Erik Lindberg of Transition Milwaukee recently posted a good deconstruction of several common “progressive” fallacies around climate change. Climate change is a systemic problem created by our high consumption way of life, and can’t be solved while maintaining that way of life. Liberals and progressives often blame Republicans or conservatives for getting in the way of solutions, but the solutions on the table are ridiculously inadequate to address the issue and constitute another form of denial.

Unfortunately, Myth 6: “There is Nothing I Can Do” only discusses personal reduction in consumption, not the organized resistance necessary to stop the destructive system of industrial civilization. For a much more thorough treatment of “what I can do”, read the Deep Green Resistance strategy of Decisive Ecological Warfare. Otherwise, though, this is an excellent analysis.

The upshot of the previous sections is that the comforts, luxuries, privileges, and pleasures that we tell ourselves are necessary for a happy or satisfying life are the most significant cause of global warming and that unless we quickly learn to organize our lives around another set of pleasures and satisfactions, it is extremely unlikely that our children or grandchildren will inherit a livable planet. Because we are falsely reassured by liberal leaders that we can fight climate change without any inconvenience, it bears repeating this seldom spoken truth. In order to adequately address climate change, people in rich industrial nations will have to reduce current levels of consumption to levels few are prepared to consider. This truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Global warming is not complicated: it is caused mainly by burning fossil fuels; fossil fuels are burned in the greatest quantity by wealthy people and nations and for the products they buy and use. The larger the reach of a middle-class global society, the more carbon emissions there have been. While conservatives deny the science of global warming, liberals deny the only real solution to preventing its most horrific consequences—using less and powering down, perhaps starting with the global leaders in style and taste (as well as emissions), the American middle-class. In the meantime we continue to pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with each passing year.

Read Lindberg’s full post: Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question