On the issue of climate change Martyn Bradbury, the editor of The Daily Blog, wants to have his cake and eat it too.

MARTYN BRADBURY of The Daily Blog observes that the report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, released on Monday, says that we may have only a decade or so to meaningfully and concretely tackle climate change. This is true.

The report warns that we only have a dozen or so years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people. The average global temperature is now 1.0°C above pre-industrial levels and that increase is already causing more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, and is damaging many land and sea ecosystems.

So far, so bad. The trouble is that Martyn Bradbury, like others of his liberal political persuasion, seem to be still labouring under the delusion that we can somehow turn back the damaging impact of climate change and avoid a global catastrophe without upsetting the current political and economic order and the elite who profit by it. Certainly nowhere will you read him calling for 'system change not climate change', the popular slogan of the ecosocialist movement. 

What this leads to is Bradbury throwing up his hands in despair and calling for urgent action, all the while continuing to support a Labour Party that resolutely defends a capitalist system that is eating up the planet. While Bradbury recognises the danger that the world is in, he clings to the nonsensical notion that capitalism is a sustainable economic system and all we have to do is tinker with it a bit and everything will be fine. Bradbury wants to have his cake and eat it too and, in that respect, he is little different from the hopeless  Green Party co-leader James Shaw and his discredited vision of a 'green capitalism'.

Over a century ago Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels noted the environmental and ecological impact of capitalism in early industrial Europe. Engels described capitalism as production for profit and not human need and that took no account of its impact on wider society:

 “As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers.”

This drive for profit leads to ecological catastrophe: “What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees–what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!”

Marx wrote “All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility…Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth–the soil and the labourer.”

The legacy of capitalism is climate change and we must fight capitalism if we are to turn back the tide of environmental destruction. The time has long expired when the world can afford the luxury of the slow incremental policies that Bradbury seems to favour.

In an interview several years ago,  writer and activist Naomi Klein referred, and probably with a good deal of frustration, to "the mushy middle who don't want to fight.' Martyn Bradbury, and other liberals like him, need to decide whose side they are on.

But, unfortunately, I fully expect that, once the IPCC report is no longer in the headlines, Bradbury will return to cheerleading for Labour. But unless we make a radical change in our economic system, it will collapse in on itself as the cost of climate change begins to add up. Simply supporting the establishment politicians sitting in Parliament is not only not good enough but also a betrayal of our children who will inherit the world that we leave them.











1 comments:

  1. Well said. Bradbury is always mouthing off about social justice activists but what's his alternative? His old mate Willie Jackson and the Labour Party? Give me a break.

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