Jonathan Cook: Why action on the climate crisis is all hot air | Capitalism's endless growth paradigm can't be squared with sustainability. But no one – from politicians to the protest movement – is willing to admit the truth.
The debate about the climate crisis should have been settled in the early 1990s. And yet, three decades later, the extent, imminence and even existence of a looming catastrophe are still hotly disputed. That is not by accident.
David Attenborough is on social media pleading, once more, for mankind to do something before tipping points are surpassed that cannot be reversed and temperatures begin to rise inexorably, whatever we do.
In the same vein, Antonio Guterres, the United Nations' secretary general, warned late last month that humanity has shifted from the era of global warming to “global boiling”. Record temperatures keep being broken, while wildfires and floods have become a news staple.
Scientists’ updated models now predict the first breach of the limit of 1.5C mean temperature rise for the globe, set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, in a matter of a few years, rather than decades. This week it was announced that July had been the hottest month globally on record, a jump of 0.33C above the previous record.
The Middle East is likely to feel the worst effects early, with large parts of the region least able to cope with the heavy costs of adapting.
Water scarcity, extreme heat, food insecurity and desertification will make life increasingly tough, triggering migration and conflict.
And yet inaction on curbing fossil fuel use continues.
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Averting a crisis for all mankind that the industry knew was coming may have been a moral duty, but it was not a legal one.
In fact, as explained previously by Middle East Eye, the exact reverse happened. Throughout the 1990s, Big Oil successfully sabotaged meaningful climate action by pressuring western states to sign an energy treaty tying their hands on cuts to fossil-fuel use.
That was for a good reason. Under the capitalist system, the primary duty of oil corporations – like other corporations – is to maintain profitability and guarantee value for investors and stockholders. Ethics never got a look-in.
So the fossil-fuel industry spent part of its vast profits pursuing a twin-track: first, muddying the waters about the climate science, then channelling attention towards largely meaningless, small-scale fixes that fell to the public to implement.
For the critical years when urgent, state-backed action was needed on a massive scale, climate denial, funded by dark money from Big Business, was given regular airtime on influential media channels like the BBC. Ordinary people were left, as they were supposed to be, confused and unsure.
**Meanwhile, the burden of doing something was intentionally shifted away from governments to western publics. Small, private actions, we were told, would have big impacts.**
**Ordinary people were encouraged, for example, to convert, very gradually, from using wasteful, short-life lightbulbs to more efficient, long-lasting versions - lightbulbs that had been around for decades but kept out of production because they were far less profitable.**
**Now the cost-benefit analysis had changed for Big Business: the humble lightbulb was a weapon in the fight to placate a public and policymakers keen to do something about climate change.**
**Similarly, responsible citizens were advised to commute to work on a bike, even as governments exclusively prioritised road infrastructure improvements for motorists, not cyclists, and a wider culture was fostered vilifying bike riders, one that persists to this day.**
**It did not end there. The fossil-fuel lobby intensified its capture of the public space.**
Corporate money in politics meant the political class was in no mood to take on the oil industry, whatever the scientists were saying. In any case, politicians, desperate for re-election, were not about to start questioning the precepts of capitalism in a two-party system in which both parties were expected to worship the model of endless economic growth.
The establishment media was embedded in the same network of interconnected corporations that profited from an oil-based economy. Their own short-termist goals depended on shoring up an irrational faith among the public in eternal economic growth on a finite planet.
Giant psyop
**The bottom line was that no one with a public platform had any interest in warning the public that advanced societies were structured in a way that was hurtling us towards extinction. The profit-driven, over-consumption model of capitalism was never in question.**
nstead, the fossil-fuel companies set themselves a deadline of the 2010s - the point at which, as their scientists had warned, climate disruptions would be hard to conceal from the public. By that time, the oil industry would need to have ready a new script that the oil industry was integral to saving the planet.
Which is exactly what it did. Recent reports show that ethical and green investment funds have poured money into fossil-fuel companies after those firms rebranded themselves. The oil giants’ profits have again hit record levels.
Under the so-called Green New Deals, nothing fundamentally changes. We still drive our own cars in pretty, individualised colours. We still holiday abroad. We still shop in large supermarkets with everything – including year-round exotic fruit flown in from abroad – wrapped and protected in oil-based plastics.
We are still encouraged through advertising to consume as much as possible and throw away items of new technology – from personal computers to phones – every few years through planned obsolescence.
But this individualised, competitive, wasteful way of life is being given a makeover. Cars are now hybrids or electric. Holidays are “carbon offset” somehow. Plastic on our food is described as recyclable. Advertising now explains to us how all the stuff we buy is saving the planet.
Living ever more of our lives online supposedly helps too, because it reduces our carbon footprint. It is a green revolution in which everything stays pretty much the same – including the ability of giant corporations to make massive profits.
Armed with warnings – decades in advance – from their own scientists, the oil industry had enough of a head-start to invent a self-serving narrative. It's one in which ordinary people are encouraged to consume as much as before, while being persuaded either that they are making a difference or that the damage they are causing will be reversed by imminent technologies.
The new watchword is “net zero”. But in truth, it is a giant psyop, as climate scientists have gradually started to appreciate.
In 2021 a group of three leading academics admitted that for years they had been duped into championing the promises of the Green New Deal.
Technological fixes, such as carbon capture, offsetting and geoengineering, were “no more than fairy tales”, they warned. Net zero policies “were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate”.
**One, James Dyke, an expert in global systems at Exeter University, observed: “It’s astonishing how the continual absence of any credible carbon removal technology seems to never affect net zero policies. Whatever is thrown at it, net zero carries on without a dent in the fender… I've now realised that we have all been subject to a form of gaslighting.”**
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