Betrayed by Green #Capitalism, Here’s How We Can Build a Livable Future
The mainstream climate framework is utterly failing to solve the climate crisis. What could a real solution look like?
In one way of measuring it, the mainstream framework to address the climate crisis has been a huge success. Promoting green #energy, electric vehicles, conservation zones, #carbon credits, carbon capture, and other new technologies has made billions of dollars for companies like #Tesla, #Google, #NextEra Energy, British #Petroleum, Saudi #Aramco, Tongwei #Solar, #McKinsey & Company, and #BlackRock. #Governments have gained power through increased interventions in economic planning, and authoritarian regimes from #China and #India to #Canada and the #US now have a new justification to carry out land theft against Indigenous and rural populations. And millions more #NGO directors, aid workers, diplomats, accountants, entrepreneurs, engineers, academics, and scientists get a hand-out in the form of high salary employment managing the crisis.
Where the mainstream climate framework has been less successful: Doing anything to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions driving the #climate crisis. Nor has the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (#IPCC) acknowledged the reasons for this failure or presented a plan based in reality.
Here are some truths the #mainstream climate framework downplays, ignores, or covers up:
More industrial-scale green energy production actually leads to an increase in #fossil fuel #emissions.
#Greenenergy is a major source of pollution, deforestation, and land theft, and a motor for #genocide around the world.
No carbon capture techniques have proven functional at a significant scale: Their main real-world application has been to increase production at gas and oil wells.
The carbon accounting techniques developed by proponents of green growth serve primarily to obfuscate real greenhouse gas emissions.
There are tremendous short-term benefits to legitimizing the failed climate framework: jobs, #money, attention, power, the comforting belief that those in charge are going to keep us safe. Likewise, there are immense obstacles to developing realistic alternatives: Lack of rewards, marginalization and silencing, state and corporate repression. The result is a sort of self-reinforcing confirmation bias. People aren’t exposed to the gaping holes in the official framework or to examples of the kind of changes we actually need, alternatives remain easy to marginalize as “fringe,” and the failed framework maintains its fatal monopoly.
Our survival depends on escaping the dead-end cataclysm of the official response. But, we can’t enact solutions we’re unable to imagine — so let’s start imagining a real solution.
It won’t be an easy exercise: We’ll have to jettison the entire institutional complex that has caused and is managing the problem. We’ll also have to envision change occurring through a completely different paradigm than the one we’re brought up believing in. There isn’t really an alternative, since the official framework doesn’t constitute a viable plan. And everything we do toward an ecological revolution makes our own lives better, makes our own ecosystem more resilient, and increases everyone’s chances for collective survival.
Rooted Networks Instead of Hierarchies
A paradigm and a practice that could successfully confront the ecological crisis is one based on what I would call rooted networks. Rooted networks are ecosystemic and interdependent. They allow for everyone to define their own needs, to build their own relationships with their specific habitat, and to share resources and feedback throughout their habitat and across the entire system.
The basic operating principles of rooted networks are:
Build a habitat that ensures health and survival for you and those around you.
Don’t pursue interests that poison the habitat.
Turn difference into strength so that the members of the ecosystem fit together in a complementary way. Conflict or contradiction don’t mean war: work through it and grow from it or give it some space and allow different habitats to exist side by side.
Help these communities learn what they can share, to form part of an integrated global #ecosystem
This paradigm allows each of us to maximize our potential for action and our unique knowledge, and to amplify both through relationships of mutual aid. Rather than small groups of experts and owners imposing blueprints on a disempowered society and muted landscape, we would all increase our connectivity to our neighbors and the land, understand their needs and their history, and build from there.
Can you already hear that voice in your head braying out that such an approach is naïve?
https://inthesetimes.com/article/green-capitalism-climate-framework-failure-rooted-networks-better-future
#enviromentalism #anarchy #anarchism #ecology #society #greendeal