by Jack Gerson
The ink is barely dry on the accords from November’s Paris climate change conference, and already the wheels are flying off the wagon even faster than I’d anticipated.
The ink is barely dry on the accords from November’s Paris climate change conference, and already the wheels are flying off the wagon even faster than I’d anticipated.
“Climate change is first and
foremost a social problem, rooted in what capitalist society values (profits)
and prioritizes (profitability). The longer capitalism runs the world, the more
intense climate change will be.”
Obama and his team are wasting no
time to demonstrate the above. Yesterday’s online Guardian headlined, Obama’s
offshore drilling plan meets heavy resistance along Atlantic coast.
Thus, despite opposition from
residents up and down the Atlantic seaboard so intense that even several of
their Congressional representatives are opposing the plan, Obama is pushing
forward with plans to end 30-year-old bans on oil and gas drilling in the
Atlantic seabed off the U.S. east coast. Interior secretary Sally Jewel
justifies it as “a key part of the president’s effort to reduce our dependence
on foreign oil”, which is bizarre logic when a worldwide glut has sent the
price of oil plummeting. But more fundamentally, and more ominously, it
demonstrates that U.S. capitalism will continue to support worldwide efforts to
find and extract more fossil fuels from the ground and thus to pump more carbon
from those fuels into the air.
So much for meeting the Paris
climate conference targets, feeble though they are. Goodbye, coastal towns.
Goodbye, Bangladesh, Miami and all of southern Florida, Pacific islands.
Farewell, numerous species. Hello, more extreme weather — drought, blizzards,
hurricanes, tornados, and “unforeseen consequences.”
That blog post of mine from
earlier this month concluded with the following lines:
“These problems didn’t have to be,
and certainly not at their current pace and scale. Those are a product of the
way that this society is organized. We need to reorganize society along very
different lines: what we need is socialism. That means wresting power from
those who now control and run society, and are leading it (and us) to ruin.”
This is truer now than ever.
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