cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10713443
For denial doesn’t only amount to rejecting the evidence, he argues – it also consists of denying our role in the climate crisis; absolving ourselves through “carbon offsets, hybrid cars, local purchases, recycling”. And in this, far more of us are implicated.
In some ways, this argument might not seem all that new. Multiple authors have pointed out that green capitalism, not rightwing deniers of the crisis, is our greatest obstacle to properly confronting the problem. DeLay agrees. The difference is the lens he brings to it – using psychoanalysis to explain the mechanisms behind denial.
There are solutions, they just threaten the profits of the 100 or so top polluter companies and the majority of politicians are bought out by those companies. The author kind of continues the old trope that this is somehow the responsibility of every day people to solve through their individual actions. While individual action and less consumption does help, it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the effect of the industries themselves. If we want to mitigate the effects of climate change that has always been the most efficient way to go about it; forcing industries to change, even if it costs them.
The biggest issue though is, if the world solved that political issue, China is still dumping a third of the world’s greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and are still building more coal plants at a record pace. They are fixated on their geopolitical and imperial goals, scaling back to focus on domestic necessity just isn’t a possibility for Xi.
Such as?
I just laid them out; regulating the most destructive industries and forcing them to stop releasing greenhouse gasses, same way we force them to stop dumping mercury in estuaries or how we stop them from destroying national parks etc.
Climate change is not going to get solved by people buying local and making their clothes out of hemp. The responsibility for sweeping change lies with the government ultimately to get industries in line.
It’s like blaming someone who uses AC during a record heat wave when our grid itself isn’t using green sources. You fix the power source that the AC draws from and you fix the AC. It’s the same across many industries, dumping the decision-making onto average people at the end of the line is super inefficient.
And what is that going to solve exactly?
What is it going to solve if the companies responsible for more than 70% of the world’s emissions are stopped from producing those emissions via regulation? That’s your question?
Yes.
…if we cut emissions it stops climate change from getting even worse, killing even more people, destroying even more property and causing more mass migration, causing even further ecological collapse.
You’re literally just asking “Why mitigate climate change?”
And what is that going to solve exactly? What is it that this is a “solution” to?