Three days ago I wrote about the urgent need for a redistribution of trillions of dollars from the global North to the global South. Rachel Godfrey Wood wrote in response that the global North should without question transfer the money. But she presented a real problem to the pious-and-livid moralizer (me): How to trust that it will be spent on development or adaptation, and not secreted away in Swiss or Bahamian bank accounts? And what do we mean when we talk about “development” in the underdeveloped world, or “adaptation” to anthropogenic climate change? Very good questions. I started writing a short reply. But then it got out of hand. So, a post:
Your points are well-taken. It’s not clear that most countries in the global South would use this money in a truly ecologically sustainable manner, even were it to pass into the hands of those unlikely to stuff it in a sack and run. There is something sloganistic about laptop calls for tithing, notwithstanding the (I think unchallengeable) moral need for developed countries to come up with the money. The question of adaptation to a global temperature too hot to grow corn in equatorial regions of the global South is a tough one. When the atolls atop which island nations sit are inundated, or the coral reefs that protect them from storm surges are worn away, when the fish fishing cultures rely upon for survival move to more-survivable bodies of water, no “adaptation” funds will suffice to do anything other than buy them houses or apartments in the developed world, or maybe artificial sand-islands in the United Arab Emirates, preferably paid for by a direct tax on Rupert Murdoch or the dismemberment of the oil companies. It's worth keeping in mind that the slapping of monetary penalties on ecocide, through "adaptation" pay-offs is in its way intolerable, and why 350ppm should be an un-debatable, short-term, hard-target, with every resource possible diverted into an Apollo project for carbon draw-down.
More pragmatically, some projects—massive flood barriers or sea-walls to protect low-lying river deltas, as in Nigeria and Bangladesh—seem both technically feasible and urgently necessary, and might even be implemented properly, even though they pretty much exemplify the big-development projects you rightly worry about. I don’t trust how states see—“high modernism”—but leaders don’t want their sovereign territories underwater, or their people drowning to death in tremendous numbers. You could imagine money being spent on desalinization plants, too, which I think will be a necessary capital- and energy-intensive evil even under a best-case miracle scenario where emissions peak in between 2015 and 2020 and then drop sharply.
As McKibben and others are recognizing, a rough period is inevitable--it's right now--and huge, continual capital flows could help some of the worst affected countries avoid mass death. They’ll have to import food, too, probably, and there's no reason they should have to pay for it. If there were a massive research effort to figure out how to push crop-survival thresholds, or to breed heat and drought-resistant crops so their agricultural bases wouldn’t be destroyed, that could be a good use of the money, too.
More practically—since it’s facile and convenient to spout off about possible good uses of the money, when the problem is ensuring its arrival to conscientious caretakers—I think perhaps running it through the best developmental NGOs, or universities, could be one way to make sure the money doesn’t just flow to the pockets of corrupt elites. Reparations don’t have to go through states, although we're understandably accustomed to thinking about that as the default. But if they were to be channeled through civil society, it would have to be able to exert real pressure to hold on to such monies.
The predilection for dams across the underdeveloped world would be another major issue, and as you suggest, a lot of money would undoubtedly flow to that type of ecologically and physically destructive mega-project (It’s not clear that dams, for example, are even clean or emissions-negative notwithstanding their status as Clean Development Mechanisms). Speaking in the most general, and in turn the most utopian terms, in order to make sure that the money would be properly spent, there’d have to be huge popular mobilization and national-developmental states. Or less elliptically, revolution or revolutionary processes, so powerful and with such heightened consciousness as to properly harness the state. And even then there would be trouble if we’re really talking about sustainability--it's so hard to conceptualize properly.
Many indigenous groups in the Andes are agitating for extremely enlightened ecological policies—the example of Ecuador, as you know much better than I do. It’s what Climate Justice Now calls for, too. Evo Morales has been interesting, and important, in this respect, too—not because of his own idiosyncratic enlightenment but because he appears to respond to pressure from below, sometimes—although Pablo Stefanoni has written that a lot of it is flowery rhetoric while the real plans are for an “energy-intensive” path, as you write, while the Bolivian and Venezuelan developmental states are totally reliant on poisoning the atmosphere (Which in turn makes proposals like that pioneered in Yasuni, to keep the oil in the ground, all-the-more relevant for Venezuela and Bolivia; but it's difficult to even imagine Venezuela embarking on a sustainable development path given its rentier make-up and the huge urban blooms in which its population clusters, at least not unless the agrarian reform takes a qualitative leap, alongside agro-ecological tutelage from the MST).
I don’t really know enough about how much power these groups have in various left governments or even within the societies of the global South to say whether or where they could exert countervailing influence to the tendency to splash money on flashy mega-projects. I think capital transfers would play out differently in different states, but that in some—in many in Africa, in particular—they could likely play our precisely as you describe. Maybe better in the more-mobilized Latin American countries. But there’s no question that all of the above, every word, is optimistic speculation, perhaps nearly to the point of irrelevance.
Another (naively optimistic) possibility is that incipient capital transfers could generate their own organizational dynamic. In Brazil there’s a huge mobilization going on around the sub-salt beds. Possibly it pressured the Lula government to draft a better bill than it would have originally. It's probably more than a little strange to bring up the example of further hydrocarbon exploitation in this context, anyway.
And finally—perhaps it should have been primarily—I have one thing to disagree with you about. I don’t see the practical need for huge capital grants, except in the extremely-enlightened sense of moving on to a system of managed capitalism--Global Social Democracy. The people of Africa and many of those of South Asia seem totally peripheral to current global capital accumulation. They don’t consume much. They don’t drive down labor costs. That’s why we let them die from Malaria or AIDS or tuberculosis or hunger or pollution in such huge, easily eliminable numbers, that a thousandth of the global North’s GDP could prevent. We just don’t care. I think hundreds of millions could die without global Capital blinking—reducing the threat of mass-based revolts against neo-colonial land-grabs, a fringe benefit from genocide. Colossal financial transfers won’t come because 1st World leaders suddenly feel bound to alleviate the suffering our policies are responsible for—they’ll come because people in the first world demand that their governments effect such transfers, by tremendous, confiscatory taxes on the upper-class. And all that seems pretty unlikely under capitalism. All the more reason to bring it down.
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“What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.” –Frantz Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth
Yes, there’s no question. But if it’s us and not governments that will impel this process we can hope to do so in the best way possible, as much as we can.