Badrinath: Hello, everyone.

Welcome to Ideas and Insights, a show devoted to exploring novel perspectives on contemporary issues.

I am Badrinath Rao, your host.

According to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, we face a critical situation.

There is a more than 50% chance that global temperature will reach or surpass 1.5°C, or 2.7°F, between 2021 and 2040, triggering climate chaos worldwide and pushing several hundred million more people into poverty.

This alarming scenario is unfolding, paradoxically, when greenhouse gas emissions in the West are declining.

The European Union's net emissions fell from 5.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 1990 to 4.2 billion in 2018, while the United Kingdom claims a 44% reduction since 1990.

We have also achieved a modest decline in the United States, from 7.1 billion tons in 1998 to 6.7 billion today.

To explain this anomaly, we have Professor Laurie Parsons, reader in Human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London in the United Kingdom, with us today.

He is the author of Carbon Colonialism How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown, published by Manchester University Press in 2023.

Professor Parsons faults the methodology for quantifying carbon emissions, pointing out that wealthier nations have reduced their emissions because they outsource carbon intensive industries to poorer countries, a phenomenon he describes as carbon colonialism.

Professor Parsons draws on his 15 year stint conducting fieldwork in Cambodia to meticulously label the environmental degradation and staggering poverty the global factory system spawns.

He posits that since the impact of climate change depends on one's socio economic status, environmental justice is fundamentally economic justice.

Professor Parsons maintains that empowering factory workers in the global factory system is fundamental to reversing carbon colonialism.

He joins me to discuss his ideas further.

Welcome to Ideas and Insights, Professor Parsons.

Thank you for joining us today.

Professor Parsons: Hello.

Great to be here.

Badrinath: Let's begin with the main theme of your book, Carbon colonialism.

What is carbon colonialism.

And why does it matter?

Professor Parsons: Well, in a nutshell, carbon colonialism means using environmental resources in such a way that the waste from the use of those resources and the wealth from the use of those resources go in opposite directions.

And the excess of that differentiation is, in general, exactly the same ones as were undertaken in the years of active colonialism.

So it tend to be former colonies which are the recipients of waste and generally former colonizers, which are the recipients of the wealth in that equation.

So I think it's important to note that actually, in writing this book, I didn't set out to create this term carbon colonialism.

It was actually a term that was in use previously.

So that was the thing that motivated me to write the book was actually that I saw this term coming up in all kinds of different spheres, different areas of scholarship from industrial studies to cultural geographies and all kinds of areas.

There are about 5 or 6 different ways in which it was being used.

So writing the book was actually a way for me to try to make sense of all of these different perspectives, the different uses of carbon colonialism in order to understand, is there something fundamental going on here?

So when we talk about carbon colonialism, there's more than one way in which this can be, employed.

For example, one of the most famous ways is, carbon credits.

That's where, a global northern country or industry generally buys up large areas of land, generally in the global South, such as there is a forest and then essentially sets that against its emissions in order to create a net zero equation.

But it's also been used in other ways, such as carbon outsourcing, which is something that I speak about a lot.

And that's where a country, a wealthy country, moves its production to a different area, generally in the global South, generally a former colony, and then essentially gets that emissions quota off its books and appears to look like it's done a lot of cleaning up of its, economy.

And in reality, it's simply moved those same production processes elsewhere.

Badrinath: You say, Professor Parsons, that the hidden world of global production and extraction exacerbate climate change, and that there is a nexus between the two.

What is the connection between the global factory system and climate change, and how does it work?

Professor Parsons: Well, to explain, first, the idea of the global factory is something that I think it's very important to understand in this whole system.

So when we think about production around the world today, in the last 50 years, there's been a complete transformation in the way in which we make and use the goods that we consume.

Whereas 50 years ago and 19, the early 1970s, we would have made the vast majority of what we consumed in any given country within the borders of that country.

And now for wealthy countries like the US, like the UK or other parts of Europe, this is no longer the case.

We import the vast majority of what we use, and this has been made possible by a system of production which now isn't simply moving production into one single other country, but the creation of global conveyor belts, where often a part of production is done in one country or one continent, and it's moved thousands of miles away for that production process to be continued.

And then finally, the up the end good is enjoyed in a third country, often a fourth or seventh country.

Even Now, as a result of all of that, we get essentially the system whereby the impacts on the environment of our production are moved far from where the benefits of that production is enjoyed.

This, to me, happens in two ways essentially direct ways and indirect ways.

So the direct ways are where, for example, you have industrial production processes and that directly exacerbates the impacts of climate change.

So for example, if we have brick kilns making bricks, they create huge amounts of heat.

They create huge amounts of dust.

And that makes the environments in the local area around those bricks much worse for the people who live there.

And so farmers who try to farm that, the crops are coated in dust, the area is much hotter.

It's essentially exacerbating and intensifying the impacts of what's already a difficult environment from climate change.

So that's the direct way.

But then the indirect way you can observe on a global scale, if we think about, for example, the Netherlands and Bangladesh, that's a comparison I quite like, because geographically, topographically, these two countries are very, very similar.

They're both very low lying.

They're both in principle in their natural state, quite vulnerable to flooding.

But the Netherlands has very little problem in terms of the human risk or the economic risk from flooding, because they've had the money to invest in flood defenses, which are very, very effective.

And they've undertaken those investment over many decades and centuries.

Now, Bangladesh has not had that money, and as a result, it is far more vulnerable to very similar impacts which the Dutch have insulated themselves against.

So using that example, you can see that the key ingredient we often don't think about is that of money.

The environment doesn't simply impact on the world in its kind of natural overall state impacts on a governed, globalized world.

And those flows of capital and credit around the world are constantly redistributing the risk, so that the poorest parts of the world are always the ones that face the worst impacts of climate change and the richer parts of the world are able to insulate against themselves, against those impacts.

Badrinath: In the context of what you said just now, Professor Parsons, one obvious issue that arises, and you talk about this in your book, concerns how we, quantify carbon emissions.

And you have argued that, to be fair to the less developed countries, one has to move from production based metrics to consumption based metrics.

How important is this transition and what will the climate, change context look like if we indeed move from production based, metrics to consumption based metrics?

Professor Parsons: You know, this is a really important point.

It sounds quite technical, even a little bit boring.

But actually when you move the lens, you use the metric you use to understand how countries are progressing against their carbon targets.

It's not just a slight tweak, it's a completely different picture that completely turns the picture on its head.

So a production based metric is essentially one whereby you count how well you're doing it, reducing your carbon emissions by counting, the total emissions that are created within your borders.

So if you have 100 factories within your borders, you count up all the emissions from those hundred factories, and then that's your score, essentially, that's how much you've managed to reduce your emissions.

But if we look at consumption based metrics, then we look at all of the emissions which are created in the process of making the goods that we use and consume.

Now, based on what I said earlier, we've seen a complete transition in the last 50 years away from domestic production to international global production and the global factory.

So this means that for many wealthy countries, the majority of their carbon bill or the carbon bill for the goods they consume happens outside of their borders.

And that's certainly true for many countries in Europe, certainly countries like the UK, which are very big importers.

So that means that which metric we decide to use makes a transformative difference on how it looks like we're doing.

And I think this is very important because in the case of the UK, we take, if we just use, a score of what we produce within our borders, it looks like we are the world's best decarbonize.

We've reduced our carbon bill by 43% since 1990, and that's been trumpeted as a world leading achievement by UK political leaders.

But if we use a different metric, consumption based, consumption based accounting, then it's a completely different picture.

We've only reduced our total carbon emissions by 15% rather than 43%.

So we have lost 70% of our suppliers reduction simply by using a different metric.

But the key point here is it's not an accident that we're using the metric that we do all carbon negotiations or climate negotiations at global meetings like that.

The conference of the parties, the cops that the UN organizes are all based on these nationally declared contributions.

And they all use that same metric.

The reason for that is because it hugely benefits wealthy countries to do it that way, because they are, for economic reasons, moving many factory production processes outside of their borders anyway.

So this is essentially a win win scenario.

We're going to move those factories away anyway.

We don't want the environmental degradation.

They're doing anyway.

So we can essentially appear to be making big green progress simply by using perhaps the less appropriate metric.

And it's hardwired into the way that our whole climate negotiations work.

But it's not the best way of measuring these things.

Badrinath: Another issue that you raised in your book, which I think is very interesting, is the Nexus between climate change and inequality.

Now, a little while ago, you mentioned how similarly situated countries like Bangladesh and the Netherlands have vastly different capacities for dealing with climate change.

Can you elaborate on that a little more and tell us how any quality worsens climate change?

Professor Parsons: Yeah, this to me is a really important point again, and it's something that I described as climate precarity in the book.

So inequality is hugely important in the in the way in which we understand climate change.

But it's not often part of the kind of public conversation about climate change, because the climate change conversation generally has been dominated by what's called the one world, the one world discourse, the one world ideology essentially says we're all equal under the sun.

We all need to do our bit.

And everybody is vulnerable to climate change.

for reasons that we've described.

It also happens on an individual level.

It happens on a social scale.

So when we understand climate change, we shouldn't only be thinking in terms of spatial geography.

We need to be thinking in terms of social geography, like where is a person within society, not just where they are in space to understand how they're impacted by climate change.

So almost in any given society, the people who are the poorest, who are at the bottom of the social pyramid, will experience the impacts of climate change worse And as you've said, I work a lot in Cambodia, and there's all kinds of examples of how this manifests in Cambodian society.

You think about the jobs at the bottom of the Cambodian social pyramid.

This is people who are, for example, begging or people who are waste collectors or people who do very difficult and dangerous jobs like brick manufacturing.

But these people are exposed to the worst impacts of the environment in ways that wealthier people in that society absolutely just have no concept of.

If you imagine, for example, the difference in, in a hurricane or a tropical storm, if you're in a skyscraper, you know, a modern building versus if you're in a tin roofed shack, in one case, you have the water coming in, you know, everything may be ruined as a result of that storm.

In the other case, it's just water on the window.

You continue watching TV.

It's a completely different environment And if you think about the other end of the spectrum of very, extreme heat, which is something that's on everybody's minds at the moment as we have continual heat waves around the world.

The people at the bottom of the social pyramid who work in those dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs are always the ones who are worst exposed to those impacts, always the ones that have to spend the most time in the heat, the ones with the least protective equipment and, and and the ability to take risks even when they work.

And the important thing is, this isn't only something that happens in poorer countries and countries in the global South, like Cambodia.

There's many examples that you can find even in wealthy Western countries.

In Spain, for example, there was a big case of a road sweeper a tragedy which is caused purely by the environment or purely purely by the climate.

They made it much more likely they made that hazard more intense.

Badrinath: You make an interesting point, Professor Parsons.

when you talk about the need for taking into account both spatial inequality and social inequality, regardless of where one is, if one is, in a precarious situation, climate change is going to affect that person disproportionately.

Which brings us to the question of, inequality and its centrality in addressing climate change.

Now, indeed, your point is well-taken, but that shifts the terrain of the discourse from climate change to inequality and raises a whole set of issues.

And around these issues, you have identified six myths that you, say people are, unwitting victims of.

And you caution your readers about these myths and say that they must, disabuse themselves of these ideas.

Can you tell us what these myths are and why you think they are important?

Professor Parsons: Yes, absolutely.

So the reason that I ended the book with these six myths is because I see and this is something that I talk about, in the reasons behind these problems, we live in an environment essentially, of environmental and climate hegemony.

So essentially we have ways of dealing with the climate change problem, which are very difficult to think outside of because they're so dominant.

An example is what we've already talked about.

So, so on the idea of using nationally determined contributions, the idea of those production based metrics, and there are all kinds of other ways in which these kind of the sustainability discourse is just maintained on a track which is actually very ineffectual at dealing with the problems that we face, all kinds of assumptions that people bring with them.

And to my mind, to someone who's worked for many years in the Global South, I feel that what you need to do to really confront these hegemonic understandings of sustainability is to put people face to face with the realities and to show them that some of their most, their most common truths and most fundamental truths about the environment actually have huge holes in them.

So I put together these six myths as a way, essentially, of kind of putting people face to face with the the subjectivity and flaws in their own thinking.

So, I can go through a few of them.

So, the idea, for example, that climate change creates more natural disasters was myth number one.

Now, this is something that people if you ask 100 people, this climate change cause more natural disasters.

Probably at least 99 will say yes, because on the face of it, it seems like they do.

But the problem is with this terminology, actually, climate change doesn't create the disaster.

Climate change creates the hazard.

The disaster only occurs when a hazard means a vulnerable situation.

this is essentially a call to recognize that you have to bring the economic aspect into the equation.

The climate doesn't create disasters.

It simply exacerbates.

And it makes them more likely.

and then there's all kinds of other myths which I think are important for ways in which people address the climate crisis.

One of the most frustrating things for me is I think many people have very good intentions around the climate.

They really have the best intentions and they want to do something about it.

And yet all of those intentions are channeled down.

This discourse of the idea of, oh, we're just going to buy something different.

That's what we've got to do.

We just need to shop more responsible.

Now, this is problematic in multiple ways, not least because essentially it puts all of the burden on individuals who are not necessarily responsible for the problems that they face.

Actually, we need to recognize the corporations who have huge responsibility for all of this should bear a greater burden than individuals.

Essentially, you can't consume your way out of the climate crisis for a number of reasons, partly because you can't choose, for example, what, like how this how the state buildings that you depend on, like the hospitals you depend on are built.

You don't have that, right.

As a consumer, there's all kinds of things outside of our purview, and partly because it's incredibly difficult to tell what is a genuinely green product from a product which isn't genuinely green.

There's all kinds of problems in this essentially, we don't have a legal framework that backs our ability to consume responsibly.

So unless we have a legal framework and state action backing us in our efforts, then it's not going to go anyway.

So we need to push for that political change.

there are other things.

For example, the idea that environmentalists are all in favor of net zero.

Now, this is something that sounds, sounds like just a general good net zero.

It sounds like a great goal, actually, many environmentalists against this goal says apart from anything else, it doesn't, give us the capacity to, to move away from our current system of production.

Essentially, it has all of these kind of loopholes in it that, such as carbon capture and storage, which doesn't necessarily exist at the moment.

Every model of net zero includes all of this.

So actually, many environmentalists who are against this idea, they think we just need to consume less.

And that's part of the conversation.

Then, for example, I talked about the idea that, the, you know, migrant hordes are going to be a result of climate change.

It's in the papers every day in many parts of the world, in Australia and the UK, in the US.

So the idea of millions of people being displaced by climate, migration, this is something I've worked on a lot and to my mind, although this is a very, very compelling narrative, we need to be cautious about it because often it's articulated in ways which exacerbate anti-migrant politics and which potentially also dehumanize the populations that we're talking about, and also move responsibility, again, away from the economic conditions that many of these people are facing.

It's not just a question of people being forced by the climate like an act of God.

We are creating these conditions and we can create them differently if we wish.

sustainability Begins at Home was my fifth one.

The idea that we need to depend first on our domestic ideas.

And of course, as I've said, this is all a global problem.

And finally, the idea that climate science is an apolitical consensus.

to my mind, it's climate science should never be viewed as simply apolitical.

This is situation which is fundamentally about the politics of resources.

It's about the way in which we treat populations around the world.

And we need to have a social scientists nuance and a politicians lens on all of this, to understand that we are making decisions about the futures of people around the world, about populations, and to recognize that that is something we have the power of as citizens, not just as consumers.

Badrinath: We are completely out of time.

Professor Parsons, I, I have one last point.

You have, spoken at length, about issues such as the global factor system, global system of production and, extraction, obscure supply chains.

You've also talked about, the role of inequality in worsening climate change.

There are two other issues you mentioned in the book, which I think are very important.

If you would please, very briefly, talk about them.

very briefly, talk about them.

The first one concerns the, The first one concerns the, central role that greenwashing plays, that greenwashing plays, in making people think that as bad as climate change is, it can still be, overcome because, be, overcome because, be, overcome because, be, overcome because, initiatives are afoot.

initiatives are afoot.

and then there's the other question that you raised, which I thought was very interesting, namely that in this entire discourse on climate change, the voices of the less privileged, particularly in the developing world, do not get the importance that is there.

Do you can you briefly, very briefly address these issues?

Professor Parsons: Okay.

So I think very briefly, the key point on greenwashing is that people tend to think of this as being a very new phenomenon.

It feels very postmodern.

The idea of, oh, this is a kind of greenwashing age of social media, for example, but actually goes all the way back to the 1960s on Earth Day one, 1970, Coca-Cola put out one advert saying, this is the bottle for the age of ecology.

It was just the same bottle.

It was glass.

So they said, we can cash in on this.

We can get some environmentalists to buy birthday 2019 9,025% of all products sold at that time.

The US made a green claim and the EU just put out some research in Europe saying now, as of 2024, 75% of products are making green claims, but over 50% of those claims are dubious.

So we live in a world defined by greenwashing.

we live in a world in which we can't trust the claims that are made around our products, and that's what makes it so difficult for the consumers.

That's why we need strong legislation, and we need to back that as a citizens.

And on the second point, which is, I think really important when we talked about inequality of, of economic power, we talked about economic inequality of labor power.

But a key problem in the current climate discourse is inequality of voice.

So there are tens of thousands of universities around the world, tens of thousands of of professors and scholars around the world.

But only a tiny minority of those actually have vocal power.

And this conversation is dominated by Western scholars, by a small number of Western scholars.

And until we broaden the conversation beyond those elite Western institutions and recognize that scholars in the global South and around the world have an important voice to play.

And what happened?

What's in describing what's happening around the world.

Then we will continue to be stuck in the rut of these assumptions, which have driven us into a view as a very much a climate cul de sac up to now.

Badrinath: Thank you, Professor Parsons.

That was a most interesting conversation.

We appreciate your insights.

Thank you for joining us today.

Professor Parsons: Thanks very much.

Been a pleasure.

Badrinath: That's it for today.

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