The “Debt for Climate” campaign interviews Eric Toussaint about the responsibility of private companies and international organisations, such as the IMF and WB, in climate change

5 October 2022 by Eric Toussaint , Debt for climate

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It is important to emphasise that a whole series of large capitalist companies in the North, from the beginning of the industrial revolution, developed an intensive exploitation of raw materials, developed a mode of production that emitted a phenomenal quantity of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and it is the accumulation over time (200 years since the industrial revolution) that produces the ecological crisis.
Climate change is not something that happens over twenty or thirty years [...] oil companies and others have an extremely important historical responsibility, on the one hand they must be forced to abandon their polluting activities and on the other hand to pay reparations to the countries of the South.

In addition to the large private companies, we need to consider the role of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The World Bank is a multilateral organisation that imposes a productivist and an extractivist model of pollution and economically supports very large projects such as Total’s liquid gas project in Mozambique.




Author
Eric Toussaint

is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France.
He is the author of Greece 2015: there was an alternative. London: Resistance Books / IIRE / CADTM, 2020 , Debt System (Haymarket books, Chicago, 2019), Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012, etc.
See his bibliography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Toussaint
He co-authored World debt figures 2015 with Pierre Gottiniaux, Daniel Munevar and Antonio Sanabria (2015); and with Damien Millet Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, Monthly Review Books, New York, 2010. He was the scientific coordinator of the Greek Truth Commission on Public Debt from April 2015 to November 2015.

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Author
Debt for climate

Translation(s)

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