Climate Overheating is the Greatest Capitalist Crime Ever Perpetrated -

but we mention it in passing

If climate overheating is the biggest threat to life on earth, one might expect that progressive platforms would be all over this issue. Of all the great crimes of capitalism - war, imperial conquest, siphoning pocket change from workers into bloated coffers of corporate wealth, shaking down ordinary people for a false promise of health care, buying up housing with private equity to spike rents, etc - the baking of the biosphere stands out as an act of unprecedented, monstrous proportions.

Corporate greed, in its bureaucratic, industrial ability to divorce sentiment from institutional momentum, has entered a realm unique in the half billion year evolutionary history of multicellular life. Corporate humanity, armed with technology, has the ability to fast track mass extinction. The oligarchs of our species have gained admittance to a dimension formerly restricted to geological processes. If implosion of the biosphere had always been a consequence of rare acts of volcanism - the caprice of plate tectonics unfolding across eons - we now can completely obliterate living systems on a dime.

Progressive media, thus has every reason to be utterly riveted and obsessed with the climate - climate extinction is worse than war, worse than racism, worse than colonial expansion, worse than arbitrary police power, worse than union busting, worse than any corporate crimes short of nuclear war. Indeed, climate destruction might be thought of as the pure tincture of capitalism, the compressed essence of all forms of injustice. Climate, however, requires that people grasp a different order of magnitude to seriously address its lethal certainty. While police brutality, war, housing shortages, human rights abuses and racism can possibly be addressed with reform, there is no wiggle room for climate's destructive trajectory. No series of small, cautious policy adjustments can placate Mother Nature and her planned revenge.

Climate remediation demands revolutionary change - there is no path forward, as Jeremy Corbin states, via incrementalism:

“Few politicians deny that human-made global heating is real. Instead, our government peddles a different – more insidious – kind of denialism. One that moves away from a disbelief in the climate crisis, and toward a belief that incremental change can fix it.”

Climate overheating, unlike all the smaller threats plaguing our (and all other) species, requires an almost unimaginable shift in our institutions and ways of thinking - the transitions that might give the planet a hint of optimism have to take place globally within an international community hopelessly addicted to nationalism. A recent piece by Mark Wilson posted at the World Socialist Web Site encapsulates the gargantuan task - Wilson, referencing the suit by impoverished countries to access climate reparations via The World Court, states:

"Whatever the verdict of this case, the major capitalist powers responsible for the climate crisis will continue to base their policies not on science, human rights or environmental protection. Instead, the ruling elites and big business will make their calculations based on profit and on enriching themselves.

What is required by the working class globally is instead a break from the institutions that defend the capitalist system as it plunges the world into ecological devastation. The conscious political fight to abolish capitalism is the necessary strategic task to which all workers and young people must orient, as the only path to safeguard Earth and its living inhabitants."

As a regular reader of the WSWS I generally find perspectives that are more pointedly directed toward revolution than incrementalism, but oddly, one has to look hard at WSWS offerings to find climate related analysis. I had to scroll through at least 30 pieces to find the above quote. That is not to begrudge the focus on international labor struggles, worker's rights, Gaza and Marxist cultural perspectives, but the paucity of climate related reporting is not so much a failure of WSWS as it is a universal problem characteristic of progressive platforms in general.

A quick personal and anecdotal survey of five different online, leftist platforms reveals that fewer than ten percent of pieces deal with climate, and only a tiny handful go into detail regarding the more nuanced debates around climate overheating mitigation. For example, the exploration of Degrowth - ubiquitous on niche environmental sites like Resilience - almost never receives detailed unpacking on more general online sites that promote leftist journalism. Unfortunately, we have a poorly informed public with a below threshold investment in civil disobedience, and little familiarity with the prevailing positions - largely emerging from academia - regarding the strategies that will be urgent and essential to transition from a political culture of runaway ecocide. Many have complained that the climate movement does not resonate with poor and working people. The massive mobilization needed to confront the sixth extinction depends on a well informed public armed with the requisite narrative tools.

The problems confronting climate activism may be uniquely psychological. We don't see the same sort of immediate nexus that binds perpetrators and victims in the manner that a bloodied Gazan child can be traced to a conscious act of colonial expansion. The sort of violence manifest in the gratuitous burning of fossil fuels rather evades the scope of public understanding. We simply don't see the Central American refugee as a victim of corporate designs in the same way that we recognize a murdered Gazan child as a target of Israeli/US military intent. Yet that connection is real and urgently needed to be framed for those who struggle to grasp the storyline. The cause and effect linking industry to extinction ought to be the greatest horror story ever told. Our hands should be sweating as we shakily turn the pages.

The murder of George Floyd pulled at our collective heartstrings. Tens of millions of people cringed at the specific, personal, intimate revelation of police violence. We oddly respond emotionally to a single act of injustice, yet numbly fail to resonate with the onrushing death of billions. Perhaps it is our job as writers to make climate crimes personal and immediate. Climate overheating is an epic story, and we have yet to figure out how to tell it. The enormous bridge linking the planet’s greatest global catastrophe to the private suffering of real people may be nearly impossible for writers to span.

At the very least we can picture the suffering of Roger Hallam - sentenced to five years in prison for climate civil disobedience. Perhaps we can also appreciate that John Mark Rozendaal has been threatened with a seven year sentence for playing a Bach Cello Suite outside of Citibank in NYC as part of the Summer of Heat protest. A man holding an umbrella above the cellist also risked Draconian retribution. Civil disobedience has often been energized by collective outrage toward state violence directed against those who stand up for human rights - think of Rosa Parks who became the iconic symbol of the civil rights movement.

All of the things that make journalism vivid and anxiously relevant ought to drive the climate narrative. The corporate world and their political puppets want nothing more than to see readers on leftist platforms bored with climate coverage.