11

Stephen BarlowJune 4, 2026 at 6:14 AM EDT

"An equal and habitable world is possible’: academics set out sweeping vision for planetary survival" I want to write a thread about this, but before that, there is something necessary to make clear. It was always known what the solutions were. theguardian.com 1/🧵

You will find visions like this going back to the 1960s. The problems and the solutions were well known, just look at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, and the Action Plan, as evidence for how long the problems and solutions have been known. un.org 2/

But it was a conscious choice taken by powerful, the leaders of our world, not just politicians, but business leaders, and the owners and controllers of the media, not to create this change, even though they signed up and publicly agreed to do this. They deceived the public. 3/ After no action was taken on the 1972 Action Plan, the UN was so alarmed that they set up the Brundtland Commission to examine what was necessary, and to set out a more clearly defined plan, which was Our Common Future (1987). un-documents.net 4/

If you read Our Common Future, you will see that the aims were broadly similar, to that of the World Inequality Lab, and that inequality and that to even it up, was central to it. It formed the basis for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. un.org 5/

The countries of the world signed up to this plan through the various treaties signed there, including the UNFCCC on climate change, which set up the COP talks. The only problem is the devious and slippery politicians and business leaders, reneged on everything they signed up to. 6/ It is the same with the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change where the countries of the world signed up to keeping warming below 1.5C degrees. The IPCC produced a plan for how to achieve this, the SR15, which involved halving emissions by 2030. ipcc.ch 7/

You can guess what happened, political leaders reneged on their promises, and emissions are expected to be much greater in 2030, not halved. For 54 years the lying leaders of our world, have used the same deceit, to promise action, and then to renege, and to do the exact opposite. 8/ What the leaders of the world (remember I include business leaders, and the owners/controllers of the media) have done, is to prioritize the ability of billionaires and the big corporations, to make even bigger profits and to accumulate more wealth. 9/ The dishonest rationalisation for this, is they needed this wealth to fix the problems, and trickle down, would generate prosperity for all, a bare-faced lie. The motivation for this deceit is that the leaders hoped that oligarchs would personally reward them from their ill-gotten gains. 10/ How this works is very clear from the example of ex-UK PM Tony Blair, who made all these big promises in the 1990s, early 2000s, and has now made himself fabulously wealthy, by doing the bidding of the billionaires and oligarchs. 11/ What differs with the World Inequality Lab Report, is that it specifically deals with this malignant wealth accumulation by the very richest and recommends wealth taxes to redistribute this wealth, and degrowth. But we're up against the same problem of how to achieve it. wir2026.wid.world 12/

You see, nowhere in the other agreements, going back nearly 55 years, did it say, that the solution, was to massively increase the wealth of billionaires and big corporations, and the problem would be fixed with trickle down. In fact, it was acknowledged that this was the cause of the problems. 13/ It was those with the power and influence, being paid by the richest people in the world, who decided with no valid reason, to cut taxes for the very rich and big corporations and to create loopholes so they could avoid their tax bills. It's called corruption. 14/ It's created a global oligarchy, where the power of the richest has grown immensely, and they use their massive increasing wealth to buy the media and to buy politics. Where the rest of the top 1%, the only demographic with growing wealth, are all in with the agenda. 15/ Where they've funded and enabled the far right, to blame immigrants and minorities for the deceasing prosperity amongst ordinary people. The problem and solution is bringing them to heel. Then we can implement the solutions, we always knew were necessary. @georgemonbiot.bsky.social 16/