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Why We Must Replace the Global Economic System Built by the 1%
This is not rocket science and the global majority, the 99%, have the answers and are already putting them into practice.
Nov 22, 2025
This year’s G20 Leaders Summit is taking place in Johannesburg, a short distance from Constitution Hill, a former prison complex that once held Nelson Mandela and other South African democracy fighters. As the world’s most powerful leaders meet behind closed doors, this former apartheid prison turned museum will publicly write another page in the history of global economic emancipation.
Movements, workers, activists, thinkers, creatives, artists, and communities from across South Africa, Africa, Asia, and Latin America are gathering for a three-day People’s Summit for Economic Justice — a counter to the G20 — to build the power of the 99 percent. The Constitution Hill’s Old Fort, Women’s Jail, and former men’s prison cells are hosting radical conversations, art, music, and action for the Global Majority to tell their own story, share struggles and solutions, and show that another world isn’t just possible — it’s already being built by communities writing their own future.
The G20 member countries account for over 85 percent of the global GDP. Over this forum’s two and half decades of existence, the G20 has failed to use its combined economic weight to steer global financial, trade, development, and fiscal policies to address global economic and environmental challenges. Instead, it has served the interest of the 1 percent: elites, corporations, and billionaires.
As a result, a handful of billionaires and super rich people globally have amassed far more wealth than they need, abusing the power they possess. They are wrecking democracies across the world as they make rules in their favor at the expense of the 99 percent and the planet.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed an “Extraordinary Committee” of independent experts that published the first-ever G20 global inequality report earlier this month. The report shows that the richest 1 percent has captured 41 percent of all new wealth since 2000, while the bottom half of humanity received just 1 percent. The report notes that one in four people globally now face food insecurity even as the wealth of billionaires reaches levels equivalent to up to 16 percent of global GDP. Those words will not mean much to those on the frontlines of inequality without action, without redistribution.
The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other bodies have also acknowledged that extreme inequalities are thwarting the pace and sustainability of economic growth, eroding social cohesion and trust, and undermining democratic institutions and political stability that is fueling conflict and social unrest. However, they are still part of the problem, not the solution.
Enraged young people from Morocco to Madagascar, Kathmandu to Lima continue to lead street protests worldwide demanding accountability and challenging economic systems because they are not working for them. They are frustrated by poor service delivery, abuse of power concentrated in the hands of a few, unfulfilled promises, economic systems that continue to squeeze the little they earn, unemployment, unjust debt and climate breakdown.
They are drawing a red line against the failed systems and saying loud and clear, “Enough is enough.”
This is a time bomb and a bigger explosion threatens the planet and everyone on it, regardless how fat their bank account is. But we have solutions. This is not rocket science and the global majority, the 99%, have the answers and are already putting them into practice.
Wealth taxes are a progressive solution to address extreme inequalities — far better than the consumption taxes that many governments in the Global South are imposing on their people to service unjust debt and compensate for unpaid taxes by the super-rich. Taxing the super-rich can generate significant recurring revenue and restore public trust. Tax revenues from the super-rich are enough to fund essential services, such as education, healthcare, and social safety nets, which are key drivers of long-term inequality reduction.
Participants in the People’s Summit are also demanding that rich polluters pay for just transitions to clean energy. They are calling for redistributing health care to guarantee reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. And they are demanding protection of civic space and cultural rights by defending the freedom to speak, organize, and create.
The 2025 G20 Leaders Summit taking place not far from the We the 99 Peoples Summit has an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past by listening to the global majority that are gathered at Constitution Hill. Global leaders, including the G20, must stop turning for solutions to the same elites who created and continue to fuel the inequality crisis. Instead, they need to listen to the voices of the 99% – the people who have endured inequality and survived against all odds.
The 99% hold the answers. And the answer is clear: replace the system built by the 1% with a system designed for and by the 99%.
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COP30 Shows How Corporate Power Is Derailing Climate Justice
While Brazil positions the summit as an “Implementation COP,” the reality is a conference dominated by the very corporations expanding fossil fuel extraction.
Nov 20, 2025
Analysis from the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition shows more than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to COP30 in Belém, Brazil. That means 1 in every 25 participants represents the industry that is accelerating climate chaos.
Lobbyists from ExxonMobil, BP, TotalEnergies, and major trade associations roam freely while delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined are vastly outnumbered. Indigenous peoples and civil society activists are squeezed to the margins, sometimes literally, as protesters blockaded entrances to be heard. Meanwhile, fossil fuel executives are in the rooms where decisions or the lack thereof will shape our collective future.
Inside COP30, the contradiction is stark. While Brazil positions the summit as an “Implementation COP,” the reality is a conference dominated by the very corporations expanding fossil fuel extraction. Nearly $250 billion in new oil and gas projects have been approved since COP29, even as the world burns. Indigenous communities, guardians of the Amazon for generations, struggle to enter decision-making rooms, while fossil fuel lobbyists walk in with ease. The people on the frontlines of climate devastation are silenced; the industry that profits from it is amplified.
Protests in Belém, from Indigenous flotillas along the Amazon River to the blockade of COP entrances, are acts of survival and resistance. Indigenous leaders like Raoni Metuktire speak for the forest, the water, and the air that sustain life. Civil society groups push for mechanisms like the Belém Action Mechanism, aiming to put communities at the center of climate solutions. Yet in the halls of negotiation, these voices are often drowned out by the hum of corporate self-interest and the whir of greenwashed PR campaigns.
To expect hope or justice from a world run by billionaires is a delusion.
True climate justice requires more than aspirational statements. It requires dismantling the structures that allow wealth and power to concentrate in the hands of the few while the majority bear the consequences. It demands a serious rethink of the COP system itself: enforceable conflict-of-interest rules, accountability measures for governments and corporations, and meaningful participation for the communities on the frontlines of the crisis.
It is time for the people to call out this hypocrisy and expose this façade for what it is: a fiesta of corporate power, a spectacle of interests flexing muscles through Big Oil and fossil fuel lobbyists. COP30, like its predecessors, has become less a climate forum and more a playground for polluters.
Perhaps one can draw a strong parallel with the genocide in Gaza. I say this because the system is rigged: rigged against the people, the weak, and the vulnerable. Witnessing Gaza makes one feel powerless in front of structures built by and for the powerful, at the expense of the oppressed. And I write not just because of genocides in Gaza or Sudan, but because of the enduring sense of helplessness experienced by the poor and working classes across the globe. Systems rigged by corporate and neoliberal interests have fueled record levels of inequality, leaving ordinary people to bear the brunt of stagnant wages, spiraling living costs, and environmental devastation. This is not a problem confined to the so-called Global South. The endemic inequality extends to the West as well: The richest 1% now control more wealth than 95% of humanity.
The global cost-of-living crisis shows the same structural inequality at work. Inflation is surging worldwide, with food and energy costs pushing millions into poverty from sub-Saharan Africa to South Asia, and even in developed countries. People are skipping meals, forgoing medicine, or working multiple jobs just to survive. Governments scramble with subsidies or cash transfers, but these measures often fail to reach the most vulnerable or merely offer temporary relief, leaving structural inequities intact. The climate crisis and economic injustice are deeply intertwined, both fueled by concentrated wealth and corporate influence.
To expect hope or justice from a world run by billionaires is a delusion. Unless these entrenched systems of inequality are dismantled, unless wealth is distributed more equitably, climate justice like all other lofty promises of fairness will remain a mere pipe dream.
It is time to reset priorities and take an honest stock of COPs. If the conference cannot stay committed to its original purpose to protect people and the planet perhaps it is time to roll it back. Enough of greenwashed pledges and photo ops for polluters. The climate emergency is urgent, but these gatherings, as currently structured, serve only those who profit from the destruction, not those who suffer it.
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Two Negotiations, One Crisis: Why COP30 and the UN Tax Convention Must Finally Speak to Each Other
The world can no longer afford two disconnected frameworks for the same global emergency.
Nov 19, 2025
This week, governments are negotiating climate finance in Belém, Brazil and new global tax rules in Nairobi, Kenya. The coincidence of these talks happening at the same time—yet with almost no structured conversation between them—may be the clearest indicator of how disconnected the global response still is.
Climate negotiators discuss financing needs without asking where predictable public resources will come from, while tax negotiators debate revenue rules without acknowledging the rising costs of the climate crisis.
Treating these as separate worlds is no longer viable. Both deal with cross-border harms and deep inequality, and both require cooperation grounded in equity and responsibility.
The world cannot afford two disconnected frameworks for the same global emergency.
What tax negotiations can learn from climate governance
The climate regime learned early that unequal responsibility cannot be ignored. Under the Paris Agreement, global standards are paired with nationally determined plans. The system links international expectations with domestic realities.
The climate crisis has made the links between public finance, inequality, and environmental survival impossible to ignore.
International taxation has never made this leap. Failure to cooperate has allowed multinational corporations and wealthy individuals to underpay tax by shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions and hiding wealth behind secrecy. As a result, countries lose an estimated US$492 billion each year to cross-border tax abuse, according to research by the Tax Justice Network. These losses directly undermine governments’ ability to fund the climate action, social protection, care systems and economic diversification essential for a just transition.
With this round of Nairobi negotiations now concluded, countries have signaled a rare opportunity to advance a stronger UN tax convention—one that delivers fairer rules on taxing rights, tackles profit shifting, and strengthens transparency.
The convention represents a historic chance to shift the burden from ordinary people to those who profit most from pollution and extraction, and to build an international system that restores countries’ tax sovereignty—the ability of states to use tax to deliver on their people’s aspirations.
Subnational leaders are already doing what global systems have failed to do
Cities, states, and regions are carrying the weight of climate action. They build early warning systems, reinforce infrastructure, manage disaster response, and support communities during heatwaves, floods, and droughts. In practice, this means that the vast majority of climate implementation takes place at the subnational level—in many countries this accounts for 70 percent or more of climate-significant public expenditure, rising to over 80 percent in some cases. Yet these same actors receive only around 10 per cent of climate finance.
This mismatch is structural. Global climate finance is built around national governments and large international funds, with access that is slow, complex, and tilted toward institutions with high administrative capacity. Local authorities dealing with climate impacts every day are left without the stable resources they need.
Despite this, subnational governments are modelling practical, fair climate finance. Kerala’s 1 percent flood levy helps rebuild homes, roads, and schools after major floods and strengthens community readiness for future shocks. Elsewhere, solidarity arrangements between neighbouring jurisdictions channel revenue from polluting activities into joint adaptation projects. Together, these examples show how small, well-designed levies can generate stable public revenue and ensure those with greater responsibility contribute more.
These local approaches matter far beyond their borders. They show that progressive, people-centred taxation can be implemented at scale and can complement national and international systems. They are blueprints for how global rules could be designed to be more equitable and more closely aligned with lived realities.
Global South leadership on solidarity levies shows what climate and tax reform can achieve together
A coalition of eight countries—including Kenya, Colombia, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Mozambique, Tanzania, France, and Spain—launched the Premium Flyers Solidarity Coalition, backing levies on business class, first class, and private jet travel. These charges target the highest emitters and, if coordinated across willing countries, could raise around €121 billion a year, depending on design—offering a major new source of finance for adaptation, resilience, and loss and damage.
This approach builds on existing practice: more than 52 countries already apply some form of aviation levy. Several governments in the Global South are now examining just and equitable air-passenger levies that place higher costs on higher-income and higher-emitting travellers. In Kenya, for example, the new Air Passenger Service Charge sets fees at KSh 600 (about US $4) for domestic flights and KSh 6,500 (about US $50) for international flights, with higher rates for premium-class travel and the possibility of future increases through Gazette notice. These measures demonstrate how countries can advance climate ambition while strengthening the revenue tools needed to deliver it.
For many countries across Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, fiscal space is tightening, debt is rising, and private finance cannot meet essential adaptation needs. Solidarity levies are not a replacement for existing commitments, but they remain one of the most practical tools for generating reliable, debt-free public revenue at the scale highlighted in the Baku-to-Belém roadmap.
The Nairobi negotiations cannot become another exercise in managed ambition
A familiar dynamic has emerged in Nairobi. Countries from Africa and the wider South are pushing for meaningful shifts, while some high-income countries and tax havens are using procedural delays and vague language to avoid commitments. Concerns about sovereignty are raised selectively, even as the climate crisis shows that sovereignty today is strengthened through cooperation, shared rules, and predictable public finance—not through isolation.
A new global tax system is being designed, but many negotiators do not yet seem aware of the scale of this moment or its implications for climate action, inequality, and development. Without mechanisms to tax major emitters, high-net-worth individuals, and multinational polluters, the emerging convention risks becoming another symbolic agreement.
The reforms under discussion are not abstract. Ending harmful tax incentives, tackling profit shifting, and strengthening transparency could raise US$2.6 trillion a year for governments worldwide—more than enough to meet climate-finance needs and expand fiscal space for development. These are the tools countries require to invest in resilience and reduce debt pressures. Choosing not to adopt them is, in effect, choosing climate austerity—underfunded systems facing ever-rising climate costs.
Tax rules decide who carries the costs of the climate crisis
The climate crisis has made the links between public finance, inequality, and environmental survival impossible to ignore. Since 2015, the richest 1 percent have captured US$33.9 trillion in newly created wealth—an amount that dwarfs the total wealth owned today by the entire bottom half of the world’s population.
Alongside this, the world's largest oil and gas companies made around US$200 billion in profits in 2022, much of it in the form of windfall gains amid the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And all of this sits atop a global economy that still directs more than US$7 trillion a year in fossil fuel subsidies—public money that props up the very industries driving the crisis.
It is against this concentration of wealth and public resources that this week’s negotiations show how closely climate action and revenue systems are intertwined. Recognizing that connection—and acting on it—will determine the future governments choose to build, and whose pockets they expect to fund it.
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