We need to throw the kitchen sink at this with a total rethink of our relationship to ownership, work and capital, says economics writer Phil McDuff
Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?
Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?
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 ...
Today’s children, as they become more politically aware, will be much more radical than their parents...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.
We will simply have to throw the kitchen sink at this. Policy tweaks such as a carbon tax won’t do it. We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital...
Already, Joke Schauvliege, a Belgian environment minister, has been forced to resign...This conspiracism of the elite... is just one of the ways in which those currently running things have resorted to a kind of political gaslighting in an attempt to maintain their grip on power.
