 in cahoots with corrupt local elites. How do we allocate moral liability in such cases? Once you interrogate climate crimes, you find perpetrators everywhere. But there is a deeper point. As Cambridge historian Robert Tombs argues in this newspaper, the industrial revolution has led to a quantum leap in the prosperity and welfare of mankind. It created the social capital that led to the modern science, medicine, and technology that today underpins the standard of living of every member of the G77. To treat the great sweep of world history as a catalogue of western crimes is to end in intellectual nihilism. The more it intrudes at Cop gatherings, the more it provokes a Trumpian backlash, and not just in the US. Executives at Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, and Exxon must be chuckling that so many useful idiots connive in this poisonous diversion. It is hard enough already to mobilise the capital and political will needed to decarbonise the world's energy, transport, industrial, and agro-chemical systems, without turning Cop27 into an ideological battleground of competing histories. The imperative is obvious: we must help Africa and developing Asia to roll out renewables as fast as possible by helping them secure access to the $130 trillion pool of global investment capital. Much unsung progress was already made last year in Glasgow. The US, UK, and the EU backed an $8.5 billion scheme to shut all of South Africa's coal plants by 2030, even though coal today pro){kind=link}
Though pessimists persist in seeing an empty glass, the Cop process has been a remarkable success
The alliance of “developing countries” calling for climate reparations at COP27 includes the Opec oil cartel and those states in Latin America and Southeast Asia most responsible for 21st Century deforestation.
The Group of 77 (actually 134 states) includes nations with nuclear weapons and space programmes. It includes the gas sheikhdom Qatar, with the world’s top per capita income, as well as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Emirates, which hosts an indoor ski resort with a chair-lift and five pistes on artificial snow in a desert shopping mall. It includes states that subsidise fossil fuels on a systematic scale. It includes Bolsonaro’s slash-and-burn Brazil.
The G77 includes China, which accounts for 30pc of current CO2 emissions, and is pursuing an aggressive drive for global superpower supremacy, while ridiculing the liberal West in the state-media as insolvent deadbeats.
These states can happily issue demands for climate “loss & damage” – on the official Cop agenda for the first time – because the reparations debate is framed in such a way that they are not the target of this multi-trillion liability claim.