City AM is worth a glance should you come across a not-too-soggy copy outside your local railway station. It’s aimed at aspirant but none too bright city workers and offers them on their now less frequent commute to the office lots of jargon-rich financial gossip. It doesn’t often stray into anything with a time horizon exceeding six months; and, like most financial reporting, it’s obsessed with the immediate effect of central bank misdirected attempts to manage inflation and includes a large dose of snake oil around new financial jargon and technology. There is, for example, a whole page in the edition on Monday, 13 May, on what might best be described as crypto-jargon.
City AM typically ignores the climate crisis except when it has some short-term effect on share prices. Thus in the same edition it reports Barclays Bank’s huge investment in oil extraction but only as an issue which might affect their share price by upsetting nominally ‘ethical’ investment fund managers, not as criminally irresponsible behaviour. Another article in the same edition entitled ‘Climate change isn’t a culture war, either we all win or we all lose’ might therefore be seen as a welcome departure from this short termism. A closer examination of this article dashes this hope.
The author of the article is Frances Lasok. She describes herself as a ‘freelance writer’ but is, in reality, a Tory campaign manager, failed local government candidate and parliamentary hopeful, although her prospect for the last form of employment will have been adversely impacted by the current Tory meltdown. In her article, she recognises, contrary to the typical City AM line, the seriousness of the climate crisis but then argues that “we are all in it together” and can be addressed with unspecified policies that are “necessary and fair”. She criticises environmental campaigners like Just Stop Oil for implying that the crisis largely affects the poor or, as she refers to them “people who don’t pay the bills” . She exhorts us to “support policies that incentivise rather than punish, unite rather than split and focus on the collective challenge”. She doesn’t specify what these policies are – “Just Keep Pumping” perhaps?
Just Stop Oil’s tactics might be questioned, but not their goal. Fossil fuels have to be kept in the ground if the climate crisis is not to engulf the world. To deny that the climate crisis is a class issue is to overlook that the 0.1% , buffered by AI and their huge, accumulated wealth, will confidently expect to survive it for centuries. Meanwhile, the 1%, cocooned in the ethos of short-termism promoted by City AM, will mistakenly hope to share in this outcome. Meanwhile, the rest the world’s population faces the prospect of extinction. Just Stop Oil, other environmental campaigners and the CP will continue strive, in their different ways, to organise and call for the climate crisis to be addressed.
Croydon Communists 