If I had four trillion dollars

[Guest guest]

Science Matters column by David Suzuki with Faisal

Moola.

 

If I had four trillion dollars

 

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Many of you are working to recycle, reduce energy consumption, and

improve the world for your families and neighbours. The collective

impact of these many small efforts is making a big difference.

 

Just think what you could do with $4.1 trillion!

 

That’s how much the U.S. and 17 Western European countries are

spending to bail out financial institutions involved in an economic

crisis that began in the U.S. and soon reverberated around the world.

(The final amount will likely be a lot more. It’s difficult to fathom

such a large number, but consider that one trillion seconds is about

32,000 years!) To top it off, most of the details are secret; we don’t

really know what the money is being used for – although it probably

hasn’t stopped your retirement savings funds from plummeting.

 

The effect on people in developing nations is even worse. Most of them

didn’t have savings to begin with, and now the economic crisis,

coupled with the effects of the climate crisis – including drought and

food shortages – is causing more of our human family to suffer from

extreme poverty and joblessness.

 

Just think what they could do with $4.1 trillion!

 

A report from the Institute for Policy Studies, Skewed Priorities: How

the Bailouts Dwarf Other Global Crisis Spending, points out that the

amount is 40 times what the U.S. and Europe are spending in developing

nations on programs to deal with poverty ($90.7 billion) and climate

change ($13.1 billion, none of it from the U.S.). In fact, the U.S.

spent far more to bail out insurance firm AIG, $152.5 billion, than

all the countries together spent on developmental aid last year.

 

And what did the AIG executives do after getting the taxpayer-funded

bailout? They celebrated, with a $440,000 trip to a luxury spa resort.

The cost of the trip is about what the U.S. spent on food aid last

year to Lebanon, " a country struggling to recover from conflict " ,

according to the IPS.

 

If we think we needn’t worry about what happens to developing nations

because it isn’t affecting us, we should remind ourselves that, just

as everything in nature is connected, so is everything in our global

economic and political systems. Increased international job

competition and reduced export opportunities are just two of the

smaller impacts mentioned in the IPS report.

 

But the worst meltdown isn’t of the global economy. Another report,

Climate Safety, from the Public Interest Research Centre, shows that

the Arctic’s late-summer ice is melting much faster than scientists

previously predicted and may disappear within three to seven years.

The cascading consequences of such an event could be catastrophic.

 

Just think what we could do with $4.1 trillion!

 

Instead of giving companies these huge sums of money so they can

continue business as usual, buying and selling, merging, and paying

their executives obscene salaries and bonuses, we could put it toward

renewable energy, sustainable urban planning, and research into ways

to lessen the impact of climate change – things that really would

stimulate economies.

 

But, as the world’s nations meet at the UN Climate Change Conference

in Poland this month, the focus remains on the false dichotomy of

economy versus environment. Canada has continued to bolster its

reputation as a country lacking in imagination and concern for the

planet. Environment Minister Jim Prentice told Alberta business

leaders recently that, " We will not aggravate an already weakening

economy in the name of environmental progress. " His job is to protect

the environment yet he sounds like the minister of finance!

 

But if Canada is hindering progress, other nations are showing more

enlightened leadership. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said before

heading to Poland that nations must keep their commitments to reduce

greenhouse gas emissions. " Climate change is so important that we

cannot use the financial and economic crisis as a pretext for dropping

it, " he said. Eminent economist Sir Nicholas Stern has already told us

that meeting the challenge of climate change could cost about one per

cent of annual GDP but doing nothing will destroy the global economy.

Seems there’s only one thing we can do, and it won’t cost $4.1

trillion.

 

As citizens, we can and must do everything possible to keep our finite

world alive and healthy. Along with the small but important changes we

are making in our own lives, we must also call on our leaders to stop

downplaying the unequivocal science that tells us failing to quickly

address the climate crisis will make the economic crisis seem like a

minor blip in history.

 

We could tell them where to put that $4.1 trillion!

 

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