Georges Monbiot had a little run there of decent articles. Today we’re back to classical Moonbat, it’s capitalism and free markets that’re killing everyone.
It is not just that we
are free to kill other people; market freedom constrains us to do so.
The economy is so organised as to make it almost impossible to do the
right thing. If your village isn’t served by public transport and there
is nowhere safe to cycle, you have, for all the talk of freedom to
drive, no choice. If the superstores have shut down all the small
shops, you must give your money to a company whose purchasing and
distribution networks look like a plan for maximum environmental impact.
So
we are encouraged by the market and left free by the law to inflict the
most grievous harm that any group of people has ever inflicted on any
other. There are several good reasons for supposing that climate
change, within the course of this century, will throw the world into
food deficit. The glaciers of the Himalayas, which feed the great
rivers watering the farmland keeping Asia alive, are disappearing. As
the temperature rises, plant growth in the tropics is likely to slow
down: already this appears to be happening to rice crops in the
Philippines. Drought zones are expanding: even in the early 1990s the
nomadic people I worked with in east Africa were complaining that the
40-year famine cycle had been compressed to four or five.
Already,
with a net food surplus, some 800 million people on earth are
permanently malnourished. With a net food deficit, this figure could
rise into the billions. We will be responsible for this. By the time we
reach the end of our lives, every one of us, however kind and mild and
well-meaning we might be, will have been responsible for the
equivalent, in terms of human suffering, of a medium-sized act of
terrorism.
There it is folks, absolute proof, if any you should need, that the only solution to climate change is to abolish free markets. The most recent example I can think of of a place that did not have free markets was the Soviet Union. That worked really well didn’t it? Didn’t contribute to climate change at all, provided a far better standard of living for its people? OK Georges, you’ve sold me on the idea.
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