"You cannot warm yourself by the fire and curse the one who lit it." - old hill proverb
Nepal is still counting its dead. The flash floods and landslides that tore through the country's hills and valleys last week has claimed more than 1250 lives as more than 4000 are still missing. They have wrecked homes, washed out roads, and left a scar that will take a long time to heal. In the aftermath, Kathmandu has done what a lot of climate-vulnerable nations now do: pointed a finger outward. Specifically, at China, India and the United States the world's three largest emitters and floated the idea that these countries owe Nepal compensation for the damage.
It's an understandable impulse. It is also, on closer inspection, a fairly foolish one.
Skewed logic.
The argument goes something like this: these three countries burn the most fossil fuels, so they've done the most to warm the planet, so they should pay when a warmer planet floods Nepal's rivers. Clean and simple.
Except Nepal isn't a bystander to the industrial world it wants to bill. It's a customer. A happy, enthusiastic, deeply dependent customer.
Walk through any Nepali city and count the cars. Nepal doesn't manufacture any of them, from engine to the tyres all are imported from another countries. Its roads are jammed with vehicles it never had to build a factory for. The buses on its roads weren't built at home either, and neither were the motorcycles that dominate its streets or the trucks that haul its goods. All of it arrives fully assembled from the same economies Nepal now wants to hold responsible for climate damage.
The internet Nepal relies on to organise, coordinate, and vent its outrage runs on infrastructure it didn't build. Almost none of the hardware behind it, from the servers to the undersea cables, came from within its own borders. The phones people are filming the floods on were designed and manufactured in China, India, Korea, and the US. Kathmandu's buildings stand on cement that was imported. So did the steel in its bridges and the diesel that runs its generators. None of it is homegrown, and it's imported specifically because industrial economies figured out how to mass-produce it cheaply.
You cannot spend years importing the fruits of someone else's industrialisation and then send that same industrial base a compensation invoice for the emissions that made the fruits possible in the first place. That's not climate justice. That's wanting the cake, eating it, and then suing the bakery for the calories.
It is a choice you have made.
This isn't a case of Nepal being force-fed modernity against its will. Every imported car, every internet connection, every bag of cement was a choice, made because it promised a better, faster, more prosperous life. Nepal wants the GDP growth that comes with paved roads and digital connectivity. It wants the convenience of a smartphone and the mobility of a motorbike. Nobody is holding a gun to the country's head, forcing it to buy Chinese-made buses or Indian-refined petrol.
If Nepal genuinely believed China, India and the US were reckless polluters whose products it wanted no part of, the honest move would be austerity, cutting itself off from imported vehicles, imported electronics, and the emissions-heavy supply chains that bring them in. Instead, Nepal keeps buying and keeps industrialising by proxy, and then, when the weather turns violent, insists that the bill for its own consumption choices belongs on someone else's desk.
Blaming the manufacturer while using the product
There's a version of this argument that applies far beyond Nepal, and it's worth naming: it is easy to demand a country stop emitting while your own economy runs on that country's factories, container ships, and power grids. It is much harder to actually opt out.
Nepal's flash floods are real, the deaths are real, and the argument that a warming climate is making Himalayan weather more volatile has serious scientific backing. None of that is in dispute. What's in dispute is the idea that the correct response to a shared global problem one that every consuming, importing, industrialising nation is complicit in, Nepal included is to single out three suppliers and ask them to write a cheque, while continuing to buy everything they sell.
If Nepal wants to talk about responsibility, that conversation has to include its own appetite for the products of the very industrialisation it's condemning. Otherwise, it isn't a claim for justice. It's just blame-shifting with better PR.
