Rhein on Energy and Climate

The recent steep rise of food prices has caused extra hardship to hundreds of millions of poor citizens and unfamiliar political pressure on many governments across the earth.

But it has led to a new clash between the “Rich” and the “Poor” on earth and thereby added a new dimension to the age-old struggle for more distributive justice among human beings.

It is no longer the Marxian struggle between capitalists and proletarians for a more equitable distribution of their work’s product between wages and profits, which has marked history from 1850 to 1989. That will go on, of course. But over-arching it, we shall increasingly be confronted with a new conflict line that is even more existential: it is about a fair distribution of the earth’s limited resources. How much energy, food, fish, forest products and minerals will each of us be entitled to?

The USA on the one hand, China and India on the other are the champions in this new distribution battle: 3 billion still mostly poor human beings vs. a tiny minority of 300 million, strongly believing in their “inherited rights” to fully enjoy the material wealth they have been able to accumulate during the last two centuries. In many aspects the struggle is remindful of the 19th century when capitalists and land owners failed to understand the proletarian masses’ uproar.

Today, the battle cries are about C02 emissions and calories intake. Why should an average US citizen be entitled to emitting 20 tons of C02¸ 7 times more than a Chinese and 20 times more than an Indian citizen, or consuming 10 times as much meat as an ordinary Chinese or Indian citizen?

20 years ago nobody would have cared about these data. There was plenty of fossil energy and food on earth to supply all citizens, because the Indians and the Chinese were satisfied with abnormally low consumption levels, not very different from Europe before 1789, when the poor resigned to their fate and considered it as God-given.

Transparency has changed the situation. Today, every internet user can find out about the profound inequality across the world. As long as the unequal distribution of resources did not really matter, there was no reason for Indians or Chinese to get excited about wasteful living standards in the USA and other parts of the world. But today when food is getting scarce, because even relatively poor people want to eat more food or US car owners fill their tanks with biofuel, people revolt across borders. They rise in protest and lobby against crying injustices. They want their fair share.

Americans and Europeans will have to realise that it is themselves and not the Indians or the Chinese that cause soaring oil, copper, steel or grain prices! They consume a multiple of their fellow world citizens in Asia and Africa. Western consumption levels prove increasingly unsustainable for a world with 6.5 billion human beings all craving for higher living standards, let alone one with 10 billion people projected for 2050!

We are far from that wisdom. On the contrary, we consider our living standards as perfectly normal and demand income compensation for global inflation that we cause by our wasteful consumption of food and energy.

We better learn to accommodate with a more modest way of life! If we fail to do so, the earth will penalise us severely, sooner rather than later. Huntington’s “clash of civilisation” will have been nothing compared to the “clash for global resources” that lingers at the horizon.

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