The one-sentence summary

Deregulated capitalism is waging war on the climate and to stop the damage we must change everything we think about how our world is run.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • This book was written in 2014 and the writer is one of the most powerful chroniclers of the climate emergency. She has spent decades documenting the exploitation of our planet and its people, and demanding justice.
  • The first scientific breakthroughs demonstrating that burning carbon could be warming the planet were made in the late 1950s. By 1965, the concept was so widely accepted among specialists that the US President Lyndon Johnson was given a report from his Science Advisory Committee warning that through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment, and that the climatic changes produced by increased Co2 could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.
  • By 1988, James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said it was time to stop waffling about the science.
  • Trade and climate function as two solitudes, with each pretending that the other doesn’t exist, and ignoring the most glaring questions about how one would impact the other. In short, free trade around the world is the main contributor to increased emissions. The emissions accounting system does not attribute the transportation of goods across borders to any nation-state, so no single country is responsible for their polluting impact.
  • Container ship traffic has increased 400 percent in the last 20 years – and remember that this statistic is already ten years old. The rise in emissions from goods produced in developing countries but consumed in industrialized ones is 6 times greater than the emissions savings of industrialized countries. By 2007, China was responsible for two thirds of the annual increase in global emissions. A free trader’s dream is a climate nightmare.
  • The core facts of climate change are now so overwhelmingly bad that many experts have simply given up hope. In other words, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.
  • The US credit card debt per household increased fourfold between 1980 and 2010, and that voracious lifestyle would be exported to the middle and upper classes in every corner of the globe. Meanwhile the 500 million richest people on the planet are responsible for about half of global emissions.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • There are still things that can be done to help. Goods should be made to last. The use of energy-intensive long-haul transport needs to be rationed. We need to start localizing our economies again. We need to rescue the idea of a safety net that ensures that everyone has the basics covered: health care, education, food and clean water. This requires visionary long-term planning, tough regulation of business, higher levels of taxation for the affluent, big public sector expenditure, and in many cases the reversal of core privatizations in order to give communities the power to make the necessary changes.
  • Gross Domestic Product (GDP) needs to be fundamentally reordered. It is traditionally understood to consist of consumption plus investment plus government spending plus net exports, but the free market capitalism of the past three decades has put the emphasis mainly on consumption and trade. To stay within our global budget, we need to see less consumption, less trade, and less private investment in producing for excessive consumption.
  • In the 1970s there were 660 reported disasters in the world. In the 2000s there were 3,222. In these 20 years almost every government was chipping away at the health and resilience of the public sphere. This neglect has turned natural disasters into unnatural catastrophes.
  • Public money needs to be spent on smart grids, light rail, citywide composting systems, intelligent urban planning, and much more. Private companies are not interested in these projects because the profit margins aren’t there. Binding legislation needs to implement the idea that the polluter pays.
  • There are also many ways to raise the funds to pay for all of this, including a low-rate financial transaction tax on trading stocks and derivatives, closing tax havens, a 1% tax on billionaires, slashing the military budgets of the top 10 military spenders by 25%, a tax per ton of CO2 emitted in developed countries, and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies globally. It is also possible to have a progressive carbon tax system that reduces inequality as it raises the price of emitting greenhouse gases.
  • Most people don’t mind making some personal sacrifices to help the situation, but they are fed up with the culture of lopsided sacrifice, in which they are asked to pay higher prices for supposedly green choices while large corporations dodge regulation, refuse to change their behaviour, and charge ahead with ever more polluting activities.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • Not much. This short book is 10 years old, but it barely makes a difference because the data has only got worse in the meanwhile.