For a while, I've noticed that I wasn't retaining as much as I would like to when reading a book. To try to change this, I'm going to write a few sentences summarising every chapter I read.
If it doesn't help my memory, at least I'll have a place to go back to as a reminder.
Les riches contre la planète - Monique Pinçon-Charlot
- Rich people are the ones driving the climate crisis. They decide what we do with our resources because they control them. Money and by extension capitalism has become god-like and universal. The word to describe our current period shouldn't be "Anthropocene" but "Capitalocene" as to highlight how capitalism is having more impact on our era than each human at the same level.
- Rich people, since they control the cultural and production means, use them to get richer. They make sure to divide the interconnected problems in silos (ice melting, diseases spreading, draughts) so regular people can't grasp the full picture. The idea of a green transition is an unrealistic diversion since we currently have no truly decarbonated source of energy. The goal of the "transition" is to avoid confronting the need for social and organisational change so that rich people can continue exploiting their privileges. The "transition" is simply a rebranding of capital.
- A69 motorway is an example of the immoderation of capitalism and how far the oligarchy is willing to go to protect their interests.
A lot more money was put in the project (and hidden by "montages economiques") so that the state won't be able to buy back the road. This way it has to stay private capital and the tolls go to the rich people owning the road and not back to finance the state.
Naturally people want to protest but since oligarchs are the ones in power, they can crack down hard on the protesters using the police that is under their control.
- Carbon compensation credits are a "scam". First of, the point of them is not to reduce the carbon big polluters emit, but simply to offset it in forests and others as a way to appear green when you are in fact polluting a lot.
Plus, most of these credits are "ghost credits", since the persons responsible for giving away these credits are the same as those who profit from them (think banks and big companies). Therefore, they don't play by the rules and they use the system to their advantage.
Same goes for pesticides, only the declared substance is important for regulation, not the specifics. So if there is lead, arsenic or other dangerous chemicals, it's not taken into consideration. Again, those in charge of applying the regulation are the same ones that make it and profit from it so it's basically null and only there to look good.
- The movie Don't look up, is bringing an external threat. This makes it so that humans have no responsibility in the catastrophe and doesn't question the liberal capitalist system. It still had a positive effect in making people more aware.
- The rich, aware that their way of life will someday make other people rebel or that climate change will render many places unliveable have already started buying land and building bunkers to hide into when things go sour. She cites examples such as Patagonia, Nez Zealand or private islands.
- France allowed chlordecone to be used for 20+ years despite knowing it is a poisonous pesticide. It was particularly used in overseas territories and when people ask for accountability to the state for having knowingly mad them sick, the law and judges determine that it's prescribed cause too old. The climate crisis and social problems are undisociable from colonisation because capitalism means exploitation of resources but also of humans.
