Paul Mason: Post Capitalism A Guide to our Future

Paul Mason: Postcapitalism - A Guide to our Future

Chapter 9: The Rational Case for Panic

This first part of this chapter discusses the direct correlation between economics (or more specifically “the market”) and climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or from here on referred to as the IPCC (an organization working with the support of the United Nations) has stated in their fifth report (published in 2013) that the planet is unequivocally warming. Furthermore, the IPCC is confident that this is primarily caused by human beings using carbon to fuel economic growth.

For the past four years, even though the world has not agreed on a method for preventing dangerous climate change, the world has agreed on a target of reducing global warming to an average temperature of 2°C (3.6°F) above the pre-industrial level.

In Paul Mason’s book: Postcapitalism: a Guide to our Future, he reports that to remain under the two-degree global warming target “we – as a global population – must burn no more than 886 billion tonnes of carbon between the years 2000 and 2049 (according to the International Energy Agency). But the global oil and gas companies have declared the existence of 2.8 trillion tonnes of carbon reserves, and their shares are valued as if those reserves are burnable.”

Mason goes on to explain that with the huge amount of money invested in fossil fuels by private companies and corporations, it is not in our current interests, or rather the “Global Elite’s” interests to decrease our dependency on these limited resources. He arrives at this conclusion by suggesting that if people actually believed we would be reducing the amount of carbon we are burning, and achieve the 2 degrees’ target, the stock market valuation for the top 200 carbon burners would not accumulate to an astronomical $4 trillion in total.

Furthermore, Mason reports that in January 2014, John Aston the British Government’s special representative on Climate Change quoted “the market left to itself will not reconfigure the energy system and transform the economy within a generation”.

Mason suggest that with the energy industry owned by private corporations, no real change is going to be accomplished, or certainly not enough to meet our Climate Change initiatives.