How the effects of neoliberal capitalism and environmental degradation are to blame for the floods more than anything else

Ladies and gentlemen, the story of severe flooding in the South West (and to some extent the South East) has been occuring for weeks now, with the consequences of thousands of people evacuated, railway lines being rendered inoperable, and weakened flood defences unable to deal with the waves, and the latest news item of Somerset man Sam Notaro's home about to go under despite his best efforts at creating a flood defence of mud and clay around it.

Despite this, the coalition are as usual failing to respond to the UK's environmental needs and are still on course to do more damage, thanks to their failure to even sack Owen Paterson, the worst Environment Secretary Britain has ever known.

It is once again clear that the neoliberal capitalist system is to blame for allowing these floods to cause so much damage, as prominent left-wing activist Lindsey German pointed out earlier. The cuts and damage to important infrastructure (via privatisations and other methods) in the UK that have occurred in the last 30 years have left our nation unable to defend itself properly against natural disasters-this is not just limited to floods, but also windstorms (and dangerous tremors if fracking still goes ahead in the UK), which are becoming increasingly more common as artificial climate change is still progressing. More importantly, this system is too focused on growth and profit to be able to protect our natural world, even if it wished to. 

Britain is not the only vulnerable nation here-many other nations in Europe are threatened by the consequences and aftereffects of artificial climate change and temperature rises, and neoliberalism's failure to deal with this problem. I will once again say that for our sake and our earth's sake, a green and socialist alternative is there, and we need it now more than ever.

Alan.



 

Comments

  1. Laurence13 February 2014 at 00:39

    Natural disasters like this really do highlight the inability to create a sustainable ecologically sound economy which remains capitalist.

    A big contradiction came up at PMQ's today. Cameron completely failed to address Caroline's assertion that man-made climate change was going to increase extreme weather events in the future. Whilst Caroline was highlighting that preventative action was needed in the form of tackling the root cause (ecological degradation), Cameron harped on about taking "preventative" action by enforcing flood defences etc. (which is really NOT preventative as it is dealing with the symptom not the cause).

    To seal the deal, to show how incoherent the governments agenda is, he responded to a later question about high energy costs for the public by boasting about how he had CUT GREEN TAXES!

    The ecosocialist response of nationalizing, socialising, expropriating the energy companies and forcing investment in renewables on the other hand deals with the issue of social AND ecological needs, whilst dumping the cancerous "need" of capital accumulation!

    Keep up the posts Alan, I enjoy reading them. Cheers.

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