Madam President
small island nations
particularly low lying atolls like Tuvalu
who are surrounded by sea
have always had great hope
that the ocean brings prosperity and life.
The ocean is now brining destruction
and is threatening our very existence.
Sea level rise could engulf our nation, our entire nation
and therefore erase our rights
as a nation and as a sovereign state
Madam President
it is vitally important
that the international community
take immediate and decisive action
to address climate change now.
Not tomorrow,
not in 2015,
and definitely not in 2020.
We have no time to waste,
and we are only a few inches,
from the point of no return.
Money restricts freedoms;
it does not give us access to products and services;
it restricts access to them.
If you have trailers full of dollars,
then you have a whole lot more freedom than someone who has a handful of dollars.
That is the reality of our financial system.
If we look at money as a store of labour, we can ask the question:
what happens when there are not enough labour opportunities
available for our entire species?
In our human history
in which we have used any form of money
we have never managed full employment.
In today's world of more than seven billion people
could you even imagine what that might look like?
Even with much less than full employment on our planet,
we waste enough global resources producing a stratified
range of substandard products to require 1.5 Earths
in an attempt to continue to sustain it long term.
Do we really need to continue down that road
in order to confirm the ultimate conclusion?
Look at a product like a mobile telephone, as an example.
Walk into any shop selling these items and how many options are we faced with?
There is an obscenely stratified range of these products
and the resource waste involved in producing the cheapest phone
is very much identical to that of the top end phone,
which amounts to an absurd waste of planetary resources.
On top of that, every year a new phone is released
and promoted as the must-have product.
This results in people lining up in advance of the release date
in order to buy this product that on a very fundamental level
is almost identical to the predecessor.
What happens to the old phones?
Sure, there is lip service given to recycling,
but the reality is they pile up as mountains of toxic e-waste in distant countries,
far removed from the sleepy eyes of the western consumer.
In these so-called developing nations,
other human beings strip down the phones and other electronics,
subjecting themselves to all manner of toxins,
so they may earn a couple of dollars a day.
How many products do we produce on our planet that come in a similar stratified range?
All of them,
everything we have created is offered form the low-end cheap as chips bit of useless crap,
all the way through to the high-end product for people living in the Magic Kingdom.
Worse yet, even the people living in the Magic Kingdom are not getting the best we can produce.
Nobody is!
Every last bit of materialistic junk we manufacture on this planet
is made to either break or be obsolete within a time frame
that our outmoded market system can sustain.
You do not keep billions of people employed by producing products that are made to last,
are easily maintained/fixed or are capable of being upgraded.
To do that requires you produce a momentous amount of complete and utter shit.
In fact, you need to really spend some time and effort researching
exactly how to go about making things that you can be sure will fail
in order to pull this kind of system off for as long as we have.
There is just no need for it. When you look around and see all that utterly cheap garbage,
the kind of stuff you can find in dollar shops and the like,
you know what that represents?
Wasted lives!
It is not fair, and it is not good enough.
We as a species are capable of so much more, and more importantly,
if we have any intention of leaving future generations
an environment that even has a hope of sustaining some kind of meaningful existence,
then we need to change.
We need to change our attitudes in a big way.
Consider a child born into either a wealthy or a poor family:
while on the fundamental level both children are primarily the same,
their potential access to resources are extremely different,
and should that poor family live in a "developing nation"
then those differences are greatly exacerbated.
In our current social system, when it comes to individual outcomes,
there is a certain amount of luck involved in relation to where
and the economic standing of the family anyone is born into.
While there are certainly examples of individuals overcoming the odds
to experience what we currently term as "success",
how many do not overcome, for every one that does?
Even if we were to take a more holistic approach to our custodianship of this planet,
yet continued to maintain any form of labour exchange system,
there would be a plurality of social issues that would persist.
Consider again the phone example discussed previously.
If, in the interest of planetary sustainability,
we amalgamated the corporations in order to work in cooperation
to produce the best possible phone for any given period of time
which would mean the design would allow for strategic use of resources,
recycling, ease of upgrade and simplicity of repair or replacing worn parts
we would quickly find that once the phones had been produced,
employment roles would become greatly reduced.
Applying this approach to general production globally,
it can only be expected that we would find not only would we be using less resources,
but there would also be ever diminishing employment opportunities.
If we get transfixed on a manufactured need to continue using some form of currency
in order to facilitate the exchange of labour for purchasing power,
then we may as well look at our own children, laugh
and tell them they are screwed.
Because like it or no, that is exactly what we are setting them up for.
We can keep doing what we are doing;
we can take the environment to the precipice and push it over the edge
it may not result in the end of humanity.
The consumption pandemic might not kill all of us,
but it can only be expected that at the very least,
the resulting environmental degradation would cull human numbers back
allowing the biosphere to slowly regenerate.
There is no need to put that theory to test.
We are an intelligent species, and even if at times it may not seem it,
we have the power of foresight,
and can choose to live in a more symbiotic manner with the rest of nature.
As long as we fail to let go of the utopian notion that continual growth on a finite planet is sustainable,
we will be fighting the very planet and environment we rely upon to support our continued existence.
