Climate Change is not a question which requires scientific innovation to solve. We, as a society, have the means to prevent climate change from getting worse if we simply choose to do so as a group. It is not dissimilar to the questions of war and peace. War will be no more when everyone decides bloodshed is not the way to solve our conflicts, or more realistically those who are against war have the power to prevent warmongers from obtaining positions of power that enable them to start a war (e.g. post WW2 Western Europe compared to previous 2 thousand years there). Similarly, those of us who wish to avert the worst of the climate crisis need to have enough power to prevent the bad actors from continuing to ruin the planet to the detriment of us all. It is a fight between collective, compassionate generosity and greed.
The compassionate collective is interested in a sustainable system of providing wealth for all. It’s about ensuring that each person has a chance to provide for themselves and their family and that our institutions and businesses are built around the societal good, and not the maximization of profit. It means we all thrive and our actions are meant to work together to build us all up.
Greed is the exploitative economy we have built which looks at individuals as entities from which to extract the maximum possible value with no concern regarding the well being of those being extracted from. It’s about “nobility” extracting value from serfs, using whatever justifications that allow them to do so. It’s about Tech-Bros extracting all value from our digital selves even if it means turning us against each other to increase “engagement.” It’s about industry taking every last thing out of the ground no matter how many poisons are spread in the process.
Why is wealth distribution so tied in with climate change? Because the wealthy rely on an economic system based on perpetual profit in a finite world. We’ve spread across the globe, so the only way to increase profit is to take value from others and to foist the costs on others. So long as releasing CO2 into the air is “free” to the wealthy, we will have a climate crisis. To combat climate change we need an economic system based on sustainability. ANY process that is counted on to increase forever in a finite world will eventually overwhelm us. But a static world in which wealth is forever frozen in the hands of a select few is both unjust and inherently unstable. It forces us to place our trust in a small group of benevolent dictators to continue to treat the rest of us justly and to not squeeze us out in some way. And violence will erupt as the oppressed strike out in small ways and large ones to overturn the unjust system.
Compassionate collective wealth has battled greed throughout the ages, but climate change has put a hard limit on how much longer this battle will continue. Climate change, unchecked, will raise temperatures to the point of all crops failing us, the sea claiming the lowlands, and a massive destabilization of our societies resulting in mass migration, wars, disease, and famine. And as there is a lag time between cause and effect, we have precious little time to limit the damage and that damage will be locked in.
We as a society have three options. We can burn up entirely in the coming apocalypse if we choose to do nothing. A tiny portion of us can possibly survive in a dystopic future of ruined civilizations ruled by whichever of the greedy we allowed to continue in power and “wins” our future wars. Or we can choose to live together sustainably and build our society based not upon greed, but upon a system that mutually benefits us all. I don’t know about you, but the third option seems like the best choice to me.
But that third option is NOT business as usual as many Democrats seem to project. We need to question our own choices, resources, how we live, and how our lives have impacted others. And we need to do that as a society. A few people have gathered most of the wealth to themselves. Well, we need that wealth to build a world that alleviates the worst of climate change. We need that wealth to build a sustainable economy which serves everyone. And all those choices and actions are nothing like what is being put forth by our politicians or our media.
You will be told again and again elsewhere and on Daily Kos that in order to do anything we need to elect Democrats first and worry about what they will do afterward. As if that worked for the climate in 2009 or in 2021. We need a positive and bold message of equality and prosperity for all. We need to be inspirational. We’ve tried the “just have to get to the next election” path of moderate politics for the past 30 — 40 years and things have gotten worse, not better. We are out of time. “But losing to Trump yada yada yada” nothing. The progressive message IS the winning message.
Biden was his most popular when the Democrats were passing progressive legislation at the start of his term. His popularity went down when Manchin and Sinema started to muck things up. The IRA was nice but wasn’t enough for the climate or for individuals. There was no spike in popularity because it didn’t make life easier or more fair in directly observable ways for most people. The expanded child tax credit, stabilization of living circumstances like rent and college loan relief were what was popular. The winning message is equality and prosperity for all and the saving of our climate and our world. The main stream media will tell us it won’t work, because they don’t want it to work as they are on the side of morbidly rich.
The question of the next election is not about which party will win. It’s a question of who we want to be as a society. We are on the clock.
My apologies in advance, I will be unavailable much of the day to participate in the comments.