Want to reduce the power of the finance sector? Start by looking at climate change

In the lead-up to a revolutionary change, the status quo often seems both unyielding and untenable. The Soviet bloc in the 1980s provides a dramatic example: neither the rulers nor the ruled had any faith in the system, yet it stayed in place, seemingly untouchable. Then, in 1989, a picnic on the border between Hungary and Austria precipitated a collapse that brought down most of the governments of Eastern Europe in a matter of months, and the Soviet Union itself a couple of years later.

Where it all began: the Bank of England building in London. 

Over the past decade, two institutions that have endured far longer than did the Soviet Union and are far more central to our way of life have come under challenge: the carbon-based industrial economy and the finance-based system of global capitalism. The two have been intertwined since their near-simultaneous birth at the end of the seventeenth century. The Bank of England was created in 1694, shortly after the first major private banks, Barclays and Coutts; the first steam-powered pump was patented only four years later by Thomas Savery, and then rapidly superseded by Thomas Newcomen’s 1712 design.

For nearly three centuries, they proceeded in tandem, periodically interrupted by crises of one kind or another. Since 1945, though, their paths have diverged.

Read the story from The Monthly by John Quiggan - “Want to reduce the power of the finance sector? Start by looking at climate change.”