Climate change is industrialized karma prompting humanity to evolve uniformly equitable social behavior to survive. Can humanity unite to stop climate change?
I answer that question in the following article.
The Righteous And The Heathens Of Climate And Capitalism
12 March 2012
http://www.swans.com/library/art18/mgarci43.html
manuelgarciajr 
Drowning The Maldives
Manuel García, Jr.
22 March 2012
In a his blog entry for March 21, Louis Proyect discusses (and shows the trailer to) “The Island President,” (http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/the-island-president/) a new documentary film about Mohamed Nasheed, the ex-president of the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean.
Nasheed, “the Maldives’ Mandela,” was elected president in 2008, ushering in democratic government after a lengthy period of dictatorship, and has just been deposed by a military coup linked to the former dictator. Nasheed is an activist seeking a major reduction in the global emissions of carbon dioxide because rising sea levels caused by global warming are threatening to inundate his entire country. The coup was backed by the owners of the vacation resorts in the Maldives, which cater to the foreign tourist trade. The United States government wasted no time recognizing the coup government. Clearly, given a choice between preventing a nation’s extinction or continuing its capitalist exploitation, capitalism wins.
The situation of the Maldives is a specific example of the overall lack of cooperative global response to climate change in favor of a free-for-all of “making money,” as I described in general terms recently (http://www.swans.com/library/art18/mgarci43.html).
Setting off alarm bells about climate change is bad for business. Making tourists from industrialized nations feel guilty about causing tons of CO2 to be exhausted, per trip, from the airliners taking them to idyllic luxury vacations close to nature in Maldives resorts does not work in favor of maintaining the inflow of foreign money. Fiscal inundation trumps physical inundation as an existential threat for the prevailing mentality of capitalism.
It helps to think of capitalism as a contagious mental illness of the obsessive-compulsive type, similar to addiction, a hijacking of control over the deliberative and decision-making functions of the human brain by an alien algorithm that replaces the “soul” or humanity of the individual with an image substituting for character and used to label and frame the accumulation of material “wealth” the individual is now programmed to acquire and defend.
An effective global response to avert drastic climate change requires too broad a conversion to very utopian forms of socialism for such a response to be realistically anticipated. Basically, humanity’s many selfish, atavistic and hidebound constituencies, particularly those most rewarded by today’s system of world capitalism, will act to preserve the inertia of their ways of life, in effect choosing to maintain the economic systems they enjoy even to the point of human extinction.
Climate change may simply be “too big” for human mentality to deal with at its typical state of development today. Unable to think differently and respond, people just revert to their routines; inertia rules.
As the Maldives slowly drown, I’ll think of how like the Titanic our planetary civilization is, steaming full speed ahead into a dimly perceived future, and too cumbersome to veer from a collision course dictated by its inertia.