Corporations and oligarchs with massive fortunes can hire as many junktanks (so-called thinktanks), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to devise justifications and to demonise, demoralise, abuse and threaten people trying to sustain a habitable planet. The junktanks devise new laws to stifle protest, implemented by politicians funded by the same plutocratic class.
It could scarcely be more screwed up. The effort to protect Earth systems and the human systems that depend on them is led by people working at the margins with tiny resources, while the richest and most powerful use every means at their disposal to stop them. Can you imagine, in decades to come, trying to explain this to your children?
Looking back on previous human calamities, all of which will be dwarfed by this, you find yourself repeatedly asking “why didn’t they … ?” The answer is power: the power of a few to countermand the interests of humanity. The struggle to avert systemic failure is the struggle between democracy and plutocracy. It always has been, but the stakes are now higher than ever.
A drought-stricken corn crop in Jiangxi province, China. (2022) Photo: Alex Plavevski
This is No15 in our Climate Change series, and once again it is the environmentalist George Monbiot who provides the information.How strange how the rich, the power elite, manage to keep a stranglehold on our economy, and now our food, and yet no one rebels, least of all our governments. Climate breakdown and crop losses threaten our survival, but the ultra-rich find ever more creative ways to maintain the status quo.
THE PLUTOCRATS VERSUS LIFE ON EARTH
by George Monbiot
According to Google’s news search, the media ran more than 10,000 stories about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of five news stories about a scientific paper published last week, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in the world’s major…
UNIVERSE 