Communist China is by far the largest CO2 producer in the world, and they are building hundreds of new coal fired power plants. US CO2 production has been declining for a decade.https://t.co/RFGQqbNUkz pic.twitter.com/FZMnDctfIW
— Tony Heller (@Tony__Heller) April 12, 2019
Monbiot: ‘Capitalism is destroying the Earth. We need a new human right for future generations’
By George Monbiot
The young people taking to the streetsfor the climate strike are right: their future is being stolen. The economy is an environmental pyramid scheme, dumping its liabilities on the young and the unborn. Its current growth depends on intergenerational theft.
At the heart of capitalism is a vast and scarcely examined assumption: you are entitled to as great a share of the world’s resources as your money can buy. You can purchase as much land, as much atmospheric space, as many minerals, as much meat and fish as you can afford, regardless of who might be deprived. If you can pay for them, you can own entire mountain ranges and fertile plains. You can burn as much fuel as you like. Every pound or dollar secures a certain right over the world’s natural wealth….
One way of implementing this is through major land taxes, paid into a sovereign wealth fund. It would alter and restrict the concept of ownership, and ensure that economies tended towards distribution, rather than concentration.
These simple suggestions raise a thousand questions. I don’t have all the answers. But such issues should be the subject of lively conversations everywhere. Preventing environmental breakdown and systemic collapse means challenging our deepest and least-examined beliefs…
Today, whether you are talking about land, the atmosphere, living systems, rich mineral lodes or most other forms of natural wealth, it is clear there is not “enough, and as good” left in common. Everything we take for ourselves we take from someone else. You can tweak this system. You can seek to modify it. But you cannot make it just.
