Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Big business allowed to precook climate negotiations behind closed doors

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

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Big business allowed to precook climate negotiations behind closed doors – for the foreseeable future

Click here to access article from Corporate Europe Observatory.

I'm posting this piece because it provides an excellent illustration of a reformist or liberal take on the issue of dealing with climate catastrophe (euphemistically known as "climate change"). Here the writer/writers complain about the fact that capitalist ("business") interests have far too much influence over climate talks under UN sponsorship (COPs). It is essentially a long rant that totally misses the real issue: the fact of global political control by capitalists. Therefore, it totally misses the only real solution: the construction of popular revolutionary movements all over the world.

What is the UN which sponsors these events? It is a world body filled with representatives from the world's nations, the vast majority of which, are run by capitalist elites. Capitalism cannot function without growth--nobody disputes this. As Kenneth Boulding, one of the earliest ecologically sensitive economists put it: "to believe that you can have unlimited growth in a finite world you have to be either a fool or an economist!" Therefore, they simply must continue to use available cheap energies, which are fossil fuels, to keep a system, which provides them with so much power and profit, going until it destroys our human habitat. Nuclear energy is completely out of the question as Colin Todhunter explains in "A future that's not nuclear".

We have no choice. If we want to survive as humans on a healthy planet, it is imperative that we begin immediately to construct a worldwide revolutionary movement to overturn the capitalist system and replace it with one that is genuinely democratic and compatible with the Earth's ecosystem.