Our Warming Planet Needs New Global Green Deal

The EU needs a 'global' Green New Deal that ends the West's hypocritical relationship with overseas fossil fuel investment, writes Muhammad Magassy.

Muhammed Magassy has been a Gambian National Assembly member since 2012. He is also a member of Parliament for ECOWAS (The Economic Community of West African States).

Judge the gift by its giver. It was very generous of Norway to support a comprehensive satellite map of the world's vulnerable forests, which will be used to monitor, stop, and, ideally, reverse deforestation, much of which is driven by industrial agriculture and contributes to climate change.

Needless to say, tropical deforestation takes place in the Global South.

But given that Norway is the world's third-largest exporter of oil and gas, after only Russia and Qatar, is it not strange that Oslo is more focused on other countries' environmental conditions and not its own contributions? This is the problem with a great deal of Western environmentalism.

Namely, double standards, blaming the Global South for economic pressures that the West itself creates, while offering no solution for the Global South that acknowledges the reality of environmental harm but whose vulnerable economies dependent on these industries.

Progress in combating climate change would require the West to, first, change how it does business in the Global South; second, increase its commitment to fighting climate change—including demand-driven carbon emissions; and, third, coming up with a 'Global Green New Deal,' that partners with the Global South.

First, consider Western relationships with the Global South.

The EU has a much-ballyhooed 'Green Deal,' but the same EU hopes to invest $100 billion into fossil fuels—my...