It's the Brian Laris Show on WNYC.

Good morning, everyone.

This is the week the UN General Assembly is meeting for this year at UN headquarters

here in New York, as most of you probably know, when world leaders with

different interests come together to talk, the UN can be inspiring, it can be disappointing,

it can be infuriating, it can make things better, it can make things worse. We'll see this week

if they accomplished anything on the conflicts in Ukraine or Sudan or the

Middle East or on the perennial challenge of world hunger and humanity's vast inequalities. But central to the

agenda on these first few days and certainly overlapping with the equality and justice issues has been

the climate.

So for our climate story of the week, which we're doing every Tuesday on the show all this year,

we'll check in with a journalist who's been closely covering the climate aspect of the General Assembly session this week

and the activities in what activists call Climate Week, which takes place in the city simultaneously. And I want to begin this by playing a

pretty remarkable one-minute clip from a media interview last year of the Prime Minister of Barbados,

Mia Motley, giving what she sees as the long-term big picture as to why island nations like hers in the global south are more

burdened by the effects of climate change but have to depend on wealthier nations to help finance

solutions. Why is it that we're not talking about the fact that these countries became independent

having allowed those countries that colonize them to extract

significant portions of their wealth such that we had no proper housing, no proper education,

no proper health care systems, no proper legal systems, no proper across the whole street.

And certainly nothing to do with building social capital,

like community development and cultural enterprises.

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