One of the most frustrating things about explaining the origins of climate catastrophe in a free market fundamentalist society is getting people to understand that when I say "capitalism is causing climate crisis and will kill billions of people if we don't end it," I'm speaking quite literally. The evidence that capitalism itself, not just fossil fuels (although to be fair, capitalism and the wealth of the ruling class already depends on fossil fuels far more than you've been told) is the driving factor is all around us, it's just rarely reported in focus and with the level of concern it deserves in corporate media; which for both professional and class reasons, are pretty married to capitalism and free market fundamentalist ideology.
Take for example this recent Dartmouth University study demonstrating that just 111 large corporations are responsible for 28 trillion (with a t) dollars worth of climate damage to our shared biosphere.
https://truthout.org/articles/worlds-top-111-corporations-have-caused-28t-in-climate-damages-study-finds/
"In a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature last week, Dartmouth University researchers find that the global economy would be $28 trillion richer if extreme heat caused by climate emissions from the top 111 carbon majors had never happened. This is nearly the equivalent value of a year’s worth of all goods and services created in the U.S., as The Associated Press points out.
Ten top fossil fuel companies, including entities like Chevron, ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco, are responsible for half of those losses, the study finds.
The study authors say that their goal is to provide a scientific linkage between individual companies and financial losses due to their emissions, in hopes of bolstering efforts to hold polluters accountable for the climate crisis amid a growing wave of climate lawsuits and as more states and lawmakers pursue “polluter pays” laws."
Look, I don't want to give people trying to do something useful to help achieve climate justice a hard time; this study is extremely revealing, even if it does adopt a capitalist framework to describe what is quite frankly mass fucking murder in slow motion. In my experience studies like this have a rather large blind spot towards the human cost of conducting capitalism on a boiling planet where everything, including our governments, is owned by billionaire nazis, so it's likely that these folks are actually underestimating the climate costs of "doing business" for the top corporations they studied.
The larger point here however is that as a society we have already amassed oodles of definitive proof that capitalists are burning the planet and threatening billions of lives for profit, and that evidence is typically only worth a paragraph-long notice in our corporate media publications. Rich people are killing us, billions of us, they're just doing it slowly; that's not a metaphor, and I am being dead serious with you when I say that either capitalism goes, or a planet that can support 8 billion people does. Clearly the free market fundamentalists who run our society on behalf of an obscenely wealthy billionaire ruling class aren't coming to the rescue because the rich people who own them have already made their choice. They're going to slaughter billions of people to keep doing capitalism; the question then becomes - do we as a species intend to let them?
USA. Take a look at what importing our oil is doing to the earth.
