It’s not enough that the “rich” finance most of the welfare state’s comfort zone, they also have to allow themselves to be vilified by the left as the archevil of the world.
Can climate change be “steered away” quite easily if you only identify the alleged culprits and cash in generously?
Who is to blame for climate change? This question deserves a differentiated answer if you want to go into it without ideology. Because the world is often more complicated than some would like it to be in everyday political business. Experience teaches that overly accommodating – not to say populist – responses to social problems should be treated with caution.
Claudia Wirz is a freelance journalist and author.
This is especially true when it comes to identifying and holding accountable the alleged culprits in the face of an undesirable circumstance. Are corporations really to blame when human rights or environmental laws are violated in some countries? To take another example, is it really the speculators or the well-paid expats who are driving up rents? Or is it perhaps completely different, and are well-intentioned, but unfortunately not well-executed state interventions behind it?
In fact, in an enlightened society one should be able to assume a certain reluctance to assign blame and stereotypes that are too simple. Isn’t it the job of the education system to educate young people to be confident, self-thinking beings, capable of using their own reason and questioning political platitudes?
Shared responsibility is shaken off
However, politics is an emotional business, and the archaic subject of the scapegoat seems far from obsolete in modern societies. In addition, it is quite practical to delegate the blame for a circumstance and the associated penalty, for example in the form of a regulation or tax, to an abstract polluter. With this trick, you can easily shake off any joint responsibility that you might have acquired as a consumer, for example.
This leads back to the initial question: who is primarily to blame for climate change? And can climate change be “steered away” quite easily if you only identify those who are supposedly to blame and cash in generously?
Remote diagnosis of the SP co-president
The co-president of SP Switzerland seems to see it that way. He can – on Twitter – answer the initial question with a single word. It reads: overabundance. And his diagnosis is immediately followed by the suggested therapy: “Control, control, control.”
According to this reading, the “rich” are once again the archevil of this world. It doesn’t matter that they fund the lion’s share of the welfare state comfort zone that the left loves to boast about as if it were their own merit.
New guise for the class struggle
The SP co-president’s mini-analysis on climate change is one thing above all: an exposure. It shows that the climate movement is, to a large extent, nothing more than an attempt to wrap the dusty, old class struggle in a trendy guise. The “rich” are not only class enemies, but also climate enemies, and the goal remains overcoming capitalism.
The only question is who is going to finance all the blessings of the welfare state when all the “rich” are controlled poor one day.