Those who demand better pay and conditions for workers and justice for poor people have been pitched by demagogues and corporate lobbyists against those who demand a habitable planet. For years, we have struggled with the question of how to overcome this division and create a social and environmental justice platform that could unite vast numbers of the world’s people. Only one thing was clear: any such campaign had to be led by activists from poorer nations. Now, I believe, the breakthrough has arrived.t has proved too easy to stop people uniting around the crucial issues of our time. Those who demand better pay and conditions for workers and justice for poor people have been pitched by demagogues and corporate lobbyists against those who demand a habitable planet. For years, we have struggled with the question of how to overcome this division and create a social and environmental justice platform that could unite vast numbers of the world’s people. Only one thing was clear: any such campaign had to be led by activists from poorer nations. Now, I believe, the breakthrough has arrived.Developed by campaigners in some of the world’s most exploited countries, it’s a brilliant idea: simple but systemic.                                                                                                                                                                Rich nations owe a massive climate debtto poorer nations, they are deemed to owe massive financial debts to the rich nations, yet they cannot pay them without destroying their economies and their ecosystems. The proposal is simultaneously to cancel both the climate and the financial debts, liberating the money poorer nations need to take climate action. Debt for Climate, mobilising labour, social and climate movements in 28 countries, will be launched by campaigners during the G7 summit in Germany, which starts on Sunday.Campaigners often talk of “odious debts”, which means loans agreed by dictatorships, that provide no benefit to the nation. But all the debts deemed to be owed by poor nations to the rich world and its corporations could be seen this way. The idea that the global south, looted and enslaved for centuries, should owe money to its exploiters is grotesque.An analysis in the journal Global Environmental Change suggests that $10tn of value is extracted from poorer countries by richer ones every year, in the form of raw materials, energy, land and labour. That’s 70 times as much money as would be needed to end extreme poverty worldwide. This extraction provides rich nations with a quarter of their GDP: much of our apparent wealth depends on exploitation.                        https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/24/rich-nations-climate-debt-cancelling-debts-emissions-global-debt-swap-campaign?utm_campaign=Daily%20Briefing&utm_content=20220624&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter