What kinds of measures are you taking, personally, to prevent global warming? Do you carry a thermos so you don’t end up buying drinks in plastic bottles? Did you buy an electric car? These good deeds are meaningless. They can even cause more harm than good. Simply thinking that such actions are effective countermeasures can…
Written by
Kohei Saito
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Originally Published in
What kinds of measures are you taking, personally, to prevent global warming? Do you carry a thermos so you don’t end up buying drinks in plastic bottles? Did you buy an electric car? These good deeds are meaningless. They can even cause more harm than good. Simply thinking that such actions are effective countermeasures can prevent us from taking part in the larger actions that are actually necessary to combat climate change. They function like Catholic indulgences, allowing us to escape the pangs of our conscience via consumerism and to look away from the danger around us, allowing the forces of capital to swaddle our concerns in environmental impact statements and tuck them away beneath the form of deception known as greenwashing. To determine how to face this threat, we must trace the current climate crisis to its root cause: capitalism.
