Colonialism’s Climate?

Abstract

A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy. By J. Timmons Roberts, Bradley C. Parks Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 384 pp., $65.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-262-18256-4), $26.00 paper (ISBN: 0-262-68161-7). In A Climate of Injustice , J. Timmons Roberts and Bradley Parks identify global inequality as the root cause of the failure to adequately address global climate change. In short, they believe that the distrust emanating from inequality makes North-South cooperation on climate change impossible. In response, they advocate a broad set of reforms addressing inequality as a foundation for making adequate progress on climate change. They assert, for example, that more international aid and the reform of global economic law will be needed to make progress on climate change possible. We can only hope that they are wrong. Climate change negotiations by themselves have proven daunting enough, thanks to the US fetish with emissions trading and the inherent complexity of the climate change problem. If the world must remedy unfairness in global intellectual property law and agricultural protectionism before we can make real progress, we are truly in trouble. Unfortunately, Roberts and Parks may be right (see, for example, Gupta 1997; Goldstein and Keohane 1993). Roberts and Parks devote most of their energy to developing a picture of global inequality and how it affects the various impacts of climate change and the policies designed to deal with them. This picture blends insights from the literature (primarily structuralist accounts of globalism as exemplified in Krasner 1985 …