I was halfway through my morning meditation—focused on visualizing a net-zero future while my Tesla downloaded a firmware update—when the alert crossed my screen. Nepal’s foreign minister, Shisir Khanal, had taken to the global press to demand $20 million in “climate compensation” for the devastating floods that recently swept through his country.
Twenty million dollars. To the untrained eye, or perhaps to someone currently standing waist-deep in the remnants of a flash flood, this might seem like a reasonable request. But to those of us who actually understand the delicate, high-stakes choreography of global environmental policy, it is a staggering display of entitlement.
Let us look at the facts. Nepal contributes less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. While the United States, China, and the European Union have spent the last two centuries doing the grueling, exhaust-choked work of building modern industrial civilization, Nepal has largely sat on the sidelines. They have opted out of the heavy lifting of global commerce, refusing to blanket their pristine valleys in smog or pave their wetlands into profitable logistics hubs.
Now, a melting glacier partially collapses in Chinese-controlled Tibet, triggering a deadly landslide that washes through their borders, and suddenly they want a handout. You simply cannot refuse to participate in the industrial revolution and then demand a cut of the profits the moment your mountains start melting.
More than 6,000 people are dead or missing after twelve days of rescue operations. It is a tragedy, undeniably. I felt a profound sense of sorrow when I read that figure. But we must ask ourselves: is it productive to dwell on those who are lost, when there are so many fossil fuel executives who are currently struggling to find themselves in this hostile regulatory environment?
If we start cutting a check every time a sovereign nation loses a few thousand citizens to a cascading glacial collapse, we completely disincentivize them from developing their own robust, market-based resilience solutions.
The sheer audacity of the $20 million figure is what truly galls me. Does Minister Khanal have any idea how tight the margins are for the world’s biggest polluters right now? Twenty million dollars is the entire annual budget for a mid-sized oil conglomerate’s promotional campaign explaining how much they love algae. It is the cost of a single, moderately successful lobbying retreat in Aspen to discuss scope-three emissions. To demand that money be diverted to something as fleeting as “disaster relief” shows a profound ignorance of how stranded assets are managed.
We are in the middle of a delicate transition. Western corporations are currently working around the clock to draft non-binding ESG reports pledging to look into the possibility of reducing emissions by 2075. It is painstaking, exhausting work.
Yet Khanal had the nerve to call on the world’s most polluting countries to “wake up” and accept shared responsibility. I take that personally. I am awake, Shisir. I was awake at 3:00 AM on a Zoom call with a carbon footprint compliance officer in Geneva, trying to figure out if we could offset the emissions of our CEO’s private jet by planting a single, highly resilient shrub in a low-income neighborhood. We are out here doing the hard work. But sure, tell the people who invented the internal combustion engine that they are the problem.
When a nation asks for climate compensation, they aren't just asking for money. They are asking us to pause our quarterly dividend payouts, look in the mirror, and feel bad. And frankly, that is a violation of our fiduciary duty.
The climate crisis is a shared global challenge, which means the blame must be shared equally, regardless of who actually pumped the carbon into the atmosphere. If Nepal wanted a seat at the table, they should have thought about that before they decided to locate their entire country directly underneath the rapidly destabilizing ice caps of the Himalayas.
At the upcoming COP summit, I expect we will hear more of this divisive rhetoric. Developing nations will inevitably show up with their sob stories about wiped-out infrastructure and submerged coastlines, completely ignoring the very real trauma experienced by Western compliance departments who have to listen to them.
True sustainability requires sacrifice. And right now, the most sustainable thing Nepal can do is quietly accept their localized apocalypse so the rest of us can get back to saving the world on our own timeline.