What would you do with $4 trillion?

Many of you are working to recycle, reduce energy consumption, and improve the world for your families and neighbours. The collective impact of these many small efforts is making a big difference. 

Just think what you could do with $4.1 trillion!

That’s how much the U.S. and 17 Western European countries are spending to bail out financial institutions involved in an economic crisis that began in the U.S. and soon reverberated around the world. (The final amount will likely be a lot more. It’s difficult to fathom such a large number, but consider that one trillion seconds is about 32,000 years!) To top it off, most of the details are secret; we don’t really know what the money is being used for — although it probably hasn’t stopped your retirement savings funds from plummeting.

The effect on people in developing nations is even worse. Most of them didn’t have savings to begin with, and now the economic crisis, coupled with the effects of the climate crisis — including drought and food shortages — is causing more of our human family to suffer from extreme poverty and joblessness.

Just think what they could do with $4.1 trillion!

If we think we needn’t worry about what happens to developing nations because it isn’t affecting us, we should remind ourselves that, just as everything in nature is connected, so is everything in our global economic and political systems. Increased international job competition and reduced export opportunities are just two of the smaller impacts mentioned in the IPS report.

But the worst meltdown isn’t of the global economy. Another report, Climate Safety, from the Public Interest Research Centre, shows the Arctic’s late-summer ice is melting much faster than scientists previously predicted and may disappear within three to seven years. The cascading consequences of such an event could be catastrophic.

Just think what we could do with $4.1 trillion!

Instead of giving companies these huge sums of money so they can continue business as usual, buying and selling, merging, and paying their executives obscene salaries and bonuses, we could put it toward renewable energy, sustainable urban planning, and research into ways to lessen the impact of climate change — things that really would stimulate economies.

As citizens, we can and must do everything possible to keep our finite world alive and healthy. Along with the small but important changes we are making in our own lives, we must also call on our leaders to stop downplaying the unequivocal science that tells us failing to quickly address the climate crisis will make the economic crisis seem like a minor blip in history.

We could tell them where to put that $4.1 trillion!

Take David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

– Dr. David T. Suzuki is a Vancouver-based award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster.