Environmental destruction is a looming existential threat to humanity with temperatures on track to break through the 1.5 degree temperature barrier sometime in the 2030s. The past few decades have brought an increase in the frequency of natural disasters like floods, severe storms, cyclones, heat waves, droughts and bushfires. Climate change is bad enough, but it’s just one among many interacting environmental threats we face, from mass extinctions to micro-plastics and a global water crisis.
We’re told the people in power have a plan to avert climate catastrophe with emission targets, market mechanisms and green capitalism. All the while fossil fuel consumption grows amidst a frenzy of gas and oil profits, and alongside increasing natural disasters.
This session will explore how capitalism and its competitive drive for profit is leading to environmental destruction and what the alternative is.