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Their money and your life — the clarity of climate change and COVID-19
There are several parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, but perhaps the most disturbing is the intentional disregard of the value of human life in favor of money. This is hardly the first time since the end of WWII that money vs. lives has defined our daily lives. From the institutionalized denial of the damage from smoking tobacco, to the utter failure of the war on drugs, to the brutal promotion of addictive opiates by Big Pharma, financial gain by big corporations and wealthy individuals has defined the market based reality of modern existence. Nature does not matter unless it can be extracted, owned, and monetized.
The tradeoff between money and lives has always been a false narrative. It has never been a zero-sum game in which the one who dies with the most stuff wins. Most people know this, but they have been powerless to be different within a system that penalizes even modest attempts at transformation. Witness the anemic and largely failed Transition Movement in which communities tried to find a better way, only to fail within a global economy that will not support progressive change and new ways of producing goods and services.
The damage to the Earth System and our planet’s climate from fossil fuels is something that we have come to accept. Because we rely so…
