This Changes Everything

[...] over the past four decades corporate interests have systematically exploited these various forms of crisis [economic meltdowns; natural disasters; terrorist attacks; and wars] to ram through policies that enrich a small elite – by lifting regulations, cutting social spending, and forcing large-scale privatisations of the public sphere. They have also been the excuse for extreme crackdowns on civil liberties and chilling human rights violations.

We will need comprehensive policies and programs that make low-carbon choices easy and convenient for everyone. Most of all, these policies need to be fair, so that the people already struggling to cover the basics are not being asked to make additional sacrifices to offset the excess consumption of the rich. That means cheap public transit and clean light rail accessible to all; affordable energy-efficient housing along those transit lines; cities planned for high-density living; bike lanes in which riders aren’t asked to risk their lives to get to work; land management that discourages sprawl and encourages local, low-energy forms of agriculture; urban design that clusters essential services like schools and health care along transit routes and in pedestrian-friendly areas; programs that require manufacturers to be responsible for the electronic waste they produce, and to radically reduce built-in redundancies and obsolescences.

We did not create it [planet Earth]; it created – and sustains – us. The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.