Pearls and Irritations

The global consumer-capitalist machine is well-programmed to consume the planet in its quest to produce ever-more stuff. Avoiding pollution is incompatible with its present functioning. If we want to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions we need to know how to get inside the machine and turn it off, or transform it.

The 2024 State of the Climate Report begins:

We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.

Like so many warnings over recent decades, this one has been widely ignored, despite its completely clear and blunt message that the climate threat could hardly be more dire: ‘the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled’.

Given the context of still-rising greenhouse gas emissions and increasing numbers and intensities of climate-related disasters, many of them widely reported, we can safely conclude that nothing our rulers have been doing will stop our accelerating rush towards the abyss. We need to find an approach that actually works, and people to implement it.

It is no use just to decry the venality and timidity of politicians, nor the greed of CEOs. We need to understand why they don’t change their ways. Even if the CEOs wished to change, they seem unable to. Elon Musk has said ‘artificial intelligence’ (so called) is dangerous to humanity and should be regulated. Yet as long as it is unregulated he continues do develop it.

The reason is that Musk and all the rest of them are part of a system designed to keep producing more and more stuff, without end. They are on an accelerating treadmill, and they either run harder or fall off.

The core of this planet-eating system is corporations whose primary goal is profit for shareholders. The context they must operate in is competitive markets (no, the markets are not ‘free’, they are embedded in societal structures and also commonly manipulated). A third ingredient, identified by Jason Hickel, is artificial scarcity: if finance, jobs and such are kept insufficient, then everyone must scrabble for a share.

Forget the fatuous nonsense of mainstream economics about businesses being lean, efficient and agile. In this system big corporations work desperately to preserve their current business model. They will do anything to protect and increase shareholder return – destroy people’s livelihoods, destroy people, spread poisons, murder, buy politicians, destroy ecosystems, use up essential resources, foul their nest. These things are obvious, they are reported in the news every day.

The financial system keeps the focus on the short term: if next quarter’s returns are insufficient, share-holders will take their money elsewhere. The focus is on money, not on the real world nor even the real economy of making things. Money is a powerful abstraction, a legal claim on real-world wealth. Money is thus once-removed from the real world we live in. It uses the real world as a resource and a dump and is otherwise not concerned with the living forms that comprise the real world. That is why so many things are dying.

If we want to save the planet we need to disable or radically reorient this global consumer-corporate machine.

There are well-developed ideas on how to do this. Hickel and many others advocate degrowth, or post-growth. A key move is to give people access to commons – things and spaces that used to be available to people, so they were not dependent on becoming serf-labour for some feudal lord. Government services can help to release people. Restrictions on corporations and changes to corporate charters would facilitate the shift. We should restore the tight restrictions on the financial sector that applied in the post-war decades, an era of unprecedented increase of prosperity.

Wealth is produced communally, despite the claims of capitalist cowboys to being rugged individualists. They could not be wealthy without all the societal institutions and all the trained and educated people that enable their enterprise. It follows that wealth should flow fairly to everyone in a society. There is no simple formula for this, as Adam Smith recognised. So it comes back to ensuring the flow of wealth is fair and sensible, and that requires reclaiming our power.

On this basis it is fair and sensible to, for example, markedly boost the minimum wage, perhaps by 50% to start with. This would actually boost the economy. Fat cats should actually be taxed. A universal basic income is a plausible option. Certainly a job guarantee ought to be instituted. Obviously there would be much more involved in shifting our societies to become life- and planet-friendly, this is the briefest of indications.

Don’t waste your breath begging our present political class to do this. They are captured, and anyway incapable of thinking this way. They need to be replaced, urgently. Australia is leading the world at present in electing community-based independents and displacing the old parties. The present crop may or may not appreciate all of these ideas, but they want serious climate action and they are not governed by ossified back-room boys and big money, so there is potential. Obviously we need to put seriously forward-thinking people into our parliaments.

We also need to work around the commercial media. This will not be easy but boycotts and campaigns might accelerate their slowly declining baleful influence.

None of this will be easy, but if we don’t properly identify our goals we will continue to fail.

Personally I doubt there is time, anymore, to avoid global catastrophe.

But I don’t know that for sure and we owe it to our descendants keep pushing while ever we might reduce the damage.

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