meemsaf

A note a propos current events and my reading of Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital, particularly the chapter dealing with capital's failure to transition to renewables.

I think it's important to grasp what Sanders' vision of the Green New Deal amounts to: while hugely ambitious and certainly picking a fight with the billionaire class, it is in fact a plan based on doing the minimum necessary to try and really stop climate change, while preserving capitalism.

Biden's less ambitious plans fall well short of preserving the necessary conditions for human civilization. Waiting longer to start the transition to a sustainable world will require increasingly far-reaching measures, increasingly incompatible with capitalism as we know it.

Business claims it can lead the transition, but has also disproven this for us already. Knowledge of the dangers of climate change has largely been available since the late 1980s. The technology for sustainable energy has essentially been around that entire time, and is now more mature and cheaper than ever.

Throughout this very period, business has proclaimed it can lead the way. Yet in that same time, emissions accelerated faster than ever, and that business-driven green transition is nowhere on the horizon.

The resources are there, but putting them together would not be exceedingly profitable, so they can't do it. They have shareholders to answer to.

If the establishment rejects the GND compromise, they leave two possible paths forward: climate catastrophe and the end of civilization as we know it – or centralized planning on a continental-to-global scale, for a coordinated shut-down of fossil fuels and rapid transition to renewables.

It is simply tragic that no movement is able to loudly enough make this choice clear to the public and establishment alike: The Green New Deal is a compromise. The alternatives are in deep zero-sum class warfare territory — if not outright apocalyptic.