Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
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Capitalists will find ways to continue making profits, or might change their methods to produce commodities and produce profits. In some places capitalists are moving aways from fossil fuels into renovable energy
Matt, Marcos, where do you read that either Sussex or i are jettisoning or down-grading our case? We are arguing that social change is the only solution. It is not capitalism collapsing but as i say civilisation is threatened by collapse. A bit bigger than stock-market prices collapsing
This isn’t some cyclical economic crisis we are in the midst of where the capitalist system restores profitability, Marcos.
We are very much on the edge of the abyss and cataclysmic climate change …unless capitalism can fix things. You believe it can and it will.
Can capitalism repair the planet? Can capitalism mitigate the effects of global warming? Can capitalism reverse climate change?
i said in my posts that green capitalists claim that they can fix the problem either by the invisible hand of the market or by governmental legislative intervention and international treaties.
The capitalists have already finacialised the problem with carbon credit trading and it has not reduced emissions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credit
I don’t happen to believe that capitalism is capable structurally of resolving the crisis. It has economic imperatives that are not compatible with the solutions needed.
Some countries have already spurned the advice of their own scientists, not just Trump but Australia and now Brasil. Satellite pictures show China is continuing expansion of coal power stations even though they publically say these were cancelled. India is dependent on coal and is unlikely to reduce its use
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/08/02/india-shows-how-hard-it-is-to-move-beyond-fossil-fuels (registration required)
If people recall, i frequently called that we need a dedicated conference to the Party’s future and the strategies it should adopt. I still favour such an event.
I think someone wrote a long time ago, that a ruling class will never shoot itself. What I wrote is that, the capitalists will find ways to continue producing profits, I did not say that they are going to repair the planet, we don’t even know if socialism would be able to repair the planet immediately either. Right now the peoples of Brasil have placed in power a reactionary guy which is going to destroy completely the Amazon forest considered as the natural lungs of the earth, more than the prior leftwing leaders. I did say that new reforms produce new crisis, I did not say that capitalists are going to stop the crisis
We are very much on the edge of the abyss and cataclysmic climate change …unless capitalism can fix things. You believe it can and it will.
Hogwash! Where did I say this anywhere. https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/climate-crisis-our-last-chance/page/2/#post-156587
Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.
Anyone know who? It doesn’t apply to any of us of course but I wonder many out there who are imagining the end of the world can’t imagine the end of capitalism.
“Only that it will throw up some technological fixes and potential solutions but it can not escape its profit driven imperative”
apologies for misreading the above but Sussex and i agree with you.it can never escape the profit driven imperative hence it can not ultimately resolve the crisis even if the very lives of the capitalist class is at risk
“Any reforms sow the seeds of the next crisis. Always too little too late.”
I want to differentiate between capitalism’s usual periodic cyclical recessions and even recurring ills such as war and this climate crisis
This is a physics issues, hence the UN committee is composed mostly of scientists, not economists, (although there may be some) and if there is a chain reaction which many suspect we are on the verge of experiencing, there is no economic or political policy to avert it…runaway climate change caused by feedbacks.
I posted previosly that the scenario on the economy is that we will enter a recession of falling GDPs and that it will be endless. I stand to be corrected. This research says that in the developed world economic growth will continue even with climate change. Only the poorer nations will be harmed
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-climate-affect-economic-growth-poorest.html
Hence perhaps the projections of migrants movements
Not only neither Sussex or i are advocates of green capitalism but we are not supporting the other green proposals of degrowth or re-wilding
Fredric Jameson
Thanks but it’s him who wrote “Someone once said …” (see https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7690016-someone-once-said-that-it-is-easier-to-imagine-the) ! Maybe that was his way of making the point himself.
In any event, it seems to be true, which means that we are back to square one with those Greens and ecologists who imagine that the end of the world is nigh — we have to explain to them that they ought to think rather in terms of the end of capitalism (even if it doesn’t seem that nigh at the moment) and that in fact in not doing this they are helping prolong the problem and make it worse.
Perhaps a possible approach is to inform those Greens that they indeed will be proved correct about the possible apocalyptic scenario but it is not the capitalist ruling class to blame for the imminent end of civilisation, nor the government’s inactions but themselves for not understanding and not tackling the root cause. Clever enough to comprehend the physics and all the graphs and whatnot, but purposefully and painfully ignorant of what is staring them straight in the face – the need for a total system change a much-needed reboot of society since they greens offer just as the capitalist class does…business as usual
I don’t know if giving them a guilt trip would work any more effectively than our current engagement with them, which is lack of any interaction (relatively)
As i said when it comes to communicating our case, i don’t have the answer and don’t believe its an either/ or question. I keep saying we need group-think by all the members of our party. It is all about making our message heard above all the extraneous noise and that is our and always been our difficulty.
A bit more on the quote and plenty of comments concerning it
http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2009/11/easier-to-imagine-end-of-world.html
On my web travels trawling for news for our blogs i invariably get caught up in debates with the over-populationists.
I am always surprised since they consider themselves the more progressive greenest of activists and advocates yet their understanding goes no further than accepting the concept of carrying capacity and that we need 2 or 3 planets because there are too many people on the world making too many demands upon resources. Despite their smugness about being vegan and compassion about wild-life, many demonstrate a deep misanthropy and reactionary social policies. I’m particularly contemptuous of those liberal anti-vaxxers.
They always tell me we must have population control to halt climate change …as if a Sudanese peasant has the same ecological footprint as an American corporation.
I end up accusing them of racist eugenic social engineering, with a logic that would promote euthanasia for the increasing elderly because we are living longer and infanticide because we have reduced the child mortality rates and that they should be demanding like ourselves one world one people to counteract declining populations in the developed world.
Not only do we have to give them a guilt trip….we need to shame them.
But okay, i’m open to hearing about more disarming tactics of persuausion
Oh, ALB, i have lost count of the times i have been called a shill for Big Pharma for challenging CAM claims, Natural News and Dr. Mercola. You’d be surprised by the numbers who still say Wakefield was persecuted for telling the truth…but i digress…
Try replying “If you believe in depopulation, why don’t you start the process by jumping off a bridge?”
Done that once but moderators censured me for inciting suicide, a criminal act. As your example of the Waitrose editor, you need to be very careful these days…dark humour is not permitted and that is where i tend to agree with those conservative critics of Political Correctness.
We need a label like what is used by the right – watermelons, green on the outside, red on the inside.
Adding faux to environmentalist or socialist doesn’t have the same bite.
Suggestions most welcome
We have in fact tried to engage the Greens and can predict what their answer will be (once they’ve finished dealing with relative minutae such as more cycle lanes, more 20 mph roads and more vegetarian choices in schools): “Socialism is a long way off and the problem of global overwarming is so urgent that we can’t wait for that. We must do something now.” This of course begs the question that something effective and lasting can be done “now”, i.e within capitalism.
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