One silver lining

Fear-mongering is understandably in fashion this year, with prophets of doom having no shortage of new material to draw upon. But amid the endlessly bleak portents of our collective future – birds falling out of the sky in the United States, hundreds of whales washing up on Australia’s shores, a succession of ‘worst-ever’ natural disasters, set against a ‘worst-ever’ US presidential election and a once-in-a-generation pandemic – there is at least one silver lining: the urgency of tackling climate change seems, finally, to be sinking in.

Joe Biden, a stalwart of the status quo and favourite to win in November, is campaigning on the most ambitious climate change package in history. Totalling $2 trillion, and injecting some much-needed vitality into his veteran candidacy, the plan promises a complete transition to clean electricity by 2035 and net zero emissions by 2050.

China, currently the world’s biggest emitter, has announced it will phase out fossil fuels by 2060. Much of Europe is on the same path. Boris Johnson, who has spent much of his career ridiculing wind energy, has now re-branded himself as a champion of the cause. The leaders who still refuse to follow suit – blindly clinging to the fantasy that free-market capitalism will correct itself – now sound less like the custodians of economic orthodoxy they could once claim to be, and more like the heirs of Homer Simpson: “Stupidity got us into this mess, and stupidity will get us out.”

Admittedly, the gap between rhetoric and reality is always hard to identify when it comes to climate change action, and so any optimism should come with caution.

Leaders and CEOs love to pronounce their deepest commitment to the planet in public, only to subvert climate change policy in private. The boom in ‘environmentally friendly’ consumption has offered citizen-consumers a pastiche of political transformation, robbing the cause of its radical urgency, and proving far more effective at reducing the number of guilty consciences in the world than levels of carbon dioxide. According to a 2018 study, 70 percent of people in the UK and US believe that protecting the environment is primarily down to individual consumers – when just 100 companies are responsible for more than 70 percent of global emissions since 1988. As French sociologist Guy Debord once warned: “capitalism could appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely in the form of harmless ideologies.”

Yet there are signs that the ground is shifting. As governments across the world advocate the timed closure of the fossil fuel industry, a fundamental tenet of the neoliberal era loses its ascendancy: the belief that if markets are left unregulated society’s problems will solve themselves.

Excerpted from: ‘The left’s belated, and bittersweet, victory on climate change’

Aljazeera.com