The latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report has been out for a while (August 2021), and scientists are continuing to comment on it (the working group portion came out in February). In summary, limiting warming to 1.5C (probably the threshold for keeping advanced civilization from collapsing) requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 (only 3 years from now!) at the latest and be reduced by 43% by 2030 and, furthermore, we are on track for temperature increases of 2 to 4C which will likely kill all human life. We are fully on-track for an unlivable world.
You may recall that one of Joe Biden’s talking points to the donor class during
the election was that, “nothing will fundamentally change.” Nothing fundamentally changing means the end of the human species. Not coincidentally, Columbia just elected Barbara Buffaloe as mayor. One of her first acts as mayor-elect was to legitimize right-wing talk radio by being all chummy with them. When they asked why “conservatives” shouldn’t be terrified of her (because she is a “progressive”) acting as mayor, her big talking point was that during her time as the head of Columbia’s sustainability office, nothing fundamentally changed.
The function of progressive liberalism is not progress; rather, it is to maintain control of society by near-right (capitalist) forces by holding back change from both the left and the far right. Those self-described “progressives” in the Democratic party have been very clear that they “are capitalist”, and Democratic party voters like that. They think a regulated capitalism is the best possible world (with regulation being the method they use to “perfect” capitalism) because they’ve somehow lost the ability to imagine a better world. If you take the meaning of the word conservative literally, “liberal progressives” are the conservatives. Self-described conservatives are something else entirely. Both groups believe in the inherent evil of human beings — they just have different ideas about how you solve this problem.
(It is true that there is a small minority of people involved with Democratic party politics that call themselves progressive but mean it in a very different way that might be centrism or even near-left.)
Mainstream Democrats do not believe in climate change. I know that’s a confusing thing to say, but hear me out. Climate change is real regardless of whether you believe in it or not, but if the climate change you believe in bears little resemblance to the real climate change, do you really believe in climate change? You believe in something entirely different that resembles climate change, but is fictitious. Real climate change is a world-ending force, and because we waited so long to act, it can now only be mitigated through sacrifice; it can no longer be solved. On the other hand, pretend climate change can be solved by sorting your refuse into garbage for the landfill and recyclables, buying an electric car, smart investment strategies, and a clever bumper sticker. This is very similar to how conservatives believe in climate change; most of them admit it exists, but say it is insignificant (and also natural, so therefore non-lethal).
But to get back to the IPCC report — the IPCC is a conservative body. It is a product of capitalism and makes predictions that are optimistic relative to what the data indicate. The IPCC is not run by lizard people, but rather capital-controlled governments, capital-dependent scientists, and reviewers that are frequently direct representatives for capital. All that’s true and yet the excuse for why we don’t take serious action against climate change is invariably “the economy”. In essence, there’s a growing understanding among the wealthy that humanity is screwed, but they still don’t want any of the possible solutions to affect their bottom line — and that’s partially because they’ve decided that their solution for climate change is to purchase really nice bunkers. The wealthy are trying to outsource the solution to you — the taxpayer — and if they can’t make that happen, they’re just going to go hide in a hole.
We have a whole series of posts about climate change that you can read if you’d like to better understand this perspective:
This Discontinuity 1: Current Conditions
This Discontinuity 2: Worldviews
This Discontinutiy 3: Strategy
Nothing Will Fundamentally Change, and Then Humanity Will Die