Thread by @SteB777

According to our government the UK is on course for a net biodiversity gain. The truth is very different.

"The UK is one of the world's most nature-depleted countries - in the bottom 10% globally and last among the G7 group of nations, new data shows."
bbc.co.uk/news/science-e…

This highlights the problem, not only with Boris Johnson's UK government, but governments generally, with regard to climate and ecological crisis.

They think they can address the crisis, with bluster and lies, just #blahblahblah.

What we see are just token gestures.

Governments, especially the UK government, just talk up their policy, they don't actually deliver any credible action, which could result in the big ongoing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate breakdown.
theguardian.com/science/2021/a…

When it comes to the biodiversity and general ecological crisis, the problem is much worse. There are no technological fixes for this, and the only solutions are cutting back on rampant business as usual and the obsessive pursuit of economic growth.

The current business as usual, economic growth model, just sees the natural world, natural resources, as commodities to be exploited for profit. The more economies grow, the more natural systems and resources are over-exploited. That's the relentless picture of the last 50 years.

Governments talk up "green growth", with greenwash, totally false claims that you can have rampant economic growth, and thriving biodiversity and avoid the worst of the climate crisis. Again and again, the figures and the science prove this is a lie.

The essential problem is very simple. The industrial revolution ushered in a new model of economic growth, where unfettered industrialization, over-exploiting the Earth's natural resources, meant vast profits for the wealthiest people in society and the creation of more wealth.

Those benefiting most from this rampant economic growth, the richest and most powerful people in the world, talk up economic growth lifting people out of poverty (it was their pursuit of power and wealth that put people in poverty). Yet the motivation is them getting wealthier.

Let's deal with this claim of how the pursuit of economic growth lifts people out of poverty. We will take the UK, because that is where the industrial revolution began. We'll take the period 1750 to the 1930s. Let's look at the majority of people, the working class.

If we look at the working class in 1930s Britain, we see people who can barely afford to eat, whose children are malnourished to the extent they are far smaller and shorter than the children of the upper classes. So much for lifting people out of poverty.

Only in the 1950s in Britain, 200 years after the start of the industrial revolution, do we see ordinary people becoming gradually better off. However, this is a lucky accident, not the aim of economic growth capitalism (or industrial socialism come to that).

The lucky accident that allowed ordinary people to start becoming noticeably better off in the 1950s, was the Second World War, where it was necessary to work for the common good, to avoid being defeated by Nazi Germany. The pursuit of economic growth was suspended.

Instead of just focusing on economic growth to the exclusion of all else in WW2, we saw this suspended, working for the common good, with people working together towards the common good.

Of course, there was a swing back to the economic growth model, but they could not go back to the poorest living in dire poverty. Nevertheless as time went on, the gap between rich and more started to grow again, and the increase in living standards for the poorest slowed.

We see this pattern again, where the wealth of the wealthiest in the UK has and is rapidly growing, where the living standards of the poorest have stagnated or declined. So much for trickle down. The UK government's own statistics demonstrate this.
theguardian.com/news/2019/dec/…

The reason I am delving into the social aspect, is to prove how the claim that there is an obsessive pursuit of economic growth to lift the poor out of poverty is a lie. When it does happen, it is a lucky accident, not the real motivation for the pursuit of economic growth.

It is the very rich, the most powerful people in our societies who benefit by far the most from economic growth. That statistics are crystal clear. That is why the Earth's life support systems are being systematically destroyed by the relentless pursuit of economic growth.

The motivation to maintain business as usual, and economic growth, and to prevent any change to this is primarily motivated by the wealthiest in our societies, who operate the leavers of power. They own the media and bankroll politicians.

That is why the Earth's natural support systems are being relentlessly over-exploited and destroyed, and it is the reason for the resistance to this model being changed. It is not to lift people out of poverty as claimed. That is a bare-faced lie.

@GeorgeMonbiot @GretaThunberg @JKSteinberger @ClimateHuman @KevinClimate @KateRaworth

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