Greer's best paragraph sums up the situation quite well IMO: "The core issues up for debate at the Paris meeting were the same that have been rehashed endlessly at previous climate conferences. The consequences of continuing to treat the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer for humanity’s pollutants are becoming increasingly hard to ignore, but nearly everything that defines a modern industrial economy as “modern” and “industrial” produces greenhouse gases, and the continued growth of the world’s modern industrial economies remains the keystone of economic policy around the world. The goal pursued by negotiators at this and previous climate conferences, then, is to find some way to do something about anthropogenic global warming that won’t place any kind of restrictions on economic growth."
When looking at why, our governments and media refuse to look at any solutions that don't genuflect to the delusion of endless growth it's clear that to do so would be career suicide. Both governments and the mainstream media [MSM] are captured by the corporations both through their 'donations' to parties that don't seriously rock the capitalist boat and through the fear of a barrage of negative advertising by those corporate powers if they did actually say anything meaningful about the inevitable collapse our current gluttony will result in.
Furthermore the govts and MSM are also captured by their middle class's [every country has a group of powerful interests who benefit in the short term at least from business as usual] unreal expectations of endless more and the refusal of almost everyone to even consider wanting less. The fact is that the scope of change necessary to reverse the environmental calamity our consumer culture has created would crash capitalism and along with it all market based imaginary wealth.
In his essay Greer invokes the Titanic metaphor saying in comparison with COP21: "...after a great deal of debate, the passengers aboard the Titanic voted to impose modest limits sometime soon on the rate at which water is pouring into the doomed ship’s hull." But IMO, as seen in the picture above, the Titanic metaphor more aptly applies to the implications of class division.
On the actual Titanic the leadership made sure the band playing kept playing lest the passengers think something was REALLY wrong. So too on our metaphoric Titanic our elites understand that no good can come from standing up and saying it's all over thereby causing a global panic. Instead our elites, like the real Titanic's 1st Class passengers, are quietly climbing into their lifeboats while the band plays on. i agree with Greer that it's too late and expensive at this point for anything meaningful to be done about environmental collapse that dwells within the realm of the capitalist myth. We're not teetering on the brink of disaster, we're well over it, the band kept playing on the Titanic, even as it sank, so no one would panic, especially not those passengers, who like us, locked into steerage.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the real world elites are buying time and making arrangements including locking us in steerage so as to insure we go down with the ship while they - the wealthy and their ilk - take the few available lifeboat seats - private islands, mountaintop retreats, lavish bunkers or maybe on Mars - that might be able to grow food in the future and are currently being stocked up while we debate and their storm troopers protect them.
The modern tune has verses about how 100% renewables will save us, how nuclear energy will save us, how divestment from fossil fuels will save us or how "God" will save us and how unenforceable promises will save us. They are all crap designed to hypnotize us into voluntarily assuming our places in steerage.
