Imagine the worst outcome. You wake up tomorrow and the electrical grid is not down, but entirely gone. You have no running water. Your house is rickety. Your bank accounts have been emptied. You have no access to medical services. Your children can't go to school. Your life expectancy has plummeted.
You would have to think Armageddon has occurred. You would be right.
This is reality for many people right now.
Over 700 million people (twice the entire population of the United States) live in extreme poverty. Half of the global population (billions of people) lives on less than US$6.85 per person per day.
If we care about anything, this has to be it.
And please don't tell me that your pet cause is more important because it will impact the world's poor in the future. They are already impacted.
But keep in mind: things were much worse in the past. Humanity has made incredible progress on lifting people from poverty:
We accomplished this without smashing capitalism or abolishing fossil fuels or undoing globalization. Indeed - without capitalism and oil andglobalization, that curve would be much worse. There would be much more suffering.
It is fully possible to make more progress if we actually choose to make progress, rather than actively desiring to impoverish billions.
"without capitalism and oil and globalization, that curve would be much worse" - I wonder where do you take that from? What if the Anglosphere adopted Yugoslavia's market socialism instead of pushing capitalism on it through IMF? Based on evidence of worker coops the economy would be just as productive, firms just as profitable and surviving just as long as under ownership of external investors. Same for globalization - What part of it has been good for the Global South? Globalization is what halted the industrialization of the Global South and by extension the reduction of poverty. Through IMF loans and WTO trade treaties, countries of the Global South were prevented from engaging in the same protectionist economic policies that built up every single industrialized country before globalization (bans on tariffs, free capital flow requirements, etc). The result is brazilianization in the Global South and latte-stage capitalism (the coffee shop economy, see Cahal Moran) in deindustrialized countries like the UK. That's the real effect of neoliberal policies enforced by Reaganomics aka Thatcherism aka supply side economics . Let me know if you want to read more on any of that.