September 1, 2022 • 18 mins
What kind of ‘system change’ is needed to seriously cope with the climate crisis? To prevent the strong from polluting freely, we need nothing short of replacing the dysfunctional international system with a democratic federal framework for the world.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:09):
Ever since scientists started warning us about the enormous danger of man-made global warming,
it was clear that this is a problemof such a scale, a global scale,
that solving it would require some kind of human collaborationand organization at a level that is way above the local nation-state.
However, the attempt to solve it through international institutionsand agreements has proved dangerously ineffective.
(00:35):
The past three decades have been a very long timeto pull the brakes on greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet despite all the fancy meetings and summits, conventions and reports, protocols and panels,
the rate of greenhouse gas emissions in the world has not fallen,or even flattened, but has continued to soar.
Today it is more than 65% higherthan what it was back in the late '80s,
(01:00):
when national governments started negotiating aboutwhat they were willing or not willing to do about it.
This colossal failure of the international system to deal with the climate crisis
contains therefore a really important lessonfor anyone who is worried not just about the climate,
but about the ability of humanity to respond to any of theglobal threats and challenges that we are increasingly facing.
(01:25):
In this short video I will describethe major pitfalls of the current system,
and the outlines of an alternative possible system that would be able to safeguard our future.
At the very heart of the climate crisisis basically a simple problem of injustice.
Science tells us that when people burn fossil fuels- coal, oil and gas - it’s going eventually to harm other people,
(01:51):
mainly by intensifying extreme weather events such as droughts,storms, heatwaves and floods, and raising the levels of the oceans.
We also know that the billions of poor people in the world,
precisely those who use the least fossil fuelsand therefore are least responsible for this problem,
are the ones who are going to suffer the most,because their communities are the least equipped to face those disasters.
(02:15):
In an ideal world, high inner morality and good social norms
would have been enough to make everyone useonly clean energies and refrain from causing harmful pollution.
But unfortunately, in reality,we know that in order to prevent injustice
we cannot just leave it to the potential harm-giversto decide freely whether they want to harm other people or not.
(02:38):
There must be a system, a justice system, to hold accountable those who harm others.
The justice systems that we have today within our nation statesare based, of course, exactly on this principle.
That victims, for example, can sue those who harm them, in court,
and receive a compensationthat would deter others from causing similar harms.
(03:01):
Yet while greenhouse gases in the atmosphere do not stopat national borders, and the harms they inflict apply globally,
our existing justice systems are still confinedto the very narrow territory of the nation state.
Thus making it nearly impossible for those harmedby climate change to sue those that caused it.
(03:21):
Now the problem with the international system, is that rather than challenging the principle of national sovereignty,
that divides humanity to completely separate jurisdictions,it sanctifies this division and reinforces it!
How? Well, the very cornerstoneof the international order is international agreements,
which means that if some governmentsdo not agree to comply with an agreement,
(03:45):
if they prefer to allow their citizens and corporationsto pollute the entire world and harm all of humanity,
well, according to the explicit rules of theinternational system, they can. And so they do.
This is why the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,
that all the governments signed back in 1992in the so-called first ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio,
(04:10):
did not contain any binding measuresagainst the emissions of greenhouse gases.
The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 was also a voluntary agreement,so the greatest polluter, the United States, did not join it.
Canada did join, but then withdrew from itafter finding a new giant reservoir of fossil fuels, the tar sands.
(04:32):
In 2009 in Copenhagen the great Conference of Parties came,surprise-surprise, to a dead end.
And in 2015 in the Paris Agreement the governments agreedto set for themselves their own targets for emission reductions,
knowing that if they choose very low targets, or don’t meet those targets, or pull out from the agreement completely,
(04:54):
there is no justice system above them to hold them accountable.
Not surprisingly, the targets that they chose for themselves were so unambitious,
that even if they all meet them, it’s expected to pushglobal warming up to 3°C beyond the pre-industrial natural baseline.
(05:14):
To understand how dangerous that would be,think about it that, in the ice ages, tens of thousands of years ago,
the world was on average only 3°C colderthan what it was just 150 years ago, when we started burning coal.
This means that making the earth 3°C warmer puts us at huge risk.
(05:37):
It could push us beyond the tipping pointand lead us to lose all the ice in the world!
If that happens sea levels will rise by as much as 70 meters,sending entire cities and states deep underwater.
That would be a very high price to pay for maintainingthe freedom and the sovereignty of national governments
(05:59):
to do whatever they like, regardless of howtheir decisions affect and harm us, the rest of humanity.
Publicly naming and shaming those governments can feel goodbut it is dangerously far from the bare minimum that we really need.
Which is, that as long as their decisionshave power over our lives and our future,
(06:19):
we need nothing less than a right to vote those decisions down.
How? So, before the American Revolution of 1776, the settlers told the British government:
‘if you want to tax us, and have powerto decide how we live our lives,
you need to let us be represented in your parliament,our parliament, so that we can take such decisions together’.
(06:45):
Their slogan was‘No taxation without representation’.
Today, the reality of the global climate crisis should make us realizethat what we need now is a kind of a global revolution,
a conceptual and institutional revolution, that will tell every polluterand every national government in the world one very simple thing:
(07:06):
Decisions that affect only yourselves, that’s your business, decide as you will.
But any decision whose impact goes beyond your bordersto affect the lives of people elsewhere, you have no right to take them alone.
The most you can do is bring them as proposalsto be approved in a higher federal institution on the supra-national level,
(07:29):
where all the humans affectedwill have an equal say in their approval.
This means that above all the national parliamentsand governments and courts and above all the multinational corporations
we should have one federal world parliament
that will allow all of us to take partin legislating a global rule of law, of a global justice system.
(07:53):
This global rule of law should then be enforcedby the world federal executive branch,
the federal government of humanity,by humanity and for humanity.
These are not just clichés. This is our planetand our future, so then it must also be our choice.
Our slogan should be‘No emission without permission. Global democracy now!’
(08:16):
And sure enough, we are so usedto the current system and so immersed in it,
that a democratic world federationis something that people find hard to even imagine.
But this is the only real alternative to the anarchicinternational system that divides us today, and nothing less will do.
In a reality where we have one global market system,and one global ecological system,
(08:40):
national independence is a myth, a pie in the sky, that has to go,
and be replaced with a new, democratic, institutional systemfit for global interdependence.
It will enable us to finally solve together, not only the climate crisis,
but plenty of other injustices and inequalities that plague and endanger our world.
(09:02):
With regard to the climate, we need a global tax systemso that we can start taxing fossil fuels globally to reduce their emissions.
Until then, national restrictions on emissions, if there are any,
to a great degree just incentivize polluting industries to go off-shore,
to countries where the governments are too weak or too corrupt to do anything.
(09:24):
While green activists surely agreethat a global justice system would have been a very desirable thing,
it still sounds to them too big and too ambitious.
They fear that achieving it requires too muchenergy and time that we simply don’t have.
The danger, they say, is so great that we just haveto find a solution even within the current system.
(09:45):
But then, we have wasted more than three precious decades trying to get this unworkable system to work.
Is there really a chance thatin the next years it will do anything differently?
So the climate activists hope, for one thing, that as thescientific evidence on global warming continues to pile up,
that even the most ardent deniers of the problem will finally get it,
(10:09):
and then, even just out of sheer self-interest to protect themselves and their children,
they will be ready, surely, to give upon fossil fuels and leave them in the ground.
But would they? Well, many people are not aware of this number, but the amount of all the fossil fuels
that have been found and are still in the ground, is almost 4 times bigger than the amount of all
(10:34):
the fossil fuels that humans have usedsince the industrial revolution began.
These proven reserves worth a lot of money, for a lot ofpowerful people and national governments who own those resources.
And as much as it will be hardfor each of them to give up their share of the loot,
it will be far harder for them to give it up voluntarily.
(10:55):
You see, even when they realizewhat those fuels are doing to our climate,
as long as there will be no one to force all of them to give it up,
too many of them will be in the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’,
saying (11:07):
“yeah, I would have been willing to give up on my share, but only if I knew that the others are doing so as well,
because otherwise my sacrifice won’t make much of a difference, would it?
And the others must be thinking only of themselvesand their children. So, well, sorry, so should I.
Now is not time for a moral high-ground,
(11:28):
Now is the time to take this money and finda literally high ground where my children can live safely,
and then surround it with a wallto stop the climate refugees from coming in.”
So, If we want the owners and shareholdersof fossil fuels to leave them in the ground,
we cannot leave to them the freedom to decide about it themselves. We have a stake in it, and we must have a voice, and a vote.
(11:52):
No emission without permission, global democracy now! That’s the key.
But until we have it, the climate activists say that we can actuallymake sure that at least some of the fossil fuels will stay in the ground,
by simply not buying them. So they make the effortto reduce their own consumption by riding more on bikes and buses
and less on airplanes and so on, and they work hardto convince their cities and states to move to green energies.
(12:19):
This work is good, but it has a very serious limitation.
That in a global economy, when some people use less fossil fuels,there is then more supply of those fuels than demand,
and so the prices start to also go down. And when the pricesgo down, and they go down globally because it's a global market,
more people in the world start using them more,because hey, it’s cheap!
(12:42):
So you make all this effort to get your country to reduce its consumption,
only to find that even if you succeed, it ends up, what?
encouraging other people in the world to use more?
That is yet another pitfall of voluntary and local action.
One good thing that voluntary action did help to achieve
(13:02):
is the big reduction that happened in the prices of renewable energies in the past couple of decades.
It was the voluntary decision of several governments to subsidize clean energies that boosted their mass production,
which then led to a fall in their prices.
All of this has led over the past 20 yearsto a sharp increase in the use of clean energies,
(13:23):
at the average rate of almost 15% every year.
This is a very good trend, which should remind usof the importance of governmental intervention in the economy.
But when we look at the larger global picture,it is clearly really not fast enough.
In fact, clean energies’ starting point was so tiny,
(13:43):
that despite this rapid growth over two long decades,
by about 2020 they still comprise about 5% of global energy usage.
Fossil fuels, on the other hand, still supply 85% of the world’s energy.
Their share is so large,
that while their rate of growth in those two decades has been slower, less than 2% a year,
(14:07):
it meant an increase in net production that was by far larger than that of the renewable energies.
And this is why the rate of emissions continued to rise, rather than fall.
If these trends continue, it will take the clean energiesmore than 20 or 25 years until they replace fossil fuels
as the major source of energy.
(14:28):
This is too slow.
And we should be very worried, knowing that,
as soon as the fossil fuels companiesstart feeling that the competition is getting serious,
they will be able to fight back by lowering their large profit margins
and start selling their titanic reserves for a lower price.
Most importantly, as long as the national governments are divided and competing with each other, small and under-funded,
(14:52):
it’s super easy for the fossil fuels interest groupsto divide and rule them,
to buy politicians, to buy media, to buy even people in academia,
to make sure that their business is not under any real threat.
To check the power of this global industry,
the world's citizens need to have their own united federal government that will be able to do that job.
(15:15):
Because even if the green hopeswill come true, and somehow by voluntarism alone
clean energies will replace the fossil fuels in time,
humanity is still going face the huge challenge of dealing with the effects of the warming
that has been injected into the climate system during all these long decades of inaction.
We might, and might not, be saved from the worst scenarios of sea level rise,
(15:40):
but extreme storms and droughts and floods are still expectedto get worse and wreak havoc on hundreds of millions of people.
Helping and saving those victims from this injusticemust not be a question of voluntary charity,
that those who got rich by usingfossil fuels might give and might not.
(16:00):
It has to be funded by a global tax system,
which can only be imposed by a federal government of the whole world.
Which brings us to the final and very important point.In order to defend the fossil fuels industry,
their lobby came up with two influential arguments.
The first, was that putting a tax on fossil fuelsin order to reduce their consumption,
(16:23):
would actually make the poor suffer the most,
because they would not be able to afford even the small amount of energy that they need.
The second, was that the people of the rich nations of the world,
who got rich by consuming so much fossil fuel,
don’t have the right to tell the poor to avoid thosesame fuels that are necessary for their development.
(16:45):
Our children will find it hard to believe that anyone really believed these arguments.
The right way to help the poor, of course, is not to let themalso pollute and harm others as we did.
What a crazy idea!
The right way to help them is to subsidize clean energy for them!
To put a tax on pollution, to start taxing the richest 1%,
(17:07):
and then we have enough money to help all of us, including the poor, to make the transition.
We need to tax the harm givers, and use the money to help their victims cope with the disasters that they did not cause.
Is that so complicated?
In this video I explained why in the anarchic system that we have,
(17:28):
that legally divides us, it is so difficult.
And why in order to bring about global justicewe must unite into one global democratic system.
It is true that climate activists cannot bring this change alone,
but if they join hands with the other groupsthat fight for real global democracy and justice,
then I am confident that together, we can.
Ever since scientists started warning us about the enormous danger of man-made global warming,
it was clear that this is a problemof such a scale, a global scale,
that solving it would require some kind of human collaborationand organization at a level that is way above the local nation-state.
However, the attempt to solve it through international institutionsand agreements has proved dangerously ineffective.
(00:35):
The past three decades have been a very long timeto pull the brakes on greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet despite all the fancy meetings and summits, conventions and reports, protocols and panels,
the rate of greenhouse gas emissions in the world has not fallen,or even flattened, but has continued to soar.
Today it is more than 65% higherthan what it was back in the late '80s,
(01:00):
when national governments started negotiating aboutwhat they were willing or not willing to do about it.
This colossal failure of the international system to deal with the climate crisis
contains therefore a really important lessonfor anyone who is worried not just about the climate,
but about the ability of humanity to respond to any of theglobal threats and challenges that we are increasingly facing.
(01:25):
In this short video I will describethe major pitfalls of the current system,
and the outlines of an alternative possible system that would be able to safeguard our future.
At the very heart of the climate crisisis basically a simple problem of injustice.
Science tells us that when people burn fossil fuels- coal, oil and gas - it’s going eventually to harm other people,
(01:51):
mainly by intensifying extreme weather events such as droughts,storms, heatwaves and floods, and raising the levels of the oceans.
We also know that the billions of poor people in the world,
precisely those who use the least fossil fuelsand therefore are least responsible for this problem,
are the ones who are going to suffer the most,because their communities are the least equipped to face those disasters.
(02:15):
In an ideal world, high inner morality and good social norms
would have been enough to make everyone useonly clean energies and refrain from causing harmful pollution.
But unfortunately, in reality,we know that in order to prevent injustice
we cannot just leave it to the potential harm-giversto decide freely whether they want to harm other people or not.
(02:38):
There must be a system, a justice system, to hold accountable those who harm others.
The justice systems that we have today within our nation statesare based, of course, exactly on this principle.
That victims, for example, can sue those who harm them, in court,
and receive a compensationthat would deter others from causing similar harms.
(03:01):
Yet while greenhouse gases in the atmosphere do not stopat national borders, and the harms they inflict apply globally,
our existing justice systems are still confinedto the very narrow territory of the nation state.
Thus making it nearly impossible for those harmedby climate change to sue those that caused it.
(03:21):
Now the problem with the international system, is that rather than challenging the principle of national sovereignty,
that divides humanity to completely separate jurisdictions,it sanctifies this division and reinforces it!
How? Well, the very cornerstoneof the international order is international agreements,
which means that if some governmentsdo not agree to comply with an agreement,
(03:45):
if they prefer to allow their citizens and corporationsto pollute the entire world and harm all of humanity,
well, according to the explicit rules of theinternational system, they can. And so they do.
This is why the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,
that all the governments signed back in 1992in the so-called first ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio,
(04:10):
did not contain any binding measuresagainst the emissions of greenhouse gases.
The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 was also a voluntary agreement,so the greatest polluter, the United States, did not join it.
Canada did join, but then withdrew from itafter finding a new giant reservoir of fossil fuels, the tar sands.
(04:32):
In 2009 in Copenhagen the great Conference of Parties came,surprise-surprise, to a dead end.
And in 2015 in the Paris Agreement the governments agreedto set for themselves their own targets for emission reductions,
knowing that if they choose very low targets, or don’t meet those targets, or pull out from the agreement completely,
(04:54):
there is no justice system above them to hold them accountable.
Not surprisingly, the targets that they chose for themselves were so unambitious,
that even if they all meet them, it’s expected to pushglobal warming up to 3°C beyond the pre-industrial natural baseline.
(05:14):
To understand how dangerous that would be,think about it that, in the ice ages, tens of thousands of years ago,
the world was on average only 3°C colderthan what it was just 150 years ago, when we started burning coal.
This means that making the earth 3°C warmer puts us at huge risk.
(05:37):
It could push us beyond the tipping pointand lead us to lose all the ice in the world!
If that happens sea levels will rise by as much as 70 meters,sending entire cities and states deep underwater.
That would be a very high price to pay for maintainingthe freedom and the sovereignty of national governments
(05:59):
to do whatever they like, regardless of howtheir decisions affect and harm us, the rest of humanity.
Publicly naming and shaming those governments can feel goodbut it is dangerously far from the bare minimum that we really need.
Which is, that as long as their decisionshave power over our lives and our future,
(06:19):
we need nothing less than a right to vote those decisions down.
How? So, before the American Revolution of 1776, the settlers told the British government:
‘if you want to tax us, and have powerto decide how we live our lives,
you need to let us be represented in your parliament,our parliament, so that we can take such decisions together’.
(06:45):
Their slogan was‘No taxation without representation’.
Today, the reality of the global climate crisis should make us realizethat what we need now is a kind of a global revolution,
a conceptual and institutional revolution, that will tell every polluterand every national government in the world one very simple thing:
(07:06):
Decisions that affect only yourselves, that’s your business, decide as you will.
But any decision whose impact goes beyond your bordersto affect the lives of people elsewhere, you have no right to take them alone.
The most you can do is bring them as proposalsto be approved in a higher federal institution on the supra-national level,
(07:29):
where all the humans affectedwill have an equal say in their approval.
This means that above all the national parliamentsand governments and courts and above all the multinational corporations
we should have one federal world parliament
that will allow all of us to take partin legislating a global rule of law, of a global justice system.
(07:53):
This global rule of law should then be enforcedby the world federal executive branch,
the federal government of humanity,by humanity and for humanity.
These are not just clichés. This is our planetand our future, so then it must also be our choice.
Our slogan should be‘No emission without permission. Global democracy now!’
(08:16):
And sure enough, we are so usedto the current system and so immersed in it,
that a democratic world federationis something that people find hard to even imagine.
But this is the only real alternative to the anarchicinternational system that divides us today, and nothing less will do.
In a reality where we have one global market system,and one global ecological system,
(08:40):
national independence is a myth, a pie in the sky, that has to go,
and be replaced with a new, democratic, institutional systemfit for global interdependence.
It will enable us to finally solve together, not only the climate crisis,
but plenty of other injustices and inequalities that plague and endanger our world.
(09:02):
With regard to the climate, we need a global tax systemso that we can start taxing fossil fuels globally to reduce their emissions.
Until then, national restrictions on emissions, if there are any,
to a great degree just incentivize polluting industries to go off-shore,
to countries where the governments are too weak or too corrupt to do anything.
(09:24):
While green activists surely agreethat a global justice system would have been a very desirable thing,
it still sounds to them too big and too ambitious.
They fear that achieving it requires too muchenergy and time that we simply don’t have.
The danger, they say, is so great that we just haveto find a solution even within the current system.
(09:45):
But then, we have wasted more than three precious decades trying to get this unworkable system to work.
Is there really a chance thatin the next years it will do anything differently?
So the climate activists hope, for one thing, that as thescientific evidence on global warming continues to pile up,
that even the most ardent deniers of the problem will finally get it,
(10:09):
and then, even just out of sheer self-interest to protect themselves and their children,
they will be ready, surely, to give upon fossil fuels and leave them in the ground.
But would they? Well, many people are not aware of this number, but the amount of all the fossil fuels
that have been found and are still in the ground, is almost 4 times bigger than the amount of all
(10:34):
the fossil fuels that humans have usedsince the industrial revolution began.
These proven reserves worth a lot of money, for a lot ofpowerful people and national governments who own those resources.
And as much as it will be hardfor each of them to give up their share of the loot,
it will be far harder for them to give it up voluntarily.
(10:55):
You see, even when they realizewhat those fuels are doing to our climate,
as long as there will be no one to force all of them to give it up,
too many of them will be in the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’,
saying (11:07):
“yeah, I would have been willing to give up on my share, but only if I knew that the others are doing so as well,
because otherwise my sacrifice won’t make much of a difference, would it?
And the others must be thinking only of themselvesand their children. So, well, sorry, so should I.
Now is not time for a moral high-ground,
(11:28):
Now is the time to take this money and finda literally high ground where my children can live safely,
and then surround it with a wallto stop the climate refugees from coming in.”
So, If we want the owners and shareholdersof fossil fuels to leave them in the ground,
we cannot leave to them the freedom to decide about it themselves. We have a stake in it, and we must have a voice, and a vote.
(11:52):
No emission without permission, global democracy now! That’s the key.
But until we have it, the climate activists say that we can actuallymake sure that at least some of the fossil fuels will stay in the ground,
by simply not buying them. So they make the effortto reduce their own consumption by riding more on bikes and buses
and less on airplanes and so on, and they work hardto convince their cities and states to move to green energies.
(12:19):
This work is good, but it has a very serious limitation.
That in a global economy, when some people use less fossil fuels,there is then more supply of those fuels than demand,
and so the prices start to also go down. And when the pricesgo down, and they go down globally because it's a global market,
more people in the world start using them more,because hey, it’s cheap!
(12:42):
So you make all this effort to get your country to reduce its consumption,
only to find that even if you succeed, it ends up, what?
encouraging other people in the world to use more?
That is yet another pitfall of voluntary and local action.
One good thing that voluntary action did help to achieve
(13:02):
is the big reduction that happened in the prices of renewable energies in the past couple of decades.
It was the voluntary decision of several governments to subsidize clean energies that boosted their mass production,
which then led to a fall in their prices.
All of this has led over the past 20 yearsto a sharp increase in the use of clean energies,
(13:23):
at the average rate of almost 15% every year.
This is a very good trend, which should remind usof the importance of governmental intervention in the economy.
But when we look at the larger global picture,it is clearly really not fast enough.
In fact, clean energies’ starting point was so tiny,
(13:43):
that despite this rapid growth over two long decades,
by about 2020 they still comprise about 5% of global energy usage.
Fossil fuels, on the other hand, still supply 85% of the world’s energy.
Their share is so large,
that while their rate of growth in those two decades has been slower, less than 2% a year,
(14:07):
it meant an increase in net production that was by far larger than that of the renewable energies.
And this is why the rate of emissions continued to rise, rather than fall.
If these trends continue, it will take the clean energiesmore than 20 or 25 years until they replace fossil fuels
as the major source of energy.
(14:28):
This is too slow.
And we should be very worried, knowing that,
as soon as the fossil fuels companiesstart feeling that the competition is getting serious,
they will be able to fight back by lowering their large profit margins
and start selling their titanic reserves for a lower price.
Most importantly, as long as the national governments are divided and competing with each other, small and under-funded,
(14:52):
it’s super easy for the fossil fuels interest groupsto divide and rule them,
to buy politicians, to buy media, to buy even people in academia,
to make sure that their business is not under any real threat.
To check the power of this global industry,
the world's citizens need to have their own united federal government that will be able to do that job.
(15:15):
Because even if the green hopeswill come true, and somehow by voluntarism alone
clean energies will replace the fossil fuels in time,
humanity is still going face the huge challenge of dealing with the effects of the warming
that has been injected into the climate system during all these long decades of inaction.
We might, and might not, be saved from the worst scenarios of sea level rise,
(15:40):
but extreme storms and droughts and floods are still expectedto get worse and wreak havoc on hundreds of millions of people.
Helping and saving those victims from this injusticemust not be a question of voluntary charity,
that those who got rich by usingfossil fuels might give and might not.
(16:00):
It has to be funded by a global tax system,
which can only be imposed by a federal government of the whole world.
Which brings us to the final and very important point.In order to defend the fossil fuels industry,
their lobby came up with two influential arguments.
The first, was that putting a tax on fossil fuelsin order to reduce their consumption,
(16:23):
would actually make the poor suffer the most,
because they would not be able to afford even the small amount of energy that they need.
The second, was that the people of the rich nations of the world,
who got rich by consuming so much fossil fuel,
don’t have the right to tell the poor to avoid thosesame fuels that are necessary for their development.
(16:45):
Our children will find it hard to believe that anyone really believed these arguments.
The right way to help the poor, of course, is not to let themalso pollute and harm others as we did.
What a crazy idea!
The right way to help them is to subsidize clean energy for them!
To put a tax on pollution, to start taxing the richest 1%,
(17:07):
and then we have enough money to help all of us, including the poor, to make the transition.
We need to tax the harm givers, and use the money to help their victims cope with the disasters that they did not cause.
Is that so complicated?
In this video I explained why in the anarchic system that we have,
(17:28):
that legally divides us, it is so difficult.
And why in order to bring about global justicewe must unite into one global democratic system.
It is true that climate activists cannot bring this change alone,
but if they join hands with the other groupsthat fight for real global democracy and justice,
then I am confident that together, we can.
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