Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?

Climate change activism is increasingly the domain of the young, such as 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, the unlikely face of the school strike for climate movement, which has seen many thousands of children walk out of school to demand that their parents’ generation takes responsibility for leaving them a planet to live on. In comparison, the existing political establishment looks more and more like an impediment to change. The consequences of global warming have moved from the merely theoretical and predicted to observable reality over the past few years, but this has not been matched by an uptick in urgency. The need to keep the wheels of capitalism well-oiled takes precedence even against a backdrop of fires, floods and hurricanes.

 ‘The need to keep the wheels of capitalism well-oiled takes
 precedence even against a backdrop of fires, floods and
hurricanes.’

Today’s children, as they become more politically aware, will be much more radical than their parents, simply because there will be no other choice for them. This emergent radicalism is already taking people by surprise. The Green New Deal (GND), a term presently most associated with 29-year-old US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provoked a wildly unhinged backlash from the “pro-free market” wing, who argue that it’s a Trojan horse, nothing more than an attempt to piggyback Marxism onto the back of climate legislation.

Read the story from The Guardian by Phil McDuff -  "Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?”

Mandela leaves us lessons to combat global warming

The late Nelson Mandela.

Nelson Mandela may not have had much to do with the mitigation of climate change, but those eager to slow the warming of our planet have much to learn from him.

Mandela understood the importance of remaining close to your enemies.

Writing in “Mandela’s legacy for climate activists”, Alex Lenferna, pointed to the lessons from the struggle against Apartheid by Mandela.

He wrote that criticisms that inequality has in some cases worsened since the end of Apartheid, but he felt the radical behaviour of its ultimately successful opponents was instructive for those earnestly combatting climate change.

“Of course,” Lenferna wrote, “all out radicalism is no solution either, radicalism by its very nature is oppositional and if we are to work together to create a better future we need to know when to reign in our activism and sit down at the negotiating table”.