AT LEAST ONE MAN HAS IT RIGHT

Gordon Brown the ex PM of the UK has spoken in the Guardian newspaper about the unbelievably disparity in global wealth and the catastrophic effect this disparity yields. He said last year, the oil and gas industry across the world banked about $4tn, according to the head of the International Energy Agency. This represents one of the biggest redistributions of wealth from the world’s poor to the richest petrostates. The record energy prices that have produced these unearned gains have not only caused dramatically rising poverty and debt in the global south, but have also stymied decades of progress in extending power into homes, villages and towns that were previously without electricity. Let’s put this in perspective: $4tn is a bigger sum than the entire UK economy and about 20 times all the international aid budgets of the world. It is 40 times the $100bn-a-year target for the global south that was pledged in 2009 for 2020 but never reached. The windfall has given energy exporters, including the Gulf states and Norway, nearly $1tn of earnings from their foreign sales alone, and the failure to recycle a fraction of these gains to the world’s poorest countries is one of the great scandals of our times. When are real politicians going to step forward and stop this scandal that is killing thousands of people and decimating the worlds flora and fauna ?.