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It’s Time to Talk About Climate Reparations
How do we begin to give back what decades of fossil fuel polluters have taken away?
By Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt, Hot Take
Future Human has partnered with Hot Take, a podcast hosted by Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt, to share exclusive climate coverage and conversations with key figures leading the fight for human survival.
Maxine Burkett, a law professor at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, coined the term in a paper she wrote on the subject in 2009. In a nutshell, “climate reparations” translates the understanding of climate change as a monumental injustice that needs to be addressed into law and policy.
Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, a lawyer and the former North America director of 350.org, worked one of the nonprofits that supported the first case that got folks talking about climate reparations — Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil, in which the residents of Kivalina, Alaska attempted to hold Exxon accountable for its role in destroying their home.
Here, Toles O’Laughlin shares more about the past, present, and future of climate reparations, exactly what the Global North owes the Global South, and what’s owed to people of color in the Global North. Because if you recalculate global debt to account for all that was stolen through colonialism and slavery, it dramatically changes what is owed — and to whom.
The fact that debt is not calculated to account for the generations of people’s lives stolen, their ways of life outlawed and destroyed, the ecosystems wrecked, says a lot about what is valued. It’s time to fix that. In fact, it’s too late not to.
Listen to the episode:
Amy Westervelt: So let’s start with, really basically, what is climate reparations — what does that mean?
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Just explain it to me like I’m six.
