GLOBAL WARMING – The UN report confirms 2023 as the hottest year ever. Oxfam: a factor that exacerbates inequalities, it’s the “decade of great disparities.” The only way out: tax mega-assets.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a specialized agency of the United Nations dedicated to monitoring weather and climate, has recently officially confirmed that 2023 was by far the hottest year ever recorded. The global average annual temperature in 2023 was 1.45°C above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900), surpassing the significant threshold of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which aimed to limit the long-term temperature increase to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
If every decade since the 1980s has been warmer than the previous one, the most recent nine years represent the hottest period ever recorded. In 2023, global temperatures set new monthly records every month from June to December, with July and August being the two hottest months ever recorded.
The WMO’s report on the State of the Global Climate in 2023 highlighted that records were broken in all monitored sectors, including levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, ocean heat and acidification, sea level, sea ice extent, and glacier mass balance. Sea surface temperatures were exceptionally high for much of the year, leading to severe marine heatwaves. Additionally, the extent of Antarctic sea ice was the lowest ever recorded.
Climate change manifests itself daily through extraordinary weather conditions. It is not necessary to resort to sophisticated statistics to notice exceptional heatwaves, lack of snow, the looming water crisis in major islands, increased frequency of devastating fires, intense rains, floods, and tropical cyclones. Any attempt to explain these transformations, accelerating before our eyes, as the normal course of seasons, although still proposed instrumentally and culpably by various media outlets, is now not only pathetic but also ridiculous.
Politics, lagging behind all these developments and in an extreme attempt to deny the evidence, continues to give credence to sources that a serious country should exclude from public funding due to the spread of unfounded, if not outright false, news. It is right for young people belonging to various climate activist groups to organize demonstrative events to draw public attention.
The long-term climate change is intensifying and is unequivocally attributable to human activities. The climate crisis is exacerbating the inequality crisis, widening social disparities and fractures, ushering in what the Oxfam report Inequality: Power at the Service of a Few, published on the occasion of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, defines as the ‘decade of great disparities.’ Billions of people are forced to see their vulnerabilities grow due to increasingly frequent extreme weather events, while a handful of super-rich individuals multiply their fortunes at staggering and incredible rates.
The Oxfam report presents a horror movie scenario: the five wealthiest men on the planet have doubled their wealth from 2020 to today, with an hourly increase rate of 14 million dollars, while the poor become even poorer due to inflation. In Italy, the richest 1% owns 23% of the wealth (and controls much of the media, especially those ‘climate denial’ newspapers). Oxfam predicts that the first trillionaire (one trillion is 1,000 billion) will appear in the next decade. The current economic structure, with the triumph of colossal oligopolies or, in some cases, monopolies, hidden behind the façade of the ‘free market,’ thus generates an enormous concentration of wealth in an ever-decreasing number of hands.
The relationship between economic inequality and the climate crisis is explained in another Oxfam report, Climate Inequality, where it is highlighted that in 2019, the top 1% of the super-rich was responsible for 16% of global carbon emissions, equivalent to the emissions of the poorest 66% of humanity (5 billion people). Analyzing the historical series, it is noted that since the 1990s, the top 1% of the super-rich has emitted twice the carbon budget of the poorest half of humanity combined. The emissions of the top 1% of the super-rich are projected to exceed the safety limit (the allowed emissions to stay below 1.5°C of global warming according to the Paris Agreements) by more than 22 times in 2030, canceling carbon savings equivalent to nearly a million onshore wind turbines.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, has once again sounded the alarm, stating that humanity’s actions are burning the earth. 2023 was just a preview of the catastrophic future that awaits us if we do not act immediately. Guterres emphasized the need to respond to the record increase in temperature with innovative actions. Oxfam has calculated that a 60% tax on the incomes of the top 1% of the super-rich globally would reduce the equivalent of the total carbon emissions of the United Kingdom and raise $6.4 trillion to finance renewable energy and the transition from fossil fuels. The issue of taxing extraordinary and unimaginable wealth must be placed at the top of the political agenda, both for a fundamental principle of equality and resource redistribution and to limit greenhouse gas emissions at a time when it is not even clear if we are still in time to rectify the situation
Francesco sylos labini 
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