We need neither spectacle-seeking hipsters nor bankers in search of safe investments but for all human beings to band together to defend our right to subsist. For years now, entrenched corporate interests have ensured that U.N. meetings on climate change accomplish next to nothing. The names of host cities have become a litany of false starts: Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, Copenhagen, Cancún, Durban, Doha. This month’s meeting in New York is a prelude to a more ambitious session next year in Paris. Corporate lobbyists will be close at hand — through the mechanisms of the U.N. itself and by buying the inaction of leaders. Combating climate change means transforming an economic system based on short-term corporate profits and a political system that is all too eager to furnish them. And it all starts by taking on Wall Street. Corporate America wants to claim that it’s coming around, that at long last it is going green. Lockheed Martin, whose hardware helps make the U.S. military one of the world’s top polluters, is a sponsor of Climate Week events surrounding the United Nations summit. So is Bloomberg, the former mayor’s company. Michael Bloomberg recently garnered headlines for co-organizing a report, “Risky Business,” on climate change as a threat to corporate bottom lines. “It is our hope,” the report states, “that it becomes standard practice for the American business and investment community to factor climate change into its decision-making process.” One subway ad on behalf of the climate march asks, rhetorically, “What puts hipsters and bankers into the same boat?” What we need now, though, are neither spectacle-seeking hipsters nor bankers in search of safe investments but for all human beings to band together to defend our right to subsist. We shouldn’t have to wait for the investor class to agree; the purpose of business is to meet our economic needs not to dictate them. That’s basic democracy. The climate struggle is a chance for the commoners of this planet to show what it means to be good stewards of creation. If the Goldman Sachses of the world try to stand aloof, we need to take their crisis to them. america.aljazeera/opinions/2014/9/climate-change-marchwallstreetoccupysandy0.html#
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 01:03:41 +0000
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