Neo-Liberalism: A friend to climate change
Climate change is real, it is not a hoax. Yet we go about our daily lives in our own private bubbles as if the devastating forces will never come – actually they’re already here.
Most of us are comfortable not caring to know the causes, potential disruptions and catastrophic impacts of climate change. But if we are aware, we tell ourselves we are too busy to care about something so distant and abstract but this is just a way of looking away.
Somewhere deep in the recesses of our minds we know if we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to raise year after year, climate change will change everything about our world. By 2050, most of us baby boomers will be gone but our children will have to continue to live through the horrid conditions of climate change. There is a good chance that our children will spend a great deal of their lives fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extensive droughts.
Americans need to accept that they will face profound floods, devastating hurricanes, droughts and extreme heat. Also, it’s not hyperbole to predict severe shortages of food and water in the United States. We will not be spared from such cataclysmic disasters. God is done with giving us special protections, Mother Nature is impartial and this man-made phenomenon will possibly end us all.
Tragically, the vast majority of the world’s oil and gas corporations intend to scale up the extraction of fossil fuels in years ahead. My question is why are we doing this to ourselves? Why are we intentionally destroying our planet? I can only come up with one answer … short term profits.
In addition, I believe an answer to why we are not doing much to stop climate change is because lowering emissions would fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism known today as Neo-Liberalism … the reigning ideology for the last four decades.
We are stuck because actions that would give us the best chance of adverting catastrophic climate change are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a strangle hold over our economy, our political process and most of our major media outlets. This elite capitalist minority wants the maximum freedom to produce their goods as cheaply as possible and sell them with a few regulations as possible while paying as little in taxes as possible. This Neo – Liberal system is morally bankrupt and has sabotaged our collective response to climate change.
My main point is the policies that so successfully freed Neo-Liberalism from virtually all constraints also contributed significantly to the underlying cause of global warming: rising greenhouse emissions.
Climate change has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders and governments despite the fact that it carries the risk of destroying millions of lives. The worlds governments have been talking about preventing climate for more than two decades, and in that time they have failed to meet pledges, missed targets and have broken promises — which makes them pretty much free to ignore their commitments because of no international legal binding agreements.
The world governments must take the lead in instituting something like a world Marshall Plan. Yes, its true, catastrophic climate change would infiltrate the role of government to levels that would likely disturb most thinking people – whether politically left or right – but it is the case that there is no way to get cuts in emissions steep or rapid enough to avoid those catastrophic scenarios without levels of government intervention that will never be acceptable to the right-wing ideologues.
Globally, we need government policies that will stop climate change, save humanity and our planet. We need policies that will ensure that our children, that our elders, that those most vulnerable in our communities have resources and necessities not only to survive but thrive. The bottom line is Neo-Liberalism, with its profit seeking and austere policies, have to be replaced to save our planet .
Finally, when governments are willing to introduce bold programs and put goals other than profit making at the forefront of policy making, I believe change can happen with astonishing speed, where they realize its not about changing light bulbs but changing the world.