We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, April 21, 2017

A three-track strategy for climate mitigation

Click here to access article by Graeme Taylor from Climate Code Red (Australia). (This a shortened version of a scholarly, full-referenced article. Dr. Taylor is an adjunct professor associated with Griffith University, Nathan, Australia.)

This is posted on a leading worldwide environmental website that is based in Australia. The post illustrates how some environmentalists, preoccupied by climate destabilization as a threat to humans, recognize that capitalism is driving us to extinction, but refuse to name the system.

Thus the author recognizes the scale of the concern with passages like this;
There is an enormous (and currently unbridgeable) lag between the pace of political, economic and technological change and the rapid (non-negotiable) rate of climate change.

To ensure safe outcomes the global economy will have to be rapidly restructured. This will require a massive response similar in scale and urgency to the Allied effort in World War II. However, at this time strong international action is a distant dream.

Most experts assume that even under the most optimistic scenarios aggregate emissions will increase until mid-century, pushing global temperatures far past international goals. The hope is that this overshoot will be corrected over time with as yet undeveloped technologies for carbon capture and storage.
I think they do this out of fear for their careers especially private industry and government, with this caution maybe less so compelling in academia. Although you will find numerous circumlocutions like consumerism and "political and economic frameworks", you will not find a single reference to capitalism. This in itself is a manifestation of the power of capitalists to control discourse on a subject which casts even doubts about the system, much less that it must be removed and replaced with a sustainable system to prevent cataclysmic climate destabilization.