Gallagher Calls for Action on Climate Change in Progressive International
Kevin Gallagher, Professor of Global Development Policy and Director of the Global Development Policy Center at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, coauthored a new op-ed for Progressive International discussing the need to address global climate change and high levels of inequality.
In the op-ed, Gallagher and co-author Richard Kozul-Wright, Director of the Globalization and Development Strategies Division at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, describe a combined mission to bolster global public health, tackle the furies of hyper-globalization, and reverse climate change. While there has been international support for increased sustainable infrastructure financing, Gallagher argues that a systemic change in the global economic regime is required to achieve a “global Green New Deal” that will produce results.
An excerpt:
Some of our efforts to control and direct nature have produced unmeasurable improvements in our overall well-being. But that effort has often contained a darker side, giving rise to punctuated episodes of abuse that have stretched the limits of our relationship with the natural world in damaging ways. The current pandemic reflects that darker side, but it has been made worse by the rise of a predatory economic model founded on disposable social relations, and by increasingly precarious communities fed by an agro-industrial complex which has extended extractive practices to the production and delivery of food.
This mixture has had a profound impact on environmental stability. In the much of the world, the rush by some groups to exploit new sources of carbon-based energy, the greater intensity in the use of land, forests and water, and changing consumption patterns have profoundly altered the relationship with nature to one of exploitation in support of maximum profits. The resulting rise in global temperatures has captured the headlines as the scientific evidence of its damaging consequences mounts. But the threats to a habitable planet extend well beyond a warming world and include dying oceans, unbreathable air and the threat of deadly pandemics.
The full op-ed can be read here.
Kevin Gallagher is a professor of global development policy at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, where he directs the Global Development Policy Center. He is author or co-author of six books, including most recently, The China Triangle: Latin America’s China Boom and the Fate of the Washington Consensus. Read more about him here.