Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Capitalism has to go – but apparently we shouldn’t listen to unhinged claims from the “pro free market” wing that the climate action movement was always just a Communist Trojan Horse.
Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?
Mon 18 Mar 2019 23.09 AEDT
Policy tweaks won’t do it, we need to throw the kitchen sink at this with a total rethink of our relationship to ownership, work and capital
Climate change activism is increasingly the domain of the young, such as 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, the unlikely face of the school strike for climate movement, which has seen many thousands of children walk out of school to demand that their parents’ generation takes responsibility for leaving them a planet to live on. In comparison, the existing political establishment looks more and more like an impediment to change. The consequences of global warming have moved from the merely theoretical and predicted to observable reality over the past few years, but this has not been matched by an uptick in urgency. The need to keep the wheels of capitalism well-oiled takes precedence even against a backdrop of fires, floods and hurricanes.
Today’s children, as they become more politically aware, will be much more radical than their parents, simply because there will be no other choice for them. This emergent radicalism is already taking people by surprise. The Green New Deal (GND), a term presently most associated with 29-year-old US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provoked a wildly unhinged backlash from the “pro free market” wing, who argue that it’s a Trojan horse, nothing more than an attempt to piggyback Marxism onto the back of climate legislation.
The criticism feels ridiculous. Partly because the GND is far from truly radical and already represents a compromise solution, but mainly because the radical economics isn’t a hidden clause, but a headline feature. Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial system. GND-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below “absolutely catastrophic” is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo.
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This is reality v the vested interests of the powerful. Any meaningful policy has to upset the established power base and the political donor class. Any policy that doesn’t upset these people will be useless. To pretend that we can compromise our way through this while we wait for a magical, technological bullet that will keep temperatures down without costing us anything is beyond wilful ignorance now. It is a question of basic morality.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/ending-climate-change-end-capitalism
Interesting that the author jumps straight to demanding the end of Capitalism, without considering alternative CO2 emission reduction strategies like embracing nuclear power.
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“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery..”
― Winston S. Churchill
Having the most successful team in the history of the sport is not good enough. So fire the coach and replace him with a complete unknown. What could go wrong?
“The Green New Deal (GND), a term presently most associated with 29-year-old US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provoked a wildly unhinged backlash from the “pro free market” wing, who argue that it’s a Trojan horse, nothing more than an attempt to piggyback Marxism onto the back of climate legislation.“
Wrong, a straw man. The Trojan horse was wheeled into our children’s classrooms decades ago.
Consider the logic of the Guardian:
If capitalism is ended, climate change will end.
This is no different from saying:
If all people are removed from the earth, climate change will end.
This is hogwash.
The Guardian claim is fraud.
“…the existing political establishment looks more and more like an impediment to change.”
Oh, so it’s also individual FREEDOM that’s the problem. We have an existential crisis and only by giving up our freedoms can we hope to survive. Got it.
Well, look at the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights, guaranteeing our freedoms. How many time does the word capitalism appear? None. Capitalism results from exercising our freedoms in the marketplace. You cannot get rid of capitalism without eliminating those freedoms.
Thank the heavens for your right to bear arms. We in Europe are not so lucky.
The criminals are.
Interesting how the green blob is attaching itself to the current mania for socialism among the young. Capitalism as I think of it is the creation/extraction of profit into pools of capital for deployment in the economy. This happens under communism as well as the hybrid economies where non-governmental entities play a large role.
But then again I’ve lost those who don’t want low bread prices or high bread prices. They just want National Socialist bread prices.
Not one of the children in these strikes and protests have seen any Global Warming.
So we are to develop carbon (CO2) sequestration. As an engineer I can do that. The consequence, all plants die and these children and grand children die because they have no food. That is some objective.
And the parents encourage it.
“Climate change” converges towards socialism rather than towards mitigating any harm that humans are doing to the biosphere. In fact harm to the biosphere is mentioned so rarely that I cannot recall seeing a single reference to it apart from downright trendy worry-rants about this or that isolated aspect that the media fixates on.
All we get from the sustainability mob are demands that are each unsustainable. The growing economic aggregation will be affordable only in the sense that government will be called upon to print and borrow the money out of thin air to pay the growing costs, which is of course a form of theft by dilution. This is a vain attempt to force the laws of economics to function by mere fiat. But the whole scheme is one big mirage. The laws of economics always prevail, no matter how fervently socialists wish otherwise.
From the article: “The consequences of global warming have moved from the merely theoretical and predicted to observable reality over the past few years,”
That’s just false. I won’t say this reporter is lying, he probably doesn’t know any better but what he says is not true.
The truth is there is no evidence that CO2 is having any discernable effect on how the Earth’s atmosphere behaves.
This is an uninformed journalist misleading the public.
Every day we get this same CAGW lie repeated. Is it any wonder that many adults and children have been duped.
Where’s Happer? 🙂
He is promulgating a falsehood. That makes him a liar, whether he knows it or not.
Marxism is not piggybacked on to the global warming scam it is and has always been the reason to create the scam.
So getting rid of my property ownership somehow “fixes” the climate?
Let me tell you why that is one of the stupidest ideas ever invented by man!
Because if I don’t own the property, somebody or something else does!! The nebulous concept of ownership does nothing to “fix” the climate! Nothing!
But that is the hidden agenda, the whole reason for their evil trickster effort in this deception: to deny the right of private ownership!
Because once individuals are denied property ownership, and by extenstion anything else, the collective “state” owns it! And once that happens, folks, the state owns YOU!!
What a sick, demented, counterproductive plan the Commies are hatching! Call it the Green New Deal if you live in the US, call it Agenda 30 if you work for the UN; it all comes from the Globalist effort to govern the world!
They are correct. Capitalism will have to be “set aside” for them to reach their goals.
The real goals aren’t climate control. CC/AGW has never been about the climate.
This round of would be world rulers (in Academia, Government, Science, Law, Entertainment…the usual suspects in all of our major institutions) are bold but only make “progress” where the media speaks for them. Not in places like China.
China and India are not in the CC/AGW camp…not believers. Of course our “would-be” rulers don’t really believe in AGW either, ELSE THEY WOULD NOT BE GIVING CHINA AND INDIA A TOTAL FREE PASS — there are no serious emissions limitations for them.
Allowing China and India to “catch up” economically makes no sense if total CC/AGW catastrophe is certain. There’s a wee bit of hand waving…but THERE IS NO WORKABLE PLAN TO REACH EMISSIONS REDUCTION REQUIREMENTS… not even a simple country by country score sheet that shows emissions reductions that can meet CC/AGW goals.
Without curbing Chinese and Indian emissions, the AGW targets cannot be met. Not even close. No problem…they aren’t really climate targets. They are political control targets.
They are only working towards making a better world…with maybe 2 – 3 billion humans remaining alive in their tightly controlled sustainable utopia.
Sure sounds nice to me…if I get to pick the people that are allowed to live.
I don’t see how this can’t turn out good for them in the long run…they eventually have to go up against China and India and other things like the US Military…and folks like us. For now, the lefties will be happy to control just Europe and the US. They are winning in Europe…on the “front lines” of this battle.
All we have going against us here in the USA are ALL of our major institutions.
About all we deniers have going FOR us is the truth and the internet.
Far left get elected, switch to socialist politics, western economies tumble, quality of life nosedives to levels not seen a hundred plus years. Climate continues to do what what it does and has for 4.5 billion years, CO2 levels rise, temps rise, planet gets greener, eco systems flourish. “We only have 12 years to save the planet and end this existential threat to man” shriek the commisars.
I wonder if they have a 12 year plan for when the curent interglacial period comes to an end?!
There is existing technology that would “fix” CO2 emissions.
In fact there is ONLY one solution short of economic collapse and mass starvation (in case anyone cares).
Nuclear Power.
Anyone not advocating a massive Nuclear build-up cannot be serious about CC/AGW…unless they are OK with the mass starvation thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/19/climate-change-temperatures-weather-us-news
If you are scanning the Guardian, be sure not to miss this one!
Oh: also no comment on Mozambique cyclone?
there’s a lot of weather outside the US recently in the extreme category this website is quiet on…
What off it. There’s always been these events. But now everything is attributed to global warming, unless it’s positive.
Indeed, if it’s positive then Griff would say “that’s weather not climate”. It’s only climate when useful idiots like griff can point to it and claim doom and gloom due to climate change.
There has been no systematic increase in cyclone/hurricane energy over the last 100 years.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/tropical-cyclones/201713/
Up a wee bit since 1950 (maybe…some dispute), but down a wee bit when 1920-1940 is included. NOAA cherry picks dates.
Mozambique was just really bad weather.
Instead of wasting $100 Trillion on ineffective (because China and India aren’t included) emissions control, we could protect the people in Mozambique far better BY ALLOWING THEM TO ADVANCE ECONOMICALLY with fossil fuels. I’d prefer helping them with Nuclear infrastructure, but you lefties have made that too problematic to implement. Turns out that you lefties are the real long term threat to the world’s developing people.
What about the cyclone in Mozambique? Record keeping there has been close to non-exeistant, but there is a record of one hitting that country in April of 1956, leaving 107 dead. Do you have anything suggesting that cyclones now are different from those over sixty years ago? Extreme weather events at any given time in the world are the norm.
Oh it’s extreme weather now not global warming ?
Griff last it was Arctic sea ice free has it gone yet like you promised?
Have you been building your plastic pontoons for the poor polar bears?
So what is your next prediction Griff CAGW extreme volcano activity, CAGW extreme meteorite strikes?
As usual, Griff actually believes that there was no bad weather prior to a few decades ago.
AND that ALL bad weather today is 100% because of a 1 part in 10000 increase in Plant Food
Oh: also no comment on Mozambique cyclone?
there’s a lot of weather outside the US recently in the extreme category this website is quiet on…
You are talking weather not climate. Extreme weather happens. And it happens quite often. Always has, always will. If you look at the records we have, you’ll see cyclones have hit Mozambique before. weather in the extreme category has hit both outside and within the US before. many, many times before. That such events happen (and have happened) only tells you what the weather is doing. You need to show that such events are more frequent (according to the data they are not) and/or more intense (again the data suggests not) over time in order to make a valid claim about their significance vis-à-vis the climate.
I think the pertinent element is not the ‘weather’ – it’s ‘The Guardian’.
My wife and her family are from the region (Zimbabwe, Malawi). While it is bad and there has been death and destruction, it has happened before, even in her lifetime, just now report come with a “See look, climate (Change)!” tone.
People living in poor, badly managed countries, are more prone to being severely affected by bad weather events. The rains have been heavy, literally washing away whole villages.
And Griff, yet again, shows us where he gets his information from. Keep it up Griff, you must be due for a new “klimate the klown” outfit, the one you use at the moment is just about worn out.
“Capitalism” is not a “system” that can be repealed, any more than passing a law could eleminate the law of gravity. Capitalism is the explanation of the interaction between individuals and organizations exchanging goods and services. It exists under all economic paradigms, especially the most repressive.
Griff
For a second opinion on today’s heat, you should review Tony Heller’s charts.
Be wary of zealots seeking perfection.
Beginning in the early 1900s International Socialists set out to create the “perfect man”.
Then, National Socialists set out to create the “perfect” race and land space.
Now, Globalists are determined that the climate of the nearest planet be set at the “perfect’ temperature.
That capitalism causes “climate change” makes for a compelling banner.
Just as compelling to too many as prior slogans of perfection.
Well, duh. The whole point of ‘climate change’ was to justify imposing communism.
The end justifies the means and all that.
“we shouldn’t listen to unhinged claims from the “pro free market” wing that the climate action movement was always just a Communist Trojan Horse. ”
He says while demanding that in the name of climate action, communism be imposed.
I checked out the link to the Guardian webpage that was referenced at the bottom of the “boxed” excerpt from Phil McDuff presented in the above article. In scanning the full article, I was subjected to no less than four COMMERCIAL banner advertisements presented on the Guardian’s webpage.
I conclude the Guardian’s support of ending capitalism (via publishing McDuff’s pablum) is not something they themselves take seriously.
Climate has always changed irrespective of styles of government. The last change is the warming trend ended.
Policy tweaks won’t do it, we need to throw the kitchen sink at this with a total rethink of our relationship to ownership, work and capital.
Rethink our relationship to ownership, work and capital. So now we know it is not about the climate but about power and control of ownership, work and capital. In other words communism.
Unable to get their agenda through the US citizen they would go around the citizen for a dictatorial system that makes the citizen irrelevant.
the “pro free market” wing, who argue that it’s a Trojan horse, nothing more than an attempt to piggyback Marxism onto the back of climate legislation.
I guess he’s right. A Trojan horse hides what’s inside, whereas todays climate alarmists wear their Marxism openly on their sleeves: “we need to throw the kitchen sink at this with a total rethink of our relationship to ownership, work and capital”
Blackouts and extreme hyperinflation are the only answer. Call for it now and make it a big theme in the Presidential election. Please oh please.