Climate change and global poverty

S P SETH

When Oxfam came out with a damning report highlighting the obscene wealth gap between the world’s rich and its poor, it made news and pricked the conscience of some people for some time. It was difficult to ignore the enormity of the gap; with just 85 of the globe’s richest said to be controlling as much wealth as half the world’s population, which is about 3.5 billion people. It is self-evident that such skewing of the world’s wealth to benefit so few is morally indefensible, however one might define morality. But still we live with such injustice everyday, not realizing that it might one day blow up in our collective face, rich and poor.

One person, and he is no ordinary person, has been carrying on a crusade against this trying to draw a link between the assorted ills of our world. And that person is Pope Francis who is managing to combine, without much difficulty, the role of a religious leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, as well as someone who simply feels the need to talk some sense to highlight the complex but easy to unravel tapestry of the universe that holds us all together. A rich person or a rich and powerful nation obviously has the advantage in the lottery of life but when the fury of nature we have been provoking comes after us it might not spot any difference between the rich and the poor as its scale keeps on enlarging to engulf humanity at large. The reference here obviously is to climate change that is causing havoc here and there, with melting glaciers and warming oceans.

In a recent encyclical, a papal message of relevance to us all, Francis first draws attention to an increasing disconnect between today’s material world and nature and argues that the world’s ecological problems can only be solved by also fixing the “ethical, cultural and spiritual crisis of modernity.” He has no doubt that, based on scientific studies; greenhouse gases released by human activity cause most of global warming. Therefore, these gases, especially coal, need to be “progressively replaced without delay.” And he bemoans the action taken so far to curb the use of these gases because: “Reducing greenhouse gases requires honesty, courage and responsibility, above all on the part of those countries which are more powerful and pollute the most.”

An example is right here in Australia where listening to its Prime Minister (till recently) , Tony Abbot , you would think that most of the world’s scientists and now Pope Francis are talking ‘crap’ when highlighting the dangers of climate change. Indeed, he once called all this talk of global warming as sheer ‘crap’. He wouldn’t use this word now but, worse, he called coal as ‘good for humanity’. Australia is the worst polluter per capita in the world. People like Tony Abbot and others of his ilk live in a different world that created the problem in the first place. One might wonder how Abbot, a staunch Catholic, would reconcile his love for coal with the encyclical of Pope Francis. And even politicians elsewhere in the world, who are not non-believers in the matter of climate change, find themselves constrained by political and a host of other considerations when it comes to concrete action.

Pope Francis finds an intrinsic connection between environmental degradation and ‘free market’ capitalism creating all sorts of anomalies and injustices. During

 a recent tour of some of the Latin American countries he made some of the sharpest critique of colonialism and capitalism. While in Bolivia, he urged the world’s poor to change the economic order, denouncing a “new colonialism” by agencies that impose austerity programs (on others) and calling for the poor to have the “sacred rights” of labour, lodging and land, three Ls. Drawing a connection between the cruelties of the Roman Catholic Church that accompanied/followed colonial occupation of the Americas, the Argentinian-born pope sought forgiveness for the sins of the church for its treatment of Native Americans during the “so-called conquest of America.” In other words, the church was an integral part of European colonialism. It is this colonialism that gave the control of colonial resources and markets that laid the basis for the growth of capitalism, which in the so-called post-colonial period was simply usurped by a rapacious form of capitalism/imperialism fostering/forcing regulatory processes for the so-called global free trade. And this is still playing havoc for the world’s poor.

Pope sought to link all this and much more when he recently said that, “ Let us not be afraid to say that: we want change, real change, structural change” in the system that “has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature.” Speaking in Bolivia, he condemned the system, “This system is now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, labourers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable. The earth itself… finds it intolerable”, reduced to ‘a pile of filth’.

Last year, he made a sharp critique of the capitalist mode of production. He said, “In this [capitalist] system, which tends to devour everything that stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of a deified market, which becomes the only rule.” Amplifying its destructiveness, he added, “Inequality [it fosters] eventually engenders a violence, which recourse to arms cannot and never will able to resolve.” Talking of globalization, he pointedly said that, “In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference.”

Pope Francis is no economist and that is precisely why he makes sense because he says it the way he observes without any attempt to refine it. He is speaking the language of the poor and helpless as they experience all this misery every day of their lives, waiting for crumbs of the system to fall their way, for the so-called ‘trickle down’ theory to work. And instead the concentration of greater and greater wealth among the few, to the exclusion of most, is increasing. And these few are insatiate further increasing their onslaught on our fragile environment. Pope is a religious figure but he certainly makes a lot of secular sense. One wishes more religious leaders of all descriptions will say things people can relate to. For any religion to be relevant, it has to be relevant to the concerns and needs of people without being cowed down by the rich and powerful of the world.  

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au