Tom Athanasiou, co-founder EcoEquity, appeared on  Tom Palmer’s Sane Society show a few months back, discussing equity and climate change.

An interesting discussion. Here are two excerpts:

23:57 “There is this gigantic cartel which has got its tentacles around human civilization. And for lack of a better term, let’s call it the fossil fuel cartel. It’s countries and it’s companies, right, and we’re all implicated in its operation cause we’re all dependent on it’s infrastructure, right, and if we allow it to do what it needs to do to be maximally profitable, we are toast, because the oil companies already have enough coal and oil on their books to blow us so far past two degrees … identified reserves, not resources, that are already priced into traded stocks, so that, … let me put it this way: in the unlikely chance that we decided not to commit civilizational suicide, it would cause a crash in fossil stocks, so they actually have a baked in interest in civilizational suicide. They have to do it.”

2:45 “Well you know the per capita thing is a bit of a problem, because people have a sense that what would be fair would be to cut the pie up into equal shares, but the thing is, the carbon pie has already been eaten, it’s a very difficult problem because we’re already over budget.   … we’re at 392(ppm) now.”