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climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response,
believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.
The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending.
our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.
we supersized the American Dream in the 1990s, and then proceeded to take it global.
poorer countries declare that they won’t give up their right to pollute as much as rich countries did on their way to wealth, even if that means deepening a disaster that hurts the poor most of all.
Many deniers are quite open about the fact that their distrust of the science grew out of a powerful fear that if climate change is real, the political implications would be catastrophic.
financially. As Upton Sinclair famously observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Since people who scare Americans are unlucky enough to live in poor, hot places, climate change will cook them, leaving the United States to rise like a phoenix from the flames of global warming.
Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels.
goal. Goods must once again be made to last, and the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport will need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive.
“agroecology,” a less understood practice in which small-scale farmers use sustainable methods based on a combination of modern science and local knowledge.
La Via Campesina, a global network of small farmers with 200 million members, often declares, “Agroecology is the solution to solve the climate crisis.” Or “small farmers cool the planet.”25
“solastalgia,” with its evocations of solace, destruction, and pain, and defined the new word to mean, “the homesickness you have when you are still at home.”
Extractivism is a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking. It is the opposite of stewardship, which involves taking but also taking care that regeneration and future life continue.
