lol, ya basically, if you want to cut through the bullshit and get to straight to the point.

I have a lot of conversations about ecological collapse. Now that conservatives are slowly starting to acknowledge climate change and propose eco-fascist solutions, I see a lot of people complaining about the emissions from China and the population in Africa.

A lot of people will point out that Europe and the US off-shored manufacturing and the related emissions to China, and then we go ahead and consume the final product without needing to claim the emissions. So the simple numbers paint a misleading picture.

What I don’t see pointed out nearly as often, is that Africa’s population problems began with private American and European ‘investment’ into poor African countries. These fat cats built factories and dorms. They can pay but a pittance in the factories, and charge enough in the dorms to make their employees go into debt and become trapped. They can grow the same crops an American does, and walk away with a fraction of the share of revenue that an American farmer would. Why does this matter? These investors are the ones who created the systems that demand poor African families have more kids in order to work more jobs and keep a roof over their head. The population boom is entirely explained by the new extractive economic systems that were imposed upon these regions. And who is benefiting from this population boom and the increased productivity it has led to? It’s not the poor African families with 10 kids working the fields, it’s the Americans and Europeans who get access to an unsustainably cheap market and its products. And it’s not the African workers, but the foreign consumers who have any power to make the exploitative businesses change their ways. And yet most of them don’t even realize that any of this has any connection to climate change or other issues facing our world - they are alienated from the harm (for now).

That is neoliberalism not relegated to abstract theory, but put into actual practice.