Capitalism Is The Arsonist Lighting The Fires Now Burning Down The Planet.

The night before last, I forgot to close my window. So when I woke yesterday morning, my lungs felt as if they had smoked 2 packs of filterless Camel cigarettes. It got me worried that my lung disease had suddenly worsened. It always gives me a panic when I sense my lungs are labouring to breathe because my disease is progressive. It's my preference to take the slowest route to the burial ground.

Neoliberalism, however, has other plans for me, and many of you when you consider how much its economic policies have accelerated Climate Change. Yesterday morning, It didn't take me long to know why my lungs were irritated just from sleeping. Once I looked at the sky outside washed in a sepia-tone haze; it was evident the smoke from wildfires raging 2000 km away had blown on the winds into my city, and most everywhere else in Canada, much of the USA as well as some areas of Europe.

Photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash

In Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba- forests the size of small countries burn with the intensity of doomsday. Wildfires are normal and healthy occurrences- but these conflagrations are not. Before neoliberalism was allowed to run amok, they were a once-in-a-generation occurrence.

Now, it's a seasonal happening and is the consequence of dystopian climate change despite politicians' habitual spin that careless smoking or malevolent arsonists are the prime culprits of annual billion-dollar insurance claims for the damages caused by these infernos.

Over the last few years, the world has experienced floods, hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, heat waves, ocean temperature increases, and polar ice melts. These events are not the smoking gun proving climate change. They are the environment's murdered body killed by capitalism because it is an ideology that needs, like any pyramid scheme, perpetual growth which this planet can not sustain.

Despite us knowing these "natural disasters" portend humanity’s destruction, politicians and the corporate news media dismiss our anxiety about the planet's well being as either unreal or something that can be easily fixed by technology.

Journalists, politicians and anyone else who has skin in the “renewables game" attempt to make us believe that carbon offsets and cars powered by batteries made from the rarest of earth's minerals will allow western society to continue its pursuit of conspicuous consumption based upon an individual's credit score.

It’s madness how democracy resigned itself to ineffectiveness by allowing a few million people to have the riches of Croesus, which is used to barbarically lord over the other 8 billion human beings that inhabit the earth. Us versus them comprises much from Shakespeare’s line in Lear-” as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us, for their sport.”

Even the pretence, politicians once had about mitigating climate change with sound bites has faded because our undeclared war with China takes precedence. Starmer repeatedly breaks his government's Green Pledges, whilst his Energy Secretary Ed Miliband bends his knee to the PM. For Miliband having a minister's limousine holds more sway than his integrity.

Trump in America cries "Drill Baby Drill," and its not hyperbole. Trump has approved a historic amount of new natural gas and oil drilling permits through the nation's national parks, as well as much of the federal territory held in Alaska.

And in Canada where wildfires now burn with an end of the world intensity, Prime Minister Mark Carney commits to turn Canada into an energy superpower. He is going to do it with oil extracted from tar sands and strip mining for precious rare earth minerals. It is all to make the 1% wealthier on feeding us today's opium for the masses- technological hardware, which delivers us endless diversion, from the bleakness of our existence. The press, however, greets Carney's pipelines, oil extraction and precious mineral digs as a nation-building exercise rather than the last plunder by billionaires before Gotterdammerung arrives. I just hope I can keep breathing until I hear the sound of tumbrils rumbling past my open window.

Your support keeps me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. Your subscriptions are crucial to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost-of-living crisis times. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it is all good too because we are in the same boat.

For the last 18 months, I've pieced together my Dad's Green and Pleasant Land, which was unfinished at the time of his death. It's done apart for some minor adjustments that are required. It covers his life from 1923 to July 1945 concluding with Labour winning the General election.

Like my Dad's 5 other books written during those last years of life, The Green and Pleasant Land is an exploration of his generation during the eras before and after the creation of the Welfare State. The last chapter excerpt will drop this week.