Prof
Will Steffen of the Australian National University and the Stockholm
Resilience Centre explains, “It’s clear
the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and
people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard
to survive. History has shown that civilisations have risen, stuck to
their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change.
That’s where we are today.” He is a co-author of a paper which
states “There is an urgent need for a new paradigm that integrates
the continued development of human societies and the maintenance of
the Earth system in a resilient and accommodating state.” and
concludes “...The Planetary Boundaries framework does not dictate
how societies should develop. These are political decisions.”
It’s
Up to Us
Few
people today doubt the scale of the climate change threat. Media
reports about unprecedented fierce storms, polar vortexes, heatwaves,
droughts, floods and hurricanes focus attention on climate change.
Dealing with all these extreme weather events will be among the major
challenges facing humanity in the coming decades. One can only
imagine the social and human impact of the new looming catastrophes.
Climate change may well lead to famine and death in enormous numbers.
It has the potential to cause such a social world scale collapse that
it throws into question the existence of civilisation itself.
Far
from halting all carbon dioxide emissions, the world’s major states
and corporations are pumping out ever-increasing amounts with little
sign of any meaningful slow-down. An immense inertia is at the heart
of capitalism. Once patterns of production become established and
with them great concentrations of wealth and power established, they
are hugely resistant to any change. The CEOs who head the gigantic
corporations, embody a logic that they must follow to survive, an
every-expanding, profit-seeking course of capital accumulation, and
they will resist anything which fundamentally threatens their
economic power. It is those who control societies who have often been
prepared permit the whole of society to plunge into chaos rather any
challenge which undermines their power. The record of human history
gives us no reason to suppose the heads the giant global corporations
will behave any differently. A surer path to change is needed – the
socialist road. Protest and direct action has to be mobilised as
widely as possible. But the fight to halt and reverse climate change
goes beyond mere reforms within the existing capitalist system.
Appealing to a partnership with employers as the video below does, will produce barren results
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