Salon
- Jeremy Lent
Overcoming the climate crisis will require a shift away from our
growth-based, corporate-dominated global system
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General view during the Global Climate Strike March on October 02,
2020 in Durban, South Africa. According to media reports, the group
demanded that individuals and governments must take stronger action
against the effects of climate change and the emittance of the
greenhouse gas. (Darren Stewart/Gallo Images via Getty Images)
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The global conversation regarding climate change has, for the most part, ignored
the elephant in the room. That's strange, because this particular elephant is so
large, obvious, and all-encompassing that politicians and executives must
contort themselves to avoid naming it publicly. That elephant is called
capitalism, and it is high time to face the fact that, as long as capitalism
remains the dominant economic system of our globalized world, the climate crisis
won't be resolved.
As the crucial UN climate talks known as COP26 (short for "Conference of
the Parties") approach in early November, the public has grown increasingly
aware that the stakes have never been higher. What were once ominous warnings of
future climate shocks wrought by wildfires, floods, and droughts have now become
a staple of the daily news. Yet governments are
failing to meet their own emissions pledges
from the Paris agreement six years ago, which were themselves acknowledged to be
inadequate. Increasingly, respected Earth scientists are warning, not just about
the
devastating effects of climate breakdown
on our daily lives, but about the
potential collapse of civilization itself
unless we drastically change direction.
The elephant in the room
And yet, even as humanity faces perhaps the greatest existential crisis in our
species' history, the public debate on climate barely mentions the underlying
economic system that brought us to this point and which continues to drive us
toward the precipice. Ever since its emergence in the seventeenth century, with
the creation of the first limited liability shareholder-owned corporations,
capitalism has been premised on viewing the planet as a resource to exploit —
its overriding objective to maximize profits from that exploitation as rapidly
and extensively as possible. Current mainstream strategies to resolve our twin
crises of climate breakdown and ecological overshoot without changing the
underlying system of growth-based global capitalism are structurally inadequate.
The idea of "green growth" is promulgated by many development consultants, and
is even incorporated in the UN's official plan for "sustainable development,"
but has been
shown to be an illusion. Ecomodernists, and others who stand to profit from growth in the short-term,
frequently
make the argument that,
through technological innovation, aggregate global economic output can become
"absolutely decoupled" from resource use and carbon emissions — permitting
limitless growth on a finite planet.
Careful rigorous analysis, though, shows that this hasn't happened so far, and even the most wildly
aggressive assumptions for greater efficiency would still lead to unsustainable
consumption of global resources.
The primary reason for this derives ultimately from the nature of capitalism
itself. Under capitalism — which has now become the default global economic
context for virtually all human enterprise — efficiency improvements intended to
reduce resource usage inevitably become launchpads for further exploitation,
leading paradoxically to an increase, rather than decrease, in consumption.
This dynamic, known as the Jevons paradox, was first recognized back in the
nineteenth century by economist William Stanley Jevons, who demonstrated how
James Watts' steam engine, which greatly improved the efficiency of coal-powered
engines, paradoxically caused a dramatic increase in coal consumption even while
it decreased the amount of coal required for any particular application. The
Jevons paradox has since been shown to be true in an endless variety of domains,
from the invention in the nineteenth century of the cotton gin which
led to an increase
rather than decrease in the practice of slavery in the American South, to
improved automobile fuel efficiency which
encourages people to drive longer distances.
When the Jevons paradox is generalized to the global marketplace, we begin to
see that it's not really a paradox at all, but rather an inbuilt defining
characteristic of capitalism. Shareholder-owned corporations, as the primary
agents of global capitalism, are legally structured by the overarching
imperative to maximize shareholder returns above all else. Although they are
given the legal rights of "personhood" in many jurisdictions, if they were
actually humans they would be
diagnosed as psychopaths, ruthlessly pursuing their goal without regard to any collateral damage they
might cause. Of the hundred largest economies today,
sixty-nine are transnational corporations, which collectively represent a relentless force with
one overriding objective: to turn humanity and the rest of life into fodder for endlessly increasing
profit at the fastest possible rate.
Under global capitalism, this dynamic holds true even without the involvement of
transnational corporations. Take bitcoin as an example. Originally designed
after the global financial meltdown of 2008 to wrest monetary power from the
domination of central banks, it relies on building trust through "mining," a
process that allows anyone to verify a transaction by solving increasingly
complex mathematical equations and earn new bitcoins as compensation. A great
idea — in theory. In practice, the unfettered marketplace for bitcoin mining has
led to frenzied competition to solve ever more complex equations, with vast
warehouses holding "rigs" of advanced computers consuming massive amounts of
electricity, with the result that the carbon emissions from bitcoin processing
are now equivalent to that of a mid-size country
such as Sweden or Argentina.
An economy based on perpetual growth
The relentless pursuit of profit growth above all other considerations is
reflected in the world's stock markets, where corporations are valued not by
their benefit to society, but by investors' expectations of their growth in
future earnings. Similarly, when aggregated to national accounts, the main proxy
used to measure the performance of politicians is growth in Gross Domestic
Product (GDP). Although it is commonly assumed that GDP correlates with social
welfare,
this is not the case
once basic material requirements have been met. GDP merely measures the rate at
which society transforms nature and human activity into the monetary economy,
regardless of the ensuing quality of life. Anything that causes economic
activity of any kind, whether good or bad, adds to GDP. When researchers
developed a benchmark called the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which
incorporates qualitative components of well-being, they
discovered a dramatic divergence
between the two measures. GPI peaked in 1978 and has been steadily falling ever
since, even while GDP continues to accelerate.
In spite of this, the possibility of shifting our economy away from perpetual
growth is barely even considered in mainstream discourse. In preparation for
COP26, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
modeled five scenarios
exploring potential pathways that would lead to different global heating
outcomes this century, ranging from an optimistic 1.5°C pathway to a likely
catastrophic 4.5°C track. One of their most critical variables is the amount of
carbon reduction accomplished through negative emissions, relying on massive
implementation of unproven technologies. According to the IPCC, staying under
2°C of global heating — consistent with the minimum target set by the 2015 Paris
agreement — involves a heroic assumption that we will
suck 730 billion metric tonnes of carbon
out of the atmosphere this century. This stupendous amount is equivalent to
roughly twenty times the
total current annual emissions
from all fossil fuel usage. Such an assumption is closer to science fiction than
any rigorous analysis worthy of a model on which our civilization is basing its
entire future. Yet, even as the IPCC appears willing to model humanity's fate on
a pipe dream,
not one of their scenarios
explores what is possible from a graduated annual reduction in global GDP. Such
a scenario was considered by the IPCC community to be
too implausible to consider.
This represents a serious lapse on the part of the IPCC. Climate scientists
who have modeled
planned reductions in GDP show that keeping global heating below 1.5°C this
century is potentially within reach under this scenario, with greatly reduced
reliance on speculative carbon reduction technologies. Prominent economists
have shown that
a carefully managed "post-growth" plan could lead to enhanced quality of life,
reduced inequality, and a healthier environment. It would, however, undermine
the foundational activity of capitalism — the pursuit of endless growth that has
led to our current state of obscene inequality, impending ecological collapse,
and climate breakdown.
The profit-based path to catastrophe
As long as this elephant in the room remains unspoken, our world will continue
to careen toward catastrophe, even as politicians and technocrats shift from one
savior narrative to another. Along with the myth of "green growth," we are told
that a solution lies in putting
monetary valuations on "ecosystem services"
and incorporating them into business decisions — even though this approach
has been shown
to be deeply flawed, frequently counterproductive, and ultimately
self-defeating. A wetlands, for example, might have value in protecting a city
from flooding. However, if it were drained and a swanky new resort built on the
reclaimed land, this could be more lucrative. Case closed.
The new moniker arising from the corporate titans at the World Economic Forum is
"stakeholder capitalism": an inviting term that seems to imply that stakeholders
other than investors will play a role in setting corporate priorities, but
actually refers to
a profoundly anti-democratic process
whereby corporations assume increasingly large roles in global governance. This
month, the UN Food Systems Summit was
essentially taken over
by the same giant corporations, including Nestlé and Bayer, that are largely
responsible for the very problems the summit was intended to grapple with
— which
led to a widespread boycott
by hundreds of civil society and Indigenous groups.
As net-zero targets decades away are formally announced at COP26, built
implicitly on a combination of corporate procrastination and speculative
technologies, we can only expect the climate crisis to continue to worsen.
Ultimately, as negative emissions technologies fail to meet their grandiose
expectations, the same voices that currently promote reliance on them
will lend support
to the techno-dystopian idea of geoengineering — vast, planet-altering
engineering projects designed to temporarily manipulate the climate to defer a
climate apocalypse. A
leading geoengineering candidate, financed by Bill Gates, involves spraying particles into the stratosphere to
cool the Earth by reflecting the Sun's rays back into space. The
risks are enormous, including the likelihood of causing extreme shifts in precipitation around
the world. Additionally, once begun, it could never be stopped without immediate
catastrophic rebound heating; it would not prevent the oceans from further
acidifying; and may turn the blue sky into a perpetual dull haze. In spite of
these concerns, geoengineering is beginning to get discussed at UN meetings,
with publications such as The Economist
predicting that, since it wouldn't disrupt continued economic growth, it's more likely to be
implemented than the drastic, binding cuts in emissions that would head off
climate disaster.
There is an alternative
Why is the elephant in the room so rarely mentioned in mainstream discourse? One
reason is that, since the collapse of communism and the parallel
rise of neoliberalism
beginning in the 1980s, it is assumed that "there is no alternative," as
Margaret Thatcher famously declared. Even committed green advocates, such as the
Business Green group, are
quick to dismiss criticism
of our growth-based economic system as "knee-jerk anti-capitalist agitprop." But
the conventional dichotomy between capitalism and socialism, to which such
conversations inevitably devolve, is no longer helpful. Old-fashioned socialism
was just as poised to consume the Earth as capitalism, differing primarily in
how the pie should be carved up.
There is, however, an alternative. A wide range of progressive thinkers are
exploring the possibilities of replacing our destructive global economic system
with one that offers potential for sustainability, greater fairness, and human
flourishing. Proponents of degrowth
show that it is possible
to implement a planned reduction of energy and resource use while reducing
inequality and improving human well-being. Economic models, such as Kate
Raworth's "
doughnut economics" offer coherent substitutes for the classical outdated framework that ignores
fundamental principles of human nature and humanity's role within the Earth
system. Meanwhile, large-scale cooperatives,
such as Mondragon
in Spain, demonstrate that it's possible for companies to provide effectively
for human needs without utilizing a shareholder-based profit model.
Another reason people give for ignoring the elephant in the room, even when they
know it's there, is that we don't have time for structural change. The climate
emergency is already upon us, and we need to focus on actions that can occur
right now. This is true, and nothing in this article should be taken as a reason
to avoid the drastic and immediate changes required in business and consumer
practices. Indeed, they are necessary — but insufficient. Ultimately, our global
civilization must begin a transformation to one that is based not on building
wealth through extraction, but on foundational principles that could create the
conditions for long-term flourishing on a regenerated Earth —
an ecological civilization.
Even in the short term, there are innumerable steps that can be taken to steer
our civilization toward a life-affirming trajectory. Around the world Indigenous
people on the frontline of the climate emergency desperately need support in
defending the biodiverse ecosystems
in which they are embedded against assaults from extractive corporations. A
growing campaign is under way to make the wholesale destruction of natural
living systems a criminal act by
establishing a law of ecocide—prosecutable like genocide under the International Criminal Court. The powers
of transnational corporations themselves need to be addressed, ultimately
by requiring their charters
to be converted to a triple bottom line of people, planet, and profits, and
subject to rigorous enforcement powers.
The transformation we need may take decades, but the process must begin now with
the clear and explicit recognition that capitalism itself needs to be supplanted
by a system based on life-affirming values. Don't expect to see any discussion
of these issues in the formal proceedings of COP26. But, turn your attention
outside the hallowed halls and you'll hear
the voices of those who are standing up
for life's continued flourishing on Earth. It's only when their ideas are
discussed seriously in the main chambers of a future COP that we can begin to
hold authentic hope that our civilization may finally be turning away from the
precipice toward which it is currently accelerating.
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