Don't ever let anyone tell you we don't have enough money to fight climate change, or to reduce income inequality, or to begin the shift toward degrowth.
The money is there. It's just being spent in all the wrong ways and all the wrong places...
Trillions of dollars of subsidies for fossil fuels, farming, and fishing are causing “environmental havoc,” according to the World Bank, severely harming people and the planet.
Many countries spend more on harmful subsidies than they do on health, education, or poverty reduction, the bank says, and the subsidies are entrenched and hard to reform as the greatest beneficiaries tend to be rich and powerful.
In 2021, UN agencies reported that almost 90% of agricultural subsidies harmed people’s health and the climate, and drove inequality, while the IMF found that trillions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies were “adding fuel to the fire” of the climate crisis at a time when rapid cuts in carbon emissions were needed.
Fossil fuels are “vastly underpriced,” the report says, while subsidy reforms “save lives.” Pollution from fossil fuels causes 8.7 million deaths a year, according to a 2021 study, one in five of all deaths globally.
Subsidies for agriculture are “unequal and unwise,” the report says. “Not only do these subsidies promote inefficiencies, but they also cause much environmental havoc.” The report found that subsidized fertilizer caused so much overuse in some regions that it reduced crop yields, while also causing huge nitrogen pollution.
It also found farm subsidies were responsible for the destruction of 5.4 million acres of forest a year, about 14% of global deforestation, which leads to almost 4 million extra cases of malaria a year. Fishing subsidies amount to about $118 billion a year and are a key factor in the over-exploitation of marine life, which has sent the oceans into “a collective state of crisis,” according to the report.
The report says government subsidies today make up an “enormous share of public budgets worldwide, perhaps larger than at any point in human history.”
It's a vicious cycle between Big Oil, Big Ag, and Big Government, with money going round and round and round. That cycle must be broken.
Capitalism got us into this mess. Capitalism cannot get us out of this mess. We need system change NOW.
