The social body's placidity with respect to enormous compensation packages is fascinating. The financial system has collapsed, the economy is going through its most serious crisis in decades, unemployment follows a rising curve; but, contentedly, and without any sense of shame, the elite management classes responsible for the situation continue to grant themselves exorbitant incomes. Truly fascinating.

    Meanwhile, I've just learned that the Young Swiss Socialists are launching a popular initiative to limit high salaries. The maximum salary a company pays cannot be more than twelve times the lowest salary.

    One really has to be young and Swiss to come up with such ideas. All right then, well ... My subject for this ecology column is the little flowers, sheep, earthworms, oceans, climate change ...

    Yes, climate change! I read a fascinating article in the July 9 issue of the PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). It was not by the indispensable Guillaume Musso; however, the article signed by Shoibal Chakravarty and other researchers, including Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, definitely titillates the neurons.

    To prevent a full-scale climate crisis, we must limit greenhouse gas emissions so as not to exceed 30 billion tons of CO2 (carbon dioxide) in 2030. Rather than reasoning as usual in terms of each country's emissions, Chakravarty and his team tackle the question in terms of emissions per person. They study income distribution within the different countries and then at a global level. The higher one's income, the more CO2 one emits, and it is possible to establish a correlation between income level and emission level. Knowing that we are supposed to be 8.1 billion humans in 2030, calculations lead to settling on 10.8 tons per person as the maximum ceiling that would allow humanity to remain within the 30 billion ton limit. Below that ceiling a significant inequality of incomes/emissions subsists (from 1 to 10 tons per inhabitant), but that is evened out. "All emissions that exceed that level must be eliminated" an action that involves about a billion emitters.

    This reasoning has the primary merit of highlighting that the fight against climate change cannot leave the issue of social inequality aside.

    Another interesting aspect of the paper is that one finds many people in the United States and in Europe who emit more than ten tons of CO2 a year, but also in China and other countries of the South: it's not only North and South that are at issue, but rather, everywhere, the wealthy layers of the population and the masses.

    Conclusion: low CO2 emitters everywhere, unite!

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    Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher.