Obama Senior Adviser Blames Conservatives For Governments’ Inability To Fight Climate Change

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Capitalism is an economic process that utilizes the sale of resources in the form of property to allow an individual to peacefully acquire wealth. This premise goes against the very nature of Collectivist Sustainability and according to a new report released by a Progressive think tank in Washington D.C., Capitalism must be abolished in order to save the planet:

WASHINGTON, May 2 2014 (IPS) – It is time to craft new politics and economic policies to address the sustainability crisis, according to the latest edition of a flagship report by the Worldwatch Institute, a think tank here.

The global community has delayed addressing the issues associated with rapid climate change and environmental degradation for too long, according to the 294-page report, “Governing for Sustainability”.

And it is this failure in governance that has resulted in the most alarming environmental challenges that we face today, the institute warns, from water shortages to climate change.

The report, which marks the Worldwatch Institute’s 40th anniversary, highlights the challenges imposed by the existing economic and political order. For instance, it criticises neoliberalism for undermining democratic processes by granting a strong political voice to corporations, whose profit-maximising nature traditionally takes little account of environmental health and sustainability.

“The unrestrained flow of money into the political process essentially undermines democracy,” Michael Renner, co-director of the report, told IPS.

“We need to rethink many of our basic economic assumptions and mechanisms, and aim not only for a better and wiser distribution of resources, but also a better sharing of available work. This can’t be accomplished via conventional forms of capitalism.”

….Meanwhile, with little agreement on what global steps should be taken to address climate change, it is perhaps not surprising that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is now at an all-time high. In fact, over the past decade, carbon dioxide emissions have steadily increased at around 2.7 percent annually – in the process, tripling the carbon emission rate from the previous decade.

Such statistics reinforce the sense that only a drastic change in the global economic and political governance will be able to change course.

“There is a chance we can prevent the worst disruption in climate change, as well as other sustainability challenges such as erosion or fresh water access. But these need to be addressed now,” Tom Prugh, another co-director of the report, told IPS. “The more we delay, the more irreversible our imprint on the environment will be.”

Whose fault is it, according to a Senior Adviser to President Obama, for governments’ lack of ability or power to save the planet from Global Warming? Conservative, small government types of course:

Many other observers have connected these delays directly to a political and economic ineffectiveness brought about purposefully over the past several decades.

“Long before the climate crisis was the greatest market failure the world has ever seen, it was a massive political and governmental failure,” David Orr, a professor of environmental studies and an adviser to President Barack Obama, at Oberlin College, told IPS.

According to Orr, the U.S. and U.K. administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, buttressed by conservative economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, strongly undermined the role of the government. The effect was particularly potent in those parts of the government dedicated to public welfare, health, education and environment.

“The public capacity to solve public problems has diminished sharply,” Orr says, “and the power of the private sector, banks, financial institutions and corporations has risen.”

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