3/8/2018 Climate change and global poverty - Daily Times

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 indefensiblebut one might define morality. But still we live with such injustice everyday, not
realising 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 crusadeagainst 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,which is causing havoc here and there, with melting glaciers and warming oceans.
In a recent encyclical, a papal message of relevance to us all,Pope 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 fixingthe “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 that are more powerful and pollute the most.”
An example is right here in Australia where listening to itsPrime Minister (till recently), Tony Abbot, you would
think that most of the world’s scientists and now Pope Francis are talking ‘****’ when highlighting the dangers
of climate change. Indeed, he once called all this talk of global warming“sheer ****”. He would notuse this
word now; worse, he called coal “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 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. Duringa recent tour of some Latin American countries he made
some of the sharpest critiques 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 programmes (on
others) and calling for the poor to have the “sacred rights” of labour, lodging and land- the three Ls. Drawing a
connection between the cruelties of the Roman Catholic Church that accompanied/followed the 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 forcing regulatory processes forso-called global free
trade. And this is still playing havoc on the world’s poor.
The pope sought to link all this and much more when he recently said: “ 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 eventually engenders a violence, which recourse to arms cannot and
never will be able to resolve.” Talking of globalisation, he pointedly said, “In this globalised world, we have
fallen into globalised 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
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3/8/2018 Climate change and global poverty - Daily Times

misery every day of their lives, waiting for the 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 unsatiated,further increasing their onslaught on our fragile
environment. The pope is a religious figure but he certainly makes a lot of secular sense. One wishes more
religious leaders of all descriptions would 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.

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