In the past few years, scientific consensus has finally emerged that global warming is taking place as a result of industrial capitalism and with dire consequences for life on earth. Corporate efforts to bribe scientists to argue otherwise are attracting fewer and fewer takers; this is especially telling in view of how many researchers depend on industry backing. But rather than engaging with the fact that capitalism itself is destructive, governments and liberal environmentalists are promoting corporate responses to the problems posed by climate change.
This week, representatives of governments around the world are meeting in Copenhagen for the COP15, ostensibly to make decisions on how to respond to the climate crisis. The results are bound to cater to the agenda of corporate interests hoping to legitimize carbon trading and other false solutions. Fortunately, anarchists and other opponents of self-inflicted extinction will be there to crash the party.
Comrades have published a full-length critique of the prevailing narratives around climate change, Introduction to the Apocalypse [PDF, 1 MB]. Likewise, we’ve added new material to our online reading library addressing the issues:
You have to wonder what kind of person thinks that carbon trading is actually a legitimate solution to any environmental problem. It’s just unbelievable that not only corporations but the mass public is more willing to burn themselves and the entire world than control their own gross wasteage. I really find it sickening.
I’m pretty sure there’s going to be some kind of demonstration down where I am as well, and I’m looking forward to informing more people about it.
Soon, perhaps, getting a lump of coal in one’s stocking for Christmas will be a sign of wealth and prestige. Even The Economist, the British capitalist weekly, is admitting that peak oil is going to hit within a couple decades.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean everyone is about to become a radical environmentalist. The current wrangling over whether we can credibly predict environmental change, filling the pages of The Wall Street Journal and the like, shows how little that crowd care about the actual damage being done to the environment before their very eyes. For them, the question is simply how capitalism can be maintained, nothing else. The same goes for Obama, Al Gore, and every “green” capitalist, including the ones who wish the discussions in Copenhagen had produced more results.