It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both

[nosmokes]

original

The Only Solution to Climate Chaos and Peak Oil is Fundamental Social, Political, & Economic Change

The Guardian (London) February 2, 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1699956,00.html

It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both

Our economic system is unsustainable by its very
nature. The only response to climate chaos and
peak oil is major social change

By Robert Newman

There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won't do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot
sustain earth's life-support systems within the present economic system.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it
continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green
initiative anybody cares to come up with.

Much discussion of energy, with never a word about power, leads to the fallacy of a
low-impact, green capitalism somehow put at the service of environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates around wealth. Private ownership of trade and industry means
that the decisive political force in the world is private power. The corporation will outflank
every puny law and regulation that seeks to constrain its profitability. It therefore stands in
the way of the functioning democracy needed to tackle climate change. Only by breaking
up corporate power and bringing it under social control will we be able to overcome the
global environmental crisis.

On these pages we have been called on to admire capital's ability to take robust action while governments dither. All hail Wal-Mart for imposing a 20% reduction in its own carbon emissions. But the point is that supermarkets are over. We cannot have such
long supply lines between us and our food. Not any more. The very model of the supermarket is unsustainable, what with the packaging, food miles and destruction of British farming. Small, independent suppliers, processors and retailers or community-owned shops selling locally produced food provide a social glue and reduce carbon emissions. The same is true of food co-ops such as Manchester's bulk-distribution scheme serving former "food deserts".

All hail BP and Shell for having got beyond petroleum to become non-profit eco-networks
supplying green energy. But fail to cheer the Fortune 500 corporations that will save us all
and ecologists are denounced as anti-business. Many career environmentalists fear that an
anti-capitalist position is what's alienating the mainstream from their irresistible arguments. But is it not more likely that people are stunned into inaction by the bizarre discrepancy between how extreme the crisis described and how insipid the solutions proposed? Go
on a march to the House of Commons. Write a letter to your MP. And what system does your MP hold with? Name one that isn't pro-capitalist. Oh, all right then, smartarse. But name five.
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complete articlehere

[bullimiami]

1. i dont agree that capitalism itself is the problem.

any system needs checks and balances against corruption and exploitation by the powerful.
capitalism is nice in the freedom it affords by it needs to be balanced by forces which look out for the welfare of the population as a whole and the environment we live in.
unrestrained capitalism is a cancer.

[Double T]

2. Unrestrained capitalism is where we are and the diagnosis........

for 'THIS cancer patient' is terminal.

[enigma000]

3. I'm not sure the Chinese and Indians are prepared for this

They don't want to return to their pre-industrial economies - living on rice paddies, at a low-tech level of development. Because that is what it will take to save this planet - 2.5 billion more people cannot have a Western standard of living.

So, will you tell them, or should I? I'd rather not.

[MasonJar]

4. This thesis makes so much sense, unfortunately. Our planet was

going along swimmingly until the Industrial Revolution, less than 200 years ago. Look how far we have come. It is incoceivable that the same planet can sustain such massive human consumption and waste. There simply is not space or resources. So it really doesn't matter what we, the Chinese, the Indians think. Zero is zero whether we like it or not.

[nosmokes]

5. sustainability doesn't mean that we all go back to subsistence

agricultural lifestyle, but it does require that those of us in the west, especially us super consumers in the US, take an examined look at our lifestyle. and no, the entire planet cannot have this level of consumption, but who says they want it? hell, who says we want it? i don't, and i know scores of folks like me that can do without it as well. eating lower on the food chain, using renewable energy, buying orgnic locally raised food, recycling, car-pooling, bicycling, using mass transmit, all that tree hugger feel-good stuff - well it matters because it works. if we all started this in earnest 30 years ago we might be ok today, or it might have been too late then, i don't know. it's entirely possible it's too late now. but i'm a stubborn mofo and a romantic and if we don't start, then who will? our kids and grand kids? jeebus, haven't we laid enough shit off on them already, like debt and defecits and melting ice caps and melting glaciers and meltingpermafrost?

[Cleita]

6. You wouldn't want to live in a society where there was no

capitalism, because in order to survive you would have to revert to feudalism. Each civilization needs it's merchant class.

They must, however, be regulated and they shouldn't be allowed to influence government policy.

[PassingFair]

7. Yikes! My daughter and I just watched a movie called "Mindwalk" today...

and I came away with the same conclusion.

At least that's what I got from it....

[robcon]

8. I disagree. The planet is habitable now

with 7 billion humans - the most in history.

What a phony dichotomy, IMO.