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When future historians ask, 'Why didn't people take action to stop the climate crisis when they had known about it for decades', a prominent part of the answer will be the history of denial and obfuscation by the fossil fuel industry, and the ways in which people in positions of power and privilege refused to acknowledge that climate change was a manifestation of a broken economic system.

— The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg, Greta Thunberg (Page 29)

The rapidly escalating climate and ecological crisis is a global crisis: it affects all living plants and beings. But to say that all of humankind is responsible for it is very, very far from the truth. Most people today are living well within the planetary boundaries. It is only a minority of us who have caused this crisis and who keep driving it forward. This is why the popular argument that 'there are too many people' is a very misleading one. Population does matter, but it is not people who are causing emissions and depleting the Earth, it is what some people do - it is some people's habits and behaviour, in combination with our economic structures, that are causing the catastrophe. The Industrial Revolution, which was fueled by slavery and colonization, brought unimaginable wealth to the Global North, and in particular to a small minority of people living there. That extreme injustice is the foundation that our modern societies are built upon. This is the very heart of the problem. It is the sufferings of the many that have paid for the benefits of the few. Their fortune came at a price - namely oppression, genocide, ecological destruction and climatological instability. There is a bill for all this destruction that has not yet been paid. In fact, it hasn't even been added up; it is still waiting to be invoiced.

— The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg, Greta Thunberg (Page 19)

Modern capitalism, the most unique, as well as the most pernicious, social order to emerge in the course of human history, identifies human progress with bitter competition and rivalry; social status with the rapacious and limitless accumulation of wealth; the most personal values with greed and selfishness; the production of commodities, of goods explicitly made for sale and profit, as the motive force of nearly every economic and artistic endeavour; and profit and enrichment as the reason for the existence of social life. No society known to history has made these factors so central to its existence or, worse, identified them with “human nature” as such. Every vice that, in earlier times, was seen as the apotheosis of evil has been turned into a “virtue” by capitalist society.

— Remaking Society by Murray Bookchin (20%)