Nelioberalism has led us individually to fight climate change

Enough of this obsession than how many angels live. Start collectively to oppose corporate power.

Would you advise someone to shake the towels in a burnt house? Or bring insect-killers into a gunfight? However, the advice we hear about climate change almost cannot be synchronized with the nature of the crisis.

E-mail in my box last week offered me thirty suggestions to green my office space: use reusable pencils, paint bright colors, don't use the elevator.

Returning home, I walked down stairs to increase my frustration, and I could continue with other options: changing electric pots, buying healthy eco equipment, putting a solar panel on my roof.

And a study that was released Thursday claimed to have discovered the best way, the only way, to fight climate change.

These incentives for individual action in corporate advertising, textbooks and environmental group campaigns, especially in the west, seem as natural as the air we breathe. But we could hardly have been better served.

While we are busy greening our environment, fossil fuels corporations are making these efforts trivial. The depletion of carbon emissions since 1988? Only a hundred companies are responsible for the amazing 71 percent. You worry about those pencils or solar panels; They keep burning the planet.

The freedom of these corporations to pollute and obsession with a poor lifestyle concentration is no coincidence. It is the result of an ideological struggle, held over the past 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. With remarkable success, it is not too late to return it.

The political project of neoliberalism, established by Thatcher and Reagan, has followed two main objectives. The first has been to destroy any obstacle to exercising irresponsible private power. The second to freeze them in the exercise of any public democratic will.

Its policies of the brand ʹmed merchants of privatisation, tax removal and free trade agreements: these have liberalised corporations to collect huge profits and address the earth's atmosphere as a waste water depot, also to undermine our ability through state instruments to plan our collective well-being.

Everything that looks like a collective control over corporate power has become the object of elite: lobbiing and through corporate donations, attacking democracies, preventing green policies, and on the other hand maintaining fossil subsidies of running fuel; and association rights like unions, the most effective tool for workers to exercise power together, but often it happened to be printed and reduced whenever possible.

The moment climate change calls for unprecedented collective answers, neoliberal ideology stays on the street. That's why, if we want to slow down emissions, we'll have to overcome all the voices of the free market: take the railways and power services back under public control; fix corporations to contain fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay massive investments in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy so that solar panels can be on every roof of any house, not just those who can afford it.

Neoliberalism has not ensured that this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it unimaginable culturally. His celebration of competitive self-interest and hyperdividualism, his stigmatism for compassion and solidarity, has weakened our collective ties. It has spread, as an internal anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thattcher preached: “There is nothing like society”.

Studies show that people who grew up in this era have become more individualistic and consumer. Consumed in a culture that tells us to think of ourselves as consumer, not as citizens, as self-safe instead of interdependent, is it a wonder that we deal with a systematic issue by making individual efforts inefficient? We're all Thatcher's kids.

Even before the arrival of neoliberalism, capitalist economics had flourished among people who believed that by being hit by the structural problems of a user's system of poverty, unemployment, poor health, lack of fulfillment this was actually an individual failure.

Neoliberalism has taken this inner self-pity and has troubled it. This shows that you should not feel just guilt and shame if you cannot provide a good job, you are deeply indebted, and you are too overburdened to have time for friends. You are also responsible for carrying the burden of potential ecological collapse.

Of course, we need people who reduce consumption and bring alternative innovations for carbon reduction, construction of sustainable farms, invention of battery storage, spread of zero-foot methods. But individual elections will be counted more when the economic system can provide practical opportunities for the environment, for all, not just for some rich people without blemish.

If public transportation is not available, people would travel by car. If local organic food is too expensive, they will not choose from super-market chains with fuel. If cheap goods are produced indefinitely, they will buy and buy. That's what has the opposite effect and it's for neoliberalism: to persuade us to address climate change through our pocket rather than through power and policy.

Eco-consuming may be able to atone for your guilt. But, only massive movements have the power to change climate crisis trajector. This calls for our first mental rest from the magic cast by neoliberalism: Stop thinking as individuals.

The good news is that people's impulse to unite is incompatible and collective imagination is already making a political return. The climate justice movement is blocking oil pipelines, forcing the sale of trillion dollars and gaining support for economies with 100% clean energy in cities and states around the world. New ties are being withdrawn Black Lives Mather, immigrants and local rights, and wars for better wages. On the heels of such moves, political parties finally appear ready to challenge neoliberal dogma.

No one more than Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Manifest expressed a re-uniting project to address climate change: publicly reviewing the economy and insisting that corporate oligarchs can no longer continue. The notion that the rich should pay their part to finance this transformation was considered ridiculous by the political and media class. Millions disagreed. The society, said to have left, is now returned with a vengeance.

So grow some carrots and ride a bicycle: that can make you happier and healthier. But it's time to stop obsession with the way we live personally and start collectively by taking corporate power.

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