This is an open letter to every news editor in the country, to drive home something which science journalists have been trying to say for years: “Climate change”, to use the tame wording that insulates us from the reality and scale of the environmental collapse coming with an unstable climate, is not a soft “environmental” story, it’s an economic one.
The water level in the glass is fast approaching the lip of the glass. According to recent UN reports, we have 12 years to bring our emissions down to zero, to avoid the glass spilling over. But recent news about rapid melting in the Arctic suggests we may have slipped over one of the big tipping points that spins us off into a completely new climate regime, unlike the stable one in which our modern civilisation evolved. It may well be beyond our control now.
The business press is most complicit of all. It largely reports only on the performance of businesses that are benefiting from using up the atmospheric space, rather than warning that the atmospheric space is limited in size and fast running out. At best, the business press is functioning as embedded journalism. At worst, it is a publicity machine for business-as-usual capitalist growth.Big corporations are some of the biggest beneficiaries. They’ve been able to privatise the profits in this unfair game, while the costs are socialised: the cost of extreme weather events unfolding globally is largely carried by the communities being hit by these record-breaking droughts, cyclones, heat waves, floods, and wildfires.
Change at that scale needs state-level regulation. But as we’ve seen in cases where governments have been called on to put regulatory chokeholds on tobacco, plastics, and sugar and fast foods, when this threatens corporate profits, the disproportionate lobbying power of big business wins out.Here’s an example from the food sector.
A direct correlation exits between CO2 ppmv and human population. The obvious solution is depopulation....