There is going to have to be a shift to major environmental planning and economic planning. It is going to profoundly affect what's possible and what's not. There's going to have to be more attention to direct physical planning of resources and production, and direct regulation and control. There's going to be a major change in economics, and when it comes, it may well be faster and more encompassing than might be imagined in these days of stagnant neo-liberalism.
This won't mean the class struggle is over, nor that real planning and regulation, being different from the current neo-liberalism, will be pro- people in itself. On the contrary, the class struggle will break out on an extensive scale. It can and must be as severe over the nature of planning, and what is planned, as it can be against private capitalism. Without this struggle, one can hardly imagine a successful struggle for socialism developing.
The outcome of the 2011 UN climate summit at Durban shows that the bourgeoisie is still shrugging the matter off, and regarding it as another sphere for futile market measures. But sooner or later a great panic will engulf the world on this issue.
-- Joseph Green
Somebody Somebody:
>
> I agree with Carrol that the real issue is how the change in climate
> impacts human civilization. My own opinion is that a much more
> technologically advanced civilization (capitalist or otherwise) in the
> late 21st and 22nd centuries will have to devote significant resources
> into coping with climate change, but that the very fact society will be
> so much more productive will mean that mortality from average
> temperature increases will be slight. To wit, heat waves kill in
> industrialized countries largely to the extent that people don't have
> air conditioning. If they do, and I wager by the end of the century
> almost everyone will in warm parts of the world, then few will die from
> extreme heat.
Gar Lipow wrote:
This is flat out wrong. First we are likely to see more like a 6 degree than a 3 degree increase. But regardless, one of the things you are ignoring is how this will affect our ability to grown food. We are looking not only at a changed climate, but an unstable climate, more droughts, more floods, more storms, more heat waves, more cold waves.
..............
Normally I avoid dwelling on this privately or publicly. it is depressing, and I think not good politics. But when I see stuff like what SS is saying it reminds me that most people don't understand how fucking serious this is, and i guess it is worth putting forth a reminder. Also this idea that we can put costs on the next generation because they will be richer is nonsense. I mean maybe they will, but for most of history the next generation was NOT richer than the one before. Recent history where each generation is richer than the one before is an exception and there are no fucking guarantees that it will continue. (And has never applied to everyone in any case.) Continuing to shit where we eat on a societal level is one guarantee that this exception won't continue. "We'll be Ok cause most people will have air conditioning" is shallow and silly in addition to being wrong.
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