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<address class="entry-title"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.medialens.org/2020/can-i-keep-you-safe-your-future-is-uncertain-climate-and-the-fate-of-humanity/">https://www.medialens.org/2020/can-i-keep-you-safe-your-future-is-uncertain-climate-and-the-fate-of-humanity/</a><br>
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<h1 class="entry-title">‘Can I Keep You Safe? Your Future Is
Uncertain’: Climate And The Fate Of Humanity</h1>
<div class="mh-meta entry-meta"> <span class="entry-meta-date
updated">31st March 2020</span> <span
class="entry-meta-categories">Alerts</span> </div>
</header>
<figure class="entry-thumbnail"> <img
src="https://www.medialens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Earth-is-more-valuable-than-money-678x381.jpeg"
alt="" title="Earth is more valuable than money"> </figure>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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. </p>
<span id="more-4690"></span>
<p><strong>‘An Unraveling Of Our Planet’s Entire Life Support
Systems’</strong></p>
<p>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 <em>years
afterwards</em>, rising to almost $5 trillion by 2015.</p>
<p>Kyla Tienhaara, an environment and economy researcher at Queen’s
University, Ontario, notes of oil, gas and coal corporations after
the 2008 crash:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With academic understatement, she warns now that:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘bailouts to the fossil fuel industry and airlines would be
monumentally counterproductive.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of
California at Berkeley, uses stronger wording:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘it would be insane to reflate the fossil economy as it was.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Basav Sen, who directs the Climate Policy Project at the US-based
Institute for Policy Studies, is clear:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘We’re facing down not just a pandemic and a global economic
meltdown, but an unraveling of our planet’s entire life support
systems.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He adds:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mary Robinson, the former Irish president who served twice as UN
climate envoy, warns:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Money has poured into the fossil fuel industry since the Paris
agreement [of 2015]. That can’t continue.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <em>more than £2.2
trillion</em> 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. </p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>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 <em>human extinction</em> is enough to divert
the current profit-driven course towards the abyss.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Climate change: The rich are to blame, international study
finds’.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Roger Harrabin, the grandly-titled BBC ‘environment analyst’,
wrote that:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘The rich are primarily to blame for the global climate crisis,
a study by the University of Leeds of 86 countries claims.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Note the BBC newspeak: ‘claims’; not ‘reports’ or ‘concludes’.
The BBC article continued in typically anodyne fashion:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘The wealthiest tenth of people consume about 20 times more
energy overall than the bottom ten, wherever they live.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The researchers warn that:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘unless there’s a significant policy change, household energy
consumption could double from 2011 levels by 2050.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>2050? Three decades away? We simply do not have that much time.
The United Nations insisted two years ago that humanity has only <em>until</em>
<em>2030</em> to make the radical and drastic carbon cuts
necessary to prevent merely the worst impacts of global warming.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Battered By Propaganda</strong></p>
<p>A core problem for society is that we have been battered by a
system of propaganda that tells us repeatedly – or simply <em>takes
as a given</em> – 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.</p>
<p>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’.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Inevitably, climate records continue to tumble. Researchers are
now warning that the polar ice caps are melting <em>six times
faster</em> than in the 1990s:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘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).’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>One scientist, Professor Katrin Meissner of the University of New
South Wales, Sydney, told Duggan that:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘What we are doing right now is an uncontrolled, risky
experiment with the planet we live on.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dr Jennie Mallela, of Australian National University, commented:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Environmental scientist Alexandra Jellicoe recently published a
beautiful and heartfelt open letter to her young children:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘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?’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She continued:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘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…</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In short:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘We are at a cross-roads now. You have two futures and I am
powerless to influence which finds you.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>DC</p>
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