What Kind of Rebellion will it Take to Save Humanity from Extinction? - Resilience
Why, despite the sorts of technological advances that mean we can send people to the Moon and robots to Mars, are so many governments refusing to act?
To answer those questions, you have to understand how the fossil fuel age is tied up with capitalism and class rule.
Activists in the global School Strike 4 Climate movement have adopted as their own the slogan “change the system, not the climate”. Many in the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement agree, even if the movement does not include system change in its platform.
As 350.org founder Bill McKibbon put it, we are “in a fight, not a discourse” and “like most fights, it [is] about power and money. Another book or symposium [is] unlikely to move the needle.”
The climate movement needs to champion real measures that will deliver jobs and decent livelihoods. This means more than abstract promises of new jobs in renewable industries. It needs to push for an expansion of public investment in housing, health and education, and reject the privatisation madness that has made life more miserable for most workers.
In the long run, “we have to have a full ecological and social revolution, transcending existing capitalist relations of production”.
In other words, the very urgency of the analysis rules out “market solutions” within a system that has created this crisis.