Global Inequality, the Climate Emergency and the Global Justice Report

As the world relentlessly careens from one crisis to another – the forever wars, record breaking temperatures, cyclones, floods, droughts, fires, pandemics etc. – fuelled by the climate emergency, ongoing attempts to make critical sense of it all have unsurprisingly accelerated and intensified. The once smug blanket dismissals of the climate crisis as a “hoax” are now manipulatively replaced by orchestrated ideological, utopian promises by politicians and of course, by billionaires in bunkers (Wallace, 2024). The business-as-usual of neoliberal economic growth regardless of the obvious costs to planet earth, the technological delusions of so-called solutions via AI, Robotics and the proposed colonization of outer space via SpaceX, Blue Origin etc. even as the unfettered forever wars continue that to destroy lives, communities and the environment continue unbated. Given the enormous capital and power accumulation via neoliberal crony capitalism, the power and proliferation of well-funded and well-organized greenwashing buy its current and aspiring beneficiaries is unsurprising.   

However, despite all the odds stacked against them, the human capacity for critique and resistance, even in seemingly futile, insurmountable conditions, cannot but – despite the eventual pushbacks and co-optations from the power structures – fuel some hope against hope. As a range of environmentalist and anti-climate change movements – Chipko in the 1970’s (Shiva and Bandyopadhyay, 1988), the Yellow Vest Movement (Kipfer, 2019; Baber, 2019),  Via Campesina (Patel, 2009), the protests against the destruction of forests for Teslas’s battery factories and against the rapidly multiplying energy and water hungry AI data centers, the continuing legacies of the Occupy Movement (Baber, 2026) etc. amply demonstrate, most humans usually do not passively accept or acquiesce to fundamental challenges to their well-being.

Despite the overwhelming odds, the powerful, influential neoliberal capitalist social structures that seek to subvert any challenge to their production and accumulation treadmill, there is no shortage of activists and academics – not necessarily mutually exclusive categories – who organize, protest, write, analyze, debate and provide the intellectual resources for the push back against the relentless, determined greenwashing that lubricates the ongoing environmental destruction and the climate crisis. One thinks of E. F. Schumacher, Naomi Klein, John Bellamy Foster, Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore, Andreas Malm, Amita Baviskar, Jason Hickel, Thomas Piketty, Kohei Saito, Quinn Slobodian among countless others. Aware of the public’s acute awareness and anxieties about the climate crisis, many governments and states have – largely in the performative, ritualistic mode – commissioned commissions to produce reports that, despite the integrity and best intentions of their authors, are more often usually shelved and ignored by policy makers and others at the helm of power structures. Occasionally, although some reports such as the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (2006), the Dasgupta Review (2021) etc.on the economics of biodiversity do inform largely anodyne discussions and debates, they rarely get to the heart of the matter – the unbearable inequalities endemically generated by the relentless and seemingly unstoppable, destructive juggernaut of unfettered capitalism in its many guises.

Given the prevailing palpably dystopian global situation, the recent Global Justice Report (Watts, 2026) from the World Inequality Lab comes as the proverbial and possibly cliched breath of fresh air when it is most needed. Put together by a team of 45 leading scholars that includes the eminent French economist Thomas Piketty the co-director of the World Inequality Lab and one of its lead co-authors, the Report provides not just an incisive diagnosis of the causes of the climate crisis but also sketches out possible plausible alternatives to the seemingly insurmountable mess of our own making. While neither the causes nor the possible solutions proposed in this document are entirely new, what distinguishes this report and plan of action from other past pronouncements is that it puts global economic and social inequality at the heart of its analysis. Inequality however is not considered in isolation from other key factors that contribute to the catastrophic climate crisis. Rather, even while putting inequality at the centre of its analysis, four crucial dimensions that until now have been considered in isolation from each other, are combined and fused. These four dimensions are: “redistribution at the world scale; a deep reform of the international financial and economic order; a radical transformation of energy systems; substantial shifts in consumption systems” (Piketty et. al. 2026). To reduce the staggering inequality – the billionaire class constituting just 0.001% of the world population currently owns 6% of the global wealth while the bottom 50% owns only 2% –  a global wealth tax of up to 20% a year on billionaires and a global income tax of up to 90% levied on about 1% of the world’s population is proposed. This, as anticipated in the Report, would eventually result in the rise of the share of global wealth held by the poorest half of humanity from the current 2% to 30% while contracting the billionaires’ share from the current 6% to 0.05%. The report recommends the levying of a global wealth tax up to 20% a year on billionaires, and a global income tax up to 90% for the 1% of the richest of the world. The proposal is to set up a “global justice fund” financed by and overseeing the redistribution of the funds generated by such these mechanisms wealth via new institutions rather than the existing so-called “rules-based” Bretton Woods offsprings and generators of imperial global inequality – the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As opposed to the current situation where the richest regions of the world hold four times as many votes at the IMF and the World Bank, the authors of the Report argue that a new economic and financial system with a new international currency would give every inhabitant an equal voice and eventually erode the entrenched privileges of the dominant powers and rectify global trade imbalances. The result would be not the current “transfer [of resources and power] from many to few, but a gain for almost everyone” (Piketty et. al. 2026).

Well-meaning critics who reject the neoliberal, technocratic peddlers of unhinged utopias will immediately point out given the enormity of entrenched interests and power structures that perpetuate the projects of the accumulation of capital and authoritarian power will do anything to throttle and scuttle any proposals that threatens their existing stakes in “business as usual” neoliberal economies. While it is true that good ideas and proposals alone are not enough for redirecting the unambiguously destructive trajectory that the world is currently aggressively pursuing, it is also clear that a majority of the so-called general public is without any doubt deeply concerned about the climate crisis and actively searching for viable alternatives. A thoroughly researched, evidence based, critical, thoughtful and not unachievable set of proposals that the Global Justice Report encapsulates might well be the spark that eventually ignites  movements towards a rethinking and more importantly, the restructuring of the entrenched structures of inequality that fuel the eventual catastrophic climatic destruction of planet earth before it is too late. As Frantz Fanon (1963:98) presciently warned many decades ago: “The fundamental duel which seemed to be…between capitalism and socialism, is already losing some of its importance. What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.”

REFERENCES:

Baber, Zaheer. 2019. “Climate change and the yellow vest movement.” Economic and Political Weekly 54, no. 34: 24.

Baber, Zaheer. “Socialist Mayor in the Capital of Global Capitalism.” Economic & Political Weekly 61, no. 1 (2026): 13.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963.The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press.

Kipfer, Stefan. 2019. “What colour is your vest? Reflections on the yellow vest movement in France.” Studies in Political Economy 100, no. 3: 209-231.

Patel, Raj. 2009. “Grassroots voices: Food sovereignty.” Journal of Peasant Studies 36, no. 3: 663-706.

Piketty, Thomas et. al. 2026. “A good life for the 99% isn’t just a pipedream. It can be done. Here’s how.” The Guardian, 4 June, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/04/a-good-life-for-the-99-isnt-a-pipe-dream-it-can-be-done-heres-how

Shiva, Vandana, and Jayanta Bandyopadhyay. 1986. “The evolution, structure, and impact of the Chipko movement.” Mountain research and development, 133-142.

The Global Justice Report https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/

Wallace, Kathleen. 2024. “Billionaire, Bunker, Bastards”, Counterpunch, January 5. https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/01/05/billionaire-bunker-bastards/

Zaheer Baber is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto.