The Republican and Democratic parties - owned and operated by the world’s largest corporations and most powerful financial institutions - will not address the real causes of looming climate disaster, says American writer and political activist Mickey Z.
The author of Occupy This Book and Occupy These Photos made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Sunday while commenting on a report which says “Republicans are running out of ways to undermine the Obama administration's commitments as part of the Paris climate agreement.”
“In this single sentence, we are faced with four blatant lies worth examining,” said Mickey Z.
“First and least important is that Republicans are actually ‘running out of ways to undermine,’ but again, that’s the least of our concerns. The next lie relates to the ‘Obama administration's commitments.’ In reality the only way to get the US and China to participate was to make the agreement non-binding. Both countries insisted on this. Failing to live up to the meager goals of this agreement will result in exactly zero consequences,” he added.
“Next, let’s look at these two words: ‘climate agreement.’ While, of course, nothing ‘agreed’ upon goes into effect for another four-plus years, it’s crucial to note some of what’s not in this 'climate' agreement. The list is long and I urge listeners to do the work for themselves. There’s a good article in the New Yorker to get you started. For now, I’ll point out two glaring weaknesses: it doesn’t deal with coal - one of the biggest sources of man-made carbon emissions - and it doesn’t include a tax on carbon. Even within the world of corporate greenwashing, this is pathetic,” the activist stated.
“The fourth and most important lie is the insinuation that Republicans are irrational climate killers and Democrats are waging a desperate war to save the eco-system. Both parties are owned and operated by the world’s largest corporations and most powerful financial institutions. They are committed to maintaining the status quo and, at most, may quibble over which tweaks they’ll allow. Both parties vehemently defend a capitalist system based - by definition - on the relentless consumption of finite resources,” the analyst pointed out.
“The first step towards challenging this paradigm is to train ourselves to decode their propaganda and thus recognize the scope and depth of the necrophilic system we must bring down,” concluded Mickey Z.
Representatives of 195 countries reached the climate accord on December 12 following two weeks of negotiations in a Paris suburb that will commit both rich and poor nations to dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a bid to arrest global warming.
Under the deal, rich countries, which are accused of causing global warming, will provide billions of dollars to help poor nations cope with the transition to a greener economy.
US President Barack Obama called the Paris climate agreement “strong” and “historic,” and said it marks "a turning point for the world."
"The Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis," Obama said. "It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way.”
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