[D66] ‘Can I Keep You Safe? Your Future Is Uncertain’: Climate And The Fate Of Humanity

[R.O.]

https://www.medialens.org/2020/can-i-keep-you-safe-your-future-is-uncertain-climate-and-the-fate-of-humanity/


  ‘Can I Keep You Safe? Your Future Is Uncertain’: Climate And The Fate
  Of Humanity

31st March 2020 Alerts

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the most immediate objective is 
to slow its spread, minimise the death toll and help people through the 
crisis.  But, despite government promises to support citizens who are 
now losing their jobs and income, the underlying establishment concern 
will be as it always has been: to preserve the global inequitable system 
of wealth and power.

Private interests, including airlines, fossil fuel industries and 
sinister-sounding ‘businesses crucial to national security’, have been 
busy lobbying governments for taxfunder-paid bailouts. Notoriously, 
Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic even asked its employees to take eight 
weeks of unpaid leave, while hundreds of thousands in the UK are 
struggling to access benefits after becoming unemployed.

Governments are now channelling money into the economy in amounts that 
have not been seen since the Second World War. However, there have been 
calls to ensure that public rescue packages should only be agreed if 
major changes are made to the economy, including significant public 
ownership of business. There should also be legal and financial 
consequences for socially irresponsible or criminal corporate behaviour. 
Surely this all makes sense and would have massive public approval?

So far, the omens are not good. Last week, the US approved a $2 trillion 
‘financial stimulus package’ largely intended to prop up the corporate 
economy. Zach Carter, a senior reporter at HuffPost, warned that:

    ‘It is not an economic rescue package, but a sentence of
    unprecedented economic inequality and corporate control over our
    politics that will resonate for a generation.

    ‘It represents a transfer of wealth and power to the super rich from
    the rest of us, with the support of both political parties ― a
    damning statement about the condition of American democracy.’

In particular, as we will see below, many voices are rightly urging 
political leaders around the world not to abuse public funds by bailing 
out corporations that are complicit in climate breakdown. Instead, the 
priority should be to stimulate the vitally-needed transition to a truly 
green economy.

*‘An Unraveling Of Our Planet’s Entire Life Support Systems’*

The previous global economic crisis and financial meltdown of 2007-2009 
only led to a temporary dip in carbon emissions. Vested interests moved 
quickly at that time to ensure that there would be no long-term shift to 
a low-carbon future.  In the US alone, $700 billion in public money was 
given as an initial bailout in 2008 to the very banks who were 
responsible for the crisis. But public funds were funnelled into the 
financial system for /years afterwards/, rising to almost $5 trillion by 
2015.

Kyla Tienhaara, an environment and economy researcher at Queen’s 
University, Ontario, notes of oil, gas and coal corporations after the 
2008 crash:

    ‘the fossil fuel lobby ensured that carbon capture and storage
    projects sucked up a significant amount of green stimulus funds, but
    not a lot of carbon dioxide.’

With academic understatement, she warns now that:

    ‘bailouts to the fossil fuel industry and airlines would be
    monumentally counterproductive.’

Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California at 
Berkeley, uses stronger wording:

    ‘it would be insane to reflate the fossil economy as it was.’

Basav Sen, who directs the Climate Policy Project at the US-based 
Institute for Policy Studies, is clear:

    ‘We’re facing down not just a pandemic and a global economic
    meltdown, but an unraveling of our planet’s entire life support
    systems.’

He adds:

    ‘A healthy future for oil and gas inevitably means a bleak future
    for most humans and for ecosystems. At precisely the time that
    scientists say we should be phasing out oil and gas production, a
    bailout to this destructive industry is a giant step backwards.’

Mary Robinson, the former Irish president who served twice as UN climate 
envoy, warns:

    ‘Money has poured into the fossil fuel industry since the Paris
    agreement [of 2015]. That can’t continue.’

The figures involved are almost beyond comprehension. A new study by an 
alliance of US-based environmental groups reveals that the world’s 
largest investment banks have pumped /more than £2.2 trillion/ into 
climate-wrecking fossil fuels. US bank JP Morgan has been the biggest 
offender, responsible for over £220 billion in oil, gas and coal projects.

It was economists at JP Morgan who issued a stark warning last month 
that the climate crisis threatens the very survival of humanity. 
Inevitably, there was no sign from the investment bank that it would 
respond with the only obvious sane move: the immediate cessation of all 
its fossil fuel funding. Instead, the bank was at pains to point out 
that the alarming study came from a team that was ‘wholly independent 
from the company as a whole’.

Does anything more clearly sum up the madness of a global economy 
fuelled by climate-wrecking industry and Big Money? Not even the 
imminent threat of /human extinction/ is enough to divert the current 
profit-driven course towards the abyss.

Civilisation’s demise would be the ultimate crash resulting from a 
deeply unjust corporate-driven global system of finance and economics.  
Even now, at this terminally late stage of human existence, BBC News can 
only tangentially hint at the grim reality, with bland headlines such as:

    ‘Climate change: The rich are to blame, international study finds’.

Roger Harrabin, the grandly-titled BBC ‘environment analyst’, wrote that:

    ‘The rich are primarily to blame for the global climate crisis, a
    study by the University of Leeds of 86 countries claims.’

Note the BBC newspeak: ‘claims’; not ‘reports’ or ‘concludes’. The BBC 
article continued in typically anodyne fashion:

    ‘The wealthiest tenth of people consume about 20 times more energy
    overall than the bottom ten, wherever they live.’

The researchers warn that:

    ‘unless there’s a significant policy change, household energy
    consumption could double from 2011 levels by 2050.’

2050? Three decades away? We simply do not have that much time. The 
United Nations insisted two years ago that humanity has only /until/ 
/2030/ to make the radical and drastic carbon cuts necessary to prevent 
merely the worst impacts of global warming.

For obvious reasons, there is no sustained critical reporting in 
‘mainstream’ media about the destructive nature of the global system of 
profit maximisation and endless ‘economic growth’. As we have long 
observed, you simply cannot expect the corporate media to report the 
truth about the corporate world.

*Battered By Propaganda*

A core problem for society is that we have been battered by a system of 
propaganda that tells us repeatedly – or simply /takes as a given/ – 
that capitalism, despite a few ‘failures’ or ‘flaws’, has been primarily 
responsible for huge progress in the human condition since the 
Industrial Revolution. However, as economic anthropologist Jason Hickel 
correctly observes, we should reject this ‘fairytale’ promulgated by big 
business, political leaders and state-corporate media.

In reality, it has been people at the bottom of the pile – working for 
centuries to extend the voting franchise, setting up trade unions, 
improving healthcare and education – who have been primarily responsible 
for advancements in living standards. These grassroots factors, says 
Hickel, ‘are the forces that matter’.

Even Noam Chomsky, the world’s most renowned dissident, only ever 
appears rarely in the ‘mainstream’ to critique the ruling inequitable 
economic system and the charade that passes for ‘democracy’. 
Ideologically correct-thinking editors and journalists in the major news 
media, selected by a system that rewards obedience to power, are 
unlikely to offend their employers by promoting ‘extreme’ views like 
Chomsky’s:

    ‘What our leaders are good at, and have been very good at for the
    last 40 years, is pouring money into the pockets of the rich and the
    corporate executives while everything else crashes.’

Meanwhile, climate scientists continue to wave their arms frantically 
about climate breakdown, trying in vain to make governments and business 
divert from their disastrous course towards human extinction. A new 
study of human-caused emissions of methane from the extraction and use 
of fossil fuels may have been ‘severely underestimated’. Emissions are 
likely 25-40 per cent even higher than previously thought.

Inevitably, climate records continue to tumble. Researchers are now 
warning that the polar ice caps are melting /six times faster/ than in 
the 1990s:

    ‘The ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica is tracking the
    worst-case climate warming scenario set out by the Intergovernmental
    Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).’

Is it any wonder, after decades of ignored ‘wake-up calls’, that climate 
scientists are venting their feelings of powerlessness and despair? Joe 
Duggan, a science communicator at Australian National University, has 
been running a six-year project collating such responses from climate 
researchers.

One scientist, Professor Katrin Meissner of the University of New South 
Wales, Sydney, told Duggan that:

    ‘I feel powerless and, to a certain extent, guilty. I feel like I
    have failed my duty as a citizen and as a mother because I was not
    able to communicate the urgency of the situation well enough to
    trigger meaningful action in time.

    ‘What we are doing right now is an uncontrolled, risky experiment
    with the planet we live on.’

Dr Jennie Mallela, of Australian National University, commented:

    ‘So how do I feel? Frustrated, angry that our science is ignored by
    politicians, scared for my husband [a bushfire fighter] and all the
    others who are on the frontline fighting these fires and trying to help.

    ‘But mostly I feel devastated for my son, and his generation, who
    will have to heal this planet and live with the mass environmental
    destruction we have caused.’

Environmental scientist Alexandra Jellicoe recently published a 
beautiful and heartfelt open letter to her young children:

    ‘Can I keep you safe? Your future is uncertain. Can I prepare you
    for that? […] I am brokenhearted. What is a mother if she cannot
    keep her child safe?’

She continued:

    ‘I imagine sometimes what I would like to do to keep you safe in
    this terrifying world we have created. I imagine an army of
    compassionate people fully informed of the risks who live freely
    enough to disrupt the fossil fuel economy. We would hijack the media
    and create urgent public awareness campaigns…

    ‘The hardest work, I imagine, would be to create a world that is
    kinder, less competitive and more equal. Philanthropy and aid are
    not solutions for the world’s poorest but the symptoms of a broken
    global economy. My army and I would rage at the injustice of it all,
    driven forward in the knowledge that these things must be addressed
    to keep you safe.’

In short:

    ‘We are at a cross-roads now. You have two futures and I am
    powerless to influence which finds you.’

As individuals, it may sometimes feel that we are powerless. But the 
brighter, safer, saner future can still be attained, if we remember that 
together we have more power than the destructive forces driving us 
towards extinction.

DC

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