From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

5 THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM CLIMATE CHANGEdeveloping countries, who tend to aspire to US models of conspicuousconsumption.What if there is no technological fix, and a planned and publiclyagreed rebalancing of growth fails to occur? Then, economic adjustmentscan only occur chaotically in a scramble for carbon based onbrute force rather than reason. A complicating factor is the possibilitythat the world will hit ‘peak oil’ in the near future, leading to rapidlyrising prices and further tensions over access to carbon reserves.Whilerising prices would help push the world towards cutting carbonemissions (indeed that is part of the reason behind carbon trading andcarbon taxes), they are likely to be a disaster for equality. Take awaypolitical leadership, and any price-driven or even military struggleover resources between the world’s poor people and its gas-guzzlingelites can have only one outcome – the exclusion of those without thepower or wealth to gain access to carbon.At a global level, a power struggle between carbon ‘haves’ and‘have-nots’ could bring an abrupt end to the period of rapid globaldevelopment that followed the end of colonialism. In its place we mightsee the fall of a ‘carbon curtain’ separating a wealthy, high-tech groupof countries (or populations within countries), able to protect themselvesfrom the ravages of climate change and control access to carbon,from poor countries and communities living through a new Dark Age,prone to increasingly erratic and devastating climate conditions, unableto afford the carbon needed to join the wealthy group.These are apocalyptic thoughts, and environmentalists have beenaccused of crying wolf in the past, only to be proved wrong by newtechnologies and further discoveries of natural resource deposits. Butas Jared Diamond’s book Collapse graphically shows, environmentaldamage, and the nature of society’s response to it, explain the suddendisappearance of some of history’s greatest civilisations. 241 It shouldbe remembered that in Aesop’s fable, the wolf did indeed attack theshepherd boy’s flock, and no one came to his aid.While the EU and the USA remain locked in stand-off over howthe international climate regime should evolve, the biggest gulf liesbetween rich, industrialised countries and developing countries.Complicating matters further, developing-country governments arethemselves divided on climate change. Low-lying countries such as421