By Simon Leufstedt
Thursday, 21 February, 2008

About the Author

Simon Leufstedt is the editor of Green Blog. Simon has previously studied Global Environmental Justice and is currently studying Human Ecology and Political Science at Lund University in Sweden. Simon is also blogging over at the Swedish 350 website and working with the Swedish TckTckTck organisation. You can follow Simon on Twitter.

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It’s capitalism or a habitable planet – you can’t have both

Robert Newman, a British stand-up comedian, author and political activist, urges for a “major” social political change to combat global warming. Newman says that “our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature.” And he believes that “the only response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change.”

There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won’t do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth’s life-support systems within the present economic system.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.

Read the whole article over at the Guardian.

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He's about right too. We need to move away from the large scale, to small scale. Small scale local renewable power generation, locally produced food, it's all got to come down a number of gears from where it is now.

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