The super-rich and the mega-powerful have apportioned the world into their own exclusive domains: huge private oil fields, mining sites, fishing grounds, timberlands, and agro-industrial regions. The privatization of public resources—and their attendant exploitation, exhaustion, and destruction—has been egregious to the planet and its inhabitants.
The current unequal and exclusive international economic world order that cultivates an irresponsible and wasteful lifestyle has left 2.5 billion people in poverty, 1.1 billion people without drinking water, and more than 1 billion people hungry.
That’s where we are now in time and place: Earth Inc. is annihilating the very things that sustain life, including the majority of humanity, in order to maintain an obscenely luxurious lifestyle for a handful. To illustrate: the top 20 percent of the world’s richest people consume 85 percent of the world’s output, while 2.8 billion people live on less than two dollars a day.
If the world’s peoples won’t act now, we foresee the end of days: more heat waves and more heavy rainfall, more droughts and more flooding, more and harsher storms, rising sea level and disappearing coastlines, and lack of drinking water.
At the Copenhagen Summit, the so-called world’s leaders sought to quickly stabilize greenhouse gases to a level such that already vulnerable ecosystems are sustained, food production is not threatened, and the world’s general economic growth is continued.
But stopping and reversing the devastation of our only world cannot be achieved because the Copenhagen Summit is still framed by apportioning the world’s resources, not on apportioning the responsibilities for its sustenance for future generations. The issue of justice, which was glaringly absent in the formal discussions, should have guided the conference because the truth is: The few who are rich—and more economically, financially, and technologically capable to ensure the planet’s survival—caused most of the climate change, and the many who are poor are the first and worst affected by its effects.
Industrialized countries which cause 76 percent of accumulated emissions in the atmosphere must bear the greatest share of the burden to reduce these gases caused by their economies and lifestyles.
Aside from being subjected to stricter requirements concerning reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases, rich countries should also help developing countries financially and technologically in reducing their own greenhouse gas emission. They must finance mitigation and adaptation actions in developing countries. This is not a work of charity, but a moral obligation to these countries, and the trillions of dollars used to bailout banks and companies show that the money is there.
Third World countries cannot be made to bear unjust restrictions on their development. Even as life-sustaining resources are disappearing, people from poor countries need to enjoy basic human rights—guaranteed jobs and livelihood, adequate food, clean air and water, and basic services like housing, education, health services, and electricity—social protection that is bound to be further weakened by this crisis.
States and corporations which have amassed wealth at the expense of the health of the world and its inhabitants cannot be relied on to do the right thing and muster the political will to do what it should. Pressure from the people of the world is needed—with the strength of scientific and technical arguments, as well as the power of solidarity and the idea of shared wealth and power.
