Parenti lays out the details on capitalism's unrelenting pursuit of profit and the devastating impacts on a habitable earth. I think that the picture is much worse than what he presents.
Some of the very same scientists and environmentalists who see the ecology crisis as urgent rather annoyingly warn us of a catastrophic climate crisis by "the end of this century." But that's some ninety years away, when all of us and most of our kids will be dead - which makes global warming a much less urgent issue.The crucial concept are tipping points, which mean points in time whereby natural forces are set in motion that cannot be reversed. I've seen numerous studies like this one that foresees tipping points at mid-century. Tipping points are difficult to predict, but I've read where scientists think they could come even sooner. From all the extreme weather that is now happening and the accelerated rate of polar ice melting, I fear that the latter predictions are more accurate.
There are other scientists who manage to be even more irritating by warning us of an impending ecological crisis and then putting it even further into the future. "We'll have to stop thinking in terms of eons and start thinking in terms of centuries," said one scientific sage who was quoted in The New York Times in 2006. This is supposed to put us on alert? If a global catastrophe is a century or several centuries away, who is going to make the terribly difficult and costly decisions today whose effects will be felt far in the future?