๐Ÿ“‘ To Slow Down Climate Change, We Need To Take On Capitalism

Adam Maida for BuzzFeed News
Bookmarked To Slow Down Climate Change, We Need To Take On Capitalism by Kim Stanley Robinson (BuzzFeed News)

As we head for the edge of a climate change cliff, neoliberal market capitalism is chewing up the biosphere and the lives of everyone in it. But itโ€™s not too late to act.

Kim Stanley Robinson argues that change is still possible to alivate the crisis of global warming. However, this is not individual change, but rather political change.

Any such resistance will have to emerge in forms borrowed from the system we have now, in a stepwise process using the political tools already at hand. This is a depressing thought, but as methods go, itโ€™s the lesser of many evils. The other options include things like world revolution (messy, murderous, prone to failure or blowback); or a fall into a new Dark Age, followed by a renaissance some centuries later; or โ€” well, what else is there? Alien or divine intervention I leave to others to imagine. In our timeline, it seems to me the only real option is politics. Or to be more specific, political economy.

This ‘political economy’ would be post-capitalism. In many respects this touches on Douglas Rushkoff’s push for more human intervention and involvement.

A political economy like this would be a โ€œpost-capitalismโ€ one in which everyone could live at adequacy, including wild and domestic mammals, birds, fish, insects, plants, bacteria, and all the other parts of Earthโ€™s living symbiosis. What weโ€™re doing now makes it harder to get to that good future, but the goal is still physically possible to attain. This is the project that human civilization has to take on to survive, and one that will provide not just employment, but purpose. We all crave meaning in our lives, and by a strange twist of fate, a very meaningful project has been given to us: Prevent a mass extinction event, and build a better world for the generations to come.

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