It is now abundantly clear that the threat to the planet. The future of humanity and survival of the mass of animal species is now both catastrophic and extremely urgent. But no one who is rightly appalled by this should be fooled by the establishment into thinking that carbon taxes or the kind of fuel taxes Macron attempted to impose are the way to go or are serious attempts to deal with the problem.
Both carbon taxes and Macron’s fuel taxes are simple attempts by the neo-liberal elites to APPEAR to be doing something while refusing to take on the real culprits behind climate change – the oil and gas and coal companies and the beef industry. Moreover, true to their neo-liberal instincts, the little they propose which is any way completely inadequate, is at the expense of ordinary people – the perfect way to alienate those ordinary people from the need to tackle climate change.
People Before Profit says don’t impose a carbon tax on working people, impose taxes and big ones, on the fossil fuel corporations and support Brid Smith’s Climate Emergency Bill to ban further licenses for fossil fuel exploration and extraction in Ireland.
Climate change is an existential crisis for humanity and dealing with it means breaking with the giant fossil fuel and motor corporations that have a vested interest in greenhouse gas emissions; it means shifting rapidly away from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy – solar, wind and tidal power; it means free and expanded public transport to end dependency on the car; it means moving away from a massive focus on beef; it means insulating houses to save energy.
This in turn means challenging the all for profit logic of capitalism in favour of a society that puts the interests of ordinary people, in Ireland and the world, first.
