The Emergency: Climate Change, Biodiversity, Ocean Acidification, and Human Beings
For over 200 years, our economic system has operated on essentially one principle: seek to grow profits at all costs. There are two fundamental theoretical principles underpinning that system that, upon its inception, were not fully taken into account: 1) environmental externalities and 2) intergenerational wealth.
In his 2014 book Capital, Thomas Picketty digs into the principle of intergenerational wealth and the inequalities it produces. Economic inequality has been building rapidly since the 1960s, exacerbated in the 80s by drastic tax cuts and the 90s by deregulated banking and runaway CEO pay. Today inequality would be comically absurd if it weren’t eating people up by the minute. There’s really nothing funny about it. Just pure absurdity. A horror show.
The fact we live in a country with hundreds of billionaires and hundreds of thousands of homeless is shameful — and, more importantly, it ain’t gunna last so we might as well deal with it through the political system now. One theme of Picketty’s work is that inequality is a serious problem that requires a big government or societal response, mainly through some kind of a global tax on wealth or similar measure. I’m a fan of a big government response because economic inequality is one of the greatest forces tearing our society apart today…everyday. If the trends of the rich getting richer and most everyone else getting crumbs continue, we’re either going to further become a society of owners and servant-slaves or we will be forced to revolt in order to reform our expectations around individual and collective rights that human beings are entitled to by just being.
The principal of environmental externalities mentioned above is one that has gotten less attention and might very well hold the key for saving our society from tragic levels of income inequality. As citizens who seek to save our country, indeed our planet, we need to put this question of economic and environmental sustainability front and center: Can we factor climate into the U.S./Global economy in such a way that allows us to actually address the myriad environmental issues on our door step, and still maintain the so-called “doctrines of growth?” If yes, that’s great. If no, that’s okay too. But, what’s not acceptable is to continue to let climate deniers have a seat at the table or continue entertaining their positions in the media. There is a slew of evidence that mandates every thinking person on the planet to consider how unmitigated carbon emissions has affected our climate and what we might do to begin correcting the infinite number of problems we’ve created.
To begin, farmers, fossil fuel workers, fossil fuel company owners, and other carbon intensive industries must take solutions like The Green New Deal seriously, because it may be one of the best, and last, chances that we have to formulate and implement a proper response to climate from Congress. Carbon intensive industries aren’t going to be able to spin their way out of this by manipulating news cycles. Likewise, big fossil fuel companies can’t get out of this by starting new oil wars or promoting genocides by way of local death squads against vulnerable populations dissenting against their environmentally deleterious business practices. Big Oil really might be evil. The climate problem is so big, it’s going to take reforming almost everything under the sun to combat it. No one will be able to turn a blind eye to the human devastation climate is currently causing and will continue to cause in the near future.
In May of last year Damian Carrington, environmental editor at The Guardian, published an article entitled “Humans just 0.01% of all life, but have destroyed 83% of all mammals — study.” This study is important because it is the first of its kind, a comprehensive look at the “estimate of the weight of every class of living creature.” A big take away from this article is the tremendous depletion of natural habitat and resources caused by industrial “farming, logging, and development.” One of the leading scientists conducting the study admits he eats less meat because of what he learned about the impact of our current practices in raising livestock. Another important take away is many scientists believe that what is considered to be the sixth mass extinction of life has happened over the past 50 years and can primarily be contributed to our current industrial farming practices. The mass extinction continues today unabated under our current carbon intensive, anti-environment style of development. At some point we are going to have to have a discussion about who in government and the fossil fuel industry knew of the disastrous effects of industrial farming, what they knew and when they knew it in regards to climate change. We should seriously consider trying them at The Hague for international crimes. But, first we must acknowledge the seriousness of the problem, which we just aren’t right now.
This is where you should start to feel overwhelmed. Two hundred plus years of not factoring the environment into the economy has fundamentally transformed a lot of our planet. There has been almost no part of the world left untouched by the damage of this industrial 200 year old environmental destroying, market driven economy. Any solution to the environmental crisis we are in is going to have to be big and have ambitions as was suggested in the International Panel on Climate Change report issued late in 2018. The report stated, “Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” Truer words have never been written.
In just the last year: entire towns have been burned down or washed away; some whales have consumed enough plastics to die because plastic has deeply polluted our oceans — their environment (single use plastics should be banned immediately); plastics & carbon dioxide are acidifying the oceans at an alarming rate; some scientists argue major fishery collapses are likely to occur soon (though this collapse claim is disputed, I’m very skeptical of the disputing claims here); 500 year floods have become the norm over the last 20 years; and too many other instances to fit into the article. Just know, the world, yeah…it’s on fire and flooding and we are living through a major extinction, coined The Sixth Extinction, with species dying every single day.
Considering all of this damage on our way to 1 degree Celsius of warming, do we really want to tempt fate by not fighting with everything possible to work to stop and reverse the worst of what we can? I agree with AOC and this guy. Climate change is bigger than WWII. Money isn’t the biggest obstacle right now, fighting ignorance and denial is. The money will be there if we can get the will of the population behind the Green New Deal.
Inequality and climate must be addressed. It’s high time we did so through our political system.
