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Capital Blight – Dealing in Doubt, Austerity, and Lung Cancer

By x344543 - September 19, 2013

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The venerable environmental organization Greenpeace has fired a broadside at the science denial wing of the capitalist class with a scathing new report, Dealing in Doubt. This 67 page document argues, convincingly, that all of the claims that global warming is not caused by human activity are manufactured pseudoscience, and furthermore, those responsible are all linked to the fossil fuel industry, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the Koch Brothers. Much of this has happened under the cover of a front group known as “the Heartland Institute”.

The working class (and the broader “99%”) should care a great deal about this report, because (although Greenpeace doesn’t come out and say it) the very same interests that are going to great lengths to deny that climate change is happening at an accelerated pace due to (capitalist) human activity are the very same that are also pushing the broader capitalist class in general to engage in increased class warfare, which includes stepped up austerity measures, union busting, statist repression, and the transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1%. Likewise, the same forces attempting to spread pseudoscientific nonsense about global warming either mot existing or being the result of “natural causes” are those who tried for years to obscure the truth about the links between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.

The key players in this unholy cadre (other than the aforementioned forces) include a veritable who’s who of right wing and so-called “libertarian” (read market fundamentalist) think tanks, and yes, the Joseph Coors founded Heritage Foundation (whose original purpose was to destroy private sector unionism in the United States) is one of the big contributors to these efforts.

And why wouldn’t the fossil fuel industry do everything in their power to try and cover up the truth? Hundreds of trillions of dollars (U.S.) are at stake here. Already the CO2 concentrations of the Earth’s atmosphere has surpassed 400 ppm—well beyond the upper threshold that would keep the average surface temperature from rising 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. In order to even have a snowball’s chance in (the coming) hell (that is to be) of averting utter climate catastrophe, at least 70% of the known fossil fuel reserves will have to remain unextracted. These will therefore become “stranded assets” and will result in a “carbon bubble” for the capitalist class, resulting in major economic upheaval that will make the housing and stock market bubbles seem tame by comparison.

Sure enough, within days of Greenpeace having released the report, the Heartland Institute was at it again, trying like mad to claim that “the emperor’s new clothes” did exist and climate change didn’t. The folks at Polluter Watch were able to quickly counter the propaganda.

If there are any doubts that climate change is a class issue, Greenpeace’s report should dispel all of them.

The Fine Print I:

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The Fine Print II:

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