تابع رؤية 2030
بذكاء سياقي

In our increasingly dystopian world, who wouldn’t want to at least be open to a utopian antidote? The World Justice Report, published on Thursday, outlines how to build a prosperous, equitable world within safe planetary boundaries. It’s a push from the modern eco-socialist left in a global battle for ideas that will shape the future. Based on past social achievements and future energy transformation, it indicates that the overwhelming majority of people on the planet could, by the end of the century, work less and earn more while keeping temperatures down and avoiding much of the current destruction of nature. It is an ambitious, comprehensive and upbeat plan, and a stronger argument around which to build a political campaign than abstract goals of “net zero” or “decarbonisation”. By incorporating important concepts of “sufficiency” and “planetary habitability”, it also addresses the fundamental question of how to reduce the material impact of economic activity – a topic long ignored by the traditional left. While critics will question the feasibility of this vision because it relies on a radical reform of global financial institutions and massive wealth taxes – both of which have long been dismissed as unthinkable by rich nations – there can be no worthwhile assessment of its value without considering the far bleaker alternatives offered by the far right and the old left. Chief among them is the far-right techno-extractivist vision currently being championed by the US president and his supporters in Silicon Valley, who are putting artificial intelligence ahead of renewable technology. In the quest for “energy dominance”, the US is now using tariffs and military power to widen markets for oil, gas and coal. This strategy of literally concentrating power in the hands of billionaires is driving the world towards catastrophic levels of global heating and inequality. Thomas Piketty, one of the coordinators of the report, said the ambition of the mega-rich has become unrealistic and undesirable. “People realise this is simply not working. If the billionaires and the centimillionaires of the world were conducting our economy, investing the money in a way that brings us to a fantastic future with planetary habitability, rising wages and better housing conditions and health conditions for all, then everybody would be happy to give them the keys. But that’s not what we see. Their new dream is to cover the entire planet with data centres. This is their economic project for the world. But everybody can see that this is just going to increase the material footprint of our economy, that this is going to make global warming even worse.” The report also fills a hole that has existed since the inception of the global climate science infrastructure in the 1990s. One of the architects of that system, the British chemist Robert Watson, who is also a former chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told me that if he could go back in time and change anything, it would be to add more social scientists. Initially, he said, the “pure scientists” from the fields of physics and chemistry naively believed the data alone would be enough to persuade governments to act, but they later came to wish they had taken more account of social dynamics, economics, politics and psychology. This flaw has choked public support for climate action, said Piketty, who is a global authority on inequality and author of the bestselling 2013 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century: “There’s been this illusion of what we call a classless ecology, the sort of green growth illusion that everything is going to be solved by producing more and more and without worrying about the distribution, without worrying about sufficiency, without worrying about structural sectoral transformation. And this illusion has made green policy very unpopular for many lower income, middle income voters.” The Global Justice Report goes further than any previous study in addressing that shortcoming. It is also an exercise in human idealism and imagination, both of which are under ever more pressure from social media algorithms, AI and the transactional cynicism of far right politicians and business executives. Although based on well-established metrics for GDP, inequality and climate science, it widens the definition of prosperity and heightens the importance of “sufficiency” to show that quality of life is more valuable than quantity of material goods. This echoes ancient philosophies of a “golden mean,” Indigenous beliefs in the inextricable connection between human and natural wellbeing, as well as experiments in Bhutan of an economy based on “gross national happiness”. “We try to capture the reality that happiness is not just determined by economic metrics. Preserving a habitable earth does not just have a monetary benefit. You can make life better if you have more time to spend with family or in nature,” Cornelia Mohren, the Environmental Coordinator of the World Inequality Lab, said. “Sufficiency does not mean degrowth,” she says. “It is about less working hours, a different composition of consumption, and more health and education.” That will be challenged by the traditional left, which has long-tended to set goals of ever higher GDP, personal consumption and infrastructure spending, and the right, which baulks at any suggestion of planetary boundaries or lower material productivity. The authors say they welcome the debate. The report will be open for suggestions and revisions. “We don’t want to force people to change their lifestyle. It has to come with a cultural shift in the way we perceive the good life,” Mohren said. “There are majorities, even in the US that support some form of global justice, that don’t just care about themselves, but about the world.” Piketty said past social mobilisations had shown how quickly improvements can be made. With pressure also likely to come from climate breakdown, he said it was important to initiate debates now so that alternatives are already in people’s minds and will become more palatable in the future. “There will be crises. I think that’s for sure,” he said. “People need to get accustomed to the fact that big change will happen in any case.... We are not in a situation where things can just continue as they are forever.”

Humanity can raise living standards, reduce inequality and keep global heating within a 2C rise, according to a sweeping vision for planetary survival. The new report by the World Inequality Lab (WIL) aims to be the most comprehensive attempt yet to navigate the polycrisis that is pushing the world toward climate breakdown, political extremism and ever greater economic and social tension. View image in fullscreen A drone view shows the stark inequality between neighbourhoods in Santa Fe, Mexico City Photograph: Raquel Cunha/Reuters It offers a set of bold policy proposals, including hefty wealth taxes on billionaires, sharp reductions in working hours, a change in diets and a shift of investment from materially intense sectors like industry and mining to education and health. If these and other measures are taken, the report says 89% of the world population would see their incomes double by 2100 and global heating would be kept below 2C above the preindustrial average. The authors say their vision provides a positive alternative to the grim projections from far-right techno extractivists, nationalists and billionaires who claim the future will inevitably bring more fossil fuels, climate disruption and inequality. “There’s a huge cultural, intellectual, political battle that is going on. And we all have a role to play,” said Thomas Piketty, co-director of the WIL and professor at the Paris School of Economics. View image in fullscreen Economics professor Thomas Piketty says Trump-style policies will end in disaster. Photograph: Ed Alcock “The ideology, which we see with Trump and all the little Trumps that we have all across Europe and all across the world is simply not going to deliver. At the end of the day we’ll have to come to this kind of cooperative redistribution of resources and power because the alternative will simply lead to disastrous outcomes both on the environment, on the climate, but also on social grounds. The Global Justice Report, published on Thursday, tries to overcome the shortcomings of mainstream approaches to the polycrisis, including the overly materialistic emphasis of traditional leftist parties, the questionable efficacy of the economic degrowth proposed by many ecologists and the lack of social impact studies by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report aims to rectify those limitations by incorporating inequality studies, climate science and proposals for creating a political coalition capable of reforming the world’s financial architecture. View image in fullscreen A wildfire in California. The report addresses the climate crisis as well as social justice. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images This “plan for equality and prosperity within planetary boundaries” is the product of 45 authors based on databases compiled by more than 200 researchers from the world. At its core is the concept of sufficiency – the idea that people can enjoy a prosperous, healthy life without constantly striving to consume or accumulate more material possessions that degrade the natural world on which all life depends. To achieve this, the authors envisage three steps: more than halving average working time from 2,100 hours a year to 1,000 hours, roughly equivalent to a two-and-a-half-day working week; encouraging people to eat less red meat, which is the main driver of deforestation and ecological destruction; and refocusing the economy toward low-consumption activities by more than doubling education spending to €8,400 euros (£7,250) a person and healthcare spending to 14,400 euros. Piketty said: “One extra euro of GDP in education and health has three to four times less material footprint and energy consumption than one extra euro of GDP in the manufacturing sector. So that’s why the sectoral shifts are hugely important.” Tackling inequality is a central goal. The plan sees an average per capita gross national income across the world of €5,000 a month by the end of the century – an increase for almost everyone and with the greatest gains to be seen in the global south. The exception is the megarich, who would be highly taxed because they are most responsible for the climate crisis. The share of global wealth held by billionaires, who make up only 0.001% of the world population, would fall from 6% to 0.05%, while the bottom 50% would see their share of wealth increase from 2% to 30%. The other priority is reducing climate risks by cutting emissions as close to zero as possible. The report takes three mid-century scenarios for decarbonisation outlined by the International Energy Agency and projects them to 2100. Under its most ambitious plan, capital is redirected from the world’s wealthiest individuals and invested in wind, solar and other renewable technologies to accelerate the complete decarbonisation and electrification of energy supplies by 2050. Further emissions savings would come from a reduction in working hours and the shift in diets and economic activity. This is projected to keep global temperature rises to 1.8C by the end of the century – considerably lower than the catastrophic 4C to 4.5C estimates under scenarios of slow decarbonisation and ever-increasing demand for material goods. It is also better than the 1.9C projected under a scenario of across-the-board economic degrowth. Key among the practical steps needed to achieve the report’s goals would be the creation of a global justice fund to finance the energy transition and oversee an increase in education and healthcare spending to 38% of world GDP, up from 13% today. This work would be supported by a world sovereign fund, which would rebalance global holdings of public and private wealth closer to proportions last seen in 1970. “A habitable, equal 21st century is materially possible,” the report concludes. “What stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but crucial work of building a coalition behind it.” Cornelia Mohren, a co-author and environmental coordinator at the WIL, acknowledged the report was “visionary and maybe utopian” but said this was necessary to show other paths were possible. “It is good to know we can combine an equal world with staying within carbon budgets,” she said. “That is a very helpful result. It makes me feel hopeful. We saw what’s possible and we also see how hard it is with this political reality, which can be depressing.” Piketty said recent history showed the goals of the report were plausible. Countries such as Sweden and Norway were once extremely divided economically but have made rapid progress in reducing inequality thanks to government policies and a refocusing of investment toward education and health, while working hours in Europe have halved since the 19th century, which is in line with the goal envisaged in the report. The key, Piketty added, was to address inequality and planetary habitability together. Without that twin approach, he said governments would risk repeating the mistakes that caused the Yellow Vest protests in France against a carbon tax that would have hit working and middle-class people more than the rich. “If you don’t put this at the centre of your analysis and if you talk about green policies, environment, in the abstract, this is simply not going to work,” he added. The report will be unveiled and discussed at the World Inequality Conference from 4-6 June in Paris, with speakers including Ha-Joon Chang, Jean Drèze, Jayati Ghosh, Mariana Mazzucato, Branko Milanović, Lea Ypi and Gabriel Zucman. Jason Hickel, a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a visiting senior fellow at LSE, said: “It’s an important and timely intervention. All of this is technically feasible to achieve – we can have good lives for all within planetary boundaries – but it will require organised political struggle to make it happen.”

الرياض - مباشر: تركزت أحجام التداول بسوق الأسهم السعودي خلال تعاملات اليوم الثلاثاء، على مجموعة من الأسهم بعدة قطاعات شملت، الأغذية والتطبيقات وخدمات التقنية، والمواد الأساسية. وأنهى مؤشر الأسهم السعودية الرئيسي (تاسي) تعاملات جلسة اليوم الثلاثاء على ارتفاع طفيف بنسبة 0.05%، ليغلق عند مستوى 11,015.55 نقطة، بمكاسب بلغت 6.03 نقطة، وبلغت كمية التداول 299.61 مليون سهم. وتصدر سهم شركة أمريكانا قائمة الأسهم الأكثر نشاطا من حيث حجم التداول خلال الجلسة، حيث جرى تداول 25.97 مليون سهم، وأغلق السهم على تراجع بنسبة 1.01% ليصل إلى سعر 1.96 ريال، مسجلا قيمة تداولات إجمالية بلغت 50.9 مليون ريال. وفي المرتبة الثانية من حيث النشاط، برز سهم دي بي اس الذي سجل أداء قويا بارتفاع بلغت نسبته 6.85%، ليغلق عند مستوى 13.25 ريال، وبلغ حجم التداول على السهم حوالي 22.23 مليون سهم، محققا قيمة تداولات بلغت 294.55 مليون ريال. وشهد سهم شركة أنابيب نشاطا ملحوظا، حيث حل في المرتبة الثالثة من حيث أحجام التداول بنحو 21.87 مليون سهم. وارتفع سعر السهم بنسبة 4.51% ليغلق عند 7.65 ريال، مسجلا قيمة تداول بلغت 167.31 مليون ريال. وفي قطاع الطاقة، سجل سهم أرامكو السعودية تداول نحو 19.33 مليون سهم، ليغلق مرتفعا بشكل طفيف بنسبة 0.07% عند سعر 27.38 ريال، متصدرا السوق من حيث القيمة الإجمالية التي بلغت 529.29 مليون ريال. وفي قطاع المواد الأساسية، جذب سهم كيان السعودية تداولات بحجم 13.41 مليون سهم، مما دفع السعر للارتفاع بنسبة 3.47% ليغلق عند 5.97 ريال، وبقيمة تداول بلغت 80.08 مليون ريال. وشملت قائمة الأسهم النشطة أيضا سهم الكيميائية الذي ارتفع بنسبة 0.34% ليغلق عند 8.78 ريال، بحجم تداول بلغ 7.89 مليون سهم وقيمة بلغت 69.32 مليون ريال.

الرياض - مباشر: شهدت جلسة اليوم الثلاثاء بسوق الأسهم السعودية، تركز السيولة بشكل رئيسي على الأسهم القيادية بقطاعات الطاقة، والبنوك، وشركات البتروكيماويات. وأنهى مؤشر السوق السعودية الرئيسي (تاسي) جلسة تداولات اليوم الثلاثاء على ارتفاع طفيف بنسبة 0.05%، ليغلق عند مستوى 11,015.55 نقطة، رابحاً نحو 5.5 نقطة مقارنة بإغلاق الجلسة السابقة، وبلغت السيولة 5.74 مليار ريال. وتصدر سهم أرامكو السعودية قائمة الأسهم الأكثر نشاطاً من حيث القيمة، حيث بلغت تداولاته 529.29 مليون ريال، وأغلق السهم عند سعر 27.38 ريال مسجلاً ارتفاعاً بنسبة 0.07%. وجاء سهم مصرف الراجحي في المرتبة الثانية من حيث السيولة بقيمة بلغت 480.49 مليون ريال، إلا أن السهم أغلق مستقراً دون تغيير بنسبة 0.00% عند مستوى 66.7 ريال، مما عكس حالة من التوازن بين قوى العرض والطلب خلال الجلسة. وصعد سهم دي بي اس بنسبة 6.85% ليغلق عند سعر 13.25 ريال، مسجلاً قيم تداول بلغت 294.55 مليون ريال، ليحتل المركز الثالث في قائمة السيولة، وسجل سهم البنك الأول مكاسب بنسبة 0.77% ليغلق عند 34.12 ريال، بسيولة بلغت 193.87 مليون ريال. وشهد سهم أنابيب نشاطاً ملحوظاً بارتفاعه بنسبة 4.51% ليصل إلى مستوى 7.65 ريال، وبلغت قيمة التداولات عليه 167.31 مليون ريال، خوالف سهم أكوا باور اتجاه الأسهم القيادية النشطة، حيث سجل تراجعاً بنسبة 2.63% ليغلق عند مستوى 181.1 ريال، محققاً سيولة بلغت 158.46 مليون ريال. وفي قطاع المواد الأساسية، حقق سهم سابك نمواً بنسبة 2.24% ليغلق عند سعر 56.95 ريال، وذلك عبر تداولات بلغت قيمتها 138.81 مليون ريال، كما ارتفع سهم البنك الأهلي السعودي بنسبة 0.51% ليغلق عند 39.34 ريال، مسجلاً سيولة قدرها 127.28 مليون ريال. وصعد سهم معادن بنسبة 0.24% ليغلق عند 63.1 ريال بقيمة تداول بلغت 124.73 مليون ريال، وجاء سهم اس تي سي ضمن قائمة الأسهم الأكثر نشاطاً بالسيولة، مسجلاً ارتفاعاً بنسبة 0.64% ليغلق عند سعر 43.7 ريال، وبقيمة تداول إجمالية بلغت 104.24 مليون ريال.

Donald Trump claims to have mastered the Art of the Deal, but he has just given us a master class in negotiating incompetence. I would love to see an Iranian government that no longer represses its people, menaces its neighbors, or can build a nuclear weapon. Trump has set back all of these efforts. His cabinet of sycophants offered little resistance as he naively bombed first and faced reality later. Trump is reviewing and tinkering with a proposed memorandum of understanding (MOU) drafted by American and Iranian diplomats with the aid of Pakistan and Qatar. It would continue the current ceasefire for 60 days while a more permanent peace accord is negotiated. The precise contours of this preliminary agreement are not known, but its gist seems clear – and is a profound embarrassment for Trump. His unprovoked war of choice has accomplished all of nothing. A new approach is urgently needed. The best way to assess Trump’s quandary is by comparing it with what a less bellicose approach might have secured. Trump says he wants to deny Iran a nuclear weapon, but Tehran has repeatedly disavowed that goal. Rather, the real issue, given broad distrust of Iran’s clerical leaders, is how to prohibit them from obtaining the means to build a bomb. That’s what Barack Obama’s 2015 deal with the Iranians did. The joint comprehensive plan of action, or JCPOA, curtailed their nuclear program subject to intrusive international inspections. It contained sunset clauses, but they could have been extended by further agreement. Yet Trump withdrew from that accord in 2018, vowing to pressure Iran into a better deal. It didn’t work. The JCPOA had allowed Iran to enrich uranium to only a minimal 3.67% – a far cry from the 90% needed for a nuclear weapon. Iran sent 11 tonnes of uranium that had been modestly enriched above the lower level to Russia, leaving it no path to build a bomb. Trump’s repudiation of the JCPOA removed these limits. That enabled Iran to produce nearly half a tonne of highly enriched uranium at a purity of 60%. That is a short hop from the enrichment needed for a bomb. Trump is now back at square one. He is trying to persuade Iran again to limit its enrichment program and to export or dilute its enriched uranium – in other words, to do what it agreed to do with Obama. That was the subject of negotiations in February of this year, but Trump abruptly ended those talks in favor of war. Trump’s hope was to bomb and sanction Iran into submission. On the urging of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, American and Israeli bombers tried to decapitate the regime, hoping for a more pliant successor or even a popular uprising. At one point, Trump had the hubris to demand “unconditional surrender”. But if anything, the killing of Iranian leaders, including former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, enhanced the power of hardliners associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. And it was always wishful thinking that the Iranian dictatorship, which had survived years of sanctions and had slaughtered at least 7,000 anti-government protesters in January, would be more concerned about the welfare of the Iranian people under bombardment than in retaining power. Nor would the Iranian people be eager to take to the streets again to face more bloodshed at a time when their immediate concern was avoiding death from the sky. Trump had no plan B. He claimed to have destroyed Iran’s missile and drone capacity. Instead, he substantially depleted US arms stockpiles while leaving most of Iran’s arsenal intact and its ability to wreak havoc considerable. Trump also turned the strait of Hormuz from a theoretical into an actual weapon, one arguably more powerful than a nuclear bomb because it is more usable. With one fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas supply passing through the strait before the war (as well as fertilizer, sulfur and helium), the economic consequence of closing the strait are far-reaching. Iran has compounded the effect by attacking oil and gas facilities in the Gulf Arab states. The Iranians have Trump over a barrel. He pretends not to care about the November midterm elections, but everyone sees that the mounting cost of gasoline and its inflationary pressure mean that, despite their gerrymandering, the Republicans are likely to face a shellacking. Trump is thus fixated on reopening the strait so that oil and gas deliveries can resume. Meanwhile, he is punting on the key nuclear questions – the ostensible reason for this counterproductive war. In the MOU, Iran reportedly will again disavow its intention to build a nuclear bomb, but the key issue of denying it the means – of limiting enrichment and neutralizing its highly enriched uranium – will be kicked down the road for later discussion. double quotation mark [Trump] substantially depleted US arms stockpiles while leaving most of Iran’s arsenal intact and its ability to wreak havoc considerable Other issues cited by Trump as reasons for war, such as Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for regional armed groups, are apparently nowhere to be found in the proposed preliminary accord. In other words, the MOU will only return us to the February status quo, before the strait of Hormuz was even in play. The Trump-Netanyahu bombing campaign was for naught. Indeed, US negotiators are now worse off. Knowing that Trump is desperate to get the oil flowing again, Tehran has upped the ante. Reflecting distrust of Trump, the Iranians reportedly want their frozen assets released and at least some sanctions lifted before nuclear negotiations begin. They are also said to be seeking an “investment fund” to help with postwar reconstruction – in amounts far larger than those that Trump had vehemently criticized Obama for allowing. Trump may try to fudge the matter by allowing Qatar to hand over funds instead. The MOU is likely to require that passage through the strait be “unrestricted” while negotiations proceed, and Trump has gone so far as to threaten to bomb Oman, a US ally, should it join Iran to control the strait. Iran thus will probably be forced to eschew the imposition of “tolls” but may toy with surrogates such as an “environmental fee”. None of that was on the table in February before Trump’s war of choice. Tehran is also insisting that a new 60-day ceasefire extend to Israel’s military operations in Lebanon. That demand is understandable, because in the name of fighting Hezbollah, an Iranian ally, Israel has forced 1 million people from their homes in southern Lebanon – one fifth of the country’s population. As the possible MOU became public, Israel intensified its attacks in Lebanon and for the first time in two decades advanced above the Litani River. As in Gaza, Israel has honored even the current ceasefire in the breach, periodically dropping bombs as it reduces villages in southern Lebanon to rubble. Netanyahu has also told Trump he reserves the right to respond to “threats” in Lebanon, a formula that Israeli troops in Gaza have exploited to continue killing Palestinians. As in Gaza, Israel is also likely to insist that a ceasefire not include withdrawal from the vast swathes of Lebanese territory that it now occupies. There are lessons to be learned from this debacle. First, Trump should definitively repudiate Netanyahu’s preference for endless armed conflict. If Israel’s far-right government can be said to have a long-term strategy, it is to eschew negotiation for war, to bomb and bomb and, when the other side recovers, bomb some more. “Mowing the grass” is how this callous approach is described. Trump, who prides himself on being a deal-maker, should prioritize negotiation and drop his saber-rattling, such as his blatantly illegal (and thinly disguised nuclear) threat to destroy Iran’s civilization. While negotiators inevitably deploy carrots and sticks, Trump should make military force a last resort, to be used only in the narrow circumstances permitted by the United Nations charter. That is the right way to proceed as a matter of not only international law but also military practicality now that the Iranian military, equipped only with drones, sea mines and speedboats, has shown itself capable of imposing enormous costs on the world’s most powerful country, not to mention the global economy. Iranian officials are known to be tough negotiators, but Trump has plenty of leverage without resorting to another war of aggression. Between Iran’s frozen assets and the many sanctions imposed on the country, Trump can engage in an incremental give and take that should be capable of achieving an acceptable solution. As for what that solution should be, the focus should be back where it started – on denying Iran the means to secure a nuclear weapon. That requires no longer insisting on the dealbreaker demand that Iran forsake the ability to enrich uranium to modest levels, as all other governments are allowed under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Rather, pairing modest enrichment with intrusive international inspections should suffice to prevent secret bomb development. Trump may also need to accept creative solutions to neutralize Iran’s cache of highly enriched uranium – some combination of dilution, monitoring and export – as he has suggested he might. Most importantly, despite his inclinations, Trump must for once put the nation’s (and world’s) interest above his own. Trump’s ability to deny the facts and spin reality is impressive, but even he will have a hard time selling this debacle as a victory. And Tehran may not give him a face-saving way out. We must insist that he accept a deal anyway, even if it reveals the Master Deal-maker to be a Master Bungler.