Precarious planet: Choosing Earth, or choosing carbon

Dr Vishwas Satgar is an Associate Professor of International Relations at Wits. He is the principal investigator for Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene and co-founder of the Climate Justice Charter process. He dedicates this article to Professor Bob Scholes, one of South Africa’s leading scientists, who passed away on 28 April 2021.

A few weeks before Earth Day, some of the world's leading Earth scientists published an academic paper in a series of engagements on Earth’s Future: it is titled: Identifying a safe and just corridor for people and planet. A crucial premise for this intervention is the realisation that for the first time in human history we have to consider the real risk of a destabilised planet. This is an existential risk that will determine whether we have a home that can sustain life. 

The paper contains a conceptual approach that will inform the scientific framework of the newly formed Earth Commission. Central in its thinking is identifying a set of safe and just conditions, together with a set of targets, for the Earth’s systems to meet human needs while reducing exposure to risks. 

While there is room to debate the technocratic approach informing this framework, it does underline the urgency of action. In this regard, the choices we make now to address the worsening climate crisis, for instance, could either narrow or widen the corridor for just and safe human development. At all costs, we have to prevent a runaway ‘greenhouse earth’ which will be unlivable. These Earth scientists are asking us to choose a way of living on Earth so humans flourish and our planetary existence sustains all life forms.

On Earth Day, US President Joe Biden convened a climate summit with 40 world leaders. While sending an extremely powerful signal to the world that the US was taking the climate crisis seriously, this was largely informed by a reaction to Trump climate denialism, the urgencies of climate science, lived impacts of climate shocks (wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, for instance, impacting in the US), the strength of left voices calling for a Green New Deal in and alongside the Democratic Party, and a recognition that China had the upper hand on global climate diplomacy with its commitment to peak emissions by 2030 and achieve net-zero by 2060. 

While Biden pledged to reduce emissions by 50% by 2030 (with most climate justice organisations expecting a 70% commitment, given the historical emissions of the US), there is not much that is clear about how this is going to be achieved. 

Instead, we have to ponder the declaratory idea of “America is back” according to US President Joe Biden. This is about an assertion of US leadership. Within US policy and mainstream international relations academic scholarship this is either about a US hegemon, a powerful state, prevailing over the inter-state system and ending tendencies towards chaos or it is providing the basis for markets to organise the global economy. 

Over the past few decades of US leadership of the world order, the power of finance, it has unleashed, has pushed the world into wrenching inequality, weakened market democracies, produced resource peaks and has contributed to the onset of catastrophic climate change. 

Since the advent of the UN multilateral negotiations on the climate crisis, in the early 1990s, the US has failed to embrace a genuine, just and effective regulatory approach to resolve the climate crisis. The US has instead turned its back on Earth and consistently defended a wasteful, resource-intensive and ecologically destructive American way of life. It has done this at the expense of the poorest countries, those at the margins of the world system and non-human nature. 

The American way of life is anti-Earth and if Joe Biden is going to make a difference, beyond playing geopolitical games, then he has to tackle the root causes of the climate crisis producing the rupture in the Earth system. 

He has to choose Earth.

US President Joe Biden. (Photo: EPA-EFE / JIM LO SCALZO)