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.
…
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.
…
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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
So – they’re going to END climate change, now?
Stagnation, entropy, extinction – about par for the progressive course.
The full parasitical life-cycle.
“Climate change activism is increasingly the domain of the young”.
Because the rest of us have listened to the gloom and doom stories for the past 30+ years and NONE of them have actually occurred!!!
There is a reason we don’t let the young drive cars. There is a reason we don’t let them drink alcohol.
There is a reason we don’t let them vote, or buy firearms.
They are not legally responsible for their actions, because they are not mentally mature.
Climate change activism is the domain of the ignorant and the intentionally stupid.
The one and only …. consistently repeated rule of who governes the humans around them is, and will be in the future …. the one who can physically defeat their enemy. It was for this reason that the US Constitution enshrined the 2nd Amendment. For it doesn’t matter who comes in and tries to to take over, doing so at the wrong end of a gun will result in failure. There is not a single “Green” anywhere who supports the 2nd. …. none, nota …. because ….
The US Leftist have noted all along that the only success of Socialism/Communism is when the people are convinced to turn over their only means of defense against tyrants …. their weapons. Not surprisingly, the US contingent of Leftist are strong supporters of gun control, highlighting every school shooting or other mishap as a reason to turn over the guns …. but omitting the real reason for the 2nd Amendment …. it is to fight off dictators and tyrants who come along and try to destroy the founding principles of the US.
Regarding the comment about firearms, there is a tendency, especially in the USA to point at Australia and say look at what happened there.
But in fact we today probably have more firearms that before the Port Arthur matter..
It was the semi auto weapons which were banned, not the other forms of
weapons. The compensation for a semi auto was enough for two single shot weapons, and that is what happened.
As said at the time by persons against the ban, the old UK .303 Enfield was
almost as fast as many autos. The difference was a bit like the bowman at Agencourt, it required years of practice to makes perfect.
The single shot weapons make for more careful shooting, and greater accuracy. Look at sniper weapons, all are bolt action single shot.
The USA Militha were preaty good against the British, no semi auto’s back then, I still think that bit about “The right to bear arms” meant single shot weapons.
I was prior to ending up in a retirement village a gun collector and shooter, from the 1803 Enfield Flintlock to the 20th Century weapons, 50 in total.
MJE VK5ELL
It would be helpful to all concerned if we were to define our terms. Capitalism is an economic system in which the ownership of the means of production (largely, capital and land) rests primarily in private hands, and decisions about how to invest society’s savings are largely made by the private owners. We are a long, long way from pure capitalism, especially in modern OECD economies where governments often control more than 50% of society’s resources. Nonetheless, capitalism historically has proven be by far the effective system for generating investment and income over time. Free markets are what really unleash the power of capitalism because they ensure that the choices as to what to produce and consume are largely determined through the free decisions of millions of buyers and sellers. The genius of free competitive markets is that they allocate society’s resources far more efficiently and far more in accordance with the people’s choices than governments could ever do. It is almost certainly right that the complete transformation of the world’s economy away from plentiful, reliable and low-cost fossil fuel energy to expensive unreliable sources, and from conditions of plenty to conditions of global scarcity would never be achieved if free markets were allowed to continue. It would be necessary to silence free choices, and to end the free right of people to make political decisions about how economic decisions are made, as such freedom would never permit the reckless imposition of such scarcity. There is thus a clear line of logic between saying the world must stop consuming more of the energy it freely chooses and insisting that free markets and democratic governmental systems must end.
One caveat — capitalism (and capitalists) was a derisive term invented by Marx. FREE-MARKET is the correct description.
It stands to reason that those countries with the worst environmental efficiency and greatest increases in CO2 are the ones we should emulate to help the environment and save the planet from CO2.