This summer France was hit by two heatwaves, one in late June and one in late July, which saw all-time temperature records tumble all across the country.  So it was with a growing and more and more generalised awareness of the urgency of the climate crisis that world leaders met in the southern French city of Biarritz for the G7 summit in late August. The official theme for the summit was inequality but climate ended up being thrust centre stage, not least because of the images that were splashed across international media in the weeks preceding the summit of forest fires raging in the Brazilian Amazon.

Ultimately though, these two topics - climate and inequality - are two sides of the same coin. If people are poor (and the majority of the c. 15 million people living in the Brazilian Amazon are very poor indeed) they will do what they can to make a living. And they will probably not react well when people living in industrialised countries and enjoying a high level of material comfort lecture them on how to behave. It is not that they don’t care about the climate or the natural environment but rather that they look with understandable envy on people who have electricity, running water, hospitals and the like and aspire to have the same themselves.

We will not halt deforestation and we will not solve the climate crisis by telling poor people in the Global South to renounce on their dreams and live in picturesque poverty.  I believe that the only realistic and ethically coherent solution for those of us who live in the developed West and whose material comfort has, in part, been built on centuries of expropriating natural resources from countries like Brazil is to think how we use our position of comfort and wealth to reverse this process.