How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown – Dr Laurie Parsons
Around the world, leading economies are announcing significant progress on climate change. World leaders are queuing up to proclaim their commitment to tackling the climate crisis, pointing to data that shows the progress they have made. Yet the atmosphere is still warming at a record rate, with devastating effects on poverty and precarity in the world’s most vulnerable communities. Are we being deceived?
In this lecture, I will explore the murky practices of outsourcing a country’s environmental impact, where emissions and waste are exported from rich countries to poorer ones; a world in which corporations and countries are allowed to maintain a clean, green image while landfills in the world’s poorest countries continue to expand, and droughts and floods intensify under the auspices of globalisation, deregulation and economic growth.
Taking a wide-ranging, culturally engaged approach to the topic, this lecture will show how this is not only a technical problem, but a problem of cultural and political systems and structures – from nationalism to economic logic – deeply embedded in our society. Carbon colonialism, view from this perspective, is the latest incarnation of a historical system of separation: of humans from nature, nature from society, and of values from the communities that once set them.
This lecture links with the following elements of the A-Level syllabus:
AQA: 3.1.6 Ecosystems under Stress; 3.2 Global Systems and Global Governance (esp. 3.2.1.1 Globalisation and 3.2.1.6 Globalisation critique)
OCR: 2.2. Global Connections; 3.1 Climate change
Edexcel: 3.1-3.4 Globalisation and environment; 3.7-3.9 globalisation and environmental inequality
Find out more about how the global garment industry shapes climate change vulnerability in Cambodia in the Hot Trends Report.
This teaching video was created by Dr Laurie Parsons in 2022. The copyright in the teaching video belongs to Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. The teaching video can be used under the creative commons CC BY-NC-ND licence. If you wish to use the teaching video for any other purpose please get in touch with Dr Laurie Parsons via laurie.parsons@rhul.ac.uk to discuss the terms of a licence.
