 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. The planet and its people are in peril, hunger afflicts millions, the wars of imperialism swallow countries whole, the ailing struggle for medication, youth struggle for education and minorities bear the brutal brunt of oppression. Above all, the clock is ticking as humanity fails to address climate change. The pandemic has exacerbated many of these crises and the ruling elites of the world have been found wanting. People's movements on the other hand have been consistently arguing for and struggling for an entirely different way to approach and solve these problems. Recently, a host of research institutes informed and inspired by these movements have come up with a plan to save the planet. Vijay Prashad of Tricontinental Institute of Social Research explains the dimensions of the global crisis and how this plan was hatched. Well, about 1 in 3 people on the planet is hungry. Most people are struggling to find decent work. Most people have no idea where they're going to get entertainment or leisure or even free time. What's the point of being alive if you can't have fun with other people, if you can't socialize, if you can't build a cultural life? We believe that the COVID pandemic has demonstrated that something is wrong with the world as we've built it and so we have to, we must rebuild the system so that people can lead richer, healthier, much more cultured lives. The interesting thing is when the COVID pandemic was at its height and it appeared as if something was broken in the world. From the standpoint of business elites, the commodity chain was disrupted, supply chains were disrupted and so on. You began to see plans emerge. The World Economic Forum produced a plan, something called the Council for Inclusive Capitalism was set up by the Bank of London and the Vatican, very strange bedfellows. At that time, 26 research institutes gathered together under the leadership of the ALBA TCP which is a treaty organization in Latin America and the Caribbean. We came together as research institutes and began to think about what would our plan be for the planet and we thought of course that there are many ideas that emerged from political and social movements around the world, ideas about how healthcare should be structured, public healthcare systems, more primary healthcare systems and so on. Adopting the Alma Ata Declaration of 1978, we understood the need for more electricity so that you could have then a production of a wireless connectivity so you could have online education in case of something like another pandemic. We needed more classrooms with the ability for students around the world to go sit there, get proper education and so on. All of this would require funding so we had to think very hard about funding. Think about the trillions of dollars that sit in tax havens. Think about the very low corporate tax rate around the world. Think about amassing the resources that go toward the military, at least a fraction of it and put it into the human good. So it's on the basis of all these conversations, the demands that people have made over the course of the past several decades on the one side and the actual possibility of raising financing to meet those demands. We put the two things together and we created this plan to save the planet. A key aspect of the plan to save the planet is the focus on three apathites that exist today. Yawning gaps that are only heightened by the way our societies are organized. What are these three apathites and what kind of impact do they have on humanity? I was very struck when Dr. Tedros, the head of the WHO, you know Dr. Tedros is from Ethiopia, he's a very eminent scientist and so on. In the middle of the pandemic, Dr. Tedros talked about vaccine apathite. He said that some countries were getting vaccines and others were not. Now this is well known around the world. We know about this vaccine nationalism and then this vaccine apathite. The use of the term apathite struck me and then we decided let's expand this. Let's talk about medical apathite, not just vaccine apathite, how some parts of the world have enormous medical infrastructures that are built and prepared and ready for people. Others have nothing, no pharmaceutical production possible and so on. So one of the apathites is medical apathite, then food apathite. There are food deserts around the world, places where there's just no food. We know for instance that currently food production is about three times the amount of need that there is on the planet. We produce enough food. It's just that hungry mouths cannot get access to the food and the reason they can't is that they don't have money. So we call that food apathite, people just starving even though there is the existence of food. And then there's money apathite. Now money apathite is interesting. It's a curiosity that those who are rich can actually borrow money at a cheaper price than those who are poor. The reason banks do that is that they say people who are poor are higher risk. They may not pay the loan back so therefore they charge them higher interest rates. This is money apathite, the poor have a harder time getting access to money. You think about poor countries, not just poor people. They are charged more for the money that they borrow and then the penalties against them are terrible so that they cannot advance any kind of social agenda. They're basically bankrupted by the interest payments they have to make. So these are the three apathites that we write about. Of course you can think of education apathite. During the pandemic when you talk about online learning where vast numbers of children around the world don't have computers, they don't have smartphones, they don't have internet access. In fact many don't even have electricity. We've got to think of a concept like education apathite. These are useful. This concept of apathite is useful to actually broadcast the glaring gaps that exist between the rich and the poor on the planet today. 2021 was the year of COP26, the Global Climate Summit. At the end of it many were left disappointed. There seemed to be no collective will among the ruling class to truly address the crisis. How do we address the impending global climate catastrophe? What responsibilities do countries have? You see the plan to save the planet that we have is based largely on the UN Charter of 1945 but also on several international treaties that have been signed over the course of the period since the UN Charter of 1945. The most important as far as the question of climate and the environment is concerned is the treaty signed after the Rio conference of 1992. In this treaty signed in Rio 1992 was a phrase and the phrase says that as far as environment and then extrapolating that to climate is concerned there are common and differentiated responsibilities. Look it's common if you destroy the planet if you can throw plastic into the ocean and pollute the ocean or if you destroy the atmosphere this is going to impact everybody. There are common problems faced by everybody but there are differentiated responsibilities. There are different responsibilities. The advanced industrial countries for instance have had their share of the carbon budget much more than their per capita share should have been. I mean they've been polluting for decades. They've built advanced societies and so on on the backs of externalizing the cost to the planet to everybody. So based on this idea of differentiated a claim is made against the northern countries saying okay we agree that there are common problems environmental devastation you know atmospheric deterioration and so on. We agree there are common problems but there are differentiated responsibilities and the global north which is far wealthier than most of the global south countries has to pay into the climate fund not hundreds of millions of dollars a year but trillions of dollars and has to provide the technology to the countries of the global south to lead frog dirty technologies and until that happens there has to be allowance for countries to have development based on you know even some carbon fueled technologies that's going to be necessary in the interim period you can't just cut everything tomorrow until this pathway is created. So we actually don't say much that's novel around the question of environment and the question of atmospheric degradation but we stick we hue to the real formula. We also of course talk about the importance of waste and creating a civilization which is not governed by waste. Most people should know that in the northern pacific there is an island of plastic that's perhaps the size of France you know it's it's a grotesque thing that we've done to the oceans. The level of waste has to be taken in hand.