Climate Justice Social Change Leadership

Current climate change inequalities are calling for innovative social change leadership. An emerging literature and awareness on the inherent climate inequality but also on the economic gains and losses of a warming globe being distributed unequally between countries is the basis of redistribution schemes. In the current financialization of climate justice via taxation-and-bonds-redistribution strategies, social change leadership is needed more than ever before in the history of humankind. Current endeavors to set-up a scheme for some countries’ financing green bonds via carbon taxation, while other countries are climate bonds premium recipients demand for top-down leadership of global governance institutions. Climate bonds recipients would thereby be funded by the climate taxation countries. The countries economically gaining from climate change and being climate flexible as well as countries with high CO2 emissions and not changing CO2 emissions levels as well as consuming goods and services from other countries as well as having favorable bank lending rates could be taxed to transfer funds via climate bonds for regions of the world that are losing from global warming and are not climate flexible as well as countries with low CO2 emissions and lowering CO2 emissions levels that are producing goods and services that are consumed in other parts of the world as well as having unfavorable bank lending rates and hence higher industry financing costs. The proposed taxation and bonds strategy could aid in broad-based and long-term market incentivization of a transition to a clean energy economy. The bonds could be tradable and issued controlled by global governance institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. Experiences of the past, however, have shown that top-down implementations of aspirational goals need reality-checks and on-the-ground backups with bottom-up participatory decision making. This concerted top-down and bottom-up strategy calls for a broad-based social change leadership approach