The catastrophe confronting us is the severest that life has ever faced and incredibly its one of our own making. The scientific and technological advances that civilisation experienced in the past two centuries changed the world from a vibrant diverse ecosystem to a fragile one. It's hard to find any branch of the ecosystem that is in better condition to support human life today than it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. This is in spite of the exponential increased in knowledge and abilities.

Since the start of global capitalism, the disparity in wealth and power has steadily increased, to levels where a small fraction of people has unimaginable wealth, while the number of people on a near starvation level is mounting. Millions of people haven't enough potable water and lack other life's necessities, which are getting scarcer or their conditions are deteriorating. The lack of food and water will proportionally affect the majority of people who lack the money to buy food, but a consequence is that desperate people might become violent (as happen during the French and Russian revolutions). This situation will get much worse with an expected population of 9 billion, living with the effects of global warming and a reducing oil supply. Oil is the only energy and fertiliser that can support agribusiness. Well within two decades, food production from agribusiness will crash and many investments will be worthless turning some rich people into paupers.

Capitalism is in the process of killing humanity in the quest for perpetual growth and maximising profits. This is a reckless pursuit with complete irresponsibility and a disregard for fairness. The way people manage to act in that extremely inhuman way and still feel OK, is by giving control of the economic system to the market. We have rescinded many controls of society and people are now powerless to disregard the market's dictates, which is in the process of destroying life. Although there have been many attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they all failed. The reason is that we all have to compete to maintain our position in local and world markets. That competition increases production of goods, which fossil fuels is the only energy that can supply at present, therefore an effective carbon tax will cripple the global market, so we keep on emitting carbon until life is impossible.

We're Speeding On The Road To Extinction