in places like Vienna, Zurich, Melbourne, Seattle, Osaka, Vancouver or Copenhagen been the deliberate outcome of resource and labour exploitation elsewhere ?
The implications of this question are crucial to understanding ecological breakdown. Unfair labour arrangements mean that workers across Asia, Africa and Latin America see highly precarious work without adequate safety or environmental standards. They also mean that workers in Europe and North America see their jobs moved overseas, their communities abandoned, and their sense of meaning and purpose lost. The only ones who gain from all of this are the transnational creative professional and managerial service sector workers in cities across the world, who may not recognise how their high wages come at the expense of manufacturing workers made redundant or cheapened labourers in the darker-skinned nations of the world.18 What this means is that rather than writing statements about diversity, equity and inclusion, it would make better sense to build an international anti-racist coalition that supports all workers.
The stolen goods and life energies also extend to carbon emissions. For example, more than half of all emissions in the year 2004 indirectly supported investments in Western Europe, the United States and Canada. Reflecting their consumption patterns, Western Europe required an import of 72% more emissions than what is emitted within Western Europe itself, while the Middle East exported 58% of emissions for consumption in other regions (namely, Europe and North America).19 Overall, the economic investments in richer regions are underwritten by emissions in poorer places, with China’s emissions being central to maintaining living standards in the West.
The greening of debt
While many ex-colonies are in endless debt to their financial creditors in North America and Europe, these same ex-colonies are also burdened with the responsibility of dealing with climate change and ecological collapse as well as being most vulnerable to its impacts. This ‘ecological debt’ caused by the emissions from manufacturing, raw material production and industrial agriculture, which accrues largely to consumers in the richer countries, is not being paid – it’s hardly even being recognised.
Many emerging wealthy nations impose their way into poorer regions and grab resources – adopting the same forms of resource imperialism that the United States carries out in Latin America and other parts of the world, and not dissimilar to the playbook of the European colonisers’ ‘scramble for Africa.’ For instance, the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s richest petrostates, has recently acquired nearly 20% of Zimbabwe’s land surface as reserve land for carbon credits that companies can purchase to offset their climate-breakdown-inducing activities. The Dubai-based company Blue Carbon acquired forest land across five African countries totalling nearly the landmass of the United Kingdom for carbon offsets that continue to allow climate criminals to burn more fossil fuels.20 This gross public relations exercise by corporations largely responsible for planetary climate collapse has meant that land values for forested regions have skyrocketed across the continent, all while displacing and evicting the very communities who know best how to steward their forests. The displacement of communities across the continent, in turn, contributes to conditions leading to periurban informal settlements and precarious migration across the Mediterranean and the US-Mexico border. This also leads to rising xenophobia and labour exploitation in the wealthier nations, whose so-called solutions don’t get us out of ecological collapse but just dig us into deeper holes.
Imagine if all that land, energy, material and labour could be redirected to meet the needs of the people who need them – instead of going towards speculative land grabs for water-poisoning, soil-eroding, climate-change-fuelling and habitat-loss-generating cheap food export baked into deeply unequal and unfair international trade agreements. The 2 billion acres of stolen land mentioned above (a total area twice the size of India), for instance, could be used to provide varied and nutritious food for up to 6 billion people that is grown with ecological sensitivity to the needs of the land.15
Towards climate reparations
For at least a decade social movements and governments in the Global South have been pushing for the West to redress historical harm caused by the pollution they are largely responsible for.21 For example, at the 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, over 35,000 people from 140 countries, comprising Indigenous peoples, labour unions, and social movements for climate justice, agrarian reform and women’s rights, gathered to draw up a declaration that asserted the need for repaying climate debt : ‘Developed countries, as the main cause of climate change, in assuming their historical responsibility, must recognise and honour their climate debt in all of its dimensions as the basis for a just, effective, and scientific solution to climate change.’22
Reparations are direct transfers of resources that can repair historical and ongoing damage to people whose ways of knowing about the world have been erased. In this way, they are an attempt to repair relationships marred by centuries of harm. They seek to restore the ‘freedom dreams’ of people whose pasts have been marred by colonial pillaging and whose futures are being compromised by financial speculation dependent on cheap Black and Brown labour.23–24 It’s key that these reparations, as philosopher Olúfẹmi Táíwò notes, ‘make tangible differences in the material conditions of people’s lives’ – including through secure housing, accessible food and drinkable water.25
Yet, it’s not enough to frame reparations as being about a better distribution of resources ; it is also about correcting past atrocities and the ways these continue into the present and future. This means not only transferring resources but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, ceding power and staying silent (for a change) by giving no-strings-attached decision-making power and autonomy to those who have been and continue to be robbed of their territories and their own bodies (as enslaved, indentured and exploited workers), and who are subjected to climate change’s impacts (like sea level rise) which they did not cause. But very concretely, it means preventing people like Bill Gates and other land investors from elsewhere in the world (including the UAE, China and India) from interfering in decisions that affect historically disadvantaged groups, so that these groups can make decisions over their own lives on their own land, rather than listening to a (too often, white) saviour from outside telling them how best to run things. As Táíwò states : ‘A refusal to take reparative steps when one has injured another can signal that the injured party morally deserved their injury or need not be regarded as a moral equal.’26 Reparations are particularly important for Indigenous people, whose autonomous land-use practices have a record of being more compatible with stewardship and sustenance, but who have also been subject to some of the most extreme kinds of condescension and patronisation.
A so-called ‘loss and damage’ fund was agreed upon by world governments at the 2022 climate conference in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt. A year later, in time for the next climate conference in Dubai, a special UN committee proposed the World Bank as interim trustee and host of the fund. At Dubai, countries’ pledges for the fund totalled only $700 million, which covers less than 0.2% of what one NGO estimated was needed per year.
Hosting the fund at an institution notorious for funnelling wealth to wealthy Northern creditors and corporate interests hardly bodes well for addressing the historical legacy of exploitation that created climate crises in the first place.27–30 And a fund whose purse strings are held principally by North American and Western European nations does not bode well for ceding power to poorer countries and regions that urgently need to develop without depending on richer nations. Wealthy and ex-colonial nations like Belgium, France and the United Kingdom have yet to repair historical damage to the societies they exploited, causing unthinkable violence. Others, like the United States, do not even acknowledge, let alone attempt to repair, debt-driven foreign policies and deadly dictatorships they installed and propped up in places like Indonesia, Angola and many parts of Latin America to keep resources flowing in their direction.31–32
In this context, a ‘loss and damage’ fund that supposedly accounts for the historical responsibility of climate breakdown and is framed as climate reparations has a much greater risk of reproducing the same patterns, especially if those who manage the funds are the perpetrators of previous and ongoing wrongdoing. Strings-attached development aid, especially from Europe and North America, but increasingly from China and India, has entrenched poverty, keeping the conditions intact for cost-shifting exploitative labour practices and degraded environments to places where most people can’t afford to complain without risking imprisonment or worse.33 Climate reparations mean climate justice to undo historical wrongs. They can’t mean reproducing the same cycle of debt-driven loans, the stripping of public assets, an excuse to grab cheap resources or find a cheap location to dump wastes.
A recent study has quantified what reparations would imply for countries that historically have been responsible for climate change.33 Taking as a baseline the year 1960 (a very generous baseline, given centuries of colonial pillaging) and assuming a collective goal of keeping global warming at 1.5°C, the study’s authors found that places like the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union have exceeded their fair share of carbon emissions 2.5 times over. The authors show that if all countries were to reduce their emissions to zero by 2050, the over-emitters in the wealthy countries of Europe and North America will still overshoot by nearly three times the amount of greenhouse gas that can be safely emitted to stay within 1.5°C of warming. This would also take up half of poorer countries’ emissions budgets and force them to mitigate their impacts faster. According to these authors, the climate reparations owed to countries who suffer the most from climate breakdown would amount to a total of $192 trillion by the year 2050. The over-appropriation of the carbon budget by the United States alone would require reparations of $80 trillion.34
Down to earth
Smallholder farmer movements, represented by La Via Campesina, a global coalition of farmworkers that represents 200 million farmers across the world, have been calling for land reform and an accounting of the true costs of industrial agriculture. They have been joined by the global Shack Dwellers International and the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra) in pushing for a recognition of and reparations for the ‘ecological debt’ carried by the world’s poor. The Kisan Andolan, or Indian Farmers’ Movement, of 2021–22 built broad-based alliances across urban and rural divides and demanded action to protect small-scale farming livelihoods, and they did this even amid a global pandemic and despite an increasingly authoritarian government. We could also mention here movements like the Yellow Vests in France, who in 2018 took to the streets and set up people’s councils across the country in protest against a carbon tax that would ultimately have a greater impact on working-class people than on climate change.35–41
In short, we are eco-friendly when we build solidarity with the people organising for a better kind of world – a real somewhere, not a nowhere pipe dream of speculation that shifts costs onto future generations and faraway places. This means coming ‘down to earth,’ so to speak, to take back our future and reclaim ecological balance for everyone. We have to pull ourselves away from the vortex of speculative innovation, technological fixes and ‘green’ myths of efficiency that simply keep the status quo machinery operating faster and without delay. We need to build an internationalist network of solidarity across workers and dismantle the class and racial divides that are driving ecological breakdown.
Vijay Kolinjivadi and Aaron Vansintjan are the authors of The Sustainability Class (The New Press, December 2024), from which the above is an adapted excerpt. Kolinjivadi is an assistant professor at the School for Community and Public Affairs, Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is also a co-editor of the website Uneven Earth. Vansintjan, who is the Policy Manager for Food Secure Canada, is founder and co-editor of Uneven Earth and co-author of The Future Is Degrowth.
Notes
1. K.W. Kapp, The Social Costs of Private Enterprise. 1st ed., 1950. New York : Schocken.
2. H. Healy, J. Martínez-Alier, L. Temper, M. Walter and J.F. Gerber (eds.), Ecological Economics from the Ground Up. 2013. New York : Routledge.
3. C.L. Spash, ‘The Contested Conceptualisation of Pollution in Economics : Market Failure or Cost Shifting Success ?,’ Cahiers d’économie politique, 1 (2021) : 85–122.
4. S. Lerner, Sacrifice Zones : The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States. 2012. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.
5. R. Bullard, ‘Environmental Justice in the 21st Century,’ in Debating the Earth : The Environmental Politics Reader, J.S. Dryzek and D. Schlosberg (eds.), 2nd ed., 2005, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 431–449.
6. R. Salvidge, ‘Explainer : “Forever Chemicals” : What Are PFAS and What Risk Do They Pose ?,’ The Guardian, 8 February 2022.
7. C. Gillam, ‘“A Worldwide Public Health Threat” : Rob Bilott on His 20-Year Fight Against Forever Chemicals,’ The Guardian, 1 May 2022.
8. D.E. Taylor, Toxic Communities : Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. 2014. New York : New York University Press.
9. F. Demaria, ‘Can the Poor Resist Capital ? Conflicts over “Accumulation by Contamination” at the Ship Breaking Yard of Alang (India),’ in Nature, Economy and Society : Understanding the Linkages, N. Ghosh, P. Mukhopadhyay, A. Shah and M. Panda (eds.), 2016, New Delhi : Springer, 273–304.
10. K. Bell, ‘Carrying the environmental burdens,’ in Working-Class Environmentalism : An Agenda for a Just and Fair Transition to Sustainability, 2020, Springer Nature.
11. H. Lyons, ‘New BNP Paribas Fortis Headquarters Wins Award at Cannes Property Fair,’ Brussels Times, 18 March 2022.
12. N. Nunn, ‘The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123, no. 1 (2008) : 139–176.
13. R. Patel and J.W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. 2017. University of California Press.
14. T. Piketty, Twitter post, 18 April 2024.
15. J. Hickel, C. Dorninger, H. Wieland and I. Suwandi, ‘Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy : Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1990–2015,’ Global Environmental Change, 73 (2022) : 102467.
16. A. Olla, ‘Why Is SNL Giving Elon Musk Yet Another Platform ?,’ The Guardian, 8 May 2021.
17. C.C. Price and K.A. Edwards, ‘Trends in Income from 1975 to 2018,’ RAND Corporation Working Paper WR-A156, September 2020.
18. V. Prashad, The Darker Nations : A Biography of the Short-Lived Third World. 2007. New Delhi : LeftWord Books.
19. L. Bergmann, ‘Bound by Chains of Carbon : Ecological-Economic Geographies of Globalization,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(6) (2013) : 1348–1370.
20. A. Dewan, ‘A UAE Company Has Secured African Land the Size of the UK for Controversial Carbon Offset Projects,’ CNN, 23 November 2023.
21. A. Bhadani, ‘What Are Climate Reparations ?,’ Yes ! Magazine, 29 November 2021.
22. ‘People’s Agreement of Cochabamba,’ World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, 10 April 2010.
23. R. Kelley, Freedom Dreams : The Black Radical Imagination. 2022. Boston : Beacon Press.
24. A. Mitchell and A. Chaudhury, ‘Worlding Beyond “the” “End” of “the World” : White Apocalyptic Visions and BIPOC Futurisms,’ International Relations, 34(3) (2020) : 309–332.
25. O.O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations. 2022. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 140.
26. O.O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations. 2022. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 135.
27. Al Jazeera, ‘Historic “Loss and Damage” Fund Adopted at COP27 Climate Summit,’ 20 November 2022.
28. Reuters, ‘World Bank to Host Climate Damages Fund Despite Opposition from Developing Nations,’ CNN, 5 November 2023.
29. N. Lakhani, ‘$700m Pledged to Loss and Damage Fund at Cop28 Covers Less than 0.2% Needed,’ The Guardian, 6 December 2023.
30. B. Rich, ‘The World Bank’s Legacy of Environmental Destruction : A Case Study,’ Open Democracy, 12 April 2019.
31. N. Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival : America’s Quest for Global Dominance. 2003. New York : Macmillan.
32. V. Bevins, The Jakarta Method : Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World. 2020. New York : PublicAffairs.
33. P. Bigger and S. Webber, ‘Green Structural Adjustment in the World Bank’s Resilient City,’ Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(1) (2021) : 36–51.
34. A.L. Fanning and J. Hickel, ‘Compensation for Atmospheric Appropriation,’ Nature Sustainability, 6 (2023) : 1077–1083.
35. A. Salleh, ‘Listening to Ecological Voices from the Global South,’ Journal of Environmental Thought and Education, 8 (2015) : 64–71.
36. M. Lang, C.D. König and A.C. Regelmann, Alternatives in a World of Crisis. 2019. Bruselas : Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar.
37. M. Deveaux, ‘Poor-Led Social Movements and Global Justice,’ Political Theory, 46(5) (2018) : 698–725.
38. M. Ajl, A People’s Green New Deal. 2021. London : Pluto Press.
39. K. Kinniburgh, ‘Climate Politics After the Yellow Vests,’ Dissent, Spring 2019.
40. S. Van Outryve, ‘Realising direct democracy through representative democracy : From the Yellow Vests to a libertarian municipalist strategy in Commercy,’ Urban Studies, 60(11) (2023) : 2214–2230.
41. To learn more about these movements, see the work of organisations like Focus on the Global South, Food First, Global Footprint Network, GRAIN, Landless People’s Movement, Lucha Indigena, Shack Dwellers International, Survival International, Third World Network and the Transnational Institute. Thanks to Ariel Salleh for this list.
