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Capitalism And Climate Change Essay

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Climate change is the most serious issue humankind is facing in the 21th century. Future generations depend on our ability to make the necessary social changes, before reaching the tipping point of irreversibility, which will lead the planet into a catastrophe incompatible with life. Anthropogenic pressures on the Earth System, caused by Capitalism, have reached a scale, through the “Great Acceleration” where abrupt global environmental change can no longer be excluded. Scientists have defined nine planetary boundaries within which humanity is expected to operate safely. Transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be lethal due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental-to …show more content…

(The Ecological Rift, Foster, p.30). It is a process of dehistoricization and deresponsabilization. To abandon the critique to capitalism, when it is most needed, since its logic is the main cause of the imminent human catastrophe, is the major fault of contemporary social science, the failure to confront the historical momentum in a stubborn denial of the importance to engage critically with the reality of the environment. (The Ecological Rift, Foster, p. 31). As Professor Foster explained the core of the needed ecological revolution is in viewing the world ecologically, which involves recognizing that modern human societies are ecosystem-dependent and thus rejecting the assumption that societies are “exempt” from the forces of nature. The wrong conceptual thinking that our technology and economic system can find solutions to our problems, recalls the Midas Effect in which Gold (THE CAPITAL) becomes more important than Life (Human beings and Planet Earth), where “the logic of capital accumulation runs in direct opposition to environmental sustainability” (The Ecological Rift, Foster,

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