The structures holding climate change in place have developed alongside the formation of a modern globalized society, and thus make it impossible for any substantial change to be made unless they are completely dismantled. Until any government serves first and foremost its citizens, not for the sake of power and numbers but for the care of each and every individual seeking to create a healthy and happy life, no amount of legislation or treaties will hold these powers accountable for the change that must happen. [4] The Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement were doomed to fail so long as they did not address the underlying issues of climate change. So long as these nations continue to make empty promises without considering the full extent of action necessary to ensure a healthy future for our planet, climate change will continue to escalate.
Those who were born into circumstances that have thus far granted them the fortune of remaining willfully blind to climate change must also understand these power structures and the suffering of those who have not been so fortunate. In order to dismantle a system of governments that undermine and undervalue its people, those who have the power to change their governments must exercise their rights and do what they can to create a system that acts in the interest of the citizens.
Furthermore, the interconnected nature of humanity plays an integral part in the pursuit of a viable solution to climate change. In the veil of ignorance, in which each individual in the creation of a society must make decisions without knowing their role in that society, equal justice is theoretically given to all when acting in self-interest. While no such blind society can be realistically created, it thus falls on the citizens of the planet to remain conscious of the injustices of the current system. No person on earth is safe from the true dangers of climate change, and thus we must work as a collective humankind to prevent its dangers from ever coming to light. Climate change has already impacted people around the globe, and those people must receive an extension of care and empathy as members of the human race who have suffered the consequences of previous choices.
The combined efforts of the citizens of this planet and a changed structure of government must be established in order to combat the dangers imposed by capitalism. So long as a government serves only economic interests, it will impose that same burden on its citizens. They too are then subjugated to participate in a society that does not allow for the collective care for its people, and leaves each individual to fend for themselves. People receive power that they do not deserve and believe they have earned it, thus granting them the right to demean those who lack power. Yet each person on this planet is equally victim to chance, and we must recognize that reality in order to understand why worshiping the dollar benefits nobody.
To undermine the benefits of the current system and ignore its accomplishments would leave no room for a realistic plan for combating climate change. Complete abandonment of the current system would fail to acknowledge and include the current uses for the technological and economic development that has emerged in the 20th and 21st centuries. There is no denying that the current state of the world is fully capable of working in favor of preventing climate change; however, it is the powerful few who benefit from that which contributes to climate change who prevent this modern prosperity from being turned towards something beneficial to all. Endless growth with no direction and the accumulation of wealth for its own sake points to a contradiction: humanity has flourished, yet it has also failed in so many ways.
The economy and the government cannot be at war with the planet. In order to utilize the unprecedented development accomplished by humanity for the purpose of ending climate change, economics must be structured around a focus of prosperity for the entire planet and creating a sustainable future. When those from third world countries and all of the planets non-human creatures are discounted and left to suffer for the sake of others, that system has failed everybody.
The necessity of solid focus towards the future and an optimistic picture of what that looks like emerges when considering how to plan for stopping climate change. Instead of questioning what can be done to stop the worst from happening, we must ask ourselves what can be done to allow the very best to happen. Constantly fighting against the injustices of the world for some baseline bare necessities leave an enormous amount of complications as well as possibilities out of the picture. The Paris Agreement is both unrealistic as well as not ambitious enough; it expects this change to happen in the world at its current state, when humanity is already capable of accomplishing so much more under different conditions.
We must constantly set goals that aim to be better than we are currently. Improvement must be the ultimate decision for everybody: for citizens, for the government, for the owners of corporations and those who reap the benefits under the current system. The world can be better than it currently is, and the human race is exemplified by its ability to grow and progress. So long as that progress has a focus and a direction, humanity is more than capable of repairing the damage to the earth that we have caused.