Climate Crisis And The Profit Motive
We’ve done nothing to solve our climate crisis at the industrial level where it counts.
There is a 99.99% scientific consensus that climate change/global warming IS happening, set to make the Earth unlivable for human beings and countless other lifeforms in the coming decades. And there's 99.99% scientific consensus that carbon emissions are THE main cause of it, ie: fossil fuel use from cars, power plants, industry, etc., exacerbated by our destruction of carbon-absorbing rainforests and oceans—the planet's natural immune system.
We need hard, binding legal caps on emissions; measurable pass/fail benchmarks which must be met by polluting companies on a regular basis, made severely punishable by law.
However, the true root of Climate Change is the profit motive, societies one singular goal. If it makes money, if it generates income, that’s all that matters, no matter how dumb, destructive, distracting, or undemocratic. It supersedes priorities, moralities, and our very politics of decision making itself, where critical system change is made in this regard.
A system does what it does by design, regardless of individual intent within it. And the nature of a system is to perpetuate. So we need radical System Change.
Short term, we need new laws that enforce Sustainability. Companies won't do the right thing under Capitalism, with massive wealth and power, or even their livelihoods in contention; they must be forced to.
Long term, we need to delink private power and profit from essential institutions, industries, and resources. A 1% private ownership over the means of society has no place in an actually sane, rational, tenable Economic System. It's cruel, shameless hierarchical minority rule, and nothing more; nothing to do with merit, incentive, innovation, human nature, or any claims of such. We need to work towards the universalizing/nationalizing of our resources, infrastructure, and institutions, to share and decide on society collectively, democratically, and sustainably; the basis for any common sense system.
21st C. activism, in an age of disinfo and distraction, beautiful potential and compounding peril, is a battle of priority. Some will dismiss the climate crisis as overblown, that things will self correct in time, as "paranoia"... It is not. We face Species Extinction. We've already crossed critical tipping points of "no return"; regularly shattering projected, conservative models of ecological breakdown ahead of schedule.
The established system, however broken it may be in the pursuit of long term ideals, must be strategically and structurally stopped from destroying the planet, before it's too late. Visionary futures are meaningless if the planet is unlivable.
Sustainability—arguably the only thing we should be talking about.