The Biggest Issue of Our or Any Time

The Capitalist Climate Catastrophe

I’m moved to make today’s post by the irritatingly and dangerously warm February and March that have had my lovely border collie-pit mix Oreo hanging her tongue out and trying to drink polluted lake water far too soon in the year.  And by the idiocy of an N“P”R talk show host who yesterday said that “power lines are causing deadly wildfires” in the USA when anyone with common sense and a modicum of knowledge about the matter knows that the conflagrations in question are mainly about the extreme volatile dryness of forest and brush terrain resulting from human-generated global warming.

When someone asks me what the single biggest issue of our time is I never hesitate: it’s “anthropogenic” climate change.  It’s not racism or sexism or the drift towards nuclear war or Gaza or Ukraine or world poverty or immigration or nativism or the rise of fascism and other forms of authoritarianism…or name your pressing current local, national, or global matter. It’s a climate that has been warming so quickly since 1970 thanks to fossil-fuel addicted capitalism that Earth is now hotter than it was at least 125,000 years ago, well before anything that resembled modern human civilization had emerged.

Why the top issue? Because nothing else will matter if the “anthropogenic” heating of the planet isn’t brought to heel. There’s no social justice, democracy, peace, humanism, revolution, exploration, beauty, wonder, music, poetry, ballet, basketball, philosophy, historiography, painting, science, and love on a melted planet. Who wants to more equitably share out the slices of a poisoned pie?  Who wants to turn the world upside down as it has been cooked to death?

Decent human life and civilization cannot co-exist with the warming that is turning nearly every year into the hottest one on record, creating “missing winters” and excessively warm springs that give way to drought-plagued, dangerously over-heated and drought-plagued summers? As the smart bourgeois author Jeffrey Goodell writes in his recent bestselling book The Heat Will Kill You First:

“Life on Earth is like a finely calibrated machine, one that has been built by evolution to work very well within its design parameters.  Heat breaks that machine in a fundamental way, disrupting how cells function, how proteins unfold, how molecules move…yes, we are remarkable creatures with a tremendous capacity to adapt and adjust to a rapidly changing world. But extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have reckoned with before.  It may be a human creation, but it is godlike in its power and prophecy.  Because all living things share one simple fate: if the temperature they’re used to – what scientists sometimes call their Goldilocks Zone – rises too far, too fast, they die” (Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First, p. 20).

The “finally calibrated machine” has been under relentless assault from recklessly excessive heat-trapping carbon emissions for nearly eight decades now, ever since the massive escalation of global economic activity that occurred after World War II.  And the threat those emissions pose is arguably worse than the one posed by nuclear weapons.  Every year we fill the atmosphere with yet more insane levels of carbon we stick another nail in the coffin of livable ecology, increasing the rising likelihood that we will pass “game over” tipping points and cross into runaway planetary roasting – literal Hell on Earth.  The nuclear risk is terrible and rising thanks to the US-NATO provocation of Russia, but it’s not on a cumulative and potentially irreversible  path to tipping points beyond which nuclear disarmament becomes impossible. Nuclear weapons can be taken down and dismantled.  Good luck re-cooling the planet back to the Goldilocks Zone, with all due respect to various technical fixes being dreamed up.  

Still, it’s important not to reify and isolate the global warming problem, which is intimately related to and bound up with other big issues of our time.  I could spend 20,000 words on the interconnections, but that’s impractical so let me just suggest three chains of interrelatedness:

·       Climate change is crippling agricultural economies rowing across much of the global South, generating mass poverty and fueling mass nonwhite migrations that are sparking white nationalist nativism, a critical ingredient of fascism, in Europe and the United States. 

·       The inter-imperialist but primarily US-NATO-provoked war in Ukraine caused restrictions on Russian oil and gas export to the West that sparked an increase in planet-cooking oil and gas drilling within and beyond the United States.

·       The fascist movements and parties of the US and Europe are strongly dedicated to the escalated drilling and burning of fossil fuels (see Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism) , which they identify with national greatness/regeneration/wealth  and the supposed superiority of so-called white civilization. Their hatred of intellectuals feeds their denial of climate science.

At the same time, climate change (really the climate catastrophe) is not understandable or solvable without central reference to the underlying mode of production and socio-political order that gave rise to it: capitalism, the taproot cause of what I have called “the greatest crime in history – turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber.” I’m talking about the bourgeois profits system, a regime of constant inter-firm and inter-imperial competition that is hopelessly addicted to and invested in fossil fuels to power the relentless expansion, commodification, and accumulation on which it depends. It’s an anarchic global economic and state system devoid of remotely adequate capacity for the sustainable and coordinated alignment of social and political relations with the requirements of livable ecology. There’s a vast literature on how and why this is the case [1].

“Anthropogenic” climate change is capitalogenic climate change. Anyone who tells you the climate catastrophe can be overcome under the capitalist mode of production and its attendant political and ideological superstructure is system is telling you to live in a hopey-changey dream world.

Here' s a curious passage the smart but bourgeois Jeffrey Goodell’s aforementioned book:

“Maybe twenty thousand people dying in a [future] sudden heat wave in St. Louis or New Delhi will spark a revolution.  I met people while researching this book who believe that the political and economic systems that go with them are unsalvageable.  You might be able to retrofit the buildings of Paris, they argue, but you can’t retrofit the politics of Paris – or anywhere else, for that matter.  The solution is to burn it all down and start over.  So the sooner we get on with that, the better.”

Well, “the political and economic system” is capitalism or, if you prefer, capitalism-imperialism. It must be overthrown and radically replaced with an ecologically sane socialist mode of production and state where the common good and not private profit is the higher power. The current dominant system is burning civilization down to the ground.  What’s required is radical transformation and levelling up to historical-material sanity.  Revolution is now a matter of life and death.

[1] See (for starters), John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution; Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming; Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System;  Herve Kempf (the longtime environmental editor of Le Monde), The Rich Are Destroying the Earth; Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?; Jason W. Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? and  Capitalism in the Web of Life: Capitalism and the Accumulation of Capital.