Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Flannery's climate 'Third Way' well intended, but dodges the problem

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

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Flannery's climate 'Third Way' well intended, but dodges the problem

Click here to access article by Phil Shannon from Green Left Weekly.

Shannon reviews a recently published book by Tim Flannery in which the author describes several promising techno-fixes to the excessive pumping of carbon into the atmosphere and oceans by capitalist engines of production for profit. He concludes his review with these statements:

By not scaring the sacrosanct GDP horses, by not challenging the capitalist god of economic growth, Flannery obscures the link between global warming and the capitalist economic system that has given rise to it. ....

Flannery's “Third Way” is the grand, and risky, illusion of geo-engineering, albeit shorn of its dangerously wilder fantasies, that will keep capitalism humming all the way up to environmental Armageddon.