Saludo Global. El escenario actual y perspectivas a futuro

18 private providers in many countries’ health systems left them woefully ill-pre- pared for SARS -CoV2, even as the pandemic showed us the importance of care provision (in health and more widely) as humanity’s greatest and most un- der-valued gift. While we heaped praise for health and other essential workers who bore the burdens of the worst of the pandemic, our still dominant finan- cialized and predatory form of capitalism exacerbated already gaping socioeco- nomic inequalities. Billionaire wealth skyrocketed during the pandemic even as most of the world’s peoples saw their livelihoods collapse. Whether the pandemic will finally unseat neoliberalism’s hegemonic grip over the determinants of our (ill) health —as we hoped the 2008 global financial crisis should have done— is still moot. The shibboleth of inflation has fiscal hawks sharpening their talons, blaming it on governments’ excess borrowing and spending (to cope with the pandemic) while largely ignoring supply/demand disruptions and excess corporate profiteering as likely causes. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has jettisoned many of the commitments countries have made to de-carbonize their economies and achieve their emissions target of net-zero by 2050 target. The failure of liberal democracy under the strictures of neoliberal inequalities has incited a new generation of autocrats keen to divide and conquer an already fractured public. This is the global health landscape of late 2022. It appears grim (it is), yet as this collection interrogates, there are policy options governments could pursue to mitigate these crises. Climate change (more accurately described now as climate chaos) is the most pressing threat to human and ecosystem health. Fossil fuel remains politically powerful as the challenge the US Biden Administration has faced in trying to implement its ‘build back better’ climate and social protection agenda demonstrates. Still, subsidies and investments in‘green energy’ outpace those in oil and gas, and there is momentum to institute carbon border taxes to incentivize global compliance with agreements to lower emissions, in an attempt to leverage global trade for a public (rather than singularly private) good. To do so equitably means ensuring that global carbon markets are governed such that rich countries bear disproportionate costs reflecting their historic responsibility for emissions, and that‘nature-based’solutions do not allow them to lower their emissions simply by purchasing carbon offsets in poorer countries desperate for debt-relief or financial assistance. Even if countries succeed in weaning themselves off coal, oil, and gas, there are finite limits to the human consumption of material resources that earth can provide. Climate change and biodiversity loss are merely the sharper edges of humanity’s massively unequal appropriation of planetary wealth. Here we confront the consumption/growth imperative of capitalism, however much we might tame its dis equalizing outcomes by reimposing the systems of progressive taxation (at national and global scales) so blithely slashed under neoliberalism. We already consume annually over 4 times the ecological