Essay by Eric Worrall
“… the share of global wealth held by the poorest … would rise from just 2 percent today to 30 percent, while the proportion held by billionaires would fall …”
Could tackling climate change and levelling inequality go hand in hand?
The world can raise income, reduce inequality and limit global warming, according to an ambitious roadmap presented this week by economists in France. Making the case for a radical transformation of economies and lifestyles, they call on rich countries to slow growth, phase out fossil fuels and tax the wealthiest to help poorer countries fund development and mitigate the effects of climate change.
Issued on: 06/06/2026 – 06:56
By:RFI
Published on Thursday by the World Inequality Lab, the Global Justice Report presents a vision of a fairer world built within the planet’s limits.
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Under the plan, the share of global wealth held by the poorest half of the world’s population would rise from just 2 percent today to 30 percent, while the proportion held by billionaires would fall dramatically.
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The report also calls for a reduction in working hours in wealthier regions, alongside efforts to equalise incomes both within and between countries.
According to its authors, this would mean near-zero per capita growth in richer economies, while poorer regions would grow faster to close the gap.
Taxing the rich
To finance the transition, the economists propose the creation of a “global justice fund”, initially funded through steep taxes on the wealthiest individuals – up to 20 percent annually on billionaires’ fortunes and income tax rates of up to 90 percent.
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Read more: https://www.rfi.fr/en/international/20260606-could-tackling-climate-change-and-levelling-inequality-go-hand-in-hand
The full report is available here.
Socialists like the global justice project and world inequality council have no idea how money works.
Taking money off billionaires wouldn’t redistribute wealth, it would destroy the wealth. Money only has value because billionaires hold some of it, and use that money to create the goods and services which give money its value.
Poor people and countries are not poor because of circumstances, they are poor because of the bad choices they make. Giving broken nations money without fixing the problems which caused those nations to fail doesn’t lift their income, it just destroys the value of that money.
There are plenty of example of nations which started making better choices and thrived, like the Asian tiger economies Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, at least until the Chinese started throwing their weight around. There are nations which started making poor choices and fell or are busy falling, such as Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Europe. And there are nations which are caught in the borderlands between prosperity and ruin, depending on which direction they choose next. None of this has anything to do with wealth redistribution between nations.
“Money only has value because billionaires hold some of it.”
BS.
Money was around for thousands years before the first billionaire popped up.
Since 1990 the number of billionaires went up by about 1000% while the Dollar lost 60% of its value.
Since 1913 the Dollar lost 96% of its value since the creation of the FED(a (almost)billionaires vehicle).
Before that the Dollar lost 0.5% in 140 years(the number of billionaires was almost inexistent during this timeframe)
“Poor people and countries are poor because of choices THEY made”
The choice to be bombed by the US,
or sanctioned by the US,
or regime changed by US , NGO’s, or CiA that ended right after its creation the 1st democracy in the middle east in Syria.
then force them to buy overpriced and useless/killswitched US weapons
and forbid them to chose trading partners(or is Venezuela now allowed to develop their Oilfields with Russia, China,Japan)
or their currency being wrecked by almost billionaires like Bessent and their ressources being stolen,
or loanshark loans by IMF/Worldbank with the only intention to force austerity and open up those markets for Wall Street.
And then there are circumstances related to geography,ressources and,yes climate.
Not much choice either.
And then there are parasitic billionaires, locusts like Paul Singer who shouldn’t exist in the first
( it was not Venezuelas bad choice to lose Citgo, it was taken away ),
Jared Kushner who is only billionaire because of his father in law
or Crowns and Pritzker who made their fortune as Mafia
And on top of that using South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong as examples is a joke –
South Korea and Taiwan only got there because of billions of foreign aid Dollars .
Hong Kong “choice” was result of the Opium Wars – that’s how the British got rid of their massive silver deficits to China by killing and looting millions of chinese.
The loss of its unique status 1997? and directly competing with the rest of China slowed the economic growth,
but Hong Kong is no.1 in the economic freedom of world index,5200 startups and one of the most expensive property regions on earth, life expectancy went up by 6 years,GDP per capita by 80% – that’s how much Chinese throw their weight around.
Yes, with a John Wayne(Tom Clancy for the educated) mindset everything’s so easy
once you ignore 95% of data.
That’s how we got global warming and a runaway effect.
And Europe is not a country.
Life was harder before big corporations. Corporations become big because they provide an essential service or product. Their owners become billionaires.
Poor countries are places where billionaires either don’t exist, or where the rich elites who run the country make that money through kleptocracy rather than service provision.
Take the money from billionaires and the money making systems they built, which supply us with our daily needs, all fall apart. Think Mao’s cultural revolution, or the 1930s Soviet famines.
As for Hong Kong, in the last decade they’ve slipped from 13th place to 22nd place in the Legatum Prosperity Index. So still a prosperous place, but they’ve moving in the wrong direction.
They become billionaires because they hold stock in public companies that they created and grew. A stock is not money. It is a promise to receive a dividend from a company’s profit. A stock is only worth what someone will pay for it and might only be worth what a sheet of paper is worth.
Take all of Musk’s stock and try to convert it to money to be redistributed, I dare you. First thing you will hear is the screaming from all the pension funds, union funds, insurance funds, etc. Their stock will become worthless.
Jim what you are ignoring is the talent of the billionaire founders who created that value. Communism is the belief you can replace founders of thriving businesses with bureaucrats and still expect the economy to thrive. The Soviet Union is what happens when someone is stupid enough to test that belief.
I am ignoring nothing. I am fully aware of the difference between capitalism and a market economy and communism.
I just wanted to point out that billionaires do not have gold and dollars stashed away in hidden vaults that you can seize and redistribute.
Stocks are not money. To convert them to money, they must be sold on a stock market. The people who can buy a billion dollars worth of stock, don’t have fungible money laying around either, so they have to convert other stocks to actual money. What a great way to start a major selloff and devaluation of all stocks.
Stock is not money, but it is value. It can be converted to money at any time by selling it to a willing buyer.
As to the problem of converting physical assets to liquid assets, you have the same problem with a car or house that you have to unload in a hurry.
The problem is not selling small numbers of stocks to obtain some fungible cash. The problem is selling LARGE amounts of stock on the stock market without causing damage.
Notice these gimmicks are always about redistribution of money, i.e., cash. They don’t talk about confiscating stock certificates through eminent domain and passing them out to people.
Let’s note that the redistributionists have so little knowledge of finance that minor issues of stocks not being money completely elude them. They probably also believe that real property is money. In short, they really don’t know what they are talking about.
And, as always, they don’t know the difference between wealth and income.
Like most socialists you completely ignore the tremendous increase in total wealth during those years.
Those billionaires ran companies that created trillions in new wealth, and the people who owned and ran those companies got a share of that money.
It wasn’t stolen from the poor as you have been trained to believe.
Of course, this drivel comes from France.
A country where you can still get an excellent condition WW2 rifle—only dropped once, never fired.
A country whose tanks have 5 reverse gears but only 1 forward—in case attacked from the rear.
Rud
Well said.
You hit the nail on the head. Choice is the marker of wealth. Sure, money means more choice and so does health and freedom of all types. The greatest asset to choice is knowledge an inexhaustible resource that can only bolster the other planks of wealth.
I am of the opinion that paying people to learn (starting with school children) and at the same time not paying people to do nothing, is the key to universal wealth.
This approach ticks all the boxes.
Eric
Your summary is simplistic, and idealistic nonsense.
The United States has that system and the numbers of poor people keep rising in the world’s richest country.
Additionally about 75% of the world’s trade goes through tax havens.
You are also assuming that all people are equally skilled in making money.
All wealth flows upward, the system is designed that way.
US national debt is heading in the wrong direction. I was thinking USA when I mentioned nations “caught in the borderlands”. Trump is trying to shrink the debt and deficit by growing the economy, I hope it works.
“Trump is trying to shrink the debt and deficit by growing the economy, I hope it works.”
Sadly, history has shown that total US debt has NEVER shrunk from just “growing the economy”.
There is no correlation whatsoever between the amount of income the Federal government receives in any given year and the amount of that income allocated to reducing the Federal debt. Hence, we have the current house-of-cards situation of a current Federal debt of $39.2 TRILLION, equivalent to $356,000 per citizen taxpayer.
This debt load will never be shrunk, but it will eventually blow up in our faces.
America got rich by plundering other countries natural resources. The recent antics into south America continues that saga.
The primary use of the military is to protect american corporations international interests.
It’s economy grew only during the period of building it’s infrastructure.
It is highly unlikely that the federal budget will ever become positive, as the corporations own almost everything.
I have traveled through over 40 states in the USA and have great affection for the people. So my comments are not criticism of the people, just a disappointment that they have lost control of their destiny, like all western countries citizens.
Regards
You miss entirely the process of westward expansion and the creation of wealth it created. The industrial revolution also spurred creation of wealth using our own resources. We mined our own coal and oil. We used our own water for steam driven machines. We grew our own food to feed an increasing population.
None of this required plundering other countries resources.
Name one “country” that is less well off because of our plundering! Your statement, “The recent antics into south America continues that saga.“, has not made one country worse. I’m sure you’ll mention Cuba, but you’ll need to explain exactly what “plunder” we took from Cuba!
Well, since you put the word “country” in quotation marks, in response to your invite I will name the region now named as the United States of America that was previously inhabited by tribes of American Indians . . . you know, the Iroquois, Cherokee, Algonquian, Puebloan Peoples, Navajo, Sioux, Pawnee and others.
Few people with an IQ above room temperature will disagree that these peoples and their “country” (aka cultures and land occupation) are worse off because of our (as in European races) plundering of their lands and introduction of new diseases.
One might also similarly consider how the “countries” and native populations of Mexico, Central America and South America became less well off due to plundering of their lands and accumulated wealth of gold, silver, precious minerals and gems, cultural and historic artifacts, etc., by European races who “colonized” their lands and introduced European-originated disease with devastating consequences for the existing inhabitants.
Funny how you don’t mention “America” in your list of European races. Places like Spain and Portugal. Why do you think places like Mexico, Central America, and South America don’t speak “American”. The original statement was about America plundering. Please address that.
Really? Are you seriously trying to assert that the term “America” applies to any region of, or population of, or cultural history of any nations located in geographically-defined “Europe”???
I already did, but apparently you have difficulty understanding that. So, here we go:
America became an officially recognized nation with its own distinctly-recognized population (a mix) in 1783.
Most of the US “settlement of west” (under the hubris of “Manifest Destiny”) and its related destruction of American Indian “nations” occurred over the period of 1778 through 1890.
Yes, America (as in the “United States of America”) plundered North American Indian nations by directly confiscating their lands.
And this fact is not “funny” at all.
I’m sorry but this makes little sense to me. Please rephrase.
They were not plundered because they were generally unoccupied by nomadic tribes. The land was put to better use. You speak as if we should be living as hunter/gathers roaming the land for sustenance, warring on other tribes, stealing women and children to use as slaves.
Who do you think stopped the practice of slavery practiced by most Native American tribes? Is that plundering?
How far back does this plundering go? Did the Jews plunder the land and people living in the Promised Land after being driven out of Egypt? Did the Moors plunder Spain? I think you’ll find that “plundering” goes way back amongst a whole lot of folks and mostly in tribal societies. Did the Cheyanne plunder the Souix?
Stop trying to blame White Europeans for cultural evolution all over the planet. It just doesn’t work.
Poor is relative. In the US, poverty is defined as a fraction of the median income, as such, as wealth goes up, so does poverty.
People at the poverty line in the US, would be middle to upper middle income anywhere in Europe and wealthy in most of the rest of the world.
75% of world trade goes through tax havens. Please define what you mean by a tax haven. Most socialist define it as anyplace where productive people are allowed to keep what they earn.
You don’t have to be skilled at investing, all you need to do is spend less than you earn and let a financial manager take care of the rest.
If wealth flows upward, why does the standard of living for everyone keep going up.
Your problem is that other people are allowed to have more than you do, and that drives you crazy.
As you point out, “poor” is defined in terms of income. But income is not wealth, so the second part of your first sentence has some problems.
Mark w.
You can’t help yourself with the personal attacks. You don’t even know me, or my circumstances.
Fixing the title to accurately reflect the goals:: ‘Large Scale Climate Change Scare is Required to Impose Wealth Redistribution.’
These people are nutcases. It’s not surprising, really, that the “World Inequality Lab” is a joint project of the Paris School of Economics and UC Berkeley. The two world-class artesian geysers of bad ideas since at least the mid-20th century.
None of this is news. They’ve been saying this for years.
The entire discussion of “redistribution of wealth” has always annoyed me, because the fundamental purpose of the discussion isn’t to come up with any practical means of taking wealth from some and giving it to others; it is to sneak in as an ironclad fact the idea that wealth is “distributed” in the first place – i.e. given out by some entity. After that, no one can object to “re”distriubtion of wealth, if the initial “distribution” is somehow deemed to have been “unfair.”
People who use the term have no clue what wealth actually is, how it is produced, and why it would be destroyed rather than conveyed by any “redistribution” scheme.
Giving money to the poor doesn’t go to the poor. It goes right into the pockets of Kleptocrats. They are the reason those countries are poor to begin with.
One of my favourite books is P J O’Rourke’s “Eat the Rich“.
In one chapter O’Rourke describes participating in a US mission to help alleviate a Somali famine. Mogadishu was starving.
So they sent an expedition into the countryside, to bring food relief to hungry rural folk, and passed field after field full of crops. The whole thing got more and more ridiculous.
There was no crop failure. What had actually happened was Mogadishu was starving because farmers had stopped entering the capital city where they always got robbed.
But Mogadishu still had economic activity. Since the roads around the city were bandit ridden and impassable, the local warlords were airlifting tons of the African narcotic drug Khat every day into Mogadishu, for local consumption. The operation was funded with stolen US aid. Everyone with any source of income was using it, including the people guarding O’Rourke’s compound.
Khat requires a real effort to get high, hours of chewing is required to extract the narcotic. O’Rourke described how around 3-4pm every afternoon they locked themselves in their apartments for “Khat Hour”, when everyone including their own compound guards went drug psychotic and started shooting into the air or at random people.
O’Rourke tried to do some good. As the rural expedition was passing through the countryside, apparently the US army at the time had a strict no-littering regulation. O’Rourke passed on a message to the mission commander that the peasants really wanted the empty MRE containers and used water bottles so they could reuse them for themselves as insect resistant storage containers for their produce, but the commander felt unable to break the army’s no-littering rules.
Do these imbeciles not understand that most of the “wealth’ of the rich is only potential. There are no gold bars or dollar bills stacked up in a vault somewhere that can be taken to redistribute. Take 100 billion of Musk’s stock and sell it in a fire sale and see how many pennies you get. Then tell all the folks that depend on him for jobs that they are going to become just like the poor folks in Cuba. It will never accomplish anything because it is just one big circle jerk by folks who have the need to tell other what to do and how to live. They should be sent to an island somewhere and told to use their wherewithal to create equality.
People who believe this simply don’t understand the creation and destruction of wealth. They think that everyone could be wealthy if wealth were equally distributed among all. In reality, that would simply destroy all the wealth. Wealth is created only by humans, and is created only when the product of labor and resources is worth more than the cost of creating it. It’s noteworthy that people like Musk and Rockefeller, and Bezos gained their wealth by making products cheaper and easier to get, not by hoarding gold. When governments destroy the incentive to create wealth, none will be created.
There are 2 ways to have the tallest building in town
The World Inequality Lab appear to favour (sic – I’m and Aussie) the second option
Yep. The clowns who wrote the redistribution plan want society to adopt option 2.
I looked briefly at this report, and at the website of the organisation that created it. I also looked at the funding of this organisation. The funding is the usual alphabet soup of government quangos and NGOs, with the UN and the EU prominent in one form or another. The ‘World Inequality Lab’ say they get most of their budget from ‘public organisations’, with no whisper of the thought that these ‘public organisations’ get their money from the taxpayer.
However, I want to ask a question. The ‘World Inequality Lab’ gets some of its funding from foundations that were established, often decades ago, by wealthy and philanthropic businessmen (all men, at least the ones I have looked at; sometimes man and wife). I looked at one or two, and their mission, at first, was to fund ‘scientific research’, perhaps with a view to allowing society to benefit from this research. I do not think that these philanthropists would necessarily look kindly on the activities that are now funded in their name. It seems to me very likely that somebody has already researched and published on the issue of charitable foundations being hijacked by people whose ambitions and actions are outwith the original charitable aims. Can any of you point me towards such work?
From the “In my pockets” team.
Wealth distribution is the whole purpose of the Climate ideology. It is Socialism of course and Socialists have no concept of wealth creation, they think it just exists and can be portioned and shared around like a cake. They never consider what happens when the last slice is gone.
The people who wrote this socialist wish list are the same people who are working to prevent African nations from building electrical grids based on dispatchable power.
Yes, the whole world should be run like Haiti. Utopia.
Many western nations are already encouraging more people to be poor and unproductive.
Social and tax policies.
“Climate change,” the statistical average of weather, does not result in anything.
“Climate change” is the result of weather.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life.
Instead of just dropping skid loads of cash int these places, go in with tools, teach them how to build, and get them started.
Biggest problem with foreign aid is it never gets past the politicians/elites in the receiving country.
Biggest problem with the idea of helping to build is first you have to replace the elite steals with financial cuts to those elites/politicians.
Nevermind.
You fail to elucidate any resources that were plundered.
I am not advocating that the Native American society was not badly. However, plundering resources is a different subject than treating a society badly.
A position that taking unused land is plundering, places everyone in danger in the future. If the Chinese are the first society to establish a colony on the moon and claims the entirety of its lands and minerals will you make the same argument that the U.S. cannot “plunder” their claim?
You need to make the argument that tribal societies where death occurs at 60 yo, high infant mortality, no antibiotics, on, and on, deserve to live in a bare subsistence society by being actively isolated
Good grief! . . . I thought most US citizens were taught this in their high school years. Maybe you never took such a class in American history?
Of course, such are not at all hard to find by Web search, unless one is just plain lazy.
This, from Google’s AI bot:
“American Indian tribes have lost nearly 99% of the lands they historically occupied in the United States. Between 1776 and the late 19th century alone, the U.S. government seized approximately 1.5 billion acres through treaties, executive orders, and forced removal policies.”
Among the many well-known natural resources existing on tribal lands that were confiscated without anything close to fail compensation are:
— oil, coal and natural gas fossil fuel deposits,
— uranium deposits,
— precious and critical minerals (gold, silver, copper, molybdenum ore, iron ore, lithium ore)
— underground reserves of helium,
— timber from forests,
— grasslands, and
— water (surface rivers and lakes, and in underground aquifers).
Is that enough “elucidation” for you?
Google AI only knows what it has been taught. Address the fact that “historically occupied” really means nomadic wandering over large tracts of land being hunter/gatherers. Basically it is like Homo Sapiens replacing Neanderthals. Better societies replacing less developed ones.
Erase Europeans from history. Who would have discovered America. The Japanese? The Chinese? These were advanced cultures at the time of European exploration. Would they have expanded into America displacing Native American culture? Sure they would have. Again, more advanced societies replacing less developed ones. Did you ever study cultural anthropology in college where this is taught?
How many Native Americans used these things?
You are getting carried away here. Let me add, we adopted our Native American son 46 years ago. We made sure he was taught his culture, attending all tribal meeting and pow wows, he learned who his ancestors were and how they came to be here, he votes in tribal elections, and he uses Haskell University’s health system. Our granddaughter and here children are also registered with the tribe and participate in tribal affairs. I am not uneducated in tribal affairs and religion.
Have you offered to donate your property to a Native American tribe as restituton, assuming you are in the U.S.?