Since the first compelling reports of human-caused climate change in the early 1990s, the general public, our elected officials, and world leaders have refused to believe the overwhelming scientific evidence for it, and the end result has been that there has been no significant effort to confront it. The Kyoto Protocol agreement was a failure, as were the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009 and other attempts to get worldwide cooperation to address the global challenge. Fast forward to today and we find that 7/10 people now think that climate change is a real threat, largely because they no longer need to take the word of the scientists because they can see the effects all around them, through their window, and on the news, with more and more destructive and intense weather events causing havoc in their backyard and all around the planet. The trouble is, that as the scientists had warned us, every year we don't take action means that it will be harder to fix later, and we have done nothing but increase our emissions for nearly 3 decades since being aware of it.
There are some signs today that world leaders are taking climate change more seriously and the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris is the world's new hope for significant change. However, it is highly unlikely that a truly united effort including all the world's worst polluters will come to a tangible agreement, let alone follow through with that agreement. The crux of the climate change matter is that under capitalism there are always going to be two opposing forces; 1) the demand for economic growth, and 2) the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.
Making the necessary changes globally with an ever-increasing human population, and an ever-increasing demand for consumption of natural resources, with an ever-increasing need to build infrastructure and find energy to support that demand, within a system which cares only about the accumulation of wealth, ROI, and the bottom line, with an ever-decreasing window of time to avert disaster, is simply IMPOSSIBLE! No government official or elected leader is ever going to come out and denounce economic growth, they just tell us how well our business leaders are rising to the challenge and that our innovators are finding new ways to build the green economy to save us. It's just too little, too late, and even if we had ubiquitous wind turbines and solar panels operating all around the world, it will still not solve our out-of-control population problem, and our endless consumption of natural resources.
The only way we can plausibly get out of this unbelievable looming disaster is to face the fact that capitalism has to come to an end. Arguably it has served us well for over 50 years but even John Maynard Keynes, the father of modern day capitalism knew that it was mathematically impossible to have continual economic growth indefinitely. The naysayers will shout "communism" and argue that there is no alternative, but for the first time in human history we have the ability to use our technology to build a viable system to replace capitalism, one which gives a better life for all people while preserving our planet for future generations to come. Nutopia is a new concept that allows us to slam on the brakes, reverse the damage we have done, and then properly manage our shared resources in a sustainable way going forward.
