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Greenwashing the Climate Catastrophe
Orphan, Kenn
http://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/08/greenwashing-the-climate-catastrophe/Date Written: 2019-02-08 Publisher: Counterpunch Year Published: 2019 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX23361 Many solutions to climate change such as the Green New Deal do not address the real threat to the planet: capitalism. They in fact are a smokescreen under which to conduct business as usual. Abstract: -- Excerpt: With this in mind political solutions, like the Green New Deal, are being trotted out by democratic socialist and neoliberal politicians that merely cloak the problem, never identifying the root of it all: Capitalism. In fact, many of these policies are weak on protecting nature and are simply designed to keep capitalism afloat. At its core this is a system that is incapable of even beginning to address climate change or biospheric degeneration. Its principles are based upon the exploitation of the environment for the material gain of the ruling class, kept alive through institutions of repression and corporate state violence. Under this rubric environmental causes may be soothed for some; but the poor and working class are continually battered and raped by industry and the corrupt governments that house and protect them. Indigenous peoples, who face the worst exploitation, continually see their lands desecrated and denuded by state policing factions at the behest of powerful corporations. And militarism, which is of course wedded to capitalism, ensures that all of this exploitation can continue and expand virtually unopposed by bourgeois society. Subject Headings |