Thread by @jasonhickel

I have a new paper that's out today in The Lancet Planetary Health, quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown. I'll discuss the method and results in the thread below. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

1. I start from the position that the atmosphere is a commons, and that all have equal rights to it within the planetary boundary of 350ppm (which we crossed in 1990). This allows us to determine which nations have exceeded their share, and thus contributed to climate breakdown.

2. Results:

-The USA is responsible for 40% of excess global CO2 emissions.

-The European Union (EU-28) is responsible for 29%.

-The Global North as a group is responsible for 92%.

3. By contrast, most countries in the Global South remain *within their fair shares*, including India, Indonesia, Nigeria and China, which means they have contributed nothing to climate breakdown (although China will overshoot its fair share very soon).

4. The global South - the entire continents of Africa, Latin America and Asia - have contributed only 8% of global excess emissions. And that comes from only a few countries.

5. And yet, according to the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, the South suffers more than 90% of the costs of climate breakdown, and 98% of the deaths associated with climate breakdown.

6. This represents a process of atmospheric colonisation. Just as rich countries have relied on the appropriation of labour and resources from the South to fuel their growth, so they have appropriated atmospheric commons, with devastating consequences for the colonized.

7. If our struggle against climate breakdown is not attentive to these colonial dimensions - if it is not ultimately a struggle against colonization - then we have missed the point.

8. Here are the top overshooters (climate debtors) and undershooters (climate creditors).

And here is a free PDF download of the paper: jasonhickel.org/s/Hickel-Quant…

9. I should add, we can quantify the scale of atmospheric theft. Overshoot nations have stolen 265 billion tons of "fair share" CO2 from the rest of the world, while also emitting an additional 684.6 billion tons of CO2 in excess of the planetary boundary.

10. I should clarify that here I used consumption-based emissions data as much as possible to account for offshoring by rich nations.