Evo Asks a Good Question on Climate Change

You could call it Bolivia's Katrina (though with a far more active national government than the one that so terribly botched relief to New Orleans). Whole sections of the country are under water. Thousands are displaced. A huge effort is required to save lives and an even bigger one will be needed to address the economic damage left in the floods wake.

In the midst of the Bolivian relief effort, Bolivia's President, Evo Morales, asked a reasonable set of questions this weekend. What role does global climate change have in Bolivia's massive weather disaster? Who caused this problem? Who bears its brunt? And what will the world do to address it, in all of its consequences both environmental and economic?

I will leave it to climate experts to debate whether the current Bolivian catastrophe is a genuine product of global climate change or just a run-of-the-mill El Nino disaster that would have happened anyway. If Bolivia can't hang the massive floods in its tropics and eastern lowlands on climate change, it can certainly point to other impacts, including the prediction by climatologists that the country's ancient glaciers, remnants of the ice age, may be melted off within 30 to 40 years.

It is not the world's impoverished countries that have fanned the forces of climate change with an addiction to energy use far beyond their fair share. The US, with 5% of the world's population, produces 25% of the planet's climate-changing carbon dioxide emissions. The "blame rate" for other wealthier nations is pretty similar. The catastrophic results of climate change, however, do not allot themselves according to energy overuse. Not only do poorer nations get hit, when they do get hit they are in a far weaker position to respond. Wealthy nations have rescue helicopters. Poor nations have rickety and slow wooden boats.

Much has been written in recent years about the financial debts owed by the global south to the global north, but little is written (for now) about the vast environmental debt the energy-eating countries of the global north owe the climate change victims of the global south. Who will pay Bolivia for its glaciers?

Evo has asked a good question. When will the world address the fact that it is poor nations (and I would add, as demonstrated by Katrina, poor people in wealthy nations) that are bearing so much of the brunt of this disaster? Morales has called for a special session of the United Nations to engage a full global debate on what is to be done. The US long ago signaled that it would not take the lead on addressing global climate change. In the family of nations that populates the world in 2007, it may be that it will be poorer nations, like Bolivia, that help force both a debate and action.