 Welcome, everyone. Hello, I'm Arjun Jayave, senior economist at INET and professor of economics at Haseem Prem's University. Welcome to INET's live climate debates. This session has a very interesting title and a set of questions. We will be discussing international cooperation, who governs and who funds the climate transition. Joining us today is a very distinguished panel, Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at UMass Amherst and former professor of economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India. Roenton Medora, who's the president of the Center for International Governance and Innovation, CG, which is a long-standing partner of INET and he's also there for a governing board member of INET. And Keston Perry, who's a professor of Africana Studies at Williams College in Massachusetts. Just for the audience, throughout the discussion, we will take a few questions. Please submit your questions any time by clicking on the Q&A button, which should be on your right. So let's get started. And when I was thinking about this, there's such a whole host of questions that come about when we have a topic this large. Is the appropriate unit to deal with climate change that the nation state? Who has the power really to manage a transition to a carbon-free economy? Can this be done unilaterally or really does it need cooperation at the scale that sometimes we think? How does one think of new technologies in their deployment? Does everyone bear equal responsibility? And if not, who really bears what kind of responsibility? How do you address historical inequities? How can global governance, which seems to be sort of fraying on many parts change and what the key institutions that we need in this regard? So really a momentous set of concerns. So to really start us off, perhaps I can start with Jayati for some opening remarks. And maybe if you could really address this question that I've been thinking about. How should we be thinking about climate change mitigation or even if you will adaptation at this moment when a lot of things seem to be fraying global governance? And what do you see as obstacles but perhaps also opportunities that are ahead of us? Thank you Arjun and it's really a privilege to be part of this panel and part of these broader discussions. So I think what is happening today in the world is not just something of extreme concern but is actually terrifying when we think about it because it's fairly obvious and no point repeating it that climate change is not something that can be handled at the national or even the regional levels. It is definitionally global. It is about the planet. And we know that extreme weather events do not respect national boundaries and passports and visas and so on. So it's fairly obvious that we have to have global cooperation. It's also fairly obvious that we are not getting it immediately and that there's really no sign of significant global cooperation despite the fact that the COP is going to happen soon that there will be countries trying to establish their own national commitments for the future. There isn't any evidence of genuine systematic cooperation at the global level to deal with what are global problems. And I'm very glad you identified adaptation along with mitigation because for a while the emphasis has been on mitigation. Every country is supposed to give its own commitments for how much carbon emission is going to reduce and all of that. But there isn't enough recognition that it's already upon us. It's no longer in the future. We are experiencing climate change. We have already got in many parts of the world climate refugees. We are going to have more and more of them. There are going to be more and more very dramatic sometimes apocalyptic events in different parts of the world which will have to be dealt with. And that also will require resources. We see no evidence of a movement away from a very national and sometimes even less than national perspective in terms of providing the necessary resources for this for both mitigation and adaptation. And there are so many low-hanging fruit perhaps I will come back to that which are available for doing that, for thinking of global public investment to meet what is a global challenge. Yet somehow we don't get the cooperation that is obviously essential for this. And what worries me is that what we've seen in the last two years of the pandemic is that even a relatively simple problem like the pandemic, I say relatively simple in relation to climate change did not generate the obvious responses in terms of nation states. And particularly I would say G7 in terms of the things that could be done very easily to ensure that the pandemic came to an end much faster than it is. We didn't see a sharing of vaccine technology. We didn't see a sharing even of the produced vaccines. Instead we saw vaccine grabs and we're seeing little gifts of vaccines and drips and grabs about to expire vaccines being sent to developing countries with much tom tomming. We're not seeing the kinds of response even for something simple like vaccines. So when it comes to climate change which is affecting every country then there's possibly going to be much more inward looking responses which is terrifying. But I'll come back to some of these issues. Let me stop here. Thanks very much, Eithi. And so good way to start if you will to really lay out the fact that this is a really sort of somber challenge. But I'd like to move to Roenton here. And Roenton, you know, you spend a lot of your life really thinking about governance writ large. So in some sense the same question do you see more rays of hope than, you know right now that in our discussion so far or given that there have been other kinds of spaces in which people have been thinking of some sharing the WHO proposal in terms of vaccines. So there's been some talk. What do you see as really the obstacles to getting things done when it seems fairly obvious that they need to be done both for things like vaccines but also more generally for climate change? So Archon, thank you. First, it's good to see you and co-panelists again and to be at an INEP event. Thank you for including me in it. To get your question, you know, I'd make two or three points. First, I'd sort of underline everything Jaiti said about the inertia and dysfunction and the disjointness of managing global change. The pandemic was a sudden event where we saw the effects immediately and roll out in a matter of weeks and months and we have seen how sclerotic is the response. Climate change is more insidious. It's something that's been happening over decades and so the marginal change is never important until you hit the tipping point. And so it's a different kind of governance problem. And if we're not dealing with the immediate to answer your question directly, Archon, how optimistic I am about these more long-term important changes not vary to other points on what to do about it or what the framing might be. One is the obvious one. Jaiti mentioned low hanging fruit and I'm not sure which ones would be on her list but top of my list would obviously be fossil fuel subsidies. You ask who governs and who funds. Now, removing subsidies is not a funding issue. It's the actual opposite but there are clearly economic and political economic reasons why these subsidies persist. I'm struck by the fact that their extent is still ranges. I've seen estimates anywhere from 600 billion a year to trillions, 5.3 trillion. Take the lower end number and still see that as a windfall gain. And one has to ask why do national and international institutions that have leverage do not succeed in this area? My final point and this is the main one that I want to dwell on from my perspective has to do with technology and it also connects with the vaccine point. There's three features of technology when it comes to climate change, adaptation and mitigation especially that we might want to keep in mind. One is that in the last 10 years there's been what's called a hockey stick effect in technological change. By hockey stick, I mean ice hockey, not field hockey, okay? Flat and then rapid increase in filings at WIPO in the last 10 years. Second, filings in climate change related technologies and one could quibble about how we define but let's take as a given that there are definitions out there in ways of measuring this. Outpace other technological change, 24% annual growth rates vis-a-vis 6% for technological filings for patents as a whole. And the third point and this is the kicker is the concentration of this technology. It's located in a handful of countries, five or six, China, Japan, the US, South Korea and Germany or EU writ large. You add all of that up and my proposition to you is that we're not going to get to the root of the climate change, adaptation and mitigation issue until we found a way to increase the supply if you will of technology and the demand for technology. By supply, I mean creative ways to increase where innovation happens and later if you're interested we can get to that. And by demand, I mean enabling technology transfer whether it's through trips reform, compulsory licensing or other mechanisms. One needs both of those to work and so I will stop at that point. Thanks for that and I'll definitely come back to some of the points that both you and Jayati made but I'd like to move to Keston now and maybe hopefully I'd like to ask you Keston to really take this into maybe a broader political economy space. We've been talking really in terms of the standard economic categories if you will of global public good and undersupply of those of innovation and so on and maybe some blockings, but maybe you could please that isn't how you think we should be conceiving of the relationship between climate change and climate change mitigation adaptation writ large and the historical system of production of global colonialism if you'd like because there is a whole question of who should pay given the histories that we have. So if you could start. Yeah, sure. Thank you Arjun. Thank you again to yourself and all the organizers at INET for the invitation. Jayati and Rohinton raised a number of points that I think are absolutely critical to understand where we're at and how the current sort of global governance space has not delivered to a large degree. I think a part of that the challenge is the fact that one, we are currently addressing the problem in a very nationalistic way. And I think part of that problem is probably attributable to the sort of Trump moment, right? And sort of the countries looking inward. But I think there's a longer history to this. And what has happened in the context of the United States, for instance, is that the United States has done a really good job to some degree of deflecting its responsibility at the international level through negotiations, through the various climate accords we have had. The United States has done a great job of deflecting its responsibility as the richest capitalist nation on earth and also the largest emitter of greenhouse gases historically followed by the European Union and European countries which all happen to be former colonizing powers and colonizing forces in the world. So a part of what has to happen is that there needs to be a lot more reflection on what role the United States has played. And I think what happens often in the political sphere is that we have new leaders and new presidents and so on and they present themselves as climate champions. But we know, for instance, that Joe Biden has just initiated two major oil and gas projects. We know, for instance, yesterday I think he announced that they're going to double climate finance, public climate finance to about $5 billion over the next five years. But that is a pledge that was made since 2012. So more than a decade ago, that very pledge was made. So a part of what goes on is that sort of deflection and lack of understanding of the responsibility. But that all ties into the global governance landscape and the global power relations that we have faced. So emitting countries are former colonizing countries or in the case of the United States, still a colonial colonizing power with respect to Puerto Rico, for instance, which faces huge amounts of effects due to climate change. I mean, Hurricane Maria in 2018, the recent hurricanes and tropical storms that we're facing, you know, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean region in particular are stand out as the leading countries that face on a per capita basis the costs and effects of climate change. So we do have a very serious problem of how do we address that lack of responsibility? On the one hand, and I think we have to go back to, for instance, in 2010, when Bolivia held a major conference and we had the Cochabamba statement, which I think is absolutely crucial to understand how forces at the grassroots level, workers, trade unions, civic organizations have challenged both the United States and former colonizing powers to address the problem. For instance, they point out that United States has overreached 92%, over 92% of atmospheric space and used up much of that atmospheric space, but it still is trying in some way or the other blame other countries for those kinds of, for the problems that it itself has been responsible for. So we definitely need to have a sort of broader discussion on responsibility and how do we move beyond these kinds of mirage of both pointing blame at other countries, but also using national politics to not actually do very much to address the problem. Thanks very much, Kirsten. I think it's very good to have this kind of perspective, which is in some sense a systemic perspective. I think all three of you would probably agree in greater or less a part with the idea that in some sense this is something that what should be looked at systemically, I'll use the word is global capitalism and the forms of global capitalism that we have now, taking off from the earlier colonial capitalism that was there, which Kirsten mentioned continues a pace and the question really is are there other elements in it which are preventing in some sense a transition because it is also true that if you just looked at it purely from the innovation perspective and the kind of things that the production system is able to produce, it is possible that renewables are becoming cheaper, more accessible and so on. So maybe I'll switch to Jayati and ask, Jayati, you had mentioned that there were many factors that were preventing, if you will, a transition, right? It was not simply in some sense, just ill will, but really in some sense people and interests of the global capitalist sphere, if you will. So maybe you could elaborate on that and we could come back to Roenton. I'm sorry, I keep forgetting to unmute. Yes, I really do want to elaborate that and I'm really happy that Kirsten raised these points because I do believe that we have to look at it systemically and it's absolutely right. I think Manuel Montez has raised a very important point in the chat that we have to look at subsidies not just for production but for consumption and there is a huge amount of the consumption which is based on imports in the global North and basically ends up subsidizing fossil fuel types of production yet it's not counted in the emissions of the North. And so there is of course that measurement problem and there is the need to recognize that it's consumption patterns and patterns of investment that have to be altered both ways. But there is another very important systemic feature which is the operations of global finance. And I think we have to see financial regulation as an essential part of the whole issue of dealing with climate change. So that for example, the United States will say, well, we have made these commitments for our own fossil fuel investments. But when you look at it globally out of the 10 top funders of coal projects across the developing world, eight of them are US finance companies. And so really the US financial system is not doing anything to prevent its finance companies from funding the worst possible types of investment. There are no strictures in place. There's no guidelines in place. There are no norms. There's no regulation at all of any of this. At the same time, you mentioned that it's much cheaper now. For example, solar energy. Rohinton has done work on this as well. It's much cheaper in Africa. Yet it's impossible to get the funding for it at scale because Africa is seen as riskier. So the same finance companies that are busy funding coal projects across the developing world are not funding solar energy projects which are actually very, very cheap per unit and a two scale in the developing world. Surely we should think of a financial system in which the regulations either incentivize certain kinds of investment or de-incentivize or forbid other types of investment. And again, this is not even a huge transformative kind of statement. This is a very marginal, let's tweak the system at the corners kind of thing. It's not a big ask to do this. And yet we don't find this on the table in any of the global discussions. I find that quite extraordinary. Thanks, Jethi. Rohinton, maybe I can ask you to come in here as well. I mean, you had mentioned innovation as something that you thought was a place where we should be looking at more carefully in some sense, the current state of play. I just want to get your sense. Is it possible in some sense to be looking at this and solving some problems at the margin or do we really have to look at all of these things together? For example, as Jethi was saying, we really, it's one thing to have the innovation and have some sort of public finance for that. But as long as you have the possibility for private firms to be supporting fossil fuels, you're not going to get anywhere. So how much emphasis would you place on something a really large systemic transformation which may be much harder as opposed to some other things that may be easier to do at the margin? So I mean, I'd say time is not on our side. If you had lots and lots of time, if you were in 1975, you could sequence things, do some, not others, play that game as you move closer to some kind of D-day, those bigger comprehensive solutions remain not just tempting, but the only options out there. So that's the quick answer. I'd make one or two other points building off what Jethi and Keston said. One is I do think not just tweaking but building insensible climate risk considerations in finance and many thoughtful people and central banks especially as of financial regulators are thinking about this, perhaps haven't moved as much as they should. Changing financial intermediation, if you think about why we created the IFI system at Bretton Woods, it was so that a club would use its fantastic of capital market credibility to borrow at preferred rates and then find investment opportunities in the developing world where social rates of return are high and make that transition. What we now find is that the private sector so dwarfs the IFI system and isn't bound by that social rate of return ethos. And so those I think are two big changes that we have to think about on the finance side. On the innovation point Arjun and you and others in DJI T and Joe Stiglitz have written about this global capitalism and this global capitalism. Global capitalism has also yielded successes including COVID vaccines where I'd argue that if we simply got distribution right at least we're halfway there. But I also think of an era in the sixties when famine and malnutrition and hunger were endemic. And the global community came together and created and I've said this before and I'll say it again came together and created the International Agricultural Research System which not only creates supply and creates innovation hubs around the world. They have some landmark jumps in innovation which are and patents are held in the public interest. And I wouldn't attribute the end of hunger and malnutrition totally to the CGIAR but I would put forward that as a model within the capitalist system which through cooperation can address a global public ban by creating goods. I'd make the same point by the way about advanced market commitments in which private philanthropy and a few self-enlightened bilateral donors came together and created a certain market. And so one can use market mechanisms for the social good. And what that requires is forms of cooperation which in the last 10, 20 years have been fraying. So there are some questions and I'll get to them in a second. Thank you, those of us. But I just wanted to follow up with guesting once more on something that he said, which was very interesting which is about the Cochabamba discussion the declaration and so on. You know, here is a question which I think has become quite stark with respect to climate change which is obviously the people who have the least ability to escape it are going to be people in the global south in general. So it's really a question. Why do you think there has not been more of these kinds of movements in the global south as a resistance if you will to the kind of depredations of the carbon bank as it were? And is there a scope for that or is the world far too fragmented for that to occur? Like it did, for example, in different contexts in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Okay. I would address your question just a moment but I'm thinking about some of what Rohington has mentioned. And I seem to be at odds with some of the points he made in the sense that we have a system that essentially attributes if we want to call them markets and we have a system which exploits the underclass of the world if we wanna call it that through climate change. So climate change one, we need to consider it first as not an exogenous factor of global capitalism. It's very endogenous, first of all. So the problem is that we have had climate change has become the problem that we're now facing that countries are India and countries in global south Caribbean in particular are facing large numbers of people are dying and are facing monsoons and major tropical events and storms and hurricanes and so on. So the problem is not one that markets have not adjusted to address the problem. The issue is, and the fact is that countries that are facing the most impacts as a result of climate change are the ones that have been long oppressed and depressed and suppressed as a result of the system that we currently live in. In addition to which we need to also consider that creating markets and supporting investors to address the problem is actually an ironic situation in the sense that you are actually creating markets for climate dispossession is exactly what you're doing. You are supporting investors to gain rewards from the fact that climate change is affecting countries and resulting in large numbers of debts resulting in large economic costs and so on. So it is a bit of a paradox in my view that you would want to create a market where people are actually benefiting from other people dying, right? So it is a bit of a challenge for me to sort of square that particular suggestion. In respect of how we look at movements that have been building and these movements have been around for at least 20 years, two, three decades that have attempted to challenge both major emitters like the United States and military powers. So the United States military is actually the largest consumer of hydrocarbons. If we address the problem of trying to build movements, major countries have gone awry in the face of major global powers. And those powers use both military, they use economic sanctions, they use all sorts of various sorts of intrusions to suppress those kinds of movements. And that is what has happened with respect to the global climate justice movement which has become hugely parochial and have become largely focused on internal issues and very not transnational compared to the ones we saw in Cochabamba. I wanted to make one final comment on with respect to fossil fuel subsidies which are absolutely important for us to address the problem, but there is a fallout. The issue is the majority of countries that actually depend on fossil fuel exports are actually in the global south. So the United States, which I don't think is gonna happen, the United States can decide that it's going to cut fossil fuels tomorrow, it's not going to have the kind of effect that is going to happen in the global south countries. So we're talking about most of the countries in Africa. We're talking about countries in South America and Latin America. When you, we do need to address the problem of fossil fuel exports and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That is, there's no gain saying where that is concerned. But what do we do when there is major social dislocations and political chaos that results from the fact that demand for those fossil fuels have dried up? What do you do? In my view, the only mechanism that we need to do and apart from sort of international finance which has not really done what it should do is actually paying these countries reparations for telling them and demanding that they basically do not exploit those resources. Because if we do not do that, it means that there is going to be social and economic chaos in those countries that have completely, there's no more demand basically for their resources. What are they going to produce? What are they going to do? What are their populations going to do? We're going to need a lot more problems if that particular equation is not addressed. Thanks very much, Kessen. We may get a moment to come back to the question of climate reparations in a bit. I should note that in the chat, Father Kabub has very helpfully also linked to a couple of articles on this particular issue. I'd like to go to two questions actually which were briefly touched upon by both Roenton and Jayathi, which is about broadly finance. All three of you spoke about financing this question and this issue of climate transition. And the first one, as seen in reverse orders, Colin McCullough asks, the World Bank borrows in global markets at very low rates and lends at low ultra low or zero interest or in most ED cases grants. The IMF can create funds externally as SDRs and loan them on easy terms. What role do they or should they have in this, you know, in the global governance, if you will, towards a transition? So either Jayathi or Roenton, maybe you could start or even Kessen, if you'd like anyone who ever wants to go. I think Jayathi's lost her connection. So maybe Roenton, you might want to go. Okay, yeah. Look, I'd say that that's a good question, Colin. I'd say that the bank and the fund and I'd add the WTO to that, the Brettonwood Stroika are necessary but not sufficient condition for success here in a number of ways, in no order, but number one standard setting. If you're going to change the way financial sectors are governed, the way risk is measured and implemented and that set of issues, the bank and fund are hugely influential in creating those norms and we have to work through them and of course the capacity building that you need for civil services and others to enforce and implement those norms. That's something the bank and fund have historically done and I'd argue done well in other fields and we need to bring that here. Second of course is raw finance and both organizations have clear statements and you know, the article for consultations include language about fossil fuel subsidies but there's an imbalance here. The important countries, when the fund makes a statement about fossil fuel subsidies or agricultural subsidies in the US, the US doesn't care. If it makes the same statement of a country in Sub-Saharan Africa, it has to care. So I think that's a governance issue that we're not going to get to the bottom off very quickly. I guess the final point I'd make on SDR creation which is part of Colin's question is that there have been some interesting proposals made dating back to the 60s and 70s and Peter Kennan where not only do you create global liquidity but then instead of distributing it along existing quota lines, you distribute it unequally through you know, some kind of link between aid and SDR creation or use it for green finance. And I think all of those things are important but my final point would be on the question of necessary versus sufficient, bank fund resources are a fraction except in a handful of countries of capital flowing into the question, into developing countries. And so we still need private capital to get on board and that's where the leverage is lacking the most. Jayati, do you want to? Yes, thank you. And I'm sorry, my connection seems to be a bit wavering. I hope it lasts through this but yes, to add to what Roenton just said, you know, it took one and a half years before the idea was first mooted to get the IMF to issue SDRs. It's well below what was requested. It's 500 trillion SDRs, about $650 billion. But even that, if it could be leveraged, in other words, about 80% of it is going to countries that are not going to use it. Let's say even 60% of it is going to go to countries that are already holders of global reserve currencies or have huge excess reserves. And so they're really not going to use it. Surely we should be thinking of ways of recycling this and moving forward to, I would argue, you know, you could have a global public investment fund. You could at least ask these countries bilaterally to donate to COVAX, which is hugely underfunded to donate to the CTAP, the Technology Access Pool of the WHO, which could buy up existing patents and actually encourage more production across the world just for the COVID part. But for climate change, I mean, it's not enough for sure. We need much more, but at least this money should be used to do the kinds of things that are essential for immediate investment for adaptation and mitigation. Because this is free money, virtually. And so the countries that are not going to use it, the budgetary cost is minimal. It's a very, very small interest rate that you pay to the IMF for whatever you use. It could be done very easily. I don't think it's going to happen globally for all of the reasons that we've talked about, but maybe citizens in the North should be putting pressure on their governments to use this free money in ways that would benefit the whole world, including themselves. So in terms of what could be done, but I want to get back to that larger point that Roentgen made, this is a fraction of the money that is sloshing around the world globally. And there are two points here I want to make. One is harking back to Roentgen's point about philanthropy. Yes, it can be very good. And yes, we're stuck with it. Having said that, I'm really quite uncomfortable with the way global philanthropy has evolved in the recent past. Because I think there are massive conflicts of interest. There is disproportionate power of a few large foundations, certainly the Gates Foundation, for example, is the biggest largest donor in the world, funding also the international organizations and influencing their policy. And I don't know that that's a good thing. I mean, I for one, strongly believe that all these big corporations that can transfer surpluses into foundations should begin by paying the same effective tax rates as local companies. And there are ways to do that, but begin by paying your taxes, okay, then you have surplus, you want to set up a foundation, excellent, please do it. But then to exercise so much influence and power over global economic policy, global health policy, global development, I think it's a real concern because these are fundamentally unaccountable institutions. And we do know that there are conflicts of interest. We do know that the vaccine that was developed in a publicly funded lab with 96% public funding in an Oxford University lab was then transferred to AstraZeneca because of the intervention of a major funder which happened to be the Gates Foundation. And that this is now a privatized thing. And we're hoping that they will transfer technology. They get to decide who and when and where and all of that. There are huge conflicts of interest in all of this. So I am a little concerned at the way in which we have allowed philanthropy to just grow and grow and grow till it has really overtaken everything else and is in a huge position of influence and power and without any accountability. That's the first. The second is about this other money that is sloshing around the globe. And here I think it's not just a question of persuading finance, finance doesn't get persuaded. I mean, it's not Mother Teresa, right? It's not trying to do good in the world. It's trying to make profits and that's what it's doing. So let's recognize that's what it's doing and then put in conditions for its operation so that the attempt to make profits has to conform with social goals. I think that's where we've gone wrong. We've sort of said, oh, well, let's try and persuade and let's think of public-private partnerships that can incentivize. I think we have to put in conditions. We have to put in regulations that force private profit to be aligned with social goals. And that's both nationally true and internationally true. So it's not going to happen by an appeal to the morality or the ethics or the good feeling of private capital. Because that's not the nature of capital. That's not what it's supposed to do. What we have to do is make sure capital conforms to what society requires and what humanity and the planet require at this point. Thanks. Kirsten, did you have anything to add to this? To the particular thing? To this about the World Bank? Yeah, I think actually these two agencies, these two institutions are actually part of the problem to some degree. The IMF has in at least, and across the world, we can look at Mozambique after Hurricane, was it Hurricane Kenneth in 2019? We can look at the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian in 2019 as well. Of course, the Caribbean region, after major disasters, the IMF piles on huge amounts of debt on countries that cannot afford it, paying huge interest payments to the IMF and to global capital after a disaster. How inhumane and completely berserk that rationale for debtors in the sense that, you know, why are countries that are least responsible? So we're talking about Mozambique, the entire continent of Africa, it's less than 3% of global carbon emissions. We're talking about the Caribbean, less than 0.1% of global carbon emissions and they have to actually pay debt to meet the recovery and relief needs of their people. That is absolutely absurd. And so in my view, both institutions are actually, have bought us, are actually part of the problem. One, their inability to recognize that colonial and neoclonial relationships that have been maintained in the current world that we live in have contributed to these climate disasters that countries are facing and communities are facing. They have also contributed to reifying global capital and institutional investors to try to contribute to the problem through basically after disaster happens, you know, you can float a bond and global capital contributes to it and so on. And it's not a mechanism that actually centers equity. It's not a mechanism, loans that is, or bonds and so on. It's not a, these are not mechanisms that look at the problem from an historical perspective in the sense that countries that have been become most, you know, reliant on fossil fuel exports, for instance, are because of their colonial relationship. These are actual, these are the, these are how I think in my view, we need to look at these problems and not as one that has happened just yesterday. And so we have only dealing with the present context of how, but we need to understand how these problems emerge on the one hand. And it is my view, unfortunately, in the current configuration, both the IMF and the World Bank have actually contributed to the problem and are not actually, you know, resolving it to the extent that that equity forms a huge part of their particular interest. Thanks very much, Kirsten. You know, something that Jethene Butcher, Groenton said a little earlier is actually a perfect lead into a question from Zoe Lindesay, which I, you know, it's again, asking a question which I think is very important. Governments still seem to be looking for private sector solutions to climate change. If we allocate responsibility to address climate change at the national level, shouldn't this be backed up by public finance? And if I add a code out to that, we seem to be much more comfortable post-2008 with expanding deficits with greater debt and so on. Why is this not the obvious place to look for for supporting and changing our relationship to production and distribution of fossil fuels and so on? So Jethene, maybe you can start and then we'll go on. Yeah, yeah, thank you. So look, one thing we know especially post-pandemic is that when advanced country governments want, suddenly they can produce the money, right? There's no problem of financing. All that stuff about how it has to be only monetary policy has to only go to the private sector, shouldn't be financing government debt. All of that disappeared in the advanced economies. It was suddenly available as much as was required as soon as it was required. So clearly that whole myth about how, you know, governments cannot spend more, et cetera, has been vanquished in the advanced economies. It may come back, of course, you know, there's always the hardline hawks waiting in the wings, but right now it's been vanquished. In the developing world, as we've seen, that's far from true. And it's Keston pointed out the role of the IMF even now. The majority of the agreements that are signed in the pandemic era with developing countries and dire straits have demanded fiscal consolidation, reductions in public spending, austerity, and regressive taxation like VAT rather than direct taxation of large companies and the rich. So there is this unevenness, first of all, fiscally in terms of what can be done nationally and internationally. But it is absolutely true that, you know, you cannot expect private finance to do this because the social returns are so much larger than, and of course the social returns in the future are so much larger than the immediate and private returns. It's not in the nature of private capital to be doing this. And we shouldn't be expecting it to, we shouldn't be pointing fingers at it because that's really asking it to turn into something else. But I repeat, yes, public finance, but also fundamentally, we have to regulate what private finance does and direct it into the ways in which, you know, we think it would be useful. There is an often a disregarded sentence in Keynes's general theory, which is, I think it goes something like the duty of ordering the volume of investment in an economy cannot safely be left in private hands. I think that very prescient cannot safely be left in private hands. And it has many different dimensions. Of course, it gives you financial instability, tendencies to unemployment, equilibria, blah, blah, but it also means you're not going to get the necessary investments to deal with climate change. You have to have very, very large public investment. I go back to the point, it has to be global public investment. And I mean global public investment, not aid, little dribs and drabs of aid from a particular rich country to a particular poor country, but a recognition that this is a global problem that requires global public investment or in both adaptation and mitigation, wherever it is required. Thanks, Roenton, same question. I mean, the private sector solution versus, in some sense, expanding the FISC's capacities to deal with climate change. No, I think the premise of Zoë's question is spot on and Jayati's response was spot on that these are not either or things. You don't say only public or only private. This is almost a standard econ 100 kind of issue. In the face of externalities, you have to internalize them. How do you internalize them? It's some form of public action. It could be taxes and subsidies. That requires collective action. It could be foundational or platform investments on which innovation builds. That requires public action. It could be leveraging and public-private partnerships, again, public investments. So we know the problem. We know the streams through which one can influence private action. But at the center of it all is some kind of notion of the public good and public action. Thanks, Kirsten. There is definitely some need for global public action, whether that takes the form of existing sort of regimes of investment. I don't know whether those types of streams of investment would actually address the problem, especially in an equitable manner. So we're going back to the question of historical equity. How that is done, and if you take a sort of traditional conventional economics frame as we're hinting at just sort of outlined, you're not going to address the issues of equity when in inequality or injustice. Because it is considered a sort of allocative question and it's considered an efficiency question in how you address public investment as opposed to an equity question. These are very, very different principles. So considering public investment, people have talked about a global green new deal. People have talked about national forms of green new deals or some form of the other that really does not address the historical wrongs and harms that these countries have actually perpetrated and continue to perpetrate against populations and people in global south, right? So I think the only form, and I agree completely with Jayati that it can't be a form of aid or some form of charity as though you are giving to the needy and giving to those most wanting. It's you who've created the problem. You have contributed most to the problem. So it is your responsibility to address it and it has to be a reparative, reparatory form of addressing that problem. In my view and a reparatory resolution to that problem if we consider history as important to the question of climate change. I'd like to just stay on this for a second because I'm thinking about something which maybe starts at this in a different way which is if you look at the experience of those countries which were involved in the last world war, we know that public debt levels went up a huge amount across the board and that was in a war footing. There was clearly, we're going to get all the kinds of resources that they needed to do that, right? And they didn't really think about debt levels and so on. So here's the question. It seems to me that in the presence of sort of a very frayed and very ineffective global governance mechanism where you have to push a lot to get very little why is it not the correct thing to do to sort of wind power if you will. It's hard enough to wind power at the nation state level and expand public spending extensively. Why is that not the first most important thing to do because the productive systems in your own country both for mitigation and adaptation you need to take into account. Why are we fixated on in some sense, trying to get, if you will, global capital to do the work for us? I don't know who wants to take this or whether my question is even clear, but I'll try again. Yeah, no, it is clear, but to begin with if you still have even a minorly open capital account or a minorly open trade account you'll get massive capital flight as a developing country. So that's the first problem. The minute you say I'm going to expand my public spending by 20%, 30% and forget about the deficit, bam, you get capital flight and the associated currency and financial crises and et cetera, et cetera. So you would have to put in place systems which means a whole bunch of other regulations which would effectively de-globalize if you like. And it may be required and necessary but I'm just saying that that's a tough call for most developing countries. I think what has more possibility is possibly a regional approach. I think there are already signs in Africa that there are attempts to build that kind of approach. We've had many failed experiments in the past of even Asian cooperation regionally in monetary cooperation and that kind of thing but perhaps the conditions are different now because there is much greater cynicism and lack of expectation from the North. I mean, G7 has shown itself to be not leaders of the world but leaders of their own countries with very petty, narrow national interests. So you find leaders in Africa actually much more willing to think of regional industrial policy, regional trade, regional ways of doing things and dealing with some of these big issues. Whether that, I mean, I hope that goes forward because that's one way that's the thin end of the wedge to get into more global cooperation. But I agree with you that we can't just keep waiting for the global system to change and we have to think of ways to intervene in that. Thanks, Yethi. Either Kirsten or Rohit and whoever wants to take this up. Look, I mean, I'm completely live to the fact that if many developing countries expanded spending the way rich countries have in the COVID era there would be capital flight. But as a thought experiment, if they were all totally closed economies and they did the same thing, you would still have because of supply constraints and other politically economic domestic bottlenecks, not all of which can be pinned on the global system, you would still have some massive amounts of inflation and economic dislocation. So I don't think everything is about globalization in this case. The other point I'd make on regionalization and so again, I might be old fashioned here but I don't think Balkanization is the way forward. I don't think regionalization with the activities of regional superpowers dominating would necessarily give you a superior outcome to what we're seeing. I think political economy and our imbalances exist around the world. They may be augmented by global interaction but they existed before global interaction happened. We should be live to the fact that there are all kinds of inefficiencies and incompetencies in domestic structures and I think you're right to point that out. It really speaks to the point you made early, Arjun, which is that we have to be acting at several levels, globally as well as nationally in terms of the impediments to change. Thanks very much, Arjun and then we've got only about three minutes left. So Kirsten, you'll have the last word. I think my response isn't as technical a response. It has to do with, I believe, the politics of the possible. And what I mean by that is we have seen the kinds of shifts in conversations around the world, around climate change and climate justice and action due to political action. A lot of this by being young people, by anarchists, by people who are doing the kinds of confrontations with big corporations and so on. A lot of that, those kinds of politics have been very provokial and very narrow in how they conceive of the problem on the one hand and how we can address it. I think we can draw from the page of the coach, I'm gonna come back to the coach on Bamba movements in Bolivia that was started in 2010. We also had similar kinds of organizing around bringing workers together, bringing civic leaders together and all these various groups and especially marginalized groups, especially to confront global capital and confront various forms of inequity and putting forward in a very clear articulate program of action of how we address the problem. I think the answer lies in how that kinds of politics reinvigorates itself beyond the sort of nationalistic and provokial frames that they have set themselves and bringing, of course, the concerns of historical injustices, equity together and having a form of transnational conversation beyond simply nationalistic Green New Deal, as it were. Well, thanks very much, Kirsten. We're coming really to the end of our time. So if I had to summarize, I would, and it's almost impossible to summarize something this large and capacious, I would say that I think broadly all our panelists really think that the question is hard and I think we all agree probably because it's systemic. We may have different emphases on which particular parts of the system need to be reformed and in what way, but it seems clear that global finance and its re-regulation, as it were, was central to it. Thinking about the world more differently, thinking about reparations more effectively, all these are questions that will come up again and again, I'm sure over the next years and decades. So thanks very much to the panelists, Kirsten, Roenton, Jayati, and thanks to everyone for watching.