naomi klein gave a very important speech at unifor about a year ago, and i was ecstatic when i heard it because she articulated exactly what i've been saying about this for years. it's nice to see that jill realized it's importance, as well. trying to be "bipartisan" about climate change is a waste of time - there is a bipartisan consensus, and it's that dealing with it sounds expensive. if you want to change something, forget about building consensus in washington. that doesn't work. you have to bring in the whole machinery of worker's politics, and you have to be willing to fight those that will reject those politics. what defines our social relations within capitalism is conflict, not consensus. we have to start telling the hippies to fuck off.

the status quo provides us with two ways to change things. first, we can pass regulatory laws. now, we're consistently bombarded with messaging that regulation is tyrannical, but worse is that the regulatory bodies inevitably end up controlled by industry. so, that leads us down the garden path to the elite's preferred method of change: markets. the elite prefers this method because the only change that markets are capable of producing is increased class stratification.

jill is being careful with her language, but what she's calling for is worker ownership of production. and, she's right. naomi was right. i'm right. there is no way the government will ever work against the corporate lobbies to impose substantial sanctions or provide serious incentives. rather, government will continue to work in the interests of capital - and dirty energy - so long as government exists. so, that rules out using both regulation and markets.

this is the option the status quo declines to inform us of, and it's the only way forward. we're not going to elect a saviour that will fix the issue with centralized government policy. we're not going to solve the issue with green toilet paper, or subsidies for clean energy. we have to take over the factories and convert them. we have to take over the oil fields and shut them down.

...and we have to get over our programming that teaches us to work within a system that was constructed to be useless and stop pretending there's another answer.