Climate Change or Global Poverty: Climate Mitigation Can Help the Poor

Last week AI featured the first installment of a debate over whether climate change or global poverty should be a higher priority. Austin Thompson of the A. Thompson Monitor argued that global poverty is a more pressing problem and that developing countries should focus on economic development and poverty reduction, even at the expense of climate change. He acknowledged that sustainable economies are vital to the planet’s future, but disagreed with fast-tracking sustainability measures that would impede economic growth.

This week, Alexander Hurst of The Hurst Critique argues that the broad impact of climate change is too severe and pressing for developing countries to ignore. He frames climate mitigation as a long-term effort that will ultimately benefit the poor more than direct poverty-reduction strategies (without mitigation). In his post, Hurst calls for immediate action against climate change because climate policies take many years to become effective (as illustrated in this AI post). An excerpt from his argument appears below. The entire post can be found here.

Such pursuit of economic development at the cost of status quo (and more realistically, increased) emissions will backfire massively on the very people Austin is trying to protect from the vastly negative consequences of climate change. He seems to take a slightly defeatist attitude, acknowledging that even if all emissions were to cease today, the world would still experience warming and the subsequent consequences. However, as the recently released Stern Review, commissioned by the British government, reports, “The consequences of climate change will become disproportionately more damaging with increased warming.” While we are committed to a certain degree of warming, we still have a choice as to how much more we will cause. The consequences of further warming are, as I have stated, exponential with every degree increase in temperature, and will also be disproportionate in their effect on the world’s poor…

The energy generation facilities being built today will continue to function well into the next thirty years, which makes it even more imperative that we begin acting now to reduce emissions and make sure these new jobs will be at clean energy generating facilities. Furthermore, alternative energy offers the additional benefit to the third world of being independent from western control of oil. Many of the world’s leading solar manufacturers are from developing economies, and draw foreign investment (and will continue to do so) to those countries. Significant world spending on curbing emissions will necessarily involve the developing world, which means massive foreign investment in their nations (which happen to mostly be located in the best places for solar installations on earth).

Alexander Hurst is the author of The Hurst Critique, a blog on politics and other social issues.

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