The article opens with some very important questions:
What will it take for governments to take real action on climate? When will they declare an emergency and do what needs to be done? How much concerted, peaceful public action will be required to disrupt the current economic and political system that is driving humanity to the brink of extinction?And it ends with this paragraph:
We have now had three decades of increasingly alarming reports from climate scientists since the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up in 1988. Last October, the IPCC warned that we only had 12 years left to turn things around, taking radical action now. But alarm bells from scientists have not, and will not, stop governments in their tracks. Only peaceful and massive concerted action from citizens around the world stands a chance of doing that at this desperately late stage.Notice that the author places much emphasis on "peaceful" efforts to stop this chain of events to will result in human extinction. Why is it that we must be peaceful in the face of our own extinction? I am not prone to violence, but I will engage in it if my life is seriously threatened. Show me a species that doesn't fight for survival! I don't mean that we should engage in reckless violence, but I do think that we must not exclude any means for survival, especially if it is organized: because we are facing a powerful, well-armed enemy of the people.
Take a look at my revolutionary proposal as one illustration of how we might save ourselves.
However, I do like his overall arguments and facts, and especially this one:
To any reader unsettled by the scare word 'socialism', simply replace it with 'democracy': a genuinely inclusive system where the general population has proper input and control, and does not simply have its wishes overridden by a tiny elite that enriches itself at our, and the planet's, expense.
