A Quote by Ban Ki-moon
Extreme weather events continue to grow more frequent and intense in rich and poor countries alike, not only devastating lives, but also infrastructure, institutions, and budgets - an unholy brew which can create dangerous security vacuums.
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The science tells us that if we fail to reduce global warming pollution, global temperatures will rise to dangerous levels and unleash devastating extreme weather events and accelerate destructive sea level rise.
Climate change hype has grave real world consequences. It gets rich countries to adopt silly policies and to impose devastating eco-imperialism on poor countries. The world's rich millions can afford environmental extremism; its poor billions can't. Climate change pseudo-science about human causality has been exposed repeatedly. What's less appreciated is that there aren't more natural disasters in need of an explanation.
The people of South Jersey know that climate change is real and that it impacts their quality of life. They see that our streets flood almost every time it rains and they have seen that extreme weather events have become more frequent and more violent.
The bottom line is that weather events not only threaten private property and family budgets, but they also can decimate public resources and government coffers.
While the rich reap most of the benefits of technological development, the poor bear an unequal burden of dealing with the consequences of the resulting increased pollution. The poor continue to live in greatest proximity to the sources of pollution, the infrastructure and machinery of industry. They work in the most polluted and physically dangerous workplaces. And these same individuals, living and working closest to the sources of environmental catastrophe, are also the ones most lacking decent health care.
A cynic had defined aid as simply the system by which poor white people in rich countries gave money to rich black people in poor countries to put into Swiss bank accounts.
Aid is the process by which the poor in rich countries subsidize the rich in poor countries.
The shock caused by the September 11 events has also lead to a thorough reflection on the existing disparity between rich and poor countries, on the misery of populations of the South.
There is a considerable polarization taking place here, increasing the gap between rich and poor. It's most dramatic in Third World countries, of course, but in the rich countries it's also very noticeable.
The great question for our time is, how to make sure that the continuing scientific revolution brings benefits to everybody rather than widening the gap between rich and poor. To lift up poor countries, and poor people in rich countries, from poverty, to give them a chance of a decent life, technology is not enough. Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.
GDP excludes care work and other unpaid work, most of which falls to women and girls in rich and in poor countries alike.
If you neglect those who are currently poor and stable, you may create more poor and unstable people. There has been a tremendous concentration of donor interest in countries that are seen as particularly fragile - but it becomes harder to mobilise money for sub-Saharan, plain poor countries.
If the level and amount of consumption and waste of the western rich countries ever reaches the poor countries, it will mean the end of humanity. The big world corporations are busy doing it...The production, selling, consumption, accumulation, wastes' and advertisement explosions in the western rich countries and the continued population explosion in the poor countries will turn into major catastrophes.
It is a way to avoid difficulties, but whenever you avoid difficulties and challenges you have avoided growth also. Married people never grow. Lovers grow, because they have to meet the challenge every moment - and with no security. They have to create an inner phenomenon. With security you need not bother to create anything; the society helps.
Once-in-a-generation weather events are now becoming a regular occurrence. Whether it be public safety power shutoffs or electric system failures due to extreme weather events, we must invest in grid resilience and modernization in order to keep the power on in impacted communities.
Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.
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