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	Do We Really Need Billionaires by Lawrence Wittner, Philip Alston, Robert Reich George Washington University, University of California   Dec. 2019   Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has challenged governments around the world on their lack of political will to address poverty.   He speaks to the International Bar Association US Correspondent, Michael Goldhaber, about the injustice of wealth inequality in the US.   Michael Goldhaber: When you presented the findings of your US country visit, then US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley scoffed: 'it is patently ridiculous for the UN to examine poverty in America'. So why is she wrong?   Professor Philip Alston: If 40 million people living in poverty is not a human rights issue and not something that external scrutiny should be focused on, I'm not sure what is. I guess that every country thinks that its human rights record is fine and that the UN should be focusing elsewhere, but it's clear that the US has a blind spot on a lot of these issues. It's very important for the international community to shine a spotlight on the extent of poverty in the US and the implications that has for the enjoyment of civil and political rights in this country.   MG: You said that there was a sharp contrast between the attitude of US officials and those in other nations you visited. Have you found that officials are more committed to addressing the problems, or is denial a universal condition?   PA: The US is different in the sense that it doesn't recognise social rights it doesn't accept a right to healthcare, for example, let alone the right to housing. In other countries, at least in Western Europe, that's taken for granted. The levels can be debated, but there's no question that the government must ensure that its citizens have those basics.   In terms of reaction to critical reports, that's more of a universal phenomenon. No government wants to be criticised. They're going to try to discredit it in some way, but that's not the key issue. The key issue is what does the government really do about it? And where there's the political will, governments, having said 'we don't like the report', will then start trying to address the key issues. Where there is no political will, they will simply dismiss it and move on.   MG: American exceptionalism is taken as an article of faith in this country. So, in what ways, positive or negative, did you find us to be exceptional?   PA: The US is clearly exceptional in terms of its social welfare programmes. They are very intermittent, deliberately inadequate, premised on sort of libertarian assumptions. I think that certainly makes it different from most other developed countries. America is exceptional in the sense that there's a real openness to public debate. There's a really vibrant civil society. There were lots of groups that were very keen to engage. There's a Congress which has quite a few members who were fully engaged with my reporting and who made an issue of it afterwards and so on. I think the US has both good and bad aspects of exceptionalism.   MG: You talked about the country having an ethos that the rich and poor deserve what they have; that the poor are takers and scammers. You also talked about the American Dream turning into the 'American Illusion'.   PA: I think the conservatives, over the past 40 years or so, have really hammered this view that anyone who is on welfare is basically doing it unnecessarily and has intentionally made themselves a burden on the state. We are encouraged to see that anyone who's receiving welfare really could be out working instead. No account is taken of all of the things that befall average people in terms of bad medical health, mental health challenges, what happens to their kids, car and industrial accidents, and so on. Lots of people are simply unable to work and need to have decent support. That's not factored into the US mentality when we think of welfare.   In terms of social mobility, the sad reality of the 'Great American Dream', which people still believe in very firmly, is that statistically the US is less mobile than almost any other developed country. You have a better chance in countries like the UK, which used to be very hidebound, on being able to move from one low income group to a much higher one through your own effort.   MG: In its official response to the UN, the Trump administration offered some very different statistics from yours. They made the claim, which demographers called a joke, that only 250,000 Americans are in extreme poverty. What do you regard as the most meaningful measures of poverty in the US?   PA: One can debate that endlessly. But to suddenly say that no, the figure of 40 million is wrong, and it really should be replaced by something like 300,000, is ludicrous. One can always do this on the basis of statistics, but it's also important just to look around you, to open your eyes. We know the sort of poverty that exists in most of the large cities in the US, we know the extent of rural poverty in areas from which employment opportunities have disappeared. There is a huge amount of poverty that's not really being addressed. And when you meet the people who are living in those conditions, they don't have access to dental care for example nothing.   If they are in acute pain, they can go to an emergency room, which might extract a tooth. They don't have access to a doctor except in a dire emergency. It makes it much harder to get work. Their kids are very badly off, receiving a low-quality education and so on. To say that there isn't any real poverty in the US is not to look around the country.   MG: You wrote about the US leading the OECD in infant mortality, youth poverty, obesity, incarceration rate, second-to-last in sanitation. And perhaps most striking is that the US now leads its peer nations in inequality in the OECD.   PA: Just at the end of my visit to the US, the World Health Organization announced that China had actually overtaken the US in terms of healthy life expectancy for a child born today. Now, China is still a very uneven country, it might be rich in global terms, but per capita it's way below the US but for it to have a better healthy life expectancy is truly shocking.   Skid Row [downtown Los Angeles] was an amazing experience because you are right in the shadow of a thriving and prosperous central business district and within a few hundred yards you can see the 'other side' of life.   In Skid Row there are cities of tents, and toilets are provided at a ratio that wouldn't be acceptable in a refugee camp in Syria. Leading to people urinating and defecating in the streets.   MG: Which is in turn criminalised.   PA: Yes, that's part of the perversity of it all. Rather than trying to come up with longer-term solutions, the LA police were issuing citations and eventually arresting people at higher rates than they had been for a long time.   And the poor have no serious access to the legal system in the US. Despite all of the rhetoric, public defenders are hugely overworked, hugely underpaid. The sort of services that the poor can access are very grim. They simply can't really expect to get a decent deal from the courts.   MG: You also spoke about the many millions of disenfranchised felons, part of a pattern that you talked about in the criminal justice system.   PA: I think what's happened is a very determined effort to make people pay for their own access to justice. It's fine for me as I'm quite well off. If I'm fined, if I have to pay for a night in prison, I can do it. If you take a low-income person, those fines can put them out of the game for years. They have to pay their probation officer. They have to pay to spend nights in county jails. They have to pay high bail amounts.   There are endless ways in which the criminal justice system is now being set up to really penalise the poor and ensure that their future is much grimmer than their past has been.   MG: As you put it, to criminalise poverty leads to a cycle of homelessness, unemployment, imprisonment and disenfranchisement.   PA: And the irony is that Nikki Haley said at one stage, 'we have never criminalised poverty, there is no law in this country that criminalises poverty'. Of course that's such a formalistic reading of it because there isn't a law that says if you're poor you should be put in prison. But there are all these other laws that are designed to benefit the well off and to punish the poor.   MG: You wrote about the link between the decline of political rights and the decline of social and economic rights, especially for minority groups. Would they be so deprived of basic services if they were not also effectively deprived of the vote?   PA: I think it makes a big difference. I quote in the report a senior Democratic politician who said to me, 'you show me one of my colleagues who is really reaching out to try to get the votes of the poor'.   I don't think there's any of them because they don't think these guys are either going to be able or be willing to vote. So they're not part of the political priority.   The extent to which there's been what I call overt and covert disenfranchisement is really quite staggering. For a country that prides itself on being one of the original democracies and really having a thriving democratic culture, that's increasingly less true because of all the steps that have been taken to exclude millions of voters.   MG: A lot has changed since your tour in December 2017 and the report in June 2018. What new developments do you find the most discouraging?   PA: The enormous storm cloud that hovers over the US is the consequences of the gigantic tax cut that took place at the time of my visit. The President is now talking about further tax cuts, while anyone who's looking at the state of the economy says this is all completely unsustainable. There's going to need to be major cuts or major increases in taxes. We know that the agenda is to set the stage for saying 'we can't afford the welfare system we have'.   The next step will certainly be an even more concerted effort not just by the President, which has taken place for the last two or three years anyway, but soon by the Republicans in Congress who have been relatively quiet on a lot of these issues. Having secured massive tax cuts, they will say 'we have no choice but to cut back on whether it's Medicare or Medicaid, whether it's food stamps, we just have to cut radically'. And that's going to lead to much greater poverty in the country.   MG: You allude to the plight of the middle class in your recommendations, is middle-class insecurity a human rights issue that deserves more attention?   PA: If we look at the rise of populism around the world, a lot of people would say that it is linked to basic economic insecurity on the part of those who are not living in poverty but are at risk. The statistic that something like 40 per cent of Americans couldn't afford a $400 emergency expense without plunging into poverty, or without having to take out a loan that they can't afford, indicates that there's a large percentage of people who are living on the edge.   I think if you take a holistic view, what a society should be doing is providing a basic but assured safety net. So if people do fall through the net, there really will be a full range of different forms of assistance to help them to get back on their feet. That's just not the case in the US.   We've seen the Trump administration each year proposing drastic cuts that Congress hasn't so far accepted, but food stamps are being cut back, Medicare eligibility is being made more difficult. What does exist of a social safety net is being chipped away at a pretty significant rate.   MG: You wrote, soon after President Trump's inauguration, about the challenge posed to human rights by his distinct approach to governance, which you suggested combines elements of unilateralism and deregulation with inequality and a drift toward authoritarianism. What are the human rights implications of that toxic mix?   PA: There's both the domestic and the international. International implications, which are perhaps of the least importance to the American people, are an assault on the UN, an assault on multilateralism, a refusal to cooperate with other states, a refusal to take up a lot of the most pressing human rights issues unless they fit a very narrow ideological position. Domestically, I think what we've seen is a pretty dramatic move away from the various protections against discrimination that exist in the country.   We've seen a downgrading of a lot of the institutions that were set up to try to keep a check on ensuring respect for people's rights. A lot of the deregulation removing regulations against use of toxic chemicals, against environmental pollution and various other things, are clearly an assault on the rights of the poor.   It's staggering to be in Puerto Rico, for example, in some of the poor areas and see giant mountains of coal ash, completely unprotected, just waiting for the next strong wind to come and blow them around the neighbourhood and for people to be breathing them in.   MG: What events since your official visit do you find heartening?   PA: This is perhaps a self-centred comment, but the degree of attention that the report received. It received very extensive media coverage, it's been taken up by a lot of civil society groups and so on. I think there is a growing awareness of the fact that the existing poverty levels not only are not acceptable in their own right, but more importantly, that they have serious human rights implications. So even if you don't care about the economics of it, if you just care about the civil rights dimension of the US, then poverty has to be addressed.   MG: If you look at the agenda of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, it's remarkable how much it tracks the rest of your policy recommendations. The month after your report, California took your first recommendation and ended cash bail. How encouraged are you by these ideas?   PA: It is very encouraging. There are two things that are going on that I see. One is actually just a return to a longstanding American concern with the poor. Whether we go back to Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal or to Lyndon B Johnson's grand assault on poverty, this is not a new set of issues in the US. It's just that the country has lost sight of them over the last 30 years or so.   The second thing that's going on is not just what some would see as a great revival of the left, but is the realisation even from the right, that in fact a lot of these initiatives would be economically productive. So you have the IMF, for example, coming out and saying extreme inequality is very bad for growth. It's not sustainable. It is not the best economic move.   A lot of these programmes can actually be justified in terms of increasing productivity, giving every kid a decent education, providing more pre-school care. That's purely an economic investment in a smarter society; one that's able to have higher-quality jobs and more employment. Healthcare can be seen in the same terms. The costs of not having healthcare are huge. It's all shuffled off to the police and then to the emergency rooms of hospitals. The costs are infinitely greater in those settings than they would be if people were receiving regular preventive care from some sort of national scheme. I find the current debate very encouraging but I think it's important for conservatives to also see that there's a lot in this just in terms of, to use the awful phrase, 'making America great again'.   MG: Is it possible that we will someday look back and say that the Trump era will be remembered for bringing social democracy back to America?   PA: It's certainly provoking a lot of thought and a lot less complacency. Democracies around the world have been highly complacent. The current experience has made it clear that a lot of institutions are not working, that there's too much opportunity to skew things in favour of the very wealthy and that that's not in the interests of the overall society. So what might have been seen even five years ago as 'no no, that would be a socialist move' is now increasingly being seen as 'no, that would be in the interests of the broader community'. And I think that is a potential silver lining in what we're currently going through.   http://bit.ly/2qAcRQU http://bit.ly/2OZSlTb http://srpoverty.org/country-visits/   June 2019   Do We Really Need Billionaires?, asks Lawrence Wittner.   According to numerous reports, the world's billionaires keep increasing in number and, especially, in wealth.   In March 2018, Forbes reported that it had identified 2,208 billionaires from 72 countries and territories. Collectively, this group was worth $9.1 trillion, an increase in wealth of 18 percent since the preceding year.   Americans led the way with a record 585 billionaires, followed by mainland China which, despite its professed commitment to Communism, had a record 373. According to a Yahoo Finance report in late November 2018, the wealth of U.S. billionaires increased by 12 percent during 2017, while that of Chinese billionaires grew by 39 percent.   These vast fortunes were created much like those amassed by the Robber Barons of the late nineteenth century. The Walton family's $163 billion fortune grew rapidly because its giant business, Walmart, the largest private employer in the United States, paid its workers poverty-level wages.   Jeff Bezos (whose fortune jumped by $78.5 billion in one year to $160 billion, making him the richest man in the world), paid pathetically low wages at Amazon for years, until forced by strikes and public pressure to raise them.   In mid-2017, Warren Buffett ($75 billion), then the world's second richest man, noted that 'the real problem' with the U.S. economy was that it was 'disproportionately rewarding to the people on top'.   The situation is much the same elsewhere. Since the 1980s, the share of national income going to workers has been dropping significantly around the globe, thereby exacerbating inequality in wealth.   'The billionaire boom is a symptom of a failing economic system', remarked Winnie Byanyima, executive director of the development charity, Oxfam International. 'The people who make our clothes, assemble our phones and grow our food are being exploited'.   As a result, the further concentration of wealth has produced rising levels of economic inequality around the globe. According to a January 2018 report by Oxfam, during the preceding year some 3.7 billion people about half the world's population experienced no increase in their wealth.   Instead, 82 percent of the global wealth generated in 2017 went to the wealthiest 1 percent. In the United States, economic inequality continued to grow, with the share of the national income drawn by the poorest half of the population steadily declining.   The situation was even starker in the country with the second largest economy, China. Here, despite two decades of spectacular economic growth, economic inequality rose at the fastest pace in the world, leaving China as one of the most unequal countries on the planet.   In its global survey, Oxfam reported that 42 billionaires possessed as much wealth as half the world's population.   Upon reflection, it's hard to understand why billionaires think they need to possess such vast amounts of money and to acquire even more. After all, they can eat and drink only so much, just as they surely have all the mansions, yachts, diamonds, furs, and private jets they can possibly use. What more can they desire?   When it comes to desires, the answer is: plenty! That's why they drive $4 million Lamborghini Venenos, acquire megamansions for their horses, take $80,000 safaris in private jets, purchase gold toothpicks, create megaclosets the size of homes, reside in $15,000 a night penthouse hotel suites, install luxury showers for their dogs, cover their staircases in gold, and build luxury survival bunkers.   Donald Trump maintains a penthouse apartment in Trump Tower that is reportedly worth $57 million and is marbled in gold. Among his many other possessions are two private airplanes, three helicopters, five private residences, and 17 golf courses across the United States, Scotland, Ireland, and the United Arab Emirates.   In addition, billionaires devote enormous energy and money to controlling governments. 'They don't put their wealth underneath their mattresses', observed U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders; 'they use that wealth to perpetuate their power. So you have the Koch brothers and a handful of billionaires who pour hundreds of millions of dollars into elections'.   During the 2018 midterm elections in the United States, America's billionaires lavished vast amounts of money on electoral politics, becoming the dominant funders of numerous candidates. Sheldon Adelson alone poured over $113 million into the federal elections.   This kind of big money has a major impact on American politics. Three billionaire families the Kochs, the Mercers, and the Adelsons; played a central role in bankrolling the Republican Party's shift to the far Right and its takeover of federal and state offices.   Thus, although polls indicate that most Americans favor raising taxes on the rich, regulating corporations, fighting climate change, and supporting labor unions, the Republican-dominated White House, Congress, Supreme Court, and regulatory agencies have moved in exactly the opposite direction, backing the priorities of the wealthy.   With so much at stake, billionaires even took direct command of the world's three major powers.   Donald Trump became the first billionaire to capture the U.S. presidency, joining Russia's president, Vladimir Putin (reputed to have amassed wealth of at least $70 billion), and China's president, Xi Jinping (estimated to have a net worth of $1.51 billion).   The three leaders quickly developed a cozy relationship and shared a number of policy positions, including the encouragement of wealth acquisition and the discouragement of human rights.   Admittedly, some billionaires have signed a Giving Pledge, promising to devote most of their wealth to philanthropy. Nevertheless, plutocratic philanthropy means that the priorities of the super-rich (for example, the funding of private schools), rather than the priorities of the general public (such as the funding of public schools), get implemented.   Moreover, these same billionaires are accumulating wealth much faster than they donate it. Philanthropist Bill Gates was worth $54 billion in 2010, the year their pledge was announced, and his wealth stands at $90 billion today.   Overall, then, as wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, most people around the world are clearly the losers.   * Lawrence Wittner is Professor of History emeritus at the George Washington University   http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170723 http://inequality.org/great-divide/bernie-3-billionaires-more-wealth-half-america/ http://inequality.org/great-divide/billionaire-bonanza-2018-inherited-wealth-dynasties-in-the-21st-century-u-s/ http://inequality.org/great-divide/taxing-the-very-rich-conference-primer/ http://btlonline.org/u-s-inequality-reaching-record-highs-compels-policy-shift/ http://ips-dc.org/inequality-literally-killing-us/   May 2019   What Does Oligarchy Mean? That We're Screwed, writes Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California.   Oligarchy means government of and by a few at the top, who exercise power for their own benefit. It comes from the Greek word oligarkhes, meaning few to rule or command.   Even a system that calls itself a democracy can become an oligarchy if power becomes concentrated in the hands of a few very wealthy people a corporate and financial elite.   Their power and wealth increase over time as they make laws that favor themselves, manipulate financial markets to their advantage, and create or exploit economic monopolies that put even more wealth into their pockets.   Modern-day Russia is an oligarchy, where a handful of billionaires who control most major industries dominate politics and the economy. What about the United States?   According to a study published in 2014 by Princeton Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern Professor Benjamin Page, although Americans enjoy many features of democratic governance, such as regular elections, and freedom of speech and association, American policy making has become dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans.   The typical American has no influence at all. This is largely due to the increasing concentration of wealth. In a 2019 research paper, Berkeley economics professor Gabriel Zucman determined that the richest 1 percent of Americans now own 40 percent of the nation's wealth. That's up from 25 to 30 percent of the nation's wealth in the 1980s.   The only country Zucman found with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia.   America has had an oligarchy before in the first Gilded Age, which ran from the 1880s until the early 20th century.   Teddy Roosevelt called that oligarchy the 'malefactors of great wealth', and fought them by breaking up large concentrations of economic power the trusts and instituting a progressive federal income tax.   His fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, further reduced their power by strictly regulating Wall Street, and encouraging the growth of labor unions. The oligarchy fought back but Roosevelt wouldn't yield.   'Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob', he thundered in 1936. 'Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred'.   But the American oligarchy has returned. We are now in a second Gilded Age. As the great jurist Louis Brandeis once said, 'We can have democracy in this country or we can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both'.   We must, once again, make the correct choice and reduce the economic and political power of the American oligarchy. http://robertreich.org/ Visit the related web page
	A Very Grim Forecast by Bill McKibben New York Review of Books, agencies   Though it was published at the beginning of October, Global Warming of 1.5C, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a document with its origins in another era, one not so distant from ours but politically an age apart. To read it makes you weep not just for our future but for our present.   The report was prepared at the request of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the end of the Paris climate talks in December 2015. The agreement reached in Paris pledged the signatories to: holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.   The mention of 1.5 degrees Celsius was unexpected; that number had first surfaced six years earlier at the unsuccessful Copenhagen climate talks, when representatives of low-lying island and coastal nations began using the slogan '1.5 to Stay Alive', arguing that the long-standing red line of a two-degree increase in temperature likely doomed them to disappear under rising seas.   Other highly vulnerable nations made the same case about droughts and floods and storms, because it was becoming clear that scientists had been underestimating how broad and deadly the effects of climate change would be. (So far we've raised the global average temperature just one degree, which has already brought about changes now readily observable.)   The pledges made by nations at the Paris conference were not enough to meet even the two-degree target. If every nation fulfills those pledges, the global temperature will still rise by about 3.5 degrees Celsius, which everyone acknowledged goes far beyond any definition of safety. But the hope was that the focus and goodwill resulting from the Paris agreement would help get the transition to alternative energy sources underway, and that once nations began installing solar panels and wind turbines they'd find it easier and cheaper than they had expected. They could then make stronger pledges as the process continued.   'Impossible isn't a fact; it's an attitude', said Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who deserves much of the credit for putting together the agreement. 'Ideally', said Philip A. Wallach, a Brookings Institution fellow, the Paris agreement would create 'a virtuous cycle of ambitious commitments, honestly reported progress to match, and further commitments following on those successes'.   To some extent this is precisely what has happened. The engineers have continued to make remarkable advances, and the price of a kilowatt generated by the sun or wind has continued to plunge, so much so that these are now the cheapest sources of power across much of the globe. Battery storage technology has progressed too; the fact that the sun goes down at night is no longer the obstacle to solar power many once presumed. And so vast quantities of renewable technology have been deployed, most notably in China and India.   Representatives of cities and states from around the world gathered in San Francisco in September for a miniature version of the Paris summit and made their own pledges: California, the planet's fifth-largest economy, promised to be carbon-neutral by 2045. Electric cars are now being produced in significant numbers, and the Chinese have deployed a vast fleet of electric buses.   But those are bright spots against a very dark background. In retrospect, Paris in December 2015 may represent a high-water mark for the idea of an interconnected human civilization. Within nine weeks of the conference Donald Trump had won his first primary; within seven months the UK had voted for Brexit, both weakening and distracting the EU, which has been the most consistent global champion of climate action.   Since then the US, the largest carbon emitter since the start of the Industrial Revolution, has withdrawn from the Paris agreement, and the president's cabinet members are busy trying to revive the coal industry and eliminate effective oversight and regulation of the oil and gas business. The prime minister of Australia, the world's biggest coal exporter, is now Scott Morrison, a man famous for bringing a chunk of coal into Parliament and passing it around so everyone could marvel at its greatness. Canada, though led by a progressive prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who was crucial in getting the 1.5-degree target included in the Paris agreement, has nationalized a pipeline in an effort to spur more production from its extremely polluting Alberta oil sands.   Brazil has elecedt a man who has promised not only to withdraw from the Paris agreement but to remove protections from the Amazon and open the rainforest to cattle ranchers. It is no wonder that the planet's carbon emissions, which had seemed to plateau in mid-decade, are again on the rise: preliminary figures indicate that a new record will be set in 2018.   This is the backdrop against which the IPCC report arrives, written by ninety-one scientists from forty countries. It is a long and technical document - five hundred pages, drawing on six thousand studies - and as badly written as all the other IPCC grand summaries over the years, thanks in no small part to the required vetting of each sentence of the executive summary by representatives of the participating countries. (Saudi Arabia apparently tried to block some of the most important passages at the last moment during a review meeting, particularly, according to reports, the statement emphasizing 'the need for sharp reductions in the use of fossil fuels'. The rest of the conclave threatened to record the objection in a footnote; 'it was a game of chicken, and the Saudis blinked first', one participant said. For most readers, the thirty-page 'Summary for Policymakers' will be sufficiently dense and informative.   The takeaway messages are simple enough: to keep warming under 1.5 degrees, global carbon dioxide emissions will have to fall by 45 percent by 2030, and reach net zero by 2050. We should do our best to meet this challenge, the report warns, because allowing the temperature to rise two degrees (much less than the 3.5 we're currently on pace for) would cause far more damage than 1.5. At the lower number, for instance, we'd lose 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs. Half a degree higher and that loss rises to 99 percent.   The burden of climate change falls first and heaviest on the poorest nations, who of course have done the least to cause the crisis. At two degrees, the report contends, there will be a 'disproportionately rapid evacuation' of people from the tropics. As one of its authors told The New York Times, 'in some parts of the world, national borders will become irrelevant. You can set up a wall to try to contain 10,000 and 20,000 and one million people, but not 10 million'.   The report provides few truly new insights for those who have been paying attention to the issue. In fact, because the IPCC is such a slave to consensus, and because its slow process means that the most recent science is never included in its reports, this one almost certainly understates the extent of the problem.   Its estimates of sea-level rise are on the low end, researchers are increasingly convinced that melting in Greenland and the Antarctic is proceeding much faster than expected and it downplays fears, bolstered by recent research, that the system of currents bringing warm water to the North Atlantic has begun to break down.   As the chemist Mario Molina, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1995 for discovering the threat posed by chlorofluorocarbon gases to the ozone layer, put it, the IPCC understates a key risk: that self-reinforcing feedback loops could push the climate system into chaos before we have time to tame our energy system.   All in all, though, the world continues to owe the IPCC a great debt: scientists have once again shown that they can agree on a broad and workable summary of our peril and deliver it in language that, while clunky, is clear enough that headline writers can make sense of it. (Those who try, anyway. An analysis of the fifty biggest US newspapers showed that only twenty-two of them bothered to put a story about the report on the homepages of their websites.)   The problem is that action never follows: the scientists do their job, but even the politicians not controlled by the fossil fuel industry tend to punt or to propose small-bore changes too slow and cautious to make much difference. By far the most important change between this and the last big IPCC report, in 2014, is simply that four years have passed, meaning that the curve we'd need to follow to cut our emissions sufficiently has grown considerably steeper. Instead of the relatively gentle trajectory that would have been required if we had paid attention in 1995, the first time the IPCC warned us that global warming was real and dangerous, we're at the point where even an all-out effort would probably be too slow. As the new report concedes, there is 'no documented historical precedent' for change at the speed that the science requires.   There's one paramount reason we didn't heed those earlier warnings, and that's the power of the fossil fuel industry. Since the last IPCC report, a series of newspaper expos's has made it clear that the big oil companies knew all about climate change even before it became a public issue in the late 1980s, and that, instead of owning up to that knowledge, they sponsored an enormously expensive campaign to obfuscate the science.   That campaign is increasingly untenable. In a world where floods, fires, and storms set new records almost weekly, the industry now concentrates on trying to slow the inevitable move to renewable energy and preserve its current business model as long as possible.   After the release of the IPCC report, for instance, Exxon pledged $1 million to work toward a carbon tax. That's risible, Exxon made $280 billion in the last decade, and it has donated huge sums to elect a Congress that won't pass a carbon tax anytime soon; oil companies are spending many millions of dollars to defeat a carbon tax on the ballot in Washington State and to beat back bans on fracking in Colorado.   Even if a carbon tax somehow made it past the GOP, the amount Exxon says it wants $40 a ton is tiny compared to what the IPCC's analysts say would be required to make a real dent in the problem. And in return the proposed legislation would relieve the oil companies of all liability for the havoc they've caused. A bargain that might have made sense a generation ago no longer counts for much.   Given the grim science, it's a fair question whether anything can be done to slow the planet's rapid warming. (One Washington Post columnist went further, asking, 'Why bother to bear children in a world wracked by climate change?') The phrase used most since the report's release was 'political will', usually invoked earnestly as the missing ingredient that must somehow be conjured up. Summoning sufficient political will to blunt the power of Exxon and Shell seems unlikely.   As the energy analyst David Roberts predicted recently on Twitter, 'the increasing severity of climate impacts will not serve as impetus to international cooperation, but the opposite. It will empower nationalists, isolationists, & reactionaries'.   Anyone wondering what he's talking about need merely look at the Western reaction to the wave of Syrian refugees fleeing a civil war sparked in part by the worst drought ever measured in that region.   The stakes are so high, though, that we must still try to do what we can to change those odds. And it's not an entirely impossible task. Nature is a good organizer: the relentless floods and storms and fires have gotten Americans attention, and the percentage of voters who acknowledge that global warming is a threat is higher than ever before, and the support for solutions is remarkably nonpartisan: 93 percent of Democrats want more solar farms; so do 84 percent of Republicans.   The next Democratic primary season might allow a real climate champion to emerge who would back what the rising progressive star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called a 'Green New Deal'; in turn a revitalized America could theoretically help lead the planet back to sanity. But for any of that to happen, we need a major shift in our thinking, strong enough to make the climate crisis a center of our political life rather than a peripheral question easily avoided. (There were no questions at all about climate change in the 2016 presidential debates.)   The past year has offered a few signs that such large-scale changes are coming. In October, the attorney general for New York State filed suit against ExxonMobil, claiming the company defrauded shareholders by downplaying the risks of climate change. In January New York City joined the growing fossil fuel divestment campaign, pledging to sell off the oil and gas shares in its huge pension portfolio; Mayor Bill de Blasio is working with London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, to convince their colleagues around the world to do likewise. In July Ireland became the first nation to join the campaign, helping to take the total funds involved to over $6 trillion.   This kind of pressure on investors needs to continue: as the IPCC report says, if the current flows of capital into fossil fuel projects were diverted to solar and wind power, we'd be closing in on the sums required to transform the world's energy systems.   It's natural following devastating reports like this one to turn to our political leaders for a response. But in an era when politics seems at least temporarily broken, and with a crisis that has a time limit, civil society may need to pressure the business community at least as heavily to divest their oil company shares, to stop underwriting and insuring new fossil fuel projects, and to dramatically increase the money available for clean energy. We're running out of options, and we're running out of decades.   Over and over we've gotten scientific wake-up calls, and over and over we've hit the snooze button. If we keep doing that, climate change will no longer be a problem, because calling something a problem implies there's still a solution.   http://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ http://davidsuzuki.org/story/politicians-who-deny-reality-arent-fit-to-lead/ http://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/12/kumi-naidoo-testimony-at-philippines-human-rights-commission-investigation-into-carbon-majors-climate-change/ http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/19876/worlds-first-human-rights-investigation-into-corporate-responsibility-for-climate-change-concludes/ http://inequality.org/great-divide/can-an-unequal-earth-beat-climate-change/ http://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/climate-action-new-frontier http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/12/negotiating-for-nature/ Visit the related web page
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