The political economy of environmental protection

‘Pakistan contributes less than one percent to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is among the top ten countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.’ Over the past couple of years, this statement has been echoing in and through the policy circles of Pakistan, setting up the basis for a discourse that is ensuring the acceptance of yet another exclusionary policy as ‘common sense.’

Factually the statement is not incorrect. But there are many other relevant factually correct statements as well, why are they not an essential part of our discourse on climate change?

The fact in the statement above tries to exonerate Pakistan of the crimes of significantly polluting the environment, while it also declares the country a victim of climate change. The generally accepted inference being that the fast depleting non-renewable resources and rising carbon emissions, primarily led by the first world, the developed nations, the higher income countries, the industrialized economies, has its bearings on countries like Pakistan, pushing the developing world to dangerously uninhabitable levels.

This helps Pakistan tap into the neoliberal reconstruction of the progressive notion of climate justice under which, through initiatives like Clean Development Mechanisms that are funded by the Global North for mitigation and adaptation projects in the Global South, the country has generated millions of dollars in revenues and launched multiple small-scale projects. To this end, what the discourse ‘includes’ does benefit Pakistan at a small scale, though its sustainability remains questionable.

However, the bigger problem of this discourse is in the mythical formulation of national boundaries based culprits and victims of the impending sixth mass extinction. That is where one finds what the discourse omits, and that is what helps understand how environment protection policies are profit motivated, and therefore, aim to benefit a particular class, while further dispossessing the vast majority of humans.

The historical exploitation of Global South at the hands of Global North is undeniable, and therefore a call for climate justice holds grounds. But what is being ignored in Pakistan’s political use of this notion is that it was not nations that exploited other nations. Instead it was capitalist economic structures, looking to fuel engines of growth, which committed these crimes against the environment and hurt a vast majority of humans. The struggle to protect the environment cannot be against nations, it has to be against the cross-national global economic structures and the elite that benefits from them.

These engines of growth exist and operate in contemporary Pakistan as well, benefitting the small elite of the country while endangering the lives of many. Why are we reluctant to hold them accountable? Companies like Exxon Mobil are bad in the Global North, but when they come to Pakistan, we celebrate? Why are our policymakers only keen to point fingers at the treadmills of production in the Global North, and have no concern for their branches in Pakistan? Basing policies on statements that hold foreign nations responsible, first, protect the broader ‘security state’ narrative of our country, and second, regard our extractive economic structures as innocent, ensuring that the elite can continue to employ and benefit from them.

Therefore, while talking about climate justice at a global level is important, we must not forget climate justice at the domestic level. When we talk about Pakistan’s emissions, we must also talk about emissions by our country’s industrial and agricultural elite and compare it with the contributions of our majority population to the greenhouse gases. And then also, compare the level of vulnerability of the elite to what the working classes have already suffered due to climate change in Pakistan.

It is important to remind ourselves that in the floods of 2010-11, Pakistan’s upper class and industrialists suffered only minimally compared to the mighty losses that our lower income groups, our working class, our small farmers suffered.

When many cannot even buy a bicycle, and a significant portion of the population cannot afford a 70cc motorbike, as indicated by the government’s annual PSLM surveys, whose interests are our policymakers looking after by paying negligible attention to public transportation, and introducing electric vehicles, which will run with electricity made of non-renewable energy such as coal, as one of the key policy agendas to fight climate change? It is also shameful that the dimensions of neither labour nor gender, despite their greater vulnerability are part of our environment policy debates at all.

Certainly the general will of the public is not being represented in these policies. Humans are not a priority, businesses and economic growth is. One can only sum up and respond to this precarious state of affairs with words from Greta Thunberg’s UN speech: “this is all wrong … people are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing, we are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money, and fairy tales of eternal economic growth? How dare you?”

Email: aqeelmalick@gmail.com