Climate Change Shows That Capitalism Needs To Be Forever Eliminated

Children’s reactions to climate change show us the rawest forms of the heartbreak and dread that humanity is experiencing amid climate breakdown. One U.S. study shows that four out of five of the 10-to-12-year-olds surveyed have strong feelings of fear, sadness and anger about environmental destruction. Children around the world are already seeing the dangers of climate change, from the fires in California to the intensifying droughtsthroughout Africa and the Middle East. And when children are informed about what’s going to happen to the planet in their lifetimes, it can make them panic. As child trauma researcher Daniel Schechter has said about how climate-related disasters make kids think: “Their world becomes less safe. They wonder if it’s some kind of punishment.”

It’s crucial for us to have children understand that the destruction of their world is not a punishment against them. It’s an assault against them, an assault that’s being carried out under the sociopathic dictates of capitalism.

The chief culprits are the leaders of the 100 corporations which are behindaround 71% of the world’s carbon emissions. Additional guilty actors are those who oversee America’s bloated and environmentally destructive military, which is acting as the world’s largest polluter. These and other powerful individuals are continuing their campaign of ecocide because of the complicity of most of the political and media establishments-with climate change deniers like Donald Trump being the most destructive participants in this march towards a ruined planet. And they’re allowed to do these things because capitalism, which values money above human beings and nature, has created a paradigm wherein our very survival as a species is disregarded.

The crimes they’ve committed are too vast to be restituted by simply suing or prosecuting governmental and corporate leaders. To make up for the harm that they’ve done to our children-and to our children’s distant descendants-humanity must eliminate capitalism and not let it return.

This task of persuading people to reject capitalism will be easier than it was in the times before capitalism had significantly harmed the climate. In the centuries and millennia to come, the damages which were done to the earth during the capitalist period will serve as a reminder that human beings must never again against orient their societies around profit.

According to climate models, if the warming is kept relatively moderate, global temperatures will likely have climbed between two and three degrees celsius by the 23rd century alone, with the recovery period lasting as long as 100,000 years. In the more extreme scenario, temperatures will climb to between six and nine degrees celsius, and continue to climb until sometimes between 3000 and 4000 AD. In this timetable, the climate will take 400,000 years to recover. In either case, assuming humans survive the mass extinction they’ve created, the greenhouse gas emissions that happened during these brief few centuries are going to impact human culture and philosophy for eons.

When people in the far future see the vast uninhabitable deserts, submerged cities, and records of unprecedented die-offs, they’ll no doubt try to look back at our current era to find where it went wrong. This is why it’s our responsibility to warn these post-climate collapse societies that capitalism was the fatal misstep.

In the long term, the fight against capitalism will be an effort to preserve the historical facts about capitalism’s blame for what happened to the climate. In the shorter term, we need to stop capitalism from finishing us off before we even have time to learn from our mistakes.

Millions around the globe must get involved in mass movements aimed at dismantling capitalism and forcing the creation of an eco-socialist society. The protests of Extinction Rebellion are not enough; their efforts have to be leveraged towards creating a vast effort of more strategically executed blockades, strikes, and institution-building, attached to specific demands about dismantling global capitalism.

As Chris Hedges has written, we should get involved in the climate movement not because this will erase the harm that capitalism has done, but to defy capitalism just for the sake of it:

Resistance, especially given the bleakness before us, is about more than winning. It is about a life of meaning. It is about empowerment. It is a public declaration that we will no longer live according to the dominant lie. It is a message to the elites: YOU DO NOT OWN US. It is about defending our dignity, agency and self-respect. The more we free ourselves from the bondage of fear to throw up barriers along the forced march toward ecocide the more we will be enveloped by a strange kind of euphoria, one I often felt as a war correspondent documenting horrific suffering and atrocities to shame the killers.

This is the mentality that humanity will need to maintain into the far future, when the climate crisis is at its worst. We’ll never be able to undo the climate holocaust that capitalism is already causing, and the planet won’t recover for thousands of human lifetimes. But if humanity can stop itself from reverting to how it behaved during the capitalist era, we’ll ultimately be able to set things right.

When children are scared by climate change, we need to encourage them to become the new generation of planet healers that’s described in this Native American prophecy:

When the earth is ravaged and the animals are dying, a new tribe of people shall come unto the earth from many colors, classes, creeds and who by their actions and deeds shall make the earth green again. They will be known as the Warriors of the Rainbow.