David Cormack
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Daddy, what did you do in the war?
🕑 Added 2021-07-04 20:47:21 +0000 UTCOver the weekend, my social media feeds lit up with images of the goddamn ocean on fire. The fire was from a burst gas pipeline that ran in the Gulf of Mexico.
People were very swift to attribute blame to unfettered capitalism driving large corporates to do things that were against broader human interest, in the drive for profits.
Then some wags thought they'd outsmarted us all by pointing out that the gas pipe was owned by Pemex, a Mexican state-owned petroleum company. So this couldn't be capitalism run amok, as capitalism relies on trade and industry being owned by private individuals.
Except no. Because the motivations of extracting fossil fuels remain the same, regardless of who is doing it. Money. So while strictly speaking using the word "capitalism" in its purest form may be wrong, the ideology is not. The pursuit of money above all else.
In modern 21st century living, we look back at Victorian England and wonder how they justified using child labour and why didn't more people rise up against it. Or in the United States, people frequently battle it out over whether we should judge slave owners by the standards of today and call out some of the Founding Fathers (the answer is very much yes, the existence of just one abolitionist proves that the idea that slaves were the natural order of things is a load of shit, and you should read about John Brown).
Both of the above was done in the pursuit of money. Slavery and child labour are both cheap or free labour and that is what drove people's behaviour. The United States is now the richest country in the world because it built up so much capital off the back of free labour through slavery. The UK was able to fund so much of its imperialism through again, slavery, and serfdom.
And some people spoke up. I mentioned John Brown above. He was a committed abolitionist in the States, and it is claimed by some that John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry was what triggered the US Civil War.
So what are you doing in the fight against ecocide? Because that's what is happening right now. All around the world there are people and corporations who are deliberately destroying the planet. They know what they're doing. They know that what they're doing is causing harm, death, and destruction. But they do it anyway. Because money sure is attractive.
There are governments all around the world who choose to let this happen. They choose to subsidise fossil fuel extraction. They choose to allow environmental crimes go unpunished. They choose to allow further damage done to our planet, just so they can get more money.
Over the weekend, I was with my extended family. A couple of them are in their teens. I asked them if climate change was a common topic of discussion. They said it was; because they knew they'd bear the brunt of it.
Imagine spending your teenage years worrying about the whether you'd have an inhabitable planet because of some shitty decisions made by people in generations before you.
I fully expect that when Greta grows up, she'll want to know what I did to try and stop the wanton destruction of Earth. And what will I tell her? That I did some spicy tweets about it? That I wrote columns in a newspaper and columns for a Patreon bemoaning the state of it all?
They'll wonder why we were obsessed with plastic straws, and stickers on fruit. They'll want to know why we did very little to stop Chevron or ExxonMobil or BP from emitting billions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.
Last week I was on RNZ's the Panel. We talked briefly about a teenager down in Dunedin who was stopping people from using a car park unless they were driving an EV or a hybrid.
While the outcome won't be massive, I fully support direct action. Because all the School Strikes 4 Climate and the other marches and the voting and the crying out have done fuck all. We're still letting these companies (both state owned and private) continue to murder our planet.
So tell me, what did you do in the war on Earth?
Comments
David Cormack
I started writing a response to the above point but I'll focus write one response to both: the point I was trying to raise was that we are holding the wrong people responsible with current settings. At the moment we promote removing plastics from supermarkets, or getting rid of plastic straws as some kind of climate change panacea, when those are just tinkering around the margins of the margins. We need to be going after those who willingly harm the environment in pursuit of profit. Because no amount of signalling anything seems to change their behaviour. All taxes/increases just get passed on to the consumer who often cannot afford the increased charges but have no choice. It's why I hate petrol taxes, they are regressive and penalise people who can least afford them. And I would have thought that "you're destroying our planet" would have been an incentive to not behave in certain ways, and yet it isn't.
m3me_fr0g
Also last time I bought a plane ticket it cost $99 and I could have offset the carbon for $24. This is just stupid: it should obviously be mandatory???
m3me_fr0g
More to the point of your post, how do you define capitalism? Personally I think it's a pretty useless word because so much political disagreement seems to come down to people arguing with others that are using different definitions for words and not realising it. To me, it's better to break it down a bit. Just say commerce: people buying and selling things for their own benefit. Just say property rights: the right to own property. Etc. I don't think I would want to live in a society where people couldn't buy and sell things for their own benefit, where people couldn't own businesses or farms or houses, etc. So I don't really see any criticism of our economic system as making any sense if it's attacking the foundational parts as it tends to be when the criticism is made of "capitalism". The economy isn't perfect, obviously, but it's much more useful to focus on concrete problems. For example, environmental harm is pretty universally agreed to harm everyone, yet the costs of that harm aren't typically borne by the people doing the harm. If you sell things you have a choice to sell it in plastic or in paper. Plastic is much cheaper. For you! It's overall more expensive, because of the cost of dealing with it as waste. But the cost of it as waste is essentially paid for by society while the cost of manufacturing is paid for by you, the vendor. Naturally you want to put food on the table so you are going to, by default, choose the option that's cheapest for you. The solution to that isn't to throw the baby out with the bathwater and redo the economy from scratch. I think it's to either outright ban the plastic bags or price the externality into the cost. A carbon excise and a rubbish & recycling excise would price the two most important externalities in. If plastic bags cost society more in the long run than paper bags do, oughtn't they be more expensive to the person making the decision whether to use them? This sends proper price signals too: the plastic bag manufacturers would have a serious incentive to develop ways to recycle or reuse plastic and to reduce the carbon impact of it, because those things cause their products to be significantly more expensive.
