Wherever we live, we all ought to be concerned as conference after conference in relation to climate change takes place somewhere in the world - a good excuse politicians and bureaucrats to roam around the world at taxpayer's expense - but nothing concrete is being done to alleviate, let alone attack, the ever-growing issue from our "spoiling" our planet. All too sadly there simply isn't the will to do anything. We will all lose out - as many are already are with wild fluctuations in weather patterns.
"There is nothing in history even remotely as momentous as what humankind is now doing in full knowledge of the facts – gradually destroying the habitability of large parts of the Earth for humans and other species by burning fossil fuels in ever-increasing quantities to meet our ever-increasing energy needs. Judging by present behaviour, our generation, while living in unprecedented material comfort, is leaving the task of adapting to an Earth four or six degrees hotter than the one that existed before the industrial revolution to the generations yet unborn. If nothing changes, our legacy will be a world of rising sea levels, droughts, floods, famines, furious heatwaves; of disappearing glaciers, coral reefs and tropical forests; of acidic oceans and mass extinctions. Unless it turns out, through a miracle, that virtually the entire cadre of the world’s scientists who work in the area of climate are fundamentally wrong, the only people these future generations will be able to look upon with respect are those who saw the monstrousness of what we were doing and who gave their lives to the climate cause. One such is the Canadian leftist, Naomi Klein, the author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the climate (Allen Lane; $29.99).
Klein has two main explanations for humankind’s dispiriting behaviour. The narrower she calls “bad timing”. It wasn’t until the 1980s that climate scientists were reaching a consensual conclusion about the consequence of powering our economies by burning the fossil fuels that had lain under the Earth’s surface for hundreds of millions of years. But it was also only in the 1980s that neoliberalism, the ideology that made the contemporary world – inspired by the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, and spread by a cluster of big business–financed, private enterprise “think tanks” – had thoroughly displaced the world view dominant since World War Two, Keynesian social democracy. In the English-speaking world especially but also beyond, neoliberalism convinced the new elites of business, politics and bureaucracy of the damage done by government intervention in the economy and of the virtues of deregulation, privatisation and lower tax. Simultaneously it favoured the interests of the elites, the so-called 1%, and inhibited states from taking the kind of radical interventionist action – which Klein describes as the Manhattan Project of the Earth – that was vital if the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy was to take place with the speed the climate crisis required.
Klein concedes that, at present, the climate-change denialists are winning. The media has lost interest in climate change. Polls show that it is the lowest political priority among Americans. Accordingly, Klein begins her book with a visit to the most extreme outpost of the current camp of victory – the Heartland Institute. Their wilful blindness regarding the threat we are facing and their theories about the world conspiracy of governments and scientists are risible and contemptible. But on one thing, she argues, they are right: preserving an Earth fit for human beings will require revolutionary change of the kind Heartland most fears. The neoliberal world view will have to be discredited and replaced by something that licenses state action and imagines human motivation as nobler than individual self-gratification. Many practices of unfettered contemporary capitalism, especially among the fossil-fuel corporations, will have to be confronted and prohibited."
Continue reading this piece from The Monthly, here.
Comments