“Accepting the facts on the ground” is a nasty, slippery phrase which has been put to some extremely insidious uses. The most obvious example of this is when it’s applied to territorial negotiations between Israel and Palestine, where it’s used as a euphemism for allowing the Israeli government to annexe territory occupied by illegal settlements. However, despite this unsavoury association, there are also situations where it can be applied perfectly legitimately, and among the most glaring of these is the dispute over the Falkland Islands.

Yesterday’s announcement that the South American Mercosur trading bloc is to ban Falklands-registered ships from docking in its ports has resurrected one of those irritating issues where the Tory right are actually…well, in the right. This isn’t easy for the left to accept, partly because of the historical legacy of the Falklands war (i.e Thatcher wiping out the Labour party at the 1983 general election) and partly because it involves sounding like a Telegraph reader. However, despite the longstanding Argentinian sovereignty claim, the pertinent fact on the ground in this case is that as things stand the vast majority of the Falkland Islands’ inhabitants wish to continue to be ruled by the UK. As such, that’s how things should stay. There really isn’t a decent argument – moral, legal or otherwise – to the contrary.

Unlike Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, there are not and never have been any Argentinian refugees who were driven from their homes to make room for the British who’ve settled there. The British did (according to Wikipedia) acquire them by force in the early 19^th Century, but since Argentina was itself a colony of Spain for some time, and the Argentinian government has yet to come out in favour of the mass repatriation to the Iberian motherland of those of its citizens who are of Spanish descent it’s hard to see precisely how the case for Argentinian sovereignty is supposed to stack up. Yes, the islands are a legacy of Britain’s colonial past, but that doesn’t make the current inhabitants imperialists, and nor does it negate their right to self-determination, no matter how much any number of South American governments might wish it to be otherwise.

Aid staff and famine-stricken Somalian refugees expressed their shock today at the News of the World phone-hacking revelations.

Françoise Chevalier, 35, a nurse with Médecins Sans Frontières, whose clinics and feeding centres in Kenya and Somalia have been completely overwhelmed by the effects of the devastating drought told our correspondent she was appalled. “Steve Coogan, that poor man – how must he be feeling right now, to know that some grubby private investigator was listening to his voicemails?” she demanded, taking a break from handing out desperately-needed packs of rehydration salts to newly-arrived refugees, many of them children who walked for days without food or water to reach the Dadaab camp in Kenya. “And then for the police not to take the allegations seriously as well, it’s just so awful.”

“It’s absolutely outrageous; I can’t believe a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch would ever stoop so low,” added Omar Muhammad, a 43-year-old farm labourer, from the field hospital where he is undergoing treatment for acute malnutrition.

He expressed concern too for the fate of the journalists employed at the now-defunct News of the World. “How are they going to cope? Not only to lose your job, but to know you might never again have the chance to scoop the Sunday People on who Cheryl Cole’s been seen talking to this week – that’s got to be a hard thing to come to terms with.” He then tried unsuccessfuly to lift a bottle of water to his parched lips, before collapsing back onto his rickety camp bed, exhausted.

There has even been talk of setting up some kind of fundraising appeal to help those affected by the affair, but there are some who are doubtful it will be successful. “The trouble is that there are so many scandals like this in Europe and the US that people get cynical” explained 17-year-old Fatima Al-Ahmed from the tarpaulin-and-timber shelter she shares with half a dozen other teenagers. “You just find yourself thinking, ‘It’s all so corrupt. When are these people going to learn to govern themselves properly?’”

A version of this article was first published in International Tax Review

Bongo players, Robin Hood, men dressed as drag dinner ladies and Mrs Doyle from Father Ted proclaiming the only tea she does not like is poverty greeted activists as they filed into Westminster Central Hall to lobby their MPs. But behind the fun and frolics of Tea Time for Change, organised by seven of the UK’s leading development agencies, was a serious message. The government must act to shore up aid, crack down on tax avoidance and push for a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions to help the world’s poorest people.

Tax justice

“It’s a scandal every day that 850 million people are going hungry,” said Chris Bain, director of CAFOD, which helped organise the event. “But aid alone won’t enable us to end global poverty. Developing countries need sustainability.”

It is for this reason that tax was such a central focus of the event, which attracted 131 MPs, and activists welcomed International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell’s positive words on the subject.

“Everyone should pay their taxes due,” said Mitchell. “We champion transparency.”

Mitchell told the audience that the government is working in Rwanda and the occupied Palestinian territories to help them build the capacity necessary to ensure companies are not avoiding taxes.

Mitchell’s opposition counterpart, Harriet Harman, was even more forceful in talking about the role of multinational companies in development, pointing out that developing countries lose more through tax avoidance than they receive in aid.

“Many developing countries are rich in natural resources – in oil, diamonds, and precious metals – but their people go hungry,” Harman said. “Businesses can play a major part in helping development. But they can also be an ugly force for exploitation – the unacceptable face of global capitalism.”

Harman urged the government to act to ensure companies play their part in development and backed the Publish what you Pay campaign.

“We want the government to require companies to show what they pay in the developing world – country by country,” said Harman. “So that the world can see whether the relationship between a multibillion dollar multinational and a poor country is fair. And so that the people in that country can see that too – and hold their leaders to account.”

Chris Jordan, an economic justice campaigner at ActionAid, one of the charities behind the event, welcomed the government accepting the principle of transparency in the extractive sector, but argued that it should be wider.

“The government needs to take tangible steps before the G20, there’s no reason why transparency shouldn’t apply to all sectors,” Jordan told International Tax Review.

Financial transactions tax

Mitchell was positive on the possibility of a FTT and he stressed that using revenue from a new tax to finance development goals would not replace Britain’s commitment to spending 0.7% of its national income on aid.

“The Treasury is warm to this approach and it is looking at means to raise additional income,” Mitchell said, pointing to the report Bill Gates is preparing for French President Nicolas Sarkozy on financing for development. “We are looking at all the ways.”

Harman also supported taxing the financial sector to fund development.

“We back the demand that within Europe, in the G8 and in the G20, the Prime Minister leads on how we make the financial sector play its part in extra finance for development to tackle global poverty and climate change,” said Harman.

Campaigners were encouraged by the arguments heard from the government and the opposition.

“We welcome that the government is warming to a Robin Hood tax,” said Jordan. “We want to see those warm words turned into a commitment. Lots of the technical work has already been done, there’s no reason to delay.”

The benefits of a FTT for development, given its ability to raise large amounts of revenue with a tiny rate because of the breadth of the tax base, are obvious. So too are the difficulties. The European Commission, while giving its support to the FTT, said that it is something that needs to be implemented on a global level.

“It’s going to be most effective if it’s international, but there’s no reason why countries can’t go it alone,” said Jordan. “The concept is feasible, we already have a share transactions tax in the UK.”

The mood on the day was upbeat, with more than 1000 activists clearly excited to be drinking tea with their MPs and talking to them about tax and development. And despite the levity of the event, personified by Spitting Image comedian Jan Ravens impersonations of Sarah Palin – “When I heard there was a tea party I just had to come” – no one was in any doubt as to the gravity of the issues as the charities prepare to step up their campaign ahead of the G20 meeting in November.

“I want to share an African proverb because to me it sums up why you are here,” said Adwoa Kwateng-Kluvitse, country director for ActionAid Ghana. “When spiders webs unite they can tie up a lion.”

I was thinking recently that I should probably tone down the swearing on the posts I put up here. Not because I think there’s anything wrong with invective – it’s just that it only helps to add emphasis if it’s used sparingly, and I don’t want it to lose its effect too fast. And I really meant to try, honest I did…

…then I clicked on a news headline that read ‘Gaddafi violence against Libya civilians exaggerated, says British group’.

Seriously, who the fuck are these wankers? British Civilians for Peace in Libya are reported not to have seen any evidence of the Libyan government targeting civilians, and “witnessed substantial support for the government by broad sections of society”…on their government-organised tour of government-controlled areas? Well, what a fucking surprise. Oh, and group leader Dave Roberts apparently once gave a speech in Tripoli which ended with the words ‘Long live Muammar Gaddafi’. So he definitely went on this trip with an open mind then.

The worst thing about this story, though, isn’t the revelation that there are a small number of people in the UK who are deranged Gaddafi-apologists (and if the esteemed Mr Roberts is anything to go by, deranged they clearly are – a quick googling of ‘Dave Roberts Libya’ brings up this interesting little piece on him from the Weekly Worker a few years ago); it’s how this story is probably going to get used by the less scrupulous supporters of the NATO bombings. Because looking at the way this is being reported, the group aren’t being treated like a handful of the terminally unhinged – they’re actually being taken seriously (albeit with a degree of scepticism), as if their views are representative of most of those who oppose the war. It’s not just the Guardian, either – Sky News has a story on them too. Roberts and his happy band could end up becoming the Islam4UK of the anti-war movement – a tiny group of attention-seeking fuckwits led by a pantomime villain brimming over with ludicrous tabloid-baiting soundbites who get painted as the tip of a large iceberg when they’re anything but.

As I wrote a while back, I’m firmly agnostic about the rights and wrongs of the bombing in Libya, but you don’t have to actually be in the anti-war camp to see that there are a lot of good and persuasive arguments for being there. I’ve even read enough Chomsky to recognise that the media are probably taking a less-than-critical line towards the pronouncements and actions of Western governments, since they have a bit of a habit of doing that when we bomb places. But if British Civilians for Peace in Libya get painted as the mainstream anti-war voice, that’s going to make it very easy to write off anyone against the intervention as just another Gaddafi-loving crackpot. I might not be a staunch opponent of the war, but I don’t want that to happen. And – whatever you think about Libya – if you care about honest debate, neither should you.

I’ve recently started volunteering one day a week at an overseas aid charity. I’m doing this for a variety of vague reasons, including an interest in working in that sector, a not-inconsiderable need for some relief from the general monotony of my regular job, and some ill-thought-out guff about Making A Difference – plus, of course, the warm glow of moral superiority that comes of telling people that’s how you spend your Tuesdays.

But how did I spend my day yesterday? How, exactly, am I making the world a better place in my own small way? A sizeable couple-of-hours-long chunk was spent fielding calls and emails from people who wanted – and in some cases angrily demanded – to know why we weren’t appealing for donations to help people affected by the Japanese earthquake. The simple reason is that the Japanese government hasn’t called for a big international aid effort, and – for the moment – really doesn’t need the kind of support that the (much poorer) countries which were affected by, say, the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 were given. I must have patiently explained this thirty or forty times. Most people were satisfied with it, but in some cases it just wasn’t good enough. Couldn’t we see that Bad Things were happening somewhere in the world and Something Must Be Done?

Don’t get me wrong – of course being moved to assist fellow human beings who are suffering is an admirable impulse. But if us reaching for our wallets isn’t actually going to do any good, surely we’d be better keeping our money for a cause that actually needs it? Being moved to offer help is one thing, but if even after being told that your assistance isn’t actually needed you still feel you have to do something, that starts to look less like altruism and more like a self-regarding desire to feel like you’ve Done Your Bit, irrespective of the actual impact your action might have.

Which brings me, neatly(ish), on to Libya. Some – and I emphasise some – of those calling for intervention in Libya to stop Gaddafi crushing the nascent revolution there seem to be motivated by exactly the same kind of moral narcissism as the would-be humanitarians I spent my day deflecting: Gaddafi is doing terrible things, and we can’t stand idly by and let him get away with doing them (though we’ll keep quiet about Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, because hell, how much more expensive do you want petrol to get?) It doesn’t matter how Western intervention might look to people in the Arab world who’ve been at the sharp end of Occidental interference a few too many times over the decades – we have to do something.

Not that the hawks are the only ones who are guilty of this in the Libya debate. An equally standard anti-interventionist line, (in the mouth of the good Professor Chomsky here) is that ‘we’ve got enough blood on our hands’, correctly highlighting the inevitability of civilian casualties at the hands of Western forces if we stick our noses in. But without wishing to be too glib, I can’t help thinking that whose hands the blood is on somewhat pales in importance compared to the issue of minimising how much gets spilled overall. I’m acutely aware that we have a pretty crappy record when it comes to meddling in the Middle East, and that getting involved in Libya has the potential to go badly awry. But whatever the West does or doesn’t decide to do, lots more innocent people are going to die. And that being the case, I don’t really care whether they’re killed by Libyan tank shells or misdirected British and American smart bombs, I care that the casualty list is as short as possible.

I genuinely don’t know where I stand on intervention in Libya. There are a lot of very complex variables to consider when weighing up the pros and cons – the chances of success, what the Transitional Council and the Libyan people actually want, the likelihood of escalation, Arabic and global public opinion, and, perhaps most saliently, the fact that the way things are looking at the moment Gaddafi will probably have regained control of the entire country before the weekend anyway, thus rendering this post and every other on the same topic more of an academic exercise than anything else – but what I’m absolutely sure is of no damn relevance whatsoever is how we feel about it all. It’s not all about us, and we’d do well to remember that.

The International Monetary Fund has released a paper entitled Inequality, Leverage and Crisis making the case that inequality was an ‘underlying cause of the Great Recession of 2008-2009′, The Telegraph reports:

“Global unemployment remains at record highs, with widening income inequality adding to social strains,” he [IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn] said, citing turmoil in North Africa as a prelude to what may happen as 400m youths join the workforce over the next decade. “We could see rising social and political instability within nations – even war,” he said. [my emphasis]

I doubt the IMF has taken a drastic leftward turn (as this article suggests, it is subtley backing Washington’s position on the emerging ‘currency war’ between the US and China, and it has come out against any form of capital controls). Still, paragraphs like this are startling:

The paper, by the Fund’s modelling unit, warned of “disastrous consequences” for the world economy unless workers regain their “bargaining power” against rentiers. It suggests radical changes to the tax system and debt relief for workers.

During the current crisis the IMF has found time from its busy schedule of structurally readjusting the living shit out of third world countries to give some decent advice to the world’s policymakers. Last year it released a paper arguing that one of the best ways to boost global demand would be to increase wages as a proportion of national income (thus ending a decades-long trend of wage stagnation in countries like Britain and the US). It has also warned countries of the dangers of public spending cuts. (See the brilliant Duncan of ‘Duncan’s Economic Blog’ for more: http://bit.ly/gAzOEH).

The fact that the countries currently up in flames are all vastly unequal (intuitively something likely to encourage civil strife) hasn’t been pointed out much recently. These revolts aren’t just pro-democracy, they’re also against the parasitic elites who enjoy stunning opulence while hundreds of thousands live and die well below the poverty line. Hopefully with pronouncements like this coming from the IMF this might become a talking point.

The growth of inequality in recent decades seems to be at breaking point. A few months ago I wrote about some research showing that increasing inequality isn’t even making the rich feel better off (quite the opposite), and multi-billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have even offered to pay more taxes to deal with the US’s deficit crisis. Without the veneer of increasing consumption and cheap credit to distract us (and with spending cuts for the many coupled with tax cuts for the few on the way), the vast inequalities developed over the decades are now almost offensively obvious.

Sam Harris on the Huffington Post recently commented: “We now live in a country [the US] in which the bottom 40 percent (120 million people) owns just 0.3 percent of the wealth. Data of this kind make one feel that one is participating in a vast psychological experiment: Just how much inequality can free people endure?” I feel we may be reaching that limit (and we now know to ask how such inequality can be endured by people much less than free.)

Anybody interested in the revolution in Egypt should take the time to read this interview by Parvez Sharma with an Egyptian protester: http://www.al-bab.com/blog/2011/blog1102c.htm.

Being interviewed is the man previously referred to as ‘Yousry’ to protect his identity, but who now insists on having his real name – Omar – published openly (demonstrating the new sense of confidence among the protesters). We learn that more and more women are demonstrating in the streets, that fear of looting is no longer so widespread and that, from what we can tell, all classes in the country are united against the regime.

But what interested me the most was Omar’s rather dismissive take on the very idea of ‘social media’ having a significant role in any of this:

M[e]: Hey Omar…you know that there [are] many tweets coming in saying he is going to shut down everything tonight…whatever little internet was left and mobiles and landlines even?

O[mar]: Fuck the internet! I have not seen it since Thursday and I am not missing it. I don’t need it. No one in Tahrir Square needs it. No one in Suez needs it or in Alex…Go tell Mubarak that the peoples revolution does not need his damn internet!

Westerners see great significance in the Mubarak regime shutting down the internet, but most Egyptians (70%, according to Sharma) are not regular internet users. Here we see here just how little anyone in Egypt actually cares about this stuff; at one point Omar complains about trying to “[get] on the fucking internet which is not working and try and do these damn tweets you keep on telling me about.”

It simply doesn’t matter. As Anne Applebaum put it in Slate recently: “For all the guff being spoken about Twitter and social media, the revolution in Cairo appears to be a very old-fashioned, almost 19^th-century revolution: People see other people going out on the streets, and they join them.”

During the revolt in Iran, the use of Twitter by protesters was often reported as the main story. (People still talk about Iran’s ‘Twitter revolution’, conveniently forgetting that the Mullahs are still in power.) The idea that collective action – the only way any progress has been made anywhere – was more important than this new medium just wasn’t satisfying. Democratic change has never – and will never – come about through technological change alone. But the idea that it will is now accepted and championed by modern media. Televsion news pieces will often end with ’And you can get on twitter and tell us what you think…” Yes, send us your videos and stories and we’ll report your news; ‘like’ us on Facebook. ‘Get involved’. This is anti-political nonsense. Some years ago, the expectation was that the internet, by unleashing a deluge of information, would transform society and the way democracy works. I’m still waiting for this revolution in social relations.

Today, Google and Twitter offered Egyptians a way to bypass the sudden lack of internet connection: Egyptians can leave a voicemail on an international phone number on Google’s blog, which will then be tweeted, allowing Egyptians to ‘stay connected’. (You can see it here: http://twitter.com/speak2tweet).

This is a lovely gesture, but we can’t forget that this is a revolution involving the entire country. As Omar puts it: “40 % of this country is living below the poverty line and a large chunk above that is barely surviving…I can tell you that the majority of Egyptians have no idea what Facebook is or what Twitter is!” The strife in Egypt will continue in the ordinary way, whatever Google or twitter decide to do.

TTE readers will probably be aware of the ‘It Gets Better’ internet campaign against homophobic bullying. This was started by the brilliant American sex advice columnist Dan Savage, reacting to the suicide of Billy Lucas, a fifteen-year old gay teenager who hanged himself after suffering intense homophobic abuse from his peers. His mission statement: “I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes…I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.” He posted this video on Youtube with his partner and since then the thing has, rather wonderfully, caught on.

The campaign gained real notoriety when Barack Obama submitted his own ‘It Gets Better’ video and David Cameron has followed his example (watch it here.)

Dan Savage, though grateful, offered the following criticism:

David Cameron isn’t the first straight politician who has told bullied LGBT kids to go to their parents for support. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi—practically every straight politician who’s made an IGBP [It Gets Better Project] video has said the same thing: go and ask mom and dad for help.

Between twenty and forty percent of homeless teenagers are LGBT kids and most of these homeless LGBT kids were thrown out of their homes when they came out or were outed to their families…Bullied LGBT kids should be encouraged to reach out, to find help, to seek support. But that support, sadly, can’t always be found at home.

I have my own reservations. Firstly, the video very quickly turns into a rather soppy promotional video for modern, tolerant Britain (with opportunities for British viewers to wince when Cameron reminds viewers of his commitment to ‘fairness’). The ‘It Gets Better’ campaign was intended to be of comfort to any gay teenager suffering from abuse - there have been IGBP videos from lots of countries and in several languages; thus a gay fifteen-year old from some American backwater won’t get much from this. Cameron also refers to civil partnerships and recent Equality legislation as examples of how we’ve moved forward – forgetting to mention that these are Labour policies, opposed by his Conservative Party.

And the criticism of Obama’s IGBP message also applies to Cameron – politicians have the power to actually make things better. Just as Obama has yet to fulfill his promises on gay equality (Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, DOMA, gay marriage etc) Cameron hasn’t actually proposed any measures to combat homophobia in schools, something well within his power.

But this is still bloody significant, and Cameron should be commended. As Dan Savage pointed out, “this is the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK. Try to picture a Republican politician making an IGBP video—not one that I’m aware of has—much less the leader of the GOP.”

Climate change, responsible for the melting of the Andean glaciers, threatens the lives of millions in Latin America’s poorest country.

Sitting atop a barren mountain in Bolivia is a chunk of ice. It might be hard to imagine, on first inspection, that there is anything special about it. Ice is ice, after all; cold, hard and white. But this is all that remains of the 18,000 year old Chacaltaya glacier that disappeared last year. Once the world’s highest ski run, 5,300m (17,400 ft) above sea level, Chacaltaya is now a bare peak. Edson Ramirez, a hydrologist at San Andres University in La Paz, mourns the glacier like a dead friend. “It really hurts,” he tells the BBC’s James Painter. “We have had the privilege of seeing their [the glaciers’] beauty. The next generations will not.” Chacaltaya was around before the first humans crossed the Bering land bridge to the Americas. It has seen civilisation emerge and gods die; empires rose and fell around it; the conquistadors came, independence was won and wars were lost. But as 18,000 years of history finally come to a close, a much more serious problem is only just being realised.

It is from glaciers that, according to the World Bank, as many as 80 million people in Bolivia and its neighbouring countries, draw their water. Whilst Chacaltaya’s untimely demise is a tragedy for Club Andino who, in days of past glory, would organise skiing competitions on the slopes of this tourist magnet, it is only a symbol of a much greater tragedy in the making. Common to the major urban hubs of developing countries, El Alto, a vast suburb of La Paz, is experiencing the population boom of rural-urban migration. Last year marked an alarming turning point for Bolivia. With annual growth estimated by a Family Health International report to be at 9%, and with the glaciers of the great white-tipped mountain Illimani that supply the burgeoning population with fresh water fast melting, Ramirez gloomily predicts that from now on “demand for water will be progressively greater than supply.”

Elena, a resident of El Alto, sings hip hop to raise awareness about climate change and the right to water. Never having performed before, she admits that she was always too frightened to stand up in public. In the end it was fear that made her join Fundación Solón’s campaign to highlight Bolivia’s endangered water resources. The Andean glaciers – from which over two million people in La Paz and El Alto draw a third of their water – have shrunk by more than 30% since the 1960s, a 2007 Christian Aid report found, and the rate of retreat is accelerating. Until recently, scientists tracing Chacaltaya’s rapid decline gave it six more years of life. Its surprise disappearance last year signals the urgency of the growing crisis.

Fundación Solón – uniting performers like Elena with musicians, artists and campaigners – was instrumental in convincing the government of Evo Morales, brought to power on the aspirations of a people weary of decades of neoliberalism, to renationalise Bolivia’s water supplies. The move made affordable water available to the population of Latin America’s poorest country. “We have played our part in this process of change,” says Elysabeth Peredo, director of Fundación Solón, “just like all the people in the country.” Bolivia’s impending ecological and humanitarian crisis, however, goes far beyond Fundación Solón’s, or even its government’s, ability to influence.

“We are not culpable for climate change,” argues Oscar Paz, director of Bolivia’s National Climate Change Program, in an interview with Carolyn Kormann for Yale Environment 360. Bolivia accounts for just 0.02% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And where the United States, according to data collected in 2007 for the United Nations, is responsible for 22.2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, more than four times the emissions of all the countries of Latin America combined, it is easy to see why Bolivians, first in the firing line of the devastating effects of climate change, are angry.

For Paz, it is a grave injustice that the world’s poorest countries, disproportionately affected by global warming, should foot the bill adapting to a crisis not of their making. “The grand question here is, who compensates,” he says. “It’s not fair that a country like Bolivia already has annual economic losses from the impacts of climate change equivalent to four percent of our GDP.” Bolivia’s current expenditure, almost $0.5bn, has been channelled into handling the aftermath of two years of devastating Amazon floods, worsened by rapid glacial melt, that have left hundreds of thousands homeless. But with Ramirez predicting the complete disappearance of the glaciers as early as 2025, the costs will soar as the government struggles to build the dams and reservoirs needed to supply safe water whilst adapting to the loss of ten hydroelectric plants that provide a quarter of the country’s electricity.

The argument has been won, but it is a Pyrrhic victory. Last July, the G8, meeting at the site of another disaster, pledged twelve years too late to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2C. If kept, the agreement to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 is an historic one. The dismal performance and lukewarm commitments coming out of Copenhagen, however, make that seem increasingly unlikely. And whilst a general consensus has emerged amongst scientists and world leaders that human activity – primarily the burning of fossil fuels for power and transportation – is responsible for climate change, it may already be too late to save the Andean glaciers from going the way of Chacaltaya. “This is a process that now unfortunately is irreversible,” says Ramirez.

Fundación Solón has campaigned tirelessly for safe water access to be recognised as a human right. But it is no longer rights that are at issue, it is responsibilities. The 10:10 campaign, launched by the director of The Age of Stupid, urging everyone to cut their carbon footprints by 10% this year, is a vital first step for Britain. But if the people of the developed world, and those of rapidly developing countries such as China and India, cannot achieve the significant lowering of lifestyle expectations and the implementation of green technologies necessary to reduce carbon emissions to sustainable levels, then it is the responsibility of these countries to pay their ecological debt. “The huge amounts of money generated by putting a price on carbon emissions, probably somewhere between $1-3 trillion per year, could be used to sponsor alternative energy in poorer nations and to help them adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change,” environmental activist George Monbiot told me.

To the Aymara – who settled the region long before the rise of the Inca Empire and the coming of the Spanish conquistadors – the life-giving glacial peaks are mountain gods. “God is dead,” Nietzsche famously wrote. Urgent foreign assistance can help the Bolivian government prevent whole communities from dying too. But “God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

Some charming, handsome, intelligent fellow has written a column on the First International for this weeks Socialist Worker. Read it here.