DSP conference talk: Individual Versus Social Solutions to Global Warming (mentions Eco-Committee)

April 20, 2008

(A talk to the DSP Climate Change Social Change Conference held in Sydney from April 11 to 13. Thanks to Inhabitable Earth for the text. The subheads were added by Climate and Capitalism.)

by Terry Townsend,
Managing Editor,
Links

I’m sure everybody here is aware of the basic facts of global warming and the likely consequences if rapid and serious action is not taken. There is virtually unanimous agreement among scientists and activists, and increasingly among millions of ordinary people, about the degree of the problem and the time frame we have to make fundamental changes to address it.

The main “solutions” being offered by the capitalist class, its politicians and the corporate-dominated mass media — and endorsed by some key peak environmental organizations — are consciously designed to shift the responsibility for, and the major costs of, addressing global warming away from the most polluting corporations and to preserve the basic structure and mechanisms of Western capitalist economies. They are also designed to delay the necessary political, economic and social changes for as long as possible, and to keep them to the minimum that are compatible (in their assessment) with both the survival of capitalist society and ameliorating the worst of climate change.

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