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Articles by Tom Athanasiou

Tom Athanasiou is a long-time left green, a former software engineer, a technology critic and, most recently, a climate justice activist. He is the author of Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor and the co-author of Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming. In 2000, with Paul Baer, he founded EcoEquity, an activist think tank focused on the development and promotion of fair and potentially viable approaches to emergency climate stabilization. This work has taken shape as the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework. Tom is now the director of EcoEquity.

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  • Wealthy nations should be held accountable for their actions

    Oxfam has just taken a big step -- it wasn't easy, and they deserve heaps of kudos for it. It has called for a mandatory, global adaptation-funding regime, one that's on the right scale, or at least the right order of magnitude. It would make national obligations to pay -- to help poor and vulnerable communities adapt to the now inevitable impacts of climate change -- contingent on historical responsibility for the impacts of climate change, and on ability to pay.

    I couldn't be more pleased, and not just because Oxfam's "Adaptation Financing Index" is closely related to our own work in developing a "Responsibility and Capacity Index." What's really important here is that a big outfit like Oxfam has stuck its neck out and spoken the simple truth. Let's hope they get some support for it, because they're sure going to get some pushback from the realos.

    Tom Athanasiou Climate & Energy

  • When vacations turn into work

    If I was a real blogger, I would occasionally post little bits that didn't really have much to do with my principle concerns, but which I found illuminating or amusing, right?

    I submit this, which just surfaced as I was clearing my desk: "The Tyranny of the 2nd Home."

    It's even in the "Escapes" section.

    Tom Athanasiou Cities

  • It runs together several distinct things

    There's been a nice, coherent-if-incipient debate on cap-and-trade on this blog lately, which I've alas been too busy to reply to. But I wanted to throw in just one small thought: it just might be time to ditch the whole notion. It conflates at least three things together, and as they are all quite different, the "trading debate" as we know it is both confusing and confused.

    Tom Athanasiou Climate & Energy

  • The ethics of climate change

    It's probably rude to point to this RealClimate post on a recent meeting at the University of Washington on Ethics and Climate Change, since it mentions me. But it's really Paul Baer, EcoEquity's Research Director, that attended, and who got top billing as the author of the "influential" (and out of press) book Dead Heat.

    The real issue here, as far as we're concerned, is the notion of "developmental equity," which we are trying to develop and defend as a normative and politically salient alternative to "equal per capita emissions rights."

    Anyway, this is worth a quick read. The comments are many, and besides, authors Eric Steig and Gavin Schmidt prove the worth of the philosophical approach by defining an "Easterbrook fallacy."

    I knew there had to be a name for it.

    Tom Athanasiou Climate & Energy