George Monbiot has never been a favourite writer, but he's bang on with yesterday's article even if he is stating the exsanguinating obvious, that a economic system that only functions with exponential growth, and the mechanism of capitalism that sustains it, are unsustainable.
www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitalism-is-killing-the-planet-its-time-to-stop-buying-into-our-own-destruction?
I'm certain this dawned on me at least 50 years ago and possibly nearer 60, when I was still at school. Yet I'm not sure I've ever heard anybody in government articulate it.
I suppose I thought then that the grown ups must know something I didn't. We used to fear the oil running out, but we were reassured that there was plenty more to be found, and when there wasn't we would find something else. After all, we had 300 years of coal in the ground! Now we are saying we need to stop burning fossils long before they run out and I for one don't doubt that.
Monbiot says we urgently need to level down, not up. That "if we did all become millionaires, we would cook the planet in no time at all". Surely that is incontrovertible.
Yet nobody will get elected on a ticket of shrinking the economy and outlawing excess disposable wealth. So democracy must be unsustainable too. Perhaps we actually need a Chinese dictatorship to lead the way, but at the moment it looks as if they all want cars and regular foreign holidays too.
This isn't a matter of politics, or ideology. Just Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry/Biology. It seems inescapable that the point at which governments can no longer ensure the basic safety and health of their citizens is not many generations away unless things change soon.
Our own government has in 2 years brought us to the point where I can't reliably find a chicken in Tesco. Chinese and Russian leaders aren't even attending COP26. What chance of dealing with this? Can somebody give me some hope? What have I missed?
A bit dark for a Sunday morning, I know.
|
