 So let’s start with, really basically, what is climate reparations — what does that mean?

So
 climate reparations is a term that was coined by Maxine Burkett, who is
 an attorney and a practitioner, and a teacher in Hawaii.

She
 coined this term by writing a law review about what government could do
 to respond to climate harm, and assess all the harm that has been 
caused by so many groups and sanctioned by the government — and taxed 
double on it as well.

So
 really wrestling with all this major pollution and the fact that it 
didn’t just rob people of their actual goods, but of the vision of a 
future where we wouldn’t be fighting climate change.

She
 did this in a really incredible article in 2009, which came on the 
heels of a really great piece of litigation. I worked at Center for 
Race, Poverty, and Environment in 2009. The case that they had just 
finished was a massive effort led by a community of Alaskans in Kivalina
 — the 

So
 this case was about a community that could prove that their island 
landmass and their permanent sea ice was melting and that it was caused 
by climate change. So they sued Exxon Mobil — and got $89 million. Did 
they get that in real life? No, because Exxon fought and fought and 
fought them and appealed until they didn’t have to do anything about 
that.

(Remember that the next time Exxon tries to pretend like they’re a climate organization on Twitter.)

It’s kind of the precursor to all the climate liability cases happening now, right?

Yeah!
 And Ruth Hopkins, amazing human being. She is the daughter of the woman
 who was involved in that litigation, along with Luke Cole and a lot of 
other really great, smart people who recognize [climate reparations] is 
real. And we had to come up with a way to talk about harm when it feels 
like it’s everywhere, but we know it’s from something specific.

In
 2017, a couple of climate groups sort of bandied about the words 
“climate reparations” because reparations themselves have come in and 
out of fashion as people get a little woke — and then get scared. And so
 as reparations have come up, progressive people have been trying to 
figure out how they fit in. Because the work of environmentalism has 
avoided talking about people, racism, and sexism, and all those -isms 
that really make that money.

Given
 that a lot of this term has come and gone in a global context, it’s 
often described as loss and damage. And people think about it in terms 
of, how do you move money to people who will be forced to be climate 
refugees, who have to get up and leave because everything’s on fire?

So
 the folks who are facing that imminently, who are terrified of the 
truth, which is that their homelands are not safe and they will be 
people without land — are thinking about whose job it is to pay for it 
when the communities that are going to suffer first and worst.

They
 didn’t make those deals [to burn fossil fuels], didn’t get any benefits
 of it, weren’t asked, and frankly, shouldn’t be made to pay to 
relocate. That loss and damage conversation has been happening in the 
UN. It’s been happening at all of the COPs [UN climate change 
conferences]. Last year the Gulf South Center for Law and Policy held a —
 well, you know, it’s the South, so they do a lot of whiskey-related 
events — a whiskey and reparations event and a bunch of people came to 
talk about it.

It
 was one of those things that that made folks say: Right. So reparations
 is coming back. In the U.S. it has gone nowhere. Loss and damage hasn’t
 gone anywhere. But nobody will get the U.S. to admit that it’s been a 
bad partner. And there are internal situations that have to be dealt 
with. So Black reparations is just looking at the fact that the 
concentration of wealth on behalf of people who’ve made money hurting 
all of us is exactly corollary to the distribution of impacts, health 
impacts, loss of much shorter life income.

All
 of that stuff is connected. So climate reparations is really just 
trying to figure out how do you connect these twin harms and how do you 
add that to the conversation around racialized harm and racialized 
capital? There is not a single thing that exists in America that isn’t 
built on Black people’s bodies or Indigenous people’s suffering and 
relocation.

Yeah, the way that I usually explain climate reparations to people is: You fuck it up, you clean it up, right?

Yes. That’s exactly what it is. Right. Exactly.

When
 you get into a car accident, if you are at fault, you have to pay for 
the other person’s repairs, and that’s kind of what climate reparations 
is, right?

That’s
 right. It’s slow. The U.S. has its problems. The U.S. has racism, has 
relocation. It has tons of money being made on the backs of human beings
 who did not ask to be put in situations where their lives will be 
shortened by everything. But the U.S. itself is not the only container 
for this. England rivals it — having had a deeper hand in this for a 
longer period of time. Think about any number of island nations, 
including the British Virgin Islands, which are suddenly being given 
back to the people that live there just in time for them to get wiped 
out.

So
 if we would like a real conversation about climate reparations, we 
would be asking, why is the Crown returning all of this stuff just in 
time for people to get wiped out instead of offering them the 
opportunity to be able to move when they’re going to have the house? 
Because one in four people will become a climate refugee in our 
lifetime.

This is a good time to remember the full names of some of these companies like Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum.

Almost
 every time oil companies talk about this stuff and also this whole 
batch of tech pros in the climate space, they talk about the “energy 
poverty problem.” [That] you can’t act on climate now because that will 
make it so hard for developing countries to get a certain quality of 
life that you need. They will make this argument that it’s basically 
racist to not let India have coal or to not let Africa have coal when 
the reality is rich countries could just pay for those countries to 
transition to a cleaner energy. There is nothing stopping them from 
doing that. And the idea that somehow, it is bad for those countries to 
try to act on climate globally is a neat little rhetorical trick that 
they play.

Right.
 It doesn’t take into consideration that almost every one of the places 
that you just mentioned is actually fighting coal. Yeah, like 
decolonize.

So
 many different parts of India and Asia and Africa are in the middle of 
the fight of their lives, because every time we’ve ever had a win in the
 U.S., we’re like, yeah, we’ve killed coal. If we close our eyes and 
pretend that industry hasn’t moved offshore to an entirely different 
place without the benefit of our information of the health impacts, our 
resources to relocate people in government that, well, seven minutes ago
 we might have said have looser enforcement capacity.

I
 think we’re in a moment where we’re not feeling so smug about what our 
government can do. But we used to think, oh, it’s a jungle out there, 
quite literally — it’s nonsense that we can say and folks don’t want to 
have their water polluted or their air polluted or to be forced into 
industries where you could lose a limb and get black lung.

We
 have lots of proof here in the U.S. that people who give you black lung
 leave you to die in a hospital and don’t pay for your repair, or your 
community, if they even cover your funeral. One of the things that 
climate reparations could and should really focus on doing is resolving 
that question around coal because we’re going to be there with oil and 
gas and all the fossil fuel until we get rid of it.

I
 think that over the past couple of years, the climate movement has 
gotten more comfortable talking about racism and the intersections with 
misogyny and white supremacy and all of these other problems. Not where 
it needs to be, but I get trolled when I talk about it a lot less, to be
 honest. So I see an improvement. It feels like it’s becoming more 
mainstream to talk about it as this intersectional, holistic issue. And 
as a result of that, I’m seeing a lot of people come around to the idea 
of climate reparations and thinking that they invented it.

Because
 in the U.S. it runs up against white supremacist culture, maintenance, 
and the structure of philanthropy. So to call for climate reparations is
 to call into question the way our government operates, whether or not 
we should have free-market capitalism that allows people to plunder you 
to death. And so the idea that we can call for climate reparations is 
really a wholesale review of what the economy is made of.

We
 have to talk about treaty rights. We have to talk about the Green New 
Deal with sincerity. One of my favorite things about this moment of 
climate reparations, the remix, is the idea that we’re bringing it back 
at a time when the Green New Deal provides a roadmap for what it could 
do. It feels like a lot to me, like the teeth that could make a Green 
New Deal work because it’s a lot of great ideas about moving capital and
 people.

But
 if we don’t stop folks from making money, seize their assets so they 
don’t leave sick and dying people that they hurt on the sidewalk to die 
in a climate-related event, then we have some capital to make the Green 
New Deal happen that doesn’t just come from taxation credits and moving 
around the banking until it looks funny and everybody forgets to count. 
So I do think that this is a moment where that framework with the 
enforcement capacity of making polluters pay, stopping them at the door,
 frisking them for their assets, and then returning them back to the 
people they harmed.

I
 think the two things need each other. And that’s some of the boldness 
in terms of coming out. Or I would say is as one of those people, part 
of the reason why it’s more comfortable is because there are Black women
 yelling it — there are Black women calling for it, and building 
programs around it, and connecting the dots on it. And whether we’re 
talking about NAACP Climate and trying to figure out how to deal with 
climate finance. So we act for environmental justice, thinking through 
how do we connect the dots not just on the harm, but to how we got here 
into a narrative Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy on this based on 
how do we move this to connect the ecofeminist in Africa that’s working 
on Lake Chad? So the African Americans living in the Global South, 
inside the U.S., inside the north, that are struggling in Louisiana and 
Texas, where we do well in Appalachia and West Virginia, we are not in a
 unique moment.

We’re
 just in a place where there’s time for real alignment. And it has been a
 real pleasure of mine over the last two years to connect all of those 
dots, connect all of those people and then say, hey, wait a minute, 
there are Indigenous communities fighting for a land back. And guess 
what falls under the category of climate reparations? Land back.

I
 actually think in this moment where people are super focused about 
getting a new administration, overcoming the revolution, pushing for a 
climate. There’s a real opportunity to reconnect what’s happening in the
 U.S. to what’s happening in the Global South and the rest of the world 
and start building some Global South leadership that depends on the U.S.
 and bidding where it’s made mistakes. Climate reparations feels like a 
great way to do that. One of the things that’s really cool about it, 
Sonia Kolinsky, who has worked a lot with Maxine Burkett that’s thought 
about different kinds of reparations, Sandy Darity and Culburra, tons of
 other people have also thought about this. But the idea is generally 
that the first thing you’ve got to do is admit you broke something. You 
have to say you’re sorry. And then a second thing is you deal with 
people about what they need to get better and then you give it to them. 
And they are a part of a conversation about being brought back to 
wholeness or being moved or given the tools to adapt and build a 
different kind of housing so you could stay in your homeland.

Like
 these are conversations we can’t get in if the U.S. is still a bastard 
that can’t get involved in any conversations about climate because we’re
 still reeling from the last four years of awful.

Right. But can you say more about the “you need to say you’re sorry first”? Like why isn’t that…

The
 U.S. has been reluctant to do that because it usually means liability. 
My grandfather’s brother was the youngest person executed by the state 
of South Carolina. And it took so many years and a lot of dead people 
for them to apologize and say, “Yeah, sorry. So your grandpa’s brother 
was a kid. He couldn’t have lifted the implement and everyone in the 
town at the time knew it wasn’t him. We just wanted to execute a Black 
boy and we just did it.” I have siblings who have the same eyes.

It
 took another generation of people and forcing the government to 
apologize 70 years later, after almost all those people were dead, they 
said, “Oh, yeah, we totally did that.”

Because
 if they did it in the lifetime of the people that they harm, they would
 have to pay for it, given that the bill came due for the harm. Right? 
As Trump was being installed, the state said we don’t have to pay that. 
You know why? Because you won’t ever get this president if we take it to
 the highest court to respond to you. So he just walked off. And so this
 has happened to my family, but it’s also happened to communities 
dealing with black lung and Appalachia who were supposed to get the 
black lung fund.

That’s
 why we need to own up to an apology because it makes liability. It 
means you have to assess the harm that you’ve done to other people and 
engage them about resolving it. So if we don’t have acknowledgment come 
first, restitution and satisfaction will never come.

 Tamara, if you could design the perfect climate reparations policy, like, what would it look like?

So
 I actually think that the best-case scenario for climate reparations 
would be that we start to recognize that communities have to be dealt 
with in terms of the Green New Deal, like they are beneficiaries, like 
they are a series of folks who have been taken for hundreds of years of a
 ride they never signed up for. And we start looking at the harm to 
communities.

We
 look really closely at all the folks who’ve gotten all this fossil fuel
 money in the last couple of bailouts. We retract all of it. So first we
 take our money back from them.

Then
 we go after them through climate liability lawsuits to the government, 
no longer giving them subsidies, and cut off the faucet so we can stop 
spending good money after bad. And after we’ve done that, we put all 
that in a fund that, unlike the blackland, actually does respond to 
people who need to be to be rehoused, need to be moved to different 
communities, need to look for higher ground because maybe not today, 
maybe not tomorrow, but in 10 years, they’re not going to have a place 
to live if they’re sunny day flooding. I really love how we put such 
friendly names on horrifying things that will destroy you.

It’s like a positive feedback loop right? Yes, that actually sounds good.

So
 if you’re looking for higher ground right now and you aren’t 
independently wealthy and you can move to higher ground, I think you 
should be really smart about setting up a fund for people to be able to 
move to a place of their choice where resources to risk their lives. 
Now, that’s just happening at the community level. The Green New Deal 
has tons of ways that shows up in affordable housing and better 
transportation and community design and retraining for people. But at 
the same time, the U.S. has been a bad actor and expelled a bunch of 
things into the rest of the atmosphere, along with other bad actors 
globally.

And
 they have to think about what the pool of funds are for exactly what 
Amy mentioned, for people who are having to who are being chastised for 
getting an air conditioner and getting a car instead of a bicycle, if 
that’s what they choose because we’re not making the technology 
available.

So
 it’d be super great if we flattened all the licenses by paying for them
 so people get what they do so that I could move into better tech 
without having to pay the price tag for it.

Yeah,
 exactly. And also some of those places you got to get an air 
conditioner because it’s gotten too hot to live. Yeah, it’s gotten too 
hot to live because of the actions of, you know, companies and 
governments in the Global North.

And
 I think globally it would look like forgiveness of debt, pick a 
country, pay global debt. Like anybody who has been through the global 
debt is probably also first and worst to suffer in terms of climate 
change. So closing that so people will have to make a choice between 
fleeing and living is really important.

I
 also think it would be really, really great to start looking at the 
maps across geographies and pulling down all the walls because people 
are going to have to relocate. And as nation-states try to figure out 
who they want to save and who they literally are going to let die, we 
shouldn’t be building infrastructure to support that even in a 
hyper-militarized moment like the one we’re in.

So
 I do think that some of this has to happen in the U.S. A bunch of it is
 going to have to happen through states and municipalities suing the 
government and these perpetrators for bringing us here. But then the 
rest of it has to happen at the government, a government level from 
tribes and Indigenous communities to U.S. and Asia, U.S. and Europe, and
 everywhere. There’s a lot of transactions to be done and undone and 
none of it happens if we keep handing off all of our money to people who
 hate us and are trying to kill us. Yet coal, oil, and gas, if you’re 
out there, I’m talking to you.

But
 also the way I understand climate reparations is like if you did 
reparations for slavery and colonialism, you might deal with this 
already. Right? It’s kind of like the Global North becomes the debtors, 
right? And they are indebted to Africa and to Asia and the places that 
they stole from. And, you know, what would that look like?

Yeah,
 part of why this means so much to me as a person who shows up in a 
Black woman’s body, is that all the wealth that there is comes from 
Africa. Like I would be in West Africa, cold chillin’ if it wasn’t for —
 so all of us who have come to here through so many transactions that we
 were neither given accountability agency or any remuneration for, like 
the wealth of this country is in our bodies.

There,
 and in and in the lost opportunity, whether it’s genetic or epigenetic,
 which means not just this generation, but this one and everyone that 
could come through your body with the trauma that you’ve experienced, 
like just and answering that debt in a form of reparations would in fact
 deal with the fact that you don’t live where you live by accident.

Your
 zip code in terms of your health by accident. The racial covenants that
 have decided whether relatives even talk to you about communities that 
you live in, all of that stuff is wrapped into it. So the idea that we 
could do reparations without climate is silly. And to do climate without
 reparations is intentional blindness.

Hopefully the media will learn a lot and learn how to actually talk about climate reparations. That’s the goal.

I’m
 just so glad that you asked these questions and you wanted to have this
 chat because I do think it’s about to blow up and go big time. It’s the
 perfect time.

Transcription

The term climate reparations first came into the global climate conversation back in 2009. It disappeared for a while but has re-emerged in the past year or two. Environmental activist, organizer, lawyer, and all-around climate expert Tamara Toles O'Laughlin joins us to talk about where this idea came from, why it disappeared, and why it's back...hopefully to stay.

S2, Ep17 | Blood for Oil, with Antonia Juhasz

S2, Ep16 | No Better Time for Climate Reparations, with Tamara Toles O’Laughlin

Hot Take is a holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it. Hosted by real-life friends Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt—an essayist and a journalist— Hot Take offers a unique perspective on the issue of climate change. With a breath of fresh humanity and humor, conversation moves swiftly from cackling about the bad week an oil company had, to speaking seriously and passionately about the unequal distribution of climate impacts and our own experiences of climate grief. And then washing it down with a round of dad jokes! Every week, we’ll connect you with the latest climate news and with the journalists and storytellers trying to make sense of this complex issue to help you see the world through climate-colored glasses. We ended production on Hot Take at the end of 2022, but you can still access episodes here, or 

A holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it.

S2, Ep16 | No Better Time for Climate Reparations, with Tamara Toles O’Laughlin

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S2, Ep17 | Blood for Oil, with Antonia Juhasz