Thursday, November 06, 2008

Plus ça change...

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Yes indeed. The more things change, the more they stay the same... at least so far as 'the economy' is concerned. I don't often listen to the news, preferring to read about it later. But yesterday, American election day, I listened. I listened to President-Elect Obama's speech and - first time for ages - felt there was real hope. Then today, I made the mistake of listening to the news again. It was back to the usual tedium of how to 'grow' the economy using the same old clichés. No mention of climate change, the environment, sutainability or even the Green New Deal. No, it was back to car production, getting the consumer back into the high street, interest rates and blah blah; back to trying to get back to business as usual.

Green opportunity or TNT? Dammit, when will these people ever get it? They are totally stuck in the cramped vertical thinking of what they like to call the 'real world economy'. They're not fools, they're not stupid; just stuck. They can't see any alternative to laissez faire capitalism which has spectacularly failed. Right now, we really have the chance to dump 'business as usual', aka 'Trashing the planet with No Thought of tomorrow' or TNT, an ulimately explosive notion. Yet here, now, we have a global recession and a new American president who takes climate change and renewables seriously. Here, now, we have a chance to restructure, to dump the loony concept of eternal growth and start to build a steady-state sustainable economy which accepted that people and their business depend utterly on the biosphere. It IS the planet, stupid!John Maynard Keynes, economist (L), President-Elect Obama and Franklin D Roosevelt (R), New Deal architect. Images from Wikipedia And the planet is very sick. It needs a big dose of Franklin D Roosevelt and John Maynard Keynes' medicine to make a change actually happen. So will people who are in a position to do something open their minds to the realities of impending biosphere collapse and the notion that there could be viable alternatives to rampant consumerist capitalism? President-Elect Barack Obama could be the catalyst but the pessimist in me says that inertia, denial, greed and fear of change will ensure the TNT approach will win out. I earnestly hope I'm wrong.

6 comments:

Fireseed said...

Before you start getting too excited about the new head honcho...

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php

Matthew Tripp said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Richgail said...

Greetings,

I'm a video journalist and I recently did a story on the growing "green" movement among the youth.

Below is a link to that story. Please feel free to forward it to your community.

Thanks,
Richgail

Here's the link:

http://www.sanfranciscoiam.com/videos/c898d779b574

Hundreds of teens from the Bay Area ditched their video games at home and headed to the biggest green festival in the nation. The festival was held in San Francisco and there the kids learned AND taught one another about climate change green jobs, they even featured a bike that can generate electricity from human energy. Richgail Enriquez reports.

Anonymous said...

Sorry to post here but ddint know your email.

Thought you may like to mention my project, MySuperAd.com

I am creating an independent Super Bowl commercial to promote eco-friendly products.

Tim Weller said...

Well done, Bry. An excellent piece that I wholeheartedly agree with. Tim Weller

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