Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it? By Phil McDuff
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.
Right now we can, with
a massive investment of effort by 2030, just about keep the warming level
below 1.5C. This is “bad, but manageable” territory. Failing to put that effort in sees
the world crossing more severe temperature barriers that would lead to outcomes
like ecosystem collapse, ocean acidification, mass desertification, and coastal
cities being flooded into inhabitability.
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. The impact of a dramatic
reconfiguration of the industrial economy require similarly large changes to
the welfare state. Basic incomes, large-scale public works programmes,
everything has to be on the table to ensure that the oncoming system shocks do
not leave vast swathes of the global population starving and destitute. Perhaps
even more fundamentally, we cannot continue to treat the welfare system as a
tool for disciplining the supposedly idle underclasses. Our system must be
reformed with a more humane view of worklessness, poverty and migration than we
have now.
Unfortunately for our
children, the people they have to convince of all this are the people who have
done very well out of this system, and are powerfully incentivised to deny that
it is all that bad. Already, Joke Schauvliege, a Belgian environment
minister, has been forced to resign after falsely claiming that she had
been told by Belgian state security services that “ghosts” behind the scenes
were behind demonstrations in Belgium.
This conspiracism of
the elite, these claims that genuine mass movement can’t possibly really exist
and must be in some way being guided by agents provocateurs, 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... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/ending-climate-change-end-capitalism
