How Not to Talk About Climate Change (2018) Alyssa Battistoni. A leftists response to yesterday’s “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” article. Battistoni is missing the point: The “Losing Earth…” text is not written for “the people” it’s written for the political elite, to give the 1% hope and to feed their drive to act.
At one point, he [Nathaniel Rich] wonders, “if science, industry and the press could not move the government to act, then who could?” I don’t know — how about the people? They certainly seem more likely to act as a countervailing force to corporate power than corporations themselves. But “the public” enters this story only peripherally; they are either going obliviously about their mundane lives or being manipulated into a frenzy by a sensationalist media.
[…] there’s a story to tell about the 1980s and climate change all right, but it’s not this one. The story that matters is one about an ascendant neoliberalism being put into practice: about the crushing of trade unions and the loss of counters to corporate power; the insistence on market solutions to replace regulation by governments being actively starved of resources.