Jane
Fonda was arrested
on
the steps of the U.S. Capitol building Friday as the 81-year-old
activist and actress launched a new weekly civil disobedience
campaign called #FireDrillFriday
to
pressure American policymakers to tackle the climate crisis. Fire
Drill Friday actions
are planned for every Friday at 11 am through mid-January. In
addition to the Friday actions organized by Fonda, beginning on Oct.
17 live-streamed teach-ins will be held each Thursday night featuring
"interviews with experts who will discuss and answer questions
about each different aspect of climate change that is the focus of
the next day's action.
"Inspired
by the Swedish student, Greta Thunberg, the student strikers, and
Naomi Klein's new book On
Fire: The Burning Case for the Green New Deal,
I have decided to upend my life, leave my comfort zone, and move to
Washington, D.C. for four months to focus on climate change,"
Fonda wrote in a letter circulated by the group CodePink announcing
the campaign. "Each Friday we will focus on a different aspect
of the climate crisis and what needs to be done moving forward,"
Fonda explained in her letter, inviting celebrities, experts, and
people from impacted communities to participate. "This is a
once-in-a-century opportunity to address the greatest threat to the
future of our planet. I will be on the East Lawn of the Capitol every
single Friday, rain or shine, and would be honored to have you join
me."
Before
Fonda was arrested, she delivered
a short speech, during which she said that "we make personal
choices like driving an electric car or going vegan, recycling, and
we think that that's enough. And it's great. And we have to keep
doing it. But this is a collective crisis that demands collective
action now."
Environmental
destruction can be stopped but this means confronting capitalism. We
need to confront the system as a whole, not simply the most visible
outward appearances of it. How much more time is to be wasted before
it is accepted that capitalist politicians are incompetent to solve
the climate problem. The real powers of action are with the people
when we decide to create a society in which we will be free to
co-operate and to use all our energy and ingenuity to stop the
despoliation of our planet. Some of the immediate short-term effects
of climate change are already with us. The most immediately visible
are those heatwaves and droughts, unexpected changes in extreme
weather patterns, for instance, with more frequent and more powerful
storms. If the global warming feedback mechanisms kick in, such local
catastrophes will become much more frequent. There will be more crop
failures, the flooding of rivers deltas and low lying land areas,
more river inundations, more desertification of previous fertile
areas, as well as shifts in patterns of cultivation.
It
may be possible for the rich to escape the pollution of the city or
contaminated drinking water, but far harder for them to avoid global
warming. Governments and businesses do have a genuine interest in
tackling climate change, just as their predecessors had a genuine
interest sewers and sanitation in dealing with public health. The
stakes now are far greater. Governments have come to accept that
global warming is a threat to much of humanity. But they cannot
achieve their goal without doing away with competitive capital
accumulation, the very basis of their system. Environmental
destruction has always been the price of capitalism. As Marx observed
“all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art,
not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all
progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is
a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.”
Governments have proclaimed averting climate change to be at the top
of their agendas but they have acted only in the appearance of doing
something than the reality. Politicians make beautiful speeches about
the need to do something, attend international conferences,
promising to reshape their own behaviour – but then bow down before
those business interests which say that this or that measure to deal
with climate change will be too costly. There is no global body
capable of enforcing its will on all the transnational corporations
and national states Each is afraid that taking the drastic measures
required to reduce CO2 emissions will result in others seizing the
opportunity to steal their market. For certain, there will be more
attempts at international agreements, perhaps possessing a little
more teeth than in the past. It could hardly be otherwise as growing
number of nations are beginning to experience the real pain of
climate change. But the agreements will always been riddled with
loopholes because different states will enter them with very
different interests. These differences mean that measures that
seriously cut back on emissions would hit businesses in different
countries very differently. International regulatory institutions for
controlling agreements can only be effective insofar as those
nations' interests coincide. Each country will subordinate fighting
climate change to their own vested interests so international
regulation will continue to be slow, ineffective and insufficient to
stop the destabilising effect of the greenhouse gases.
The
only sure protection against climate change is the replacement of a
society based on accumulation for profit with one based on production
for need. That will not come about while we make futile appeals to
governments and corporations to mend their ways. The impact of
climate change will cause an intensification of all the different
problems bred by capitalism such as refugees and migration. There is
only one way to put an end to the system that creates climate change
and that is through participation in the challenge to capitalism as a
whole. In order to survive, socialism necessary. Environment
activists must make a choice between global catastrophe and
revolutionary change.
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