Doubling Down: The Military, Big Bankers and Big Oil Are Not In Climate Denial, They Are in Control and Plan to Keep It That Way

http://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/05/doubling-down-the-military-big-bankers-and-big-oil-are-not-in-climate-denial-they-are-in-control-and-plan-to-keep-it-that-way/
Date Written:  2019-07-05
Publisher:  CounterPunch
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23727

The two most important narratives imposed on us are climate change as a "threat to national security" and as a "business opportunity" - the twin rationales for military and corporate power. They want to focus us on how to manage the crisis, profit from it, or adapt to it, instead of opposing it.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

So how is it that the bankrollers of climate chaos, investing $1.9 trillion in fossil fuels just since the Paris Accords, also claim to "manage and mitigate these climate-related risks?"

According to the bankers, the problem with climate change is that it’s "posing significant risks to the prosperity and growth of the global economy." What they will not say is that the global economy -- which demands enormous fossil fuel production and consumption -- is posing significant risks to the climate. The global shipping and aviation on which peak profit-making depends is, like the military, exempt from the Paris Accords. The bankers, generals, and politicians are protecting the sources of their power.

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The two most important narratives imposed on us are climate change as a "threat to national security" and as a "business opportunity" - the twin rationales for military and corporate power. They want to focus us on how to manage the crisis, profit from it, or adapt to it, instead of opposing it.

Once framed in this way the very institutions responsible for climate change can benefit from disaster while hiding their responsibility for creating the crisis. But the military-corporate management of the crisis will undoubtedly follow the same principles that created the crisis: the costs of pollution, adaptation, endless growth and war won’t appear in the corporate ledger. Military budgets will only grow larger. The costs will be "externalized" and paid by the suffering of everyday people....

It’s "power to the people" or nothing. There is no middle ground. But we will be swamped along with the middle ground if we do not have real leverage and real power. The military, the oil companies and the big banks have plans and power both. The Green Party's Real Green New Deal is a solid plan, as are the guiding principles offered by DSA Ecosocialists, or Tulsi Gabbard's OFF Act.

But, the straightest line to the power we need is not just good policy, more manifestos, analytical precision or electoral politics (although those things might be helpful) — it's the sloppy, contradictory, demanding work of organizing and direct democracy.