George
Monbiot of the Guardian once again assails the vested interests who
contribute to the climate change.
“...The
oil industry is not your friend. Whatever it might say about its
ethical credentials, while it continues to invest in fossil fuels, it
accelerates climate breakdown and the death of the habitable planet.
Shell announced a $300m fund for “investing in natural ecosystems”
over the next three years. This, it claims, will help to “support
the transition towards a low-carbon future”. By paying for
reforestation, it intends to offset some of the greenhouse gases
produced by its oil and gas extraction. In conversations with
environmental campaigners from several parts of the world, I keep
hearing the same theme: Shell is changing, Shell is sincere...sounds
big until you compare it with Shell’s annual income of
$24bn...Among its assets are 1,400 mineral leases in Canada, where it
makes synthetic crude oil from tar sands. Some transition. An
analysis by Oil Change International explains, “there is no room
for new fossil fuel development – gas included – within the Paris
agreement goals”. Even existing gas and oil extraction is enough to
push us past 1.5C of global heating. Shell is a company committed for
the long term to fossil fuel production. Shell’s “cash engines”,
are oil and gas. There is no sign that it plans to turn the engines
off. Its “growth priorities” are chemical production and deep
water oil extraction. In the future, the company says, it will “sell
more natural gas”. Shell, however, intends to keep finding and
developing new reserves. Earlier this month its chief executive, Ben
van Beurden, gave a lecture in which he instructed people to “eat
seasonally and recycle more.” Shell’s strategy is so transparent
that it is hardly worth debating. It wants to stay in the fossil fuel
business, but it needs to fend off the regulation that might threaten
this business. If the company is not prepared to
abandon its cash
engines, it must change people’s perceptions of its activities. The
company’s strategy is working. Shell is not our friend. It is an
engine of planetary destruction....”
Workers
are creative. Technical advances are not developed by CEOs and
stockbrokers, but by the very people who are physically involved in
production and distribution of goods and services. The capitalists
merely benefit from these innovations. How many times have workers
devised a better way of doing things, only to watch helplessly as
corporations seize our ideas and control the use of them to increase
profits? Since we are the people who are generating new developments,
we can continue to do so whether the very wealthy exist or not. There
are so many of us that if we were to unite the sheer weight of our
numbers would enable us to take control of productive systems
peacefully, purposefully, and permanently.
With socialism, what is to prevent the worker-owners of the industries from carrying on polluting the environment just like the capitalists?
With their basic material needs so readily and assuredly met, people in a socialist society will have every incentive to devote a considerable quantity of their working time to improving the quality of life and prominent would be the desire to live in a clean, healthy, and pleasing conditions, where sharing an appreciation for the wonders and beauty of nature is a fairly universal attribute of humankind, ranking only a few rungs below the need for food, clothing, shelter and other basic material things.
The despoliation of the environment under the present system has made the reversal of present practices a matter of human survival almost as urgent as the daily need for food, clothing and shelter, etc.
Though we do not presume to say how workers would decide on the finer, details in socialist society, it is a safe assumption to say that they would be in favour of their own collective self-interest. Therefore, insofar as there is a collective self-interest in breathing clean air, drinking pure water, eating nutritious food, living a long, healthy life and enjoying the bounties of nature, it is safe to predict that people would allocate the time necessary to virtually eliminate waste at the point of production.
Thus, while in an abstract sense it is true that the self-governing producers of a socialist society could opt to continue neglecting the environment, it defies all reason and rationality to project such a scenario upon socialism. It is no more valid or credible a supposition than supposing that everyone under socialism could decide to burn down their own home or commit suicide some day.
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