Tom Athanasiou wrote a recent piece on the global COP climate negotiations for Foreign Policy in Focus, entitled “After COP29: The Climate Negotiations Reach Their Crisis.” Read a snippet below and the full piece here.
The Global South needs real climate finance, and plenty of it. But what if, instead of continuing to insist that this finance will eventually come from the Global North, we admit that there’s only one place to get it: from the global rich. While most of them live in the Global North, some of them don’t. There are now 1,050 billionaires in the United States and 304 in China. We want a solidarity levy on the former group, absolutely, but are we really going to get one without taxing the latter as well?
The Global South needs real climate finance, and plenty of it. But what if, instead of continuing to insist that this finance will eventually come from the Global North, we admit that there’s only one place to get it: from the global rich. While most of them live in the Global North, some of them don’t. There are now 1,050 billionaires in the United States and 304 in China. We want a solidarity levy on the former group, absolutely, but are we really going to get one without taxing the latter as well?
