EXCELLENT — Robert Hunziker: Elites Have No Plan for Climate Collapse

This is a truly excellent and vitally important

piece from Robert Hunziker!

— Molly

Getty and Unsplash+.

By Robert Hunziker

Bill McGuire, emeritus professor, Geophysical & Climate Hazards, University College London is unique within the scientific community. He claims that scientists have a public duty to tell the unvarnished truth no matter how alarming. According to sources, he embraces the label “alarmist” re the “climate emergency.”

This article is based upon a recent interview with Bill McGuire. Some statements herein are direct quotes. For those who prefer “sugar-coated” analyses, such as: “we still have time” … “transitioning to a Net-Zero future” … “plants love CO2” … “carbon capture technology” this article is not for you. Stop reading now.

Bill McGuire’s recent interview was conducted via Aaron Bastani’s Downstream on Novara Media, 1:26:03: Elites Have NO PLAN for Climate Collapse. Telling it like it is.

Elites?

Anonymous – a person who holds a unique high-level job in the U.S. government: “I post here from time to time to remind people about (1) how deeply ordinary the ‘elites’ truly are, and (2) how fragile government really is. One of the things I’ve had to quickly shed in my professional life is the notion that anyone is in control or coming to save the day. The reality is rooms full of people asking, ‘what the fuck are we going to do?” (Anonymous, not from the McGuire interview)

As for UK’s current climate change and impact on crops, McGuire views the speed of climate change as “just staggering,” headed for trouble; once we get to the stage where we’ve got food rationing, then everything’ll change. As things currently stand, it’s up for grabs; nobody knows how quickly it’ll happen. A warning was issued by the National Farmers Union publicly warning of shortages of food later in the year. This risk of food shortages is therefore common public knowledge.

Martin Lines, CEO of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, a farmer from Cambridgeshire: “As a farmer, I’m used to ironing out the bad years with the good, but three terrible harvests in a row is just devastating for my business and the farming sector as a whole. Anyone who thinks that climate change isn’t something to worry about needs to spend a day in a farmer’s boots, struggling to grow crops, feed livestock with no grass or keep animals cool in a heatwave.” (UK Arable Farmers Lose Billions After Three Years of Harvests, Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, 31 Aug. 2026)

Most crops won’t grow effectively over 30C (86F) degrees. Summer 2026 was the UK’s hottest on record, according to provisional data from the Met Office (UK), a spring and summer of persistent heat with five widespread heatwaves and 40 days of temperatures above 30C (86F), smashing the previous record of 34 days.

McGuire has been warning about an out-of-control climate system for years, but now it’s happening so quickly and much sooner than he expected. He was surprised to see how soon ‘peak heat’ started way ahead of time; a heat wave started at 35C (95F) degrees in May, which is flat-out astonishing because it’s always been July/August, but it came two months early this year, signaling a climate system going off the rails.

2027 El Niño Forewarning

Next year could be an especially bad one because of El Niño, which is the second biggest climate signal other than the changing of seasons. That’s how big it impacts the global climate. Essentially, El Niño heats up the Eastern Tropical Pacific, and it has knock-on impact throughout the planet, bringing extreme weather as far afield as Peru and Australia and Europe as well North America, depending upon how and where it gyrates, fierce firestorms, massive mud/rockslides, scorching droughts, barren riverbeds, lashing windstorms, pelting rainstorms, massive flash floods all at unprecedented levels, similar to but worse than 2026, with more glaciers of the world crumbling. Nepal set the stage, at least 1,451 deaths and 5,745 missing persons.

El Niño’s are classified based upon how much hotter the Eastern Pacific gets. The record was +2.7°C in 1877. That was the biggest El Niño on record. But 1877 may soon fall into the dustbin of history as an afterthought because estimates for 2027 are on the order of +4°C. According to McGuire: “That’s just staggering, unprecedented!” It portends a whiplashing climate system that’s brutal enough to put climate denialists on alert, avoid hot rails out of town.

Still, nobody is sure of what the impact of this upcoming El Niño will be but it’s reasonable to expect 2027 to hit +1.7°C globally above pre-industrial, well beyond the ‘danger zone’ identified at Paris 2015 when 195 nations joined hands to do whatever’s necessary to avoid exceeding 1.5C, referred to as “catastrophic.” Alas, they’ve failed miserably to contain the ‘danger zone.’

That was then, now they’ve moved the target (new danger zone) to avoid up to 2C, hmm. We’ve “effectively” been at 1.5°C for a few years now (and it has been catastrophic, especially in Europe) but the IPCC requires it to remain at that level for 10 years to officially be declared 1.5°C! That’s backwards looking and not helpful for policymakers.

COP Conferences

One of the most misleading annual events is COP (UN Conference of the Parties) held every year in November, “claiming we must do our best to keep global average temperature below 1.5 degrees C.” Yet, oil and gas companies are pumping out 40 billion tons of CO2 a year. This is all the proof needed to know 1.5°C will remain dead as a doornail. Along the way, for decades, a faux hopefulness oozed out from within streams of speeches at COPs: “keep the temperature below 1.5°C,” which was merely a delay tactic by vested interests that really want “business as usual,” the scariest three words in climate change lingo.

Truth be told, we’re heating the planet 10 times faster than ever before in planetary history. And this fact alone means that scientific models are hampered, likely incomplete and inaccurate, because there’s no precedent for what’s happening. It’s little wonder that actual climate change surprises scientists with its too-early-stage vigor.

At what point does the planet become uninhabitable for humans?

Based upon the current rate of planetary heat of one degree every 28 years, we’re looking at 2°C arriving in late 2030s, but there is current satellite data suggesting the planet is heating up much more rapidly by as much as one-half degree per decade. Moreover, there was a report last year by a German physical/meteorological society claiming 3°C by 2050 is perfectly possible. And several analyses have suggested societal economic breakdown anytime from the 2040s based upon “business as usual.” McGuire agrees with that societal economic breakdown analysis.

Geoengineering Bailout – Forget It!

McGuire: “None of the geoengineering ideas to combat excessive heat on a global scale are going to work.” However, there is considerable debate about this subject that’s contrary to his statement.

What to do?

Decarbonization is the most critical aspect to understand. According to McGuire, it’s the only solution.

“We need to be on a war footing to transition ourselves incredibly rapidly off fossil fuels, and to do that, you need a mass program of installing heat pumps in people’s homes instead of gas boilers, and a massive push for renewables much, much faster; we don’t need oil and gas.”

The Fate of The World, A History and Future of the Climate Crisis by Bill McGuire, HarperCollins Publishers, August 2026: “So this is where we are today. We have built a civilization that some will laud as a success, but it is one that fails the majority, is utterly antagonistic to the natural world, and – through driving up the global average temperature at an unprecedented rate – is sowing the seeds of its own failure, and quite possibly its ultimate demise. To the extent that dangerous climate breakdown, affecting every aspect of our lives and livelihoods, is now impossible to dodge, we are playing Russian roulette with all six barrels loaded. The only question is, just how bad the consequences will be when we pull the trigger.”

A “dangerous climate breakdown that’s impossible to dodge” what to do?

“What to do” may be a moot point if nobody buys into the truth: “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” (George Orwell).

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/25/elites-have-no-plan-for-climate-collapse/

EXCELLENT ― Homesick: A Plea For Our Planet by Andrea Gibson

Tears. So moving, so indescribably heartfelt, beautiful, wise, and rich in all the ways that most matter. Andrea Gibson remains such a treasure and her legacy lives on. Deepest gratitude and love. 🙏💜 Molly

Photo by Molly

HOMESICK: A PLEA FOR OUR PLANET

In the 5th grade I won the science fair 
with a project on climate change 
That featured a paper mache ozone layer 
with a giant hole, through which a paper mache sun 
cancered the skin of a Barbie in a bikini 
on a lawn chair, glaciers melting like ice cubes 
in her lemonade.

It was 1987 in a town 
that could have invented red hats
but the school principal gave me a gold ribbon 
and not a single bit of attitude 
about my radical political stance, 

because neither he nor I knew it was a political stance. 
Science had not been fully framed as leftist propaganda. 
The president did not have a twitter feed 
starving the world of facts.

I spent that summer as I had every summer 
before, racing through the forest behind my house
down the path my father called the old logging road 
to a meadow thick with raspberry bushes
whose thorns were my very first heroes
because they did nothing with their life but protect
what was sweet.

Sundays I went to church but struggled 
to call it prayer if it didn’t leave grass stains 
on my knees. Couldn’t call it truth if it didn't 
come with a dare to crawl into the cave
by the creek and stay put until somebody counted 
all the way to 100. 

As a kid I thought 100 was the biggest number there was. 
My mother absolutely blew my mind 
the day she said, One hundred and one. 

One hundred…AND WHAAAAAT!!!!????

Billionaires never grow out of doing that same math 
with years. Can’t conceive of counting past their own lifespans. 
Believe the world ends the day they do. 
Why are the keys to our future in the hands of those 
who have the longest commutes from their heads to their hearts? 
Whose greed is the smog that keeps us from seeing 
our own nature, and the sweetness we are here to protect?

Do you know sometimes when gathering nectar 
bees fall asleep in flowers? Do you know fish 
are so sensitive snowflakes sound like fireworks 
when they land on the water? Do you know sea otters 
hold hands when they sleep so they don’t drift apart? 
Do you know whales will follow their injured friends 
to shore, often taking their own lives 
so to not let a loved one be alone when he dies?

None of this is poetry. It is just the earth 
being who she is, in spite of us putting barcodes on the sea.  
In spite of us acting like Edison invented daylight.

Dawn presses her blushing face to my window, 
asks me if I know the records in my record collection 
look like the insides of trees. Yes, I say, 
there is nothing you have ever grown that isn’t music. 
You were the bamboo in Coltrane’s saxophone reed. 
The mulberries that fed the silkworms 
that made the slippers for the ballet. 
The pine that built the loom that wove the hemp 
for Frida Khalo’s canvas. The roses that dyed her paint 
hoping her brush could bleed for her body.

Who, more than the earth, has bled for us? 
How do we not mold our hearts after the first spruce tree 
who raised her hand and begged to be cut 
into piano keys so the elephants can keep their tusks? 

The earth is the right side of history.  
Is the canyon my friend ran to
when no else he knew would echo 
his chosen name back to him.
Is the wind that wailed through 1956 Alabama 
until the poplar trees carved themselves into Dr King’s pulpit. 
Is the volcano that poured the mercury 
into the thermometers held under the tongue of Italy, 
though she knew our fever was why her canals 
were finally running clear. She took our temperature. 
Told us we were too hot, even after 
we’d spent decades claiming she was not. 
Our hands held to her burning forehead, 
we insisted she was fine while wildfires 
turned redwoods to toothpicks, 
readying the teeth of our apocalypse.

She sent a smoke signal all the way from California.
In New York City ash fell from the sky. 
Do you know the mountains of California 
used to look like they’d been set on fire 
because they were so covered in monarch butterflies? 
Do you know monarch butterflies migrate 3000 miles 
using only the fuel they stored as caterpillars in the cocoon?

We need so much less than we take. 
We owe so much more than we give. 
Squirrels plant thousands of trees every year 
just from forgetting where they left their acorns. 

If we aimed to be just half as good
as one of the earth’s mistakes, 
we could turn so much around.
Our living would be seed, the future would have roots.
We would cast nothing from the garden of itself.
and we would make the thorns proud.

— Andrea Gibson

From You Better Be Lightning

https://andreagibson.org/homesick-a-plea-for-our-planet

Satish Kumar: Let Peace Fill Our Heart, Our World, Our Universe

Photo by Molly

Look at what realists have done for us. They have led us to war and climate change, poverty on an unimaginable scale, and wholesale ecological destruction. Half of humanity goes to bed hungry because of all the realistic leaders in the world. I tell people who call me 'unrealistic' to show me what their realism has done. Realism is an outdated, overplayed and wholly exaggerated concept.

We have to shift our attitude of ownership of nature to relationship with nature. The moment you change from ownership to relationship, you create a sense of the sacred.

I want to see a New Story education, which is not only about intellectual knowledge – not only about measurement — not only about academic achievement. It is also about heart, feelings, emotions, relationship, love, compassion, generosity, beauty. All these values are part of the heart.

Lead me from death to life, from falsehood to truth; Lead me from despair to hope, from fear to trust; Lead me from hate to love, from war to peace; Let peace fill our heart, our world, our universe.

— Satish Kumar

As Satish Kumar Turns 90, His Radical Idealism Is More Important Than Ever

I have long loved Satish Kumar and the ways that he illuminates the sacred, our interconnectedness with all of life, and what it is that truly matters. May we all be inspired by this beautiful, radiant, wise human being. — Molly

Photo credit: Ennio Cameriere

‘What we do to nature we do to ourselves. If we pollute our water, we have to drink it. If we pollute our air, we have to breathe it’

By Annabel Heseltine

In a quiet corner of coastal Cornwall far from Westminster, the brightest eyes the colour of polished conkers sparkle from a dark corner of a lovely old stone farmhouse. ‘Our crisis is not climate change, not economic growth, but aesthetics. We have lost our sense of balance, proportion and harmony. We don’t use our heart and our hands,’ says Satish Kumar, editor emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine and founder of Schumacher College, and who this year will be celebrating his 90th birthday. Kumar has been calling for a radical reimagining of our relationship with the natural world for over six decades, arguing that we need to shift our emphasis from economic growth to human and planetary wellbeing.

His influence stretches far beyond the eco-chamber. When Jane Goodall interviewed Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever who transformed the corporate giant by placing sustainability at the core of its business model, he quoted Kumar. ‘When they teach economy, they should also teach ecology,’ he said, and, ‘humanity comes from the Latin word humus, meaning earth’.

‘Satish Kumar has changed the world, because he is the catalyst for other people to do things. He articulates possibility, and paints a picture of what could be, filling you with optimism and hope,’ says Louise Chester, who introduced Polman to Kumar. Chester, a high-flying financial analyst who was overseeing billions of funds before she founded Mindfulness at Work, a not-for-profit which coaches compassionate leadership to CEOs, lists a global collective of influential changemakers mentored by Kumar. This includes activist Vandana Shiva, who established seed banks across India to resist the commodification of agriculture. ‘I really don’t think I would be the person I am without Satish. I have a very close relationship with him but so do thousands of others,’ says Chester.

Satish Kumar: ‘We consider ourselves owners of nature. If we seriously want to address the root cause of global warming, we have to shift the paradigm from ownership to relationship.’ Photo credit: Ennio Cameriere

Jonathon Porritt, former director of Friends of the Earth, credits Kumar with inspiring thousands through Schumacher College, which he founded in 1991 to offer a more holistic education through ‘the three Hs’ – heart, hands and head, including the right brain hemisphere valuing intuition and imagination. The college has become a global centre for ecological thinking and environmental humanities, attracting students from more than 60 countries. ‘Satish and I occasionally disagree,’ says Porritt. ‘I’m much angrier about the current situation than he is, and he’s uncomfortable with angry people. He thinks that’s a negative emotion and not helpful, but however choppy the waters we’re all navigating, somehow Satish in his little boat always seems to be sailing along on an even keel. He is imperturbable, which is astonishing.’

Kumar’s views are shaped by experience, conviction and courage. Raised in a Jain family in India, he scandalised his family by running away from a monastery to join the Gandhian movement, realising he could better spread the message of peace in the wider world. In 1962, aged 25, he embarked on his famous 8,000-mile peace walk, inspired by outrage at the imprisonment of the 89-year-old philosopher Bertrand Russell for demonstrating against nuclear weapons. He walked from Gandhi’s grave in Delhi to Washington DC delivering packets of peace tea to the four nuclear capitals, urging leaders to pause and think. Advised by his mentor, Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s embodiment who spearheaded land reform in India, to take no food or money, he entrusted himself to the hospitality of strangers. Being vegetarian wasn’t easy among Hindu Kush tribesmen. 

It was when he was on his way home after the walk, in 1966, that he met the economist E F Schumacher (after whom the college was named), author of Small is Beautiful. Schumacher persuaded him to become editor of Resurgence & Ecologist (formerly Resurgence magazine), arguing that there were many Gandhis in India but there would only be one in England. Kumar spent the next four decades shaping one of the most influential environmental magazines in the world. He created a platform for pioneering ecological thinkers like James Lovelock, Arne Naess, Fritjof Capra and Joanna Macy, and challenged readers to confront difficult questions around sustainability, economics and population growth long before such debates entered the mainstream.  

‘The problem is our attitude,’ he explains. ‘We consider ourselves owners of nature. If we seriously want to address the root cause of global warming, we have to shift the paradigm from ownership to relationship.’ He contrasts Descartes’ duality, ‘I think therefore I am’ with the Sanskrit phrase So Hum, ‘you are, therefore I am’, a philosophy rooted in interconnectedness with the universe outside of ourselves. He calls for a reframing of most aspects of modern life: leadership, education, economics, farming, planning and our relationship with nature, in that when we are killing the planet, we are killing ourselves. He advocates more respect for farmers; that schools should nurture imagination as much as intellect; that children should be ‘eco-literate as well as computer literate’; and that communities should care for one another rather than depend on centralised government.

It’s to nature that we return again and again in our conversation. It’s his spiritual practice, his mentor and his respite. He describes the rolling Cornish coastline and its changeable weather as a metaphor of life and reminds us of the generosity of the soil. ‘Soil is very forgiving. It does not ask if you have a Visa card. Out of one seed comes 50 tomatoes. ‘When I started writing about renewable energy in Resurgence in the 1970s, people said we were “naive, idealistic fools in cloud-cuckoo-land”,’ but what seemed radical then feels only too relevant now after decades of biodiversity collapse, floods and fires, polarisation and blinkered leadership. ‘Our bodies are soil transformed,’ he says, ‘so what we do to nature we do to ourselves. If we pollute our water, we have to drink it. If we pollute our air, we have to breathe it.’

In 1964, Satish Kumar set off on a peace walk from Delhi to Washington

I catch up with Kumar between appearances at the Oxford Union and Darwin College, Cambridge, where he is discussing alternative leadership styles. In June, he spoke at Eton College. His 90th birthday tea party will be hosted by Frieda Gormley, co-founder of the B Corp House of Hackney (which put nature on its board), who persuaded the Oxford English Dictionary to include humans in its definition of nature. His retreats based on his books Radical Love and Soil, Soul & Society are sell-outs. Other books include The Buddha and the Terrorist, No Destination, a memoir about that two-year peace walk, and his ninth book, Peace is Possible, has just been published.

He believes modern society suffers from a failure of courage and trust. ‘We want the world to be nice, but without standing up for it,’ he says. ‘Mahatma Gandhi talked about “[being] the change you wish to see in the world”.’ For Kumar, that means teaching young people resilience, compassion and respect for difference. He worries about a world increasingly shaped by division and intolerance, where people seek to destroy opposing viewpoints rather than understand them. ‘We have to dream and to imagine that a slightly less imperfect world is possible,’ he says. ‘We need to train young people to be statesmen, not politicians, to embrace diversity, not to make everyone like ourselves.’

As the sun falls over the Cornish coast, Satish Kumar turns on a light. The 89-year-old peace activist is no longer sitting in the shadows but glowing with vitality. He leans forward, those brown eyes shining even more brightly. ‘You know, Annabel, I know I sound like an idealist. But what have the realists done for us? Realism is overrated. Realists haven’t given us anything except climate change and wars, and they don’t even win them. It’s time to give the idealists a chance.’

Please go here for the original article: https://www.countryandtownhouse.com/culture/satish-kumar/

Intensified by Fossil Fuel-Driven Climate Crisis, ‘Godzilla-Level’ El Niño Smashing Records Ahead of Peak

A firefighter douses flames as they push toward homes during the Creek Fire in the Cascadel Woods area of unincorporated Madera County, California on September 7, 2020. The El Niño event of 2026 is expected to cause a variety of extreme weather, including dry conditions in some regions and extreme rainfall in others, in 2027. (Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)

“As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels,” said one scientist, El Niño “occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”

By Julia Conley

Although “El Niño comes and goes,” as one climate scientist said of the naturally occurring warm-weather phenomenon on Monday, experts are in agreement that this year is different—with meteorologists already recording a temperature rise of 3.07°C in the Pacific Ocean, putting it at a statistical tie with November 2015, when El Niño caused the ocean to warm by 3.08°C.

The temperature rise is not expected to peak until November and December, when an average of 14 models examined by Zeke Hausfather of Carbon Brief and Berkeley Earth found that a temperature rise of 4.1°C is forecast.

The event has been underway since June, Hausfather wrote, and has been gathering strength “faster than any previous event on record.”

Scientists typically track the strength of El Niño—which leads to heavy rainfall, higher global temperatures, and other extreme weather as warmer Pacific waters are pushed to the south—using the Niño 3.4 anomaly, or ONI, which determines how much hotter the central Pacific is compared with a 30-year rolling average.

A temperature rise above 2.0°C is considered a “very strong” El Niño, and scientists and policymakers are already calling this year’s event a “super El Niño,” with some experts using the terms “Godzilla-level” and “jaw-dropping” to describe the weather conditions that can be expected in the coming months due to the warmer climate.

As Common Dreams reported late last month, planetary heating driven by fossil fuel emissions is intensifying El Niño, while the naturally occurring phenomenon can in turn worsen the impacts of the climate emergency.

In the last 40 years scientists have recorded a 16% increase in the strength of El Niño events, according to a study published in Science last month. They’ve also gotten 36% stronger than they were before industrialization began.

The “double whammy,” as The Guardian called it, could make 2027 the hottest year ever recorded, blowing through heat records that have just been set this year—and that have been linked to the deaths of people around the world from extreme heat and flooding.

“This event is a huge redistribution of energy in the climate system and is dangerous because it is unfolding on top of a much warmer, human-influenced climate system,” climate scientist Friederike Otto of Imperial College London told The Guardian. “So, in many places around the world we will see never-before-experienced heat extremes, with all their consequences on health, food security, and water stress.”

Despite the fact that El Niño predates the human-caused climate emergency, Otto said, “as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, it occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”

This year’s event is likely to be the most intense El Niño in 1,000 years, reported to The Guardian, with hotter and drier conditions already linked to deadly wildfires in Indonesia and crop losses in Central America and the Caribbean region due to drought conditions. Rice production this season is expected to fail in Indonesia, according to the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University.

As the Southern Hemisphere’s summer months approach, southern Africa and Australia are at heightened risk of wildfires and droughts as well. Meanwhile, cocoa production could be damaged by extreme rainfall in parts of South America.

“All strong El Niño events on record have continued to strengthen well into the winter—and the models are in near-unanimous agreement that this one will, too,” wrote Hausfather at Carbon Brief. “If the forecast holds, the current event will peak between November and January at a level far beyond any event previously observed in the instrumental record.”

In California on Monday, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in an effort to prepare communities for El Niño’s impacts in the coming months, which could include coastal flooding and heavy snow in mountain regions.

Hausfather noted that strong El Niño events like those that occurred in 1997 and 2015 were also “associated with hundreds of billions of dollars in damages globally.”

“This event,” he told The Guardian, “is leaving those past ones in the dust.”

Please go here for the original article: https://www.commondreams.org/news/el-nino-2026

Not Just AI and Climate—Inequality Also an ‘Existential’ Threat That Demands Global Cooperation: UN Chief

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres speaks at the UNA-UK conference to mark the 80th anniversary of the founding of the UN in London on January 17, 2026. (Photo by Toby Shepheard/AFP via Getty Images)

UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on leaders to work together to solve the growing problem of global inequality at the UN General Assembly.

By Julia Conley

Sep 17, 2026

High-level meetings at the United Nations General Assembly are set to begin next week, and they come at a time when the threats to humanity posed by the climate emergency and artificial intelligence have never been clearer.

Those crises demand that policymakers work together to prevent catastrophic, permanent planetary heating and the creation of “runaway” AI technology, suggested UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Wednesday, but he emphasized that another pernicious, destructive problem cannot be overlooked.

Guterres also named “the intolerable deepening of inequalities” as another “existential threat” that leaders must address at the upcoming meetings.

Earlier this year, the anti-poverty group Oxfam International released a report showing that combined billionaire wealth stood at $18.2 trillion in 2025, having risen from $3.6 trillion in 2009.

At the same time, the number of food-insecure people on Earth shot up to 2.2 billion in 2024, rising from 1.5 billion a decade earlier.

“Nearly half of the world lives in poverty while a select few continue to gain extreme wealth and power,” said Oxfam at the time. “The amount of wealth owned by the poorest half of the world is less than the amount owned by just the 12 richest billionaires. This extreme concentration of wealth isn’t just making life less affordable for most of us, it’s creating harmful divisions. Billionaires, corporations, and politicians are taking away people’s basic ability to make choices about their futures and suppressing dissenting voices.”

An analysis focused on wealth inequality in the US by the Center for American Progress (CAP) this week also showed that the gap between the ultrarich and the rest of the American public has gotten significantly wider in less than two years since President Donald Trump was reelected, with hundreds of billions of dollars in financial backing from billionaires including tech CEO Elon Musk.

“Since Trump took office, the ultrawealthy (top 0.1%) gained more than 8,000 times as much wealth per household as those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution,” said CAP. “To provide an example of the extremity and exponential nature of wealth inequality in the United States, the 10 wealthiest Americans alone saw their real fortunes grow by a combined $259 billion over the same period, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index—about $26 billion per person, or 22 million times more than the bottom half’s $1,200 per household.”

Economic experts have found that the growing inequality crisis is entirely solvable. As Common Dreams reported last year, research from the European Union Tax Observatory found that a global 2% minimum tax on billionaire wealth “would generate about $250 billion in tax revenue—from just 3,000 individuals,” raising about $50 billion in Europe alone.

In 2024, finance ministers at a meeting of the Group of 20 in Rio de Janeiro agreed on the need to tax the richest people in the world at a higher rate to address persistent and worsening economic inequality.

As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, a study published in The Lancet found that the global inequality that’s been worsened by Trump’s foreign aid cuts could be addressed by a 3% wealth tax—raising a small amount of money compared to the total wealth of the world’s richest people, but enough to save 29.5 million lives over the next four years.

Climate campaigners in Africa, who have demanded an end to French company Total Energies’ East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), agreed with Guterres’ point that “climate, inequality, and international cooperation are inseparable.”

“People living along EACOP’s path,” said the group Stop EACOP, “are the first to bear the environmental and economic costs of decisions made far from their communities.”

Please go here for the original article: https://www.commondreams.org/news/global-economic-inequality