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https://www.theguardian.com/environ...s-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals
It's time to wake up to the fact that climate change denialism is being supported and funded by the major oligarchs running the global capitalist show. Once you put this into proper perspective, it's obvious why there is reluctance to change: it means having to dismantle our current capitalist paradigm.
Now, I'm not suggesting we do away with capitalism entirely, but that the consumer model and the growth model are not sustainable within a finite system. We must shift our economic way of life toward a resource economy. The world's ecology MUST be factored into input costs and those costs must be distributed wisely. The fiduciary responsibility of the economy has to be shifted away from making obscene profits (money isn't real) and toward thinking about the future of the planet, and not just thinking about what THIS generation can get.
At the very least, we need to start having this conversation. It doesn't mean you're a communist because you start pointing out that global capitalism is destroying the planet and humanity's future. It means that you are assessing flaws in a system and those flaws need addressing.
No more waste, no more excess. We either make this transition willingly or we do it while we face our own peril. The people running this show don't care because they have their bunkers and private oases away from the rest of us who are going to feel the burn in a perhaps fatal way.
It's time to make transparent the very source of our problems: the corporate oligarchs. Sure, every day people are responsible for changing their lives, but the people planning the economy and manipulating government to keep this dinosaur model in place are the ones who should be outed. They obstruct democracy, they rape and pillage, they horde resources, and they pit humans against one another in a competitive model that is leaving future generations a dismal legacy. It must end.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.
The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it.
The political project of neoliberalism, brought to ascendence by Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any democratic public will.
Its trademark policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and free trade deals: these have liberated corporations to accumulate enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our ability, through the instrument of the state, to plan for our collective welfare.
It's time to wake up to the fact that climate change denialism is being supported and funded by the major oligarchs running the global capitalist show. Once you put this into proper perspective, it's obvious why there is reluctance to change: it means having to dismantle our current capitalist paradigm.
Now, I'm not suggesting we do away with capitalism entirely, but that the consumer model and the growth model are not sustainable within a finite system. We must shift our economic way of life toward a resource economy. The world's ecology MUST be factored into input costs and those costs must be distributed wisely. The fiduciary responsibility of the economy has to be shifted away from making obscene profits (money isn't real) and toward thinking about the future of the planet, and not just thinking about what THIS generation can get.
At the very least, we need to start having this conversation. It doesn't mean you're a communist because you start pointing out that global capitalism is destroying the planet and humanity's future. It means that you are assessing flaws in a system and those flaws need addressing.
No more waste, no more excess. We either make this transition willingly or we do it while we face our own peril. The people running this show don't care because they have their bunkers and private oases away from the rest of us who are going to feel the burn in a perhaps fatal way.
It's time to make transparent the very source of our problems: the corporate oligarchs. Sure, every day people are responsible for changing their lives, but the people planning the economy and manipulating government to keep this dinosaur model in place are the ones who should be outed. They obstruct democracy, they rape and pillage, they horde resources, and they pit humans against one another in a competitive model that is leaving future generations a dismal legacy. It must end.