I’m still reacting to the Forbes article on Greta Thunberg. In its view the Australian and US Right is completely innocent and rational. They would help fight climate change if the Left could avoid making Ecological Destruction a political matter.

I think this is basically wrong headed. It is also a political justifcation for inaction. It does not diminish the politics of the situation.

The reality is that a solution to the problem will be political. This cannot be avoided. It certainly cannot be avoided by politicising the recognition of a problem. In the UK, the various sides of politics have managed to find a politicaly acceptable solution to energy emissions. It may not be perfect, and more is needed, but it exists. People on the right in the UK are not all pretending that recognition of ongoing ecological destruction is a socialist plot to destroy capitalism, or whatever.

Besides which, many people who object to ecological destruction are not trying to pull down capitalism, and not trying to challenge real conservative values, whatever they are.

I, for one, don’t see the possibility of capitalism, and its sidekick of developmentalism, being wound down, in any kind of deliberative non-dangerous way, in the time frames available. This is just not feasible, however desirable it might be. I do expect that capitalism and developmentalism will collapse, along with almost everything else after it has achieved a certain point of destructiveness. This point may already be passed. In which case we will have to learn to flourish amidst the ruins of capitalism.

The point is that I, and many others, are more than happy for some form of capitalism to be preserved, if it can preserve the rest of us, but I don’t see any plan for this happening – at least partly because of the Right’s refusal to engage.