Decolonizing Climate and Energy Policy with Noel Healy

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0:00:06.9 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities @ Tufts lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Bar Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities @ Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:39.9 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities @ Tufts Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partner, Shareable and the Bar Foundation, we organize Cities @ Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues.

0:01:04.5 Julian Agyeman: We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we are delighted to host Dr. Noel Healy, who’s actually in Medellín Colombia. Noel is a professor in the Geography and Sustainability Department at Salem State University and is the director of the Climate Justice and Just Transitions Lab. His research explores the sociopolitical dimensions of rapid climate change, climate mitigation, climate justice, fossil fuel politics, and climate obstructionism with a focus on economic and racial justice in climate and energy policy.

0:01:47.9 Julian Agyeman: Noel was contributing author to the UN IPCC’s AR6/WG3 report, and Noel, I’m sure you know what that means. And he serves on the Advisory Board of Cell Reports sustainability and on the editorial board of Energy Research and Social Sciences. His work has been published in leading journals such as One Earth, Wire, Climate Change, Energy Policy, and Climate Change, as well as in popular outlets such as The Guardian, The Hill, Scientific American. His research has also garnered attention from major media outlets like the Boston Globe, W Radio, Colombia, the Times, and Forbes. Noel’s talk today is decolonizing Climate and energy policy, forging a just global green transition. Noel, a zoomtastic welcome to Cities @ Tufts.

0:02:42.4 Noel Healy: Thank you, Julian. It’s great to be here. And hello to everyone. I’m gonna start off by sharing my screen. We’ll just do that logistic first. And Julian, can you see my slides now? Okay. I presume you can.

0:03:01.4 Julian Agyeman: Yes.

0:03:02.6 Noel Healy: Okay, excellent. Okay, great. Welcome everyone. I’m delighted to be here. Today I’m gonna talk about decolonizing climate and energy policy. Julian gave a nice introduction there. Basically, I work on three buckets of research, environmental climate justice, fossil fuel obstructionism, and climate and energy policymaking. For instance, one of my studies investigated the interconnected injustices along fossil fuel supply chains between Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Colombia South America and currently in Medellín Colombia. My study documented the injustices enforceable displacement of indigenous YU and Afro Colombians from coal mining at the Sarah Horne open pit coal mine. In the US, I’ve worked with folks like Greenpeace and others to document public health hazards from air and water pollution and the risks associated with climate change.

0:03:55.1 Noel Healy: And also I’ve worked on a range of issues connected to the Green New Deal. Okay, so what is the current state of the climate crisis? I’m gonna go over this quite quickly ’cause I think my audience is well versed on this, but the IPCC has outlined a magnitude of ongoing and future threats, extreme weather events, sea level rise, increased frequency and severity of droughts, floods, wildfires, and the breakdown of food systems, mass human migration, something that I’m really worried about. Over 220 people died in flooding in Valencia, Spain just within the last two weeks and the Philippines have now been hit by four typhoons in the span of just 10 days or five major storms in three weeks.

0:04:41.2 Noel Healy: Sadly, those least responsible for historical emissions will get hit hardest and fastest. Okay, so in terms of what types of cuts that are needed, and this graph here on the left is from the IPCC’s 1.5 report, and I give a lot of climate and energy folk nightmares when it first come out because effectively we have to cut global net CO2 emissions by 45% as of 2030.

0:05:10.2 Noel Healy: So achieving such a steep decarbonization would involve reconstituting not only our electrical grid, our cultural system, our transportation system, financial system, trade, manufacturing, land use, political system, military, the entire economy. So within a decade, we must cut emissions almost by half, and that’s around 7.8% of pollution cut every year. Put this in context, despite global efforts, emissions have risen every year over the last five years. And while there was approximately 8.8% decrease in global emissions during the first six months of COVID, the emissions have rebounded. So global emissions continue to reach record highs with greenhouse gases 1.3% higher in 2023.

0:05:56.9 Noel Healy: Kevin Anderson is one of my favorite climate scientists because I don’t think that he really sugarcoats the level of transformation that is needed. So we had the opportunity to do an easy, moderate change, maybe 30 to 40 years ago the same time period when fossil fuel companies knew the impact of their products.

0:06:16.5 Noel Healy: But we are now at the point where we can either do a radical transformative shift or face climate chaos. There’s really no scenario in which we won’t be experiencing massive oil and change. So as we face into Trump 2.0, it’s important to first acknowledge that the United States is producing more oil and natural gas today than ever before, and far more than any other country. So the Biden administration might argue that increased oil and gas production during its administration is to some extent a result of issues of leases issued during the Trump administration. Trump auctioned off the leases and the Biden administration signed the permits.

0:06:57.7 Noel Healy: However, the Biden-Harris administration also gave the go ahead for the nation’s largest oil drilling operation, the ConocoPhillips Vast Willow Project in Alaska, known as the climate bomb. And this had nothing got to do with Trump. Okay, so that’s the kind of quick background to where we’re at. So what do I mean by international climate policy? 

0:07:20.1 Noel Healy: International climate policy refers to collective actions and treaties such as the UN’s Paris Agreement aimed at mitigating and adapting climate change on the local scale. So the COP29 is taking place right now, and in the next few slides, and I’ll illustrate how in the fine print of international climate policies, we can still witness the continuing entrenchment and the dominance of the global North over the global south, a region already burdened by historical extraction of trillions of dollars worth of resources and labor by its colonizers.

0:07:53.0 Noel Healy: So the US and the EU are not only accountable for almost half of all historical emissions, but as architects of global Empire, leverage their colonial wealth to steer climate negotiations, obscure historical emissions, overshadowing the severe consequences they have inflicted over the global south. This is a graphic from one of Jason Hickel’s research papers, I’m a big fan of Jason Hickel’s work and Julian Steinberg and others who work on this critical, climate justice stuff.

0:08:28.6 Noel Healy: So there’s a whole body of literature which outlines that decisions on how to count emissions are political ones, with social justice implications. And I think Professor Avi Chomsky, who also teaches at Salem State, does a good job of breaking this down. Almost all emissions are calculated in terms of countries. So most statistics required by the Paris Agreement use territorial or production based accounting, which means counting emissions at the point of production.

0:08:57.5 Noel Healy: On the other hand, calculating emissions per capita or per person highlights a country’s consumption levels. Alternatively, cumulative or historical emissions measure how much a country has emitted over time. So from this perspective, the US and the EU owe a huge climate debt to the world. And many scholars argued that because of the importance of global trade and the way rich countries have outsourced their production to poorer countries, it makes more sense to measure emissions by what is consumed in the country.

0:09:29.3 Noel Healy: We then have the historical perspective. The inequality of the responsibility appears even starker than a annual total or even per capita emissions. So the US accounts for twice the amount of historical emissions as China, even though China emits more every year. So international climate policy conveniently overlooks the historical emissions of the global North, an evasion of responsibility that is a modern extension of imperial dominance.

0:09:56.8 Noel Healy: The Global North represents a mere 14% of the population, yet has emitted 80% of CO2 since 1850. And this historical debt contributes to what can be turned to atmospheric colonization. And now the entire world, especially the global South, is forced to pay the climate price for the colonial industrialization of a few countries. My second point, the Global North’s continued domination within climate policy. UN climate agreements offer non-committal ambitious sounding goals that are not backed by concrete measures to curb fossil fuel production. Meanwhile, the global south endures the most severe ecological and economic impacts of this inaction.

0:10:40.3 Noel Healy: International climate policies entrenched inequality by permitting the global north to continue emitting at levels that dwarfed per capita emissions of the global south. And this non-committal nature of the UN climate agreements allows the global north to set broad unenforceable targets without real accountability. This dynamic enables the global North to dictate terms and priorities, sidelining the urgent needs and voices of the global south as we’re seeing now in COP29.

0:11:07.5 Noel Healy: Take carbon offsets for example, this climate policy allows polluters of the global north to buy their way out of climate impact by funding projects that reduce CO2 elsewhere, often in the global south. However, this can lead to land grabs or environmental projects that displace local communities, disrupting economies and ecosystems without reducing overall emissions. My next point is that it’s not just about emissions within national borders, it’s also about the ecological footprints that span globally.

0:11:37.3 Noel Healy: The Global North exports carbon emissions and pollution by shifting production to the global south. This carbon outsourcing allows the global north to appear greener, maintain higher consumption levels while offshoring environmental damage. International climate policy also has inadvertently triggered a neo imperial rush as nation’s vie for crucial minerals like lithium in the global south.

0:12:01.9 Noel Healy: This green tech race not only threatens to displace local communities, but also murs the historical patterns of exploitation, all in the name of advancing climate progress. My next point, the co-opting of the UNFCCC process by major fossil fuel companies like BP, fossil fuel producer nations like the US has led to non-inclusive policymaking and outcomes that are non-binding and ineffective.

0:12:30.6 Noel Healy: This partnership of public authority and private profit undermines the autonomy of the global south. A staggering 70% of CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution can be traced back to a mere of 78 entities. So these corporate giants are dictating the planet’s fate. So rather than heeding the urgent calls from the global south for fossil fuel production cuts, the UNFCCC process bows to the interest of a few corporations and Petro states effectively silencing the voices of billions.

0:13:06.1 Noel Healy: For instance, the graphic on the left-hand side shows that there were over 1,700 fossil fuel lobbyists at the COP29, which is currently taking place. And this is more than delegates from the top 10 most climate vulnerable nations. Only three countries brought larger delegations. Additionally, 480 carbon capture lobbyists infiltrated, COP29 more than the US, UK, and Canada and the EU combined, even though 78% of large scale carbon capture projects have failed. And of course, it’s important to note that most negotiation red lines are drawn way before the COP takes place and fossil fuel interests have got access to all these people.

0:13:50.8 Noel Healy: My next point is that at the heart of international climate policy lies broken promises. The Global North has not fulfilled their 2009 UNFCCC pledge to provide a hundred billion annually in climate finance to the global south. Meanwhile, G20 nations blatantly contradict their old commitments, climate commitments by pouring over 1.4 trillion into fossil fuel subsidies in 2022 alone. So when the global South is asking for the global north to pay its climate debt, the global north is already pumping close to 1.4 trillion of fossil fuel subsidies. So this shows you the contradiction of the system and how it perpetuates the cycle of neglect, where the economic interest of the powerful trump the needs of the formerly colonized.

0:14:39.2 Noel Healy: My second last point in this first half of the presentation. International climate policy, and the second half I’m gonna talk about solutions, binds nations not with chains of debt, but instead with chains of direct rule, but instead with shackles of debt. Approximately two thirds of climate finance is offered as loans. So rather than addressing historical injustices, the Global North provides loans under the pretense of climate finance, while imposing high interest rates that perpetuate debt dependency in the global south.

0:15:10.5 Noel Healy: Astonishingly in 2018, a staggering 90% of climate aid in Latin America and the Caribbean came in the forms of loans, not grants, strapping nations with debt instead of providing much needed aid. And this places formerly colonized countries in a position of financial subsidy, compelling the global south to spend fivefold on debt repayments over climate action. Meanwhile, wealth is funneled back to northern creditors, perpetuating a cycle of dependency and exploitation where the global north retains economic and political control at the expense of the global south’s sovereignty.

0:15:50.3 Noel Healy: My last point before we get on to the solutions, some pretty interesting graphics here on the left hand side. If you look at the loss and damage fund, which is established to address the irreversible impacts of climate change on the global south, the global north, historically most culpable for the climate crisis have pledged a mere 700 million. This sum is a drop in the ocean, less than 0.2 of the annual losses of the global South will incur due to global warming. A staggering shortfall anywhere or estimated between 300 billion and 1 trillion or even there’s some studies that go even further that a 30 year delay in establishing the loss and damage fund highlights the global north’s apathy, especially in the US, the leading historical emitter, which has no problem allocating 800 billion annually to its defense budget.

0:16:40.9 Noel Healy: So you can see the priorities there. What is more, the global north countries have funneled investments into fossil fuel projects at a rate 58 times higher than their contributions to the loss and damage fund from 2020 to 2022. So that was just seven big points that are condensed into why we need to transform the International Climate Policy system and how these systematic inequities are baked into the system.

0:17:12.3 Noel Healy: So what about solutions? These aren’t easy, but there are solutions out there and there are movements and peoples who are working on this, the first as a organizing framework is climate justice. So what is climate justice? And I use a definition here from Professor Avi Chomsky’s new book on Climate Justice. So climate justice recognizes the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low income communities and communities of color around the world. The people least responsible for the problem. It seeks solutions that address the root causes of climate change. And in doing so, simultaneously address a broad range of social, racial and environmental justice.

0:17:55.8 Noel Healy: So this is an economic issue requiring a fundamental reorganizing of our society and economy, not just manipulating incentives and enhancing technologies. I like this quote here from Chico Mendez, “Climate Justice also centers people, marginalized communities and issues of labor, race, gender and class.” Mendez, who was a Brazilian rubber tapper, trade union leader and environmentalist famously, he said, “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.” And you could apply that to a lot of conservationist organizations historically and even present day within the US in terms of their focus.

0:18:39.0 Noel Healy: This is a new book which has just came out edited by Farhana Sultana. I’ve just read the first chapter ’cause I’m still waiting for my copy to arrive here in Columbia. The first chapter is available online, and I plucked out this nice quote from the book when I was reading it yesterday. “Decolonizing climate is largely meaningless if it doesn’t accompany measurable shifts and law, policies and institutional frameworks are material distributions.”

0:19:08.7 Noel Healy: So I’m gonna talk about what some of these might actually look like in practice. A second book, which I would strongly recommend and arguably to me, maybe one of the most important books written on climate after Naomi Kleins. This changes everything and reconsidering reparations by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. So this brings us to more complex questions around climate justice. So authors such as Táíwò, Jason Hickel, Julian Steinberg, and others, have outlined how European countries in the industrial offspring, US Canada, and Australia were built on the wealth of extractive colonialism.

0:19:41.2 Noel Healy: They used this to industrialize and build a fossil fuel economy. And I’m gonna read out this quote here from Olúfẹ́mi, “Figuring out who should pay for the loss and damage of climate change brings up familiar problems in distributive justice.” Should rich countries pay because they’re richer, because they’re more responsible? We can add another because they’ve inherited more liabilities from the global racial empire. What does he mean by this? So in his book, he outlines how the global social structure that resulted from transatlantic slavery and colonialism resulted in advantages accumulating to the Global North racially dominant communities. He and others outline that colonized countries, particularly the African continent, often inherited weak legislators, deeply autocratic political structures. And these initial conditions affected the trajectory of legislative power development even after formal dependences weren’t what was one.

0:20:41.8 Noel Healy: And he uses this study here in the top left. This form of accumulation could then directly affect a number of measures that Brooks Setall have found to be key detriments of climate vulnerability, including government effectiveness, political rights, voice and accountability, and civil liberties. I’m conducting more research in Columbia at the moment, and Columbia arguably has one of the world’s strongest climate focused president, certainly from a country that has vast resources of fossil fuels.

0:21:12.9 Noel Healy: Gustavo Petro has pledged no new hydrocarbon exploration licenses, a halt on fracking pilots, and has stopped the offshore fossil fuel development. And this is significant ’cause Columbia produces around 1% of the world’s coal, oil and gas. As you can imagine, he’s facing huge opposition here for various reasons. And if you think US politics is complicated, I think Columbia is arguably even more complicated. One question that has been raised in discussions in Columbia is, will the international community compensate Columbia for leaving fossil fuels in the ground? 

0:21:49.4 Noel Healy: And as you can imagine, questions like this draw a lot of eyebrows from Global North officials, but it raises real questions of distributive justice on a global scale at the COP26 which happened in Glasgow, Costa Rica and Denmark launch an alliance of countries committed to phasing out oil and gas production known as the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. And initiatives like this are critical in addressing the COP’s historical failure to tackle fossil fuel production directly.

0:22:17.4 Noel Healy: So the next solution framework is the National Fair Shares Approach. So climate justice groups argued that a system of climate reparations could require historical emitters to compensate poor countries for damages up to today by facilitating their rise to a common globally sustainable level of consumption by underwriting low carbon development there. And this kind of global climate justice that many grassroots organizations and the US Climate Fair Share Coalition are demanding. So what exactly is the Fair Share approach? 

0:22:51.4 Noel Healy: So the US is the largest historical contributor to climate change. It has a responsibility and capacity to commit to a Fair Share target, which was introduced by these groups. Within this framework, it calls for 195% reduction, which is 70% domestic reduction and 125 through international support. So this international support can address the Global South emission. So you might think that this, certainly in the next administration, this is not gonna happen that’s for sure. And you might think that something like this would never get implemented into any policy, but in fact, it actually did in some proposals for candidates for the 2020 election and specifically Bernie Sanders Green New Deal proposal. The graph on the right is a graphic from myself and Ray Galvin’s study, which appeared in energy research and social science.

0:23:41.0 Noel Healy: So Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal arguably represented the most transformative proposal of all 2020 climate plans. And it did in fact incorporate the fair shares approach. His Green New Deal proposed to reduce domestic emissions by at least 71% by 2030 and reduce emissions among lease industrialized nations by 36% by 2030. The total equivalent of reducing our domestic emission is by 161%. And this will be accomplished by providing 200 billion for the Green Climate Fund.

0:24:13.0 Noel Healy: So this is important because rich countries never met their stated yet insufficient goal of dispersing a hundred billion per year in climate violence. However, climate justice scholars and labor groups and EJ groups from the Global South argue that solutions should go way beyond the terms of transfer to mechanisms like the Green Climate Fund. And I’m gonna name a few different types of mechanisms that we could explore. This is from a study from myself and Fergus Green.

0:24:42.7 Noel Healy: As a political scientist at University… At College London, we conducted a desk review of around 30 Green New Deal policies that were proposed between 2019 and 2021, mainly from the US and Europe. And we then categorized the different planks or components of Green New Deals. So if you look at the top, you have reconfiguring power, so pro-union reforms, racial and indigenous justice. You have then financial security policies, so proposals like job guarantees, minimum living wage. Then if we go back, one, we have supportive macroeconomic institutions. So Green Investment Banks, complementary carbon centric policies.

0:25:28.4 Noel Healy: So carbon centric policies are traditional climate policies like carbon taxes, regulation of upstream fossil fuel supply, and then foreign policy, which I’m gonna talk a lot about in the next two slides because those were something that Green New Deals were missing certainly from the mainstream US Green New Deals.

0:25:46.6 Noel Healy: And then the last bucket is, sustainable social provisioning policies. There was more radical Green New Deal proposals such as a Red New Deal, which was a number of indigenous groups proposed various counter proposals to a Green New deal which centralized even more so environmental justice, anti-capitalist principles, and decolonization. The Red Deal is a great example of this. It’s an indigenous action to save our earth. Is a political program for liberation and climate justice that emerged from one of the oldest class struggles in Americas. The fight by native people to win sovereignty, autonomy, and dignity. And the central components include indigenous treaty rights, land restoration, self-determination, decolonization, and liberation, these rights-based approaches.

0:26:44.5 Noel Healy: So when we did this analysis of the Green New Deal, the one gap that was really missing was foreign policy. And of course, foreign policy is the one that would really challenge all or would be part of this decolonization process. So the Green New Deal is meant to be about redistribution and justice, and it shouldn’t stop at US or European borders. A recent study pointed to a real foreign policy justice gap.

0:27:10.5 Noel Healy: So among the few Green New Deals in our sample that mentioned foreign policy, some focused on border adjustments to penalize other countries taking inadequate action to reduce emissions, while others focus on rules about trade, capital flows. For example, a Green New Deal foreign policy might seek to facilitate sharing green technologies, intellectual property with poorer countries, liberalize trade and green technologies, and restrict trade in carbon-intensive goods and services.

0:27:38.0 Noel Healy: However, while the functioning of the global economy might seem obscure and beyond the reach for those who study climate, climate justice scholars and Global South groups contend this is essential for climate justice. So Global South debt, trade agreements, tax havens are big factors contributing to emissions, and how global corporate powers slow international climate action just as they do at the international level. Global Green New Deals need to name and challenge these usually invisible rules of the global economy. Our nation state-based thinking visibilizes inequality domestically, but it naturalizes it internationally.

0:28:18.2 Noel Healy: And it’s also critical to note the global inequality is racialized. So many climate justice groups and academics frame foreign policy in terms of climate reparations. Poor people in Global South are asking for foreign policy that dismantles the unjust global economic system that keeps poor countries poor and rich countries over-consuming. And climate reparations are important for both climate justice and for climate. Third world debts, global tax havens function to keep resources flowing from South to North and from poor to rich.

0:28:49.0 Noel Healy: So we shouldn’t just conceive reparations as the distant past. And this is a point made eloquently by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. It’s reparations for current extraction, not just past extraction, but it’s also how we understand the present and the future. So the Pacto Ecosocial del Sol was a Green New Deal proposal from the Global South, and they proposed plans like cancelling sovereign debt of countries, and that would allow them to reshape their political world and build platforms for countries to achieve low carbon development.

0:29:24.6 Noel Healy: This report got so little attention, and it’s just so important because Indigenous resistance stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one quarter of annual US and Canadian emissions. And when we’re talking about climate actions, this report highlights the various Indigenous-led campaigns against fossil fuel projects like pipelines, coal mines, LNG terminals, showcasing the diverse tactics used to resist development and it led to a huge amount of emissions and fossil fuels staying in the ground.

0:29:58.0 Noel Healy: So beyond direct emissions reduction, the report also argues that Indigenous resistance has also shifted public discourse around fossil fuels and Indigenous rights, and I think that that is quite accurate. If I’m to summarize all the different planks of international climate policy that could change, first one, if we look at decolonizing climate governance, so international financial institutions will have to change, establishing new global climate institutions, global trade agreements, climate refugee programmes.

0:30:32.7 Noel Healy: The second one, I’ve talked a little bit about that paying for climate debt. So climate reparations, debt cancellations, global wealth taxes, loss and damage fund, fair shares approach, Indigenous rights. So this would be Indigenous rights and climate agreements, Red New Deals, traditional ecological knowledge, legal pathways, that field is quite exciting and developing really fast at the moment in terms of climate lawsuits, global trade agreements, IP for climate tech sharing, etcetra. Fossil fuel phase-outs, so supply side climate policies which have been largely ignored. New initiatives like the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. And then rethinking economies or eco-socialist, economic policies, degrowth policies, universal basic services, planetary boundaries policies, international Green New Deals.

0:31:23.8 Noel Healy: There’s also a number of different proposals on the table that climate justice groups are proposing some of the… If you’re able to zoom into the screen, you’ll see some of them there. There are also some other ones, there’s tax on dirty ship fuels, island nations are advocating a 2% tax on ships burning, polluting fuel oil, a tax on shipping and aviation which is supported by the IMF to address emissions from sectors contributing 3.5% to global emissions. I really like this one, it’s a windfall tax on fossil fuel profits that is proposed by the UN Secretary General. I think that would be politically actually attractive from the masses, maybe not from fossil fuel interests.

0:32:07.0 Noel Healy: Another one which would be really nice in this day and age with massive global inequality is wealth tax on billionaires. Politically challenging, yes, but a 2% tax to ensure a minimum contribution could be akin to a global corporate tax reform. This has been backed by Brazil who is hosting the next COP and they believe it could generate around $250 billion annually. There’s also loan deferral for climate disasters. So mechanisms like the World Bank’s debt pause, clause allows countries to delay repayments and debt for nature swaps as well. When we’re also looking at other systems, I just read this article from Jessica Green, who’s a political scientist at Toronto, and she called for the shifting focus to international trade and financial institutions. And this is actually a better focus.

0:33:00.0 Noel Healy: So the COPs have largely failed for the last 30 years. I’m not saying that we need to abolish them, but we need to change tact. If something is not working, we need to try new strategies. And a lot of her work, she argues that tax policy as climate policy. So she highlights the impact of corporate tax practices, particularly offshoring, which deprives countries of crucial revenue for climate initiatives. So a global minimum on corporate tax could redirect funds towards sustainable projects.

0:33:28.2 Noel Healy: Another proposal is reforming investment laws. So fossil and fuel companies have exploited foreign investment laws to sue governments for climate policies that impact our profits. And this creates a regulatory chill. So reforming our withdrawing from treaties with investors state dispute settlements provisions could help countries implement stronger climate policies without fear of lawsuits. There’s also trade policy adjustments such as the World Trade Organization, which restricts domestic support for Green industries and reforming trade policies to allow local Green initiatives adopt carbon border tariffs, which could create a more supportive environment for decarbonization.

0:34:09.5 Noel Healy: And then finally, and this is linked to some domestic points that I’m going to make in terms of the current election. We need to build political support through material benefits. So effective climate policies must prioritize material benefits for working class citizens such as secure jobs and clean energy. And while Biden’s IRA had a lot of good things within it, it was mainly focused on tax breaks for industries and manufacturing. And people on the street could not really see these benefits and we probably won’t see a lot of these benefits for many years to come.

0:34:46.2 Noel Healy: So these initiatives could gain wider political backing, moving climate action from austerity to more tangible economic growth and stability. And if I end with just one or two slides on the recent election, inflation was a major issue in this election with many voters feeling that the Biden administration failed to address it effectively leading them to support Trump. Voters experienced severe or moderate voters who experienced severe or moderate hardship due to inflation favored Trump by significant margins. While those unaffected by inflation leaned towards Harris.

0:35:24.2 Noel Healy: Prices included gas and housing rose more under Biden and Trump leading to declining real incomes, which influence voters perceptions of economic management. Of course, you can argue that the Trump administration is selling snake oil in terms of how they might address this, but the message that the economy was doing great fell flat with voters.

0:35:46.5 Noel Healy: This is a pretty interesting graphic, which shows how Biden ditched his progressive domestic agenda around March, 2020. And he embraced austerity in March, 2020 onwards. And the Harris campaign effectively just carried on with this unappealing platform in terms of that it wasn’t economic populous platform. And so they gave up on economic popularism and pivoted towards austerity and a historic Pentagon budgets and that did not sit well with the electorate.

0:36:18.5 Noel Healy: And then this is my final slide, and I think one of the best climate think tanks in the US is the Climate and Community Institute, has some of the top green New Deal scholars and others. And I think that they’re really politically savvy in how they lay out, how we need to tackle the climate crisis and inequality at the same time. Essentially the Green New Deal argument and the majority of voters chose change and disruption over stability and the continuation of business as usual.

0:36:48.6 Noel Healy: So if we were to win power again to make people believe, again Democrats will have to be the party of change, which means the party itself will have to change. And I’m not sure everyone is really confident that is gonna happen soon, but the focus has to be on the material impacts not abstraction. So we need powerful, persuasive alternatives, visions of a different future to counteract Trump’s sledgehammer approach to the status quo. And many of the climate and economic conditions are devastating for working class communities, and they’re only set to deteriorate.

0:37:25.7 Noel Healy: So we need a political vision that links everyday concerns with the urgent issues facing our planet. And as the Community and Climate Project says, we need a political vision that connects kitchen table issues to the fate of the planet. Naomi Klein and others have said similar things that we all need to become Eco populous. That means championing policies that significantly lower costs while lowering emissions. So like heat pumps for all, robust tenant rights, rent caps, free and better public transportation, make polluters pay for the transition, tackling the cost of living, good jobs and infrastructure, strong unions, lower household costs by investing in public services, investing in social safety nets. All these planks within the Green New Deal actually have proven to be really popular across the political divide. Maybe when you term it green New Deal, there’s some bipartisan and cues within that. But even the Green New Deal itself, when you look at some of the polling over the last few years, it actually is very popular.

0:38:28.5 Noel Healy: And I think as we’re going into era, we have to rethink how we are framing and introducing climate policy within the US. We have to move away from this carbon centric approaches about carbon taxes that doesn’t sell. We have to tackle inequality, which is at its highest phase in many decades. So if we have a new vision for climate politics, and we have to start building that now as we’re coming up to Trump 2.0. Okay. All right. I think we’ll leave it at that. So I’ll stop sharing my screen. I think I’m within time, more or less.

0:39:08.1 Julian Agyeman: You are spot on, Noel.

0:39:08.3 Noel Healy: Here we go. How about that? 

0:39:10.7 Julian Agyeman: 12:45, we said, and it is 12:44. Noel, what a tour de force. I thought I knew something about this. You’ve opened my eyes to a whole range of new thoughts. One thing I just, one big omission, and the reason I’m gonna mention it is because next semester in Cities@Tufts, we’ve got Dr. Duncan McLaren who’s gonna talk about geoengineering as potential solutions. Now, you didn’t mention geoengineering, as I understand it, there’s two aspects to it. One is solar radiation management, the other one is carbon capture and removal. What’s your take on techno’s fixes, techno solutions? Noel.

0:39:52.9 Noel Healy: I guess the short answer would be false solutions. I think if a good rule of thumb is when you’re looking at climate solutions, what are the fossil fuel industry doing? What types of solutions are the fossil fuel industries promoting and funding within universities. And fossil fuel industry are funding geoengineering, again, like carbon capture and storage, carbon… These technologies haven’t worked at the scale we needed within the timeframe we needed right now.

0:40:26.1 Noel Healy: And even within Biden’s IRA, much of funding is going towards arguably false solutions like carbon capture and storage. Yes, they are within the IPCC but how do they get in there in the first place? Fossil fuel industries funds lots of monies into universities across the world to look at these techno fixes and these techno fixes won’t work within the timeframe.

0:40:50.9 Noel Healy: So I would argue that these geoengineering solutions are just another delay tactic by the fossil fuel industry to continue business as usual and continue burning coal, oil and gas. On the flip side, if you talk about like supply side climate policies, bans, moratoriums, ending LNG exports, these are solutions that are real, that work, but they challenge the political… They challenge the profit margins of the fossil fuel industry. So when you’re thinking about solutions, it’s always good to see, to think about which solutions are the fossil fuel industry backing or not.

0:41:27.0 Julian Agyeman: Yeah. Exactly. And I’m excited for his talk though, because he’s gonna talk specifically on the justice implications of geoengineering which has received a scanned attention. Great. Thanks for that Noel. Could humanitarian issues such as the impacts of cobalt mining in Congo be included in climate finance packages going to the global south? What interventions have resulted in effective ways for shifting power dynamics between donor countries and receiving ones, if any? 

0:42:00.0 Noel Healy: Climate finance package? Yeah, the best of my knowledge, I’m not sure if that has been included in any formal COP talk. So unfortunately, the Green Tech rush is replicating a lot of the harms that fossil fuel extraction has created over the last, since Industrial Revolution. And I think there’s now a greater awareness that issues like mining for cobalt and the Congo is something to be addressed.

0:42:30.1 Noel Healy: So I’m unaware of any finance packages linked to that, but I think it’s a great idea. That’s certainly something that needs to happen. And for the most part, when we turn on our light switch, there’s a certain level of consumer blindness. We don’t know where our electricity comes from. So in the case of Boston and Salem, when we turned on our light switch, the Salem coal power plant used coal from Salem Home Mine in Colombia, and that’s why I did the lifecycle analysis. So there’s all these supply chain issues within fossil fuels, but also within Green Tech as we try and get more critical minerals for the energy transition.

0:43:09.6 Julian Agyeman: Right. Thanks Noel. Chris asks, given national and international policy makers have, as you said, failed to bring about the types of policy approaches we need for a climate justice perspective. In states and localities that have more progressive politics, what have you seen or what can you suggest could build a movement towards power and eventual international success? 

0:43:34.8 Noel Healy: Yeah, I guess over the next 40 years, everything’s gonna be decentralized in terms of the climate movement. And so that means that I’ve done a lot of research on the Green New Deal at the federal level, but the Green New Deal can be proposed and implemented at a local level. So we saw Michelle Wu, she had a fantastic Green New Deal and proposal that was central to her election campaign in Boston. And they’re now going through the sticky politics process of trying to get different components of a past. So I think that over the next four years, everything is going to be decentralized. We’re gonna go back to local climate policy planning, state level Green New deals, even within the UNFCCC process. So it looks like Trump is gonna pull the US out of the Paris agreement. Technically, that isn’t the worst thing in the world.

0:44:26.1 Noel Healy: Okay. Yes, it is terrible. Climate change is an existential crisis, but the UNFCCC is non-binding, so that doesn’t change the bread and butter of what the US does state by state level. And if you think about within the US states, there’s 10 states that make up most of the emissions. And if those 10 states continue with their strong climate policies, states like California, even Texas is now one of the biggest wind turbine producers within the US.

0:44:56.9 Noel Healy: There’s still a lot of hope in terms of decentralized climate action. But of course the real challenge with climate change in a global level is that we need everyone on board. We need massive federal funds and certainly in the US, we’re gonna have to pivot a little bit, but it does also open up an opportunity for the EU to take more leadership, for China to take more leadership and others. And I think that the climate movement can come out stronger in terms of after four years. The problem is the climate clock is going the opposite direction.

0:45:32.4 Julian Agyeman: Denise says, hydrogen, nuclear and geo technologies are false solutions, but are there instrumental bandaids to keep the climate crisis at bay? 

0:45:43.5 Noel Healy: Yeah, so I guess when nuclear… People are really passionate about nuclear as either pronuclear or anti-nuclear. And if we are thinking about even within the climate movement, I think there’s been a slight adjustment to people’s feelings on nuclear and that people are now weighing up the sheer level of transformation that must happen in such a short space of time. And even like slight changes to some of the, we’ll say, the 2020 Green New Deal proposal. Some had proposed to leave existing nuclear power plants in existence. And I think that seems to be a fairly reasonable plan at the moment.

0:46:21.6 Noel Healy: There is a lot of hustle and bustle around green hydrogen and other technologies at the moment. And I would add a little asterisk to those in terms of the fossil fuel industry are promoting them. Nuclear, I think is something that is… The debate has certainly changed over the last number of years. Yeah.

0:46:43.6 Julian Agyeman: Where do you stand on nuclear these days and has that changed, Noel, since you were a young radical, you’re an older radical now, but since you were a really young radical, has your position changed on nuclear power? I’m not gonna say whether I’m wavering, but…

0:46:56.3 Noel Healy: Yeah. I think it has changed a little bit in that we’ll say that Bernie signed a New Deal and to the best of my recollection, he called for the decommissioning of his existing nuclear power plants. I would probably, at this day and age of the climate crisis, be okay with nuclear plants not being decommissioned and letting them to continue. So I would say my thoughts on nuclear would’ve changed a little bit, but in terms of depending on nuclear for to solve the climate crisis, it’s not gonna happen within the timeframe needed. It’s too costly as well in terms of comparing to how cheap renewable energy is at the moment. And we have the solutions right now in terms of wind, solar, and wave energy. But the problem is the political will. The problem is we’re still subsidizing fossil fuels. So until we stop subsidizing fossil fuels, until we get political leaders who treat the climate like the emergency it is, yeah, we’re gonna be in a rough space.

0:48:06.2 Julian Agyeman: Going back to your points about Mayor Wu in Boston, I remember the night she was elected in her victory speech as soon as she mentioned, yes, Boston will become a Green New Deal city. It was the biggest cheer, and I suspect it was a lot of her younger supporters. And this is something my students and I are talking about in the coming four years, refocusing on the locality, refocusing on communities on working with progressive cities and things like that. Can you say a bit more about where you see Boston’s Green New Deal? Because politically, it seemed to have been a bit hampered when the Green New Deal SAR wasn’t given a chief role, but was given the role of director and I could never work out what was the difference and was this new Green New Deal SAR hampered by not being a chief, therefore not being able to have maybe the leverage that he could have had? 

0:49:05.5 Noel Healy: Yeah, I’m a little bit out of the loop in terms of what has happened since I’ve been down in Columbia for the last half a year or so, but just in general in terms of the Green New Deal as a new climate paradigm. So the basic principles of a Green New Deal is that we engage in deep decarbonization across all sectors. So it’s not just the traditional environmental sectors, it’s energy, it’s housing, it’s essentially all policy is climate policy. And at the same time, we’re tackling inequality. And because we are at a point in history where there’s just extreme inequality, it’s just politically wise to merge these two goals together. And that’s the kind of basic principle of what the Green New Deal is. And arguably, Michelle Wu’s Green New Deal proposal was one of the top state level or city level Green New Deal proposals within the US and hopefully over the next four years, you’ll have other cities who are mirroring this.

0:50:15.0 Noel Healy: And that movement will push people towards recognizing that we need to tackle inequality and climate at the same time. It’s no longer carbon tax. If you are getting your students and who’s gonna go out and march for carbon taxes in this day and age, like nobody, except for maybe a lot of climate wonks or climate scientists who think that carbon, in theory, carbon taxes are the most efficient method. But in this day and age, it’s not gonna cut it.

0:50:41.2 Noel Healy: We have to tackle inequality and climate at the same time talking about housing, public transportation, rent caps, and making the fossil fuel companies pay. Vermont just, I think in the start of this year, introduced a new… I can’t remember the name of the bill, but it’s polluters pay bill whereby the fossil fuel companies are on the hook for X% of damages that happens within Vermont and New York are also looking at similar proposals like this. So we have to push like economic populism works. Trump was smart to enough to realize this granted he’s selling snake oil, but the Democratic party and state level, we have to go back to old school economic populism akin to the FDR era, which jumpstart the US economy after a severe number of years.

0:51:41.1 Julian Agyeman: Right. Last question and just a 30 second, one minute answer. If there was a kind of silver bullet that could cascade other changes, catalyze them, what would it be? Of all of that raft of ideas of great solutions, what would be the one that would’ve maximum bang for the buck? 

0:52:05.7 Noel Healy: At the global level and from a justice perspective, canceling global south debt is an easy win in terms of your canceling debt. Instead of countries being forced to pay a high percentage of GDP back into repaying debt, they can instead use that for climate resilience, for expanding their low carbon economy. So debt cancellation. And it’s not charity, it’s actually, it’s repaying a climate debt, repaying economic debt for plundering, and also it’s preventing continued economic or climate damage, which is gonna impact the global north anyways.

0:52:46.7 Julian Agyeman: Noel, thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your time in Medellín. Can we give Noel a great round of applause from Cities@Tufts from our last Cities@Tufts this semester? 

0:53:00.3 Noel Healy: Okay. Thanks for having me. And hopefully that was of some news.

0:53:01.1 Julian Agyeman: Absolutely. Thank you very much and happy holidays.

0:53:04.4 Noel Healy: Okay, thanks Julian. Bye everyone.

0:53:08.5 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable with support from the Bar Foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graph recording was created by Ronna Alexander. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and communications manager.

0:53:45.2 Tom Llewellyn: Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candace Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others, so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

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