impacts, a host of other critical problems face humanity. Approximately one billion people are either routinely hungry or malnourished. Over one billion people across the world, mostly in rural areas, are forced to defecate in the open because they lack sanitation and toilets. Aside from the problems of human health and loss of dignity, the lack of toilets is particularly dangerous for women, who are left vulnerable to attack. Some 2.5 billion people—about one-third of the Earth’s population—have little or no sanitation.51 Close to 700 million have no access to “improved” drinking water. A further two billion people live on less than $2 a day. Billions lack access to needed medicines or regular health care because they cannot afford them. In the United States, tens of millions of people do not have adequate access to good or affordable health care. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa have little to no regular access to electricity.
The extent of hunger and malnourishment makes it appear that there isn’t enough food to go around for the seven billion people on the planet, and the media constantly tell us that we have already, or are about to, run short. But, says Eric Holt-Gimenez, executive director of Food First and the Institute for Food and Development Policy,
“Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day—most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land—can’t afford to buy this food.”52
Profit Over Planet: The Priorities of a Sick System
At the same time that huge amounts of poverty, deprivation, and environmental degradation exist, a staggering amount of wealth has been concentrated at the top of society. A mere 8 people have accumulated as much wealth as the combined wealth of the poorest half of the world, some 3.2 billion people and the richest 1% had more wealth than the remaining 99%.53 The wealthy go to great lengths to hide their riches from sight—and tax. A 2016 Oxfam report estimates that the money stashed away in offshore tax havens is around $7.6 trillion. Hiding that amount from government tax collection agencies annually deprives the public of an extra $190 billion that could be spent on cleaning up the environment as well as health care, education, or other urgently needed public services.54 “As much as 30 percent of all African financial wealth is estimated to be held offshore, costing an estimated $14 billion in lost tax revenues every year,” notes the Oxfam report. “This is enough money to pay for healthcare for mothers and children that could save four million children’s lives a year and employ enough teachers to get every African child into school.”55
In 2012, President Obama boasted, “There are politicians who say that if we just drilled more, then gas prices would come down right away. What they don’t say is that … America is producing more oil than at any time in the last eight years. We’ve opened up new areas for exploration. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to circle the Earth and then some.”56
Even as the United States was supposedly part of saving the world during the Paris climate talks in December 2015, Obama signed a bill backed by Exxon and the Koch brothers to expedite pipeline construction permits.57 Similarly, the Obama administration approved over 1,500 offshore fracking permits in the Gulf of Mexico; some were approved even as the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill raged out of control in 2010.58
The routine immorality of how for-profit corporations operate is topped by Exxon, which knew from its own research as far back as the 1980s that its products were the primary cause of climate change. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” senior company scientist James F. Black reported to Exxon’s management committee at corporate headquarters in 1977. This spurred Exxon to set up a research program to investigate the potential for warming by as much as 18°F (10°C). When the study verified the potential for such warming Exxon curtailed the research and hid its findings.59 Meanwhile, the corporation poured tens of millions of dollars into the coffers and bank accounts of think tanks and climate change deniers—scientists and politicians who have essentially rejected the company’s own research findings and helped to delay political action against climate change by decades.
But as an investigation by Inside Climate News of internal documents and interviews reveals, Exxon was far from alone in suppressing this knowledge. The American Petroleum Institute, together with the nation’s largest oil companies, ran a task force to monitor and share climate research between 1979 and 1983, indicating that the oil industry as a whole was aware of its possible impact on the world’s climate far earlier than previously known. The group’s members included senior scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company.60
Contrary to regularly made claims that President Obama is engaged in a “war on fossil fuels,” his administration could hardly have been friendlier to increased oil production, according to a 2016 Bloomberg News article:
U.S. oil production has surged 82 percent to near-record levels in the past seven years and natural gas is up by nearly one-quarter. Instead of shutting down the hydraulic fracturing process that has unlocked natural gas from dense rock formations, Obama has promoted the fuel as a stepping-stone to a greener, renewable future.
The administration has also permitted drilling in the Arctic Ocean over the objections of environmentalists and opened the door to a new generation of oil and gas drilling in Atlantic waters hugging the East Coast. [Obama] also signed, with reservations, a measure to lift a 40-year-old ban on the export of most U.S. crude.61
It was only in the final days of the Obama administration, when confronted with Donald Trump as successor, that the president signed an order prohibiting new oil and gas drilling in large areas of the continental shelf under government control in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. Congress, however, can reverse this order.
Then there are the proposed international trade deals, which completely subvert any hope that governments are serious about addressing the climate crisis. On the international front, the Obama administration was just as busy as his predecessor in promoting corporate interests. In the final year of his presidency Obama hoped to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Modeled on the environmentally and socially disastrous 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed into law by another Democrat, Bill Clinton, both deals incorporate language designed to protect against “loss of future profits.” Translation? “Under either trade pact, if a new air rule, for instance, creates disincentive for an international energy company to build a coal plant, it can sue the government for investment losses if the company can prove the policy was adopted after initial plans for the plant were made.”62 Both international trade deals appear to be dead in the water as a result of persistent organizing against them and in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president. International trade deals such as NAFTA have little to do with trade and lowering tariff barriers; they are primarily about allowing unhindered capital movement, protecting intellectual property rights, undermining workers’ ability to organize and fight for better conditions in the North and the South, and weakening environmental regulations, all of which facilitate corporate profit-taking.
Under these so-called free trade agreements, corporate interests always trump environmental protections. But it doesn’t merely end with corporations being able to sue governments; it includes limitations on how environmental issues will be addressed. As reported in the journal Nature Climate Change,
A number of unproven approaches to environmental policies
