It's Capitalism Or A Habitable Planet - You Can't Have Both

by Robert Newman, the Guardian, posted on Commondreams




Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change.There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won't do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth's life-support systems within the present economic system.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.

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