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The case for climate reparations

A partially collapsed house stands on the banks of the Padma River after aggressive erosion of land close to the river in Bangladesh. (MUNIR UZ ZAMAN/AFP via Getty Images)
A partially collapsed house stands on the banks of the Padma River after aggressive erosion of land close to the river in Bangladesh. (MUNIR UZ ZAMAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Listen to a First Person diary on how climate change shapes the community of Kivalina, Alaska here.


There’s a tragic irony to climate change, according to New York Magazine editor David Wallace-Wells:

“The rich countries of the world … that have produced this warming, they’re not in such hot parts of the world,” he says. “The Global South in particular are being hit much more intensely, and they bare very little responsibility for the crisis.”

Wallace-Wells says the U.S. would not be where it is today if not for a century spent burning fossil fuels.

“You could really closely correlate their economic and even geopolitical standing with how much they’ve done to the planet,” he adds.

So how can America grapple with the implications of climate change? Wallace-Wells says only through an honest and moral reckoning:

“[It] requires those of us in these rich and powerful countries to leverage that wealth and that power towards helping those who are suffering the most from our pollution,” he says.

Today, On Point: David Wallace-Wells makes the case for climate reparations.

Guests

Riton Quiah, field coordinator and producer based in Bangladesh who’s worked with the BBC, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic and many more news outlets. (@fixerBD)

David Wallace-Wells, deputy editor of New York Magazine. Author of “The Uninhabitable Earth.” (@dwallacewells)

Also Featured

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University.

Colleen Swan, interim city administrator in Kivalina, Alaska.

Show Highlights: How climate change impacts Bangladesh

Bangladesh is a nation of rivers. The mouths of South Asia’s holiest rivers, the Ganges, the Padma, the Yamuna and more exit through Bangladesh and into the Bay of Bengal. That same water makes Bangladesh one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world. Floods, cyclones, storm surges. Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis have been displaced by climate disasters.

It’s estimated that by 2050, one in seven people in Bangladesh will have to move because of sea level rise alone. That’s potentially 18 million people, more than twice the entire population of New York City.

Riton Quiah, a field coordinator and producer based in Bangladesh, walks us through the climate crisis in Bangladesh.

What was the annual weather cycle like in Bangladesh when you were a child?

“I heard in 1970, that was maybe the biggest, or largest or strongest cyclone. … Nowadays it’s called Cyclone Bhola. So maybe half a million people died in 1970 and it was very close to my house. My home district is in Noakhali. … And Bhola was very, very close, just west. And my mother, she said in that, thousand and thousand people died. Even she saw those types of things.

“In 1998, at the time we saw floods. In 1991, we saw again cyclone. There was no name for cyclone at the time in Bangladesh. But very recently like 2006 … then 2009. … So in that way, it is gradually increasing. And nowadays, when I work in the field, mainly in the southern side of Bangladesh, for international media or for research work for the University of Texas, I have been seeing people they would like to say in their lifetime when they were very young, like me, they didn’t see lots of cyclones. But nowadays, there is more than two or three or four cyclones coming, and those are very strong.”

From The Reading List

New York Magazine: “Climate Reparations” — “The math is as simple as the moral claim. We know how much carbon has been emitted and by which countries, which means we know who is most responsible and who will suffer most and that they are not the same.”

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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