As the World Burns: Climate Change in Trump’s America

 
When President Trump recently walked away from the Paris climate agreement, the world was outraged and appalled, as are most of the people in the U.S. Increasingly people are understanding the peril we and the planet are in as corporations plunder and poison. People can’t understand why the government refuses to switch to clean forms of energy freely supplied by nature. They want to see an end to the continued use of fossil fuels, and the dangerous and dirty forms of extraction it requires. They realize the urgency of the threat that looms above all the rest—the resulting climate change that threatens humanity and life itself.
Scientists agree that a calamity is on its way, as polar ice melts and extreme weather becomes the abnormal norm, with floods, killer heat waves, hurricanes, sea rise, raging wildfires and mass extinctions. They warn us that unless drastic change is made immediately—meaning getting off our dependence on fossil fuels—the accelerating climate change could make the planet uninhabitable for humans and many other species.
The exit from the Paris Accords will accelerate the destruction already underway. But even with the Accords the problem would not be solved:  fossil fuels would still be exploited as the main sources of energy, because the corporations that control the U.S. government make their killer profits there. And now the Trump administration is gutting the EPA and attacking the very science that could be used to solve the problem.
Whether the Paris Accords are adhered to or not, the nature of capitalism, to guarantee corporate profits or go bankrupt, has come up against the survival of humanity and life itself. The corporations have many billions invested in these dirty sources of energy. In 2012, ecologist Bill McKibben noted the $1 trillion profit made by the top five oil companies, as tens of billions of taxpayer subsidies are paid to the fossil fuel industries every year. There is little room in an economic system based on private ownership of society’s resources for changing to clean technologies, no matter what is destroyed as a consequence. But we the people can decide what kind of world we want to live in.
We don’t have to allow a small class of super-rich exploiters to imperil life on the planet for their profit! We are in the streets in the millions worldwide demanding that we clean up the environment and switch to sustainable energy. We already know how to use renewable energy sources like wind and solar, which don’t spew emissions into the atmosphere. The only thing standing in our way are these corporations—the billionaire class— that own and control the technologies.
These new technologies could give us a clean, abundant world, if corporate rule were kicked off and society could act in the best interests of all. It is up to us to organize for such a world. A cooperative economic system would guarantee this, and put these decisions into the hands of the people, who would own and benefit from the technologies that could create a safe, fulfilling, sustainable and abundant life. A first step toward such a new society would be the demand for the government to take over the energy technologies and run them in the people’s interest, not the corporations.