Climate Change and Global Development: Towards a Post-Kyoto Paradigm‪?‬

Introduction Climate change expresses, on a world scale, the fundamental contradiction between capitalist development and ecological sustainability. The climate is a global commons--even the World Bank calls it a 'global public good' (World Bank 2006). Consumer capitalism and its rapacious appetite for commodification have critically undermined this foundation for human survival. As noted by key government players--from the Pentagon Report on abrupt climate change, to the British government's Stern report--climate change poses a profound challenge to the continued sustainability of capitalist accumulation (Schwartz and Randall 2003; Stern 2007). Stern for instance likened the impact of climate change to that of a third world war--at least as devastating as its predecessors (Stern 2007: 2). With the globe put on a war footing we sit on the cusp of a great restructuring that offers the possibility of an up-turning in North-South relations. As the old order crumbles we live in a hiatus, caught between one world and the next, where political strategy must apprehend the full dimensions of the contradictions we face.