Serious About Climate Justice? Capitalism Has to Go.
To have even a fighting chance of tackling the climate crisis, we need to drastically rethink our economic system — are we brave enough?
Something I’ve been asking myself a lot recently: can capitalism and climate justice ever be compatible?
The climate crisis is happening. You have to be pretty delusional to dispute this. Something needs to be done. Again, not up for debate. What remains to be decided is the form this “something” should take. This is a bit more complicated.
All my life, my mum has bought organic, gone around behind us turning off lights and mended clothes to avoid buying new ones. To this day, she avoids meat, buys second-hand and keeps metal straws in her handbag.
And yet, when I talk to her about the kind of radical structural change I think is needed to tackle the climate crisis, her replies are more a case of humouring me than really engaging with what I’m saying. She smiles, shakes her head and tells me my naive optimism is admirable.
The thing is I’m not being optimistic. If anything, the naive optimist is her, believing the same system that got us into this mess could ever get us out of it.
The IPCC warns that if global temperatures rise more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the impacts are highly likely to be severe, widespread and irreversible. According to forecasts, we’ll get there in the next 10 years. By the end of the century, global warming is set to reach 4°C. The World Bank says this will bring “cataclysmic changes”, including extreme heat waves, global food shortages and millions of people affected by sea level rise.
In the face of this devastation, tinkering around the edges is no longer an option. Extinction Rebellion repeatedly tells us we need ‘system change not climate change’ — they’re right, we do. We also need to be specific about what this change looks like.
Something of a personal hero, my first real exposure to the unequivocal link between capitalism and the climate crisis was Naomi Klein’s 2014 book This Changes Everything. For me at least, it did.
Growing up, very rarely do we stop and properly think about the economic system that shapes so much of our lives. We take capitalism for granted and with it, private ownership and the mentality of profit above all else.
Perpetual growth is a founding principle of capitalism. But our finite planet cannot support it.
Some defenders of capitalism argue in favour of “green growth”, claiming that the economic growth capitalism depends on can be decoupled from our use of natural resources as our economy moves from goods to services. Others argue that as technology advances, capitalism will be able to expand its reach beyond the confines of our Earth. Maybe we’ll start mining asteroids.
On the first, a 2019 paper from the journal New Political Economy debunks the myth of “green growth”. There is no empirical evidence that absolute decoupling from resources on a global scale can be achieved while economic growth is maintained.
On the second, scientists are already calling for more than 85% of the solar system to be categorised as official “space wilderness” and protected from human exploitation. Besides, extra-terrestrial mining does nothing about the damaging impacts of industry back on Earth.
The history of overexploitation of natural resources is closely tied to colonialism. From South African gold mines in the late 19th century to human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s cobalt mines today, extractivism is built on exploitation.
Extractivism is the process of extracting natural resources to sell on the world market. Klein describes it as a “dominance-based relationship with the earth, one of purely taking.” Her most evocative example is the small South Pacific island of Nauru. In the 1960s and 70s, nearly the entire island was strip-mined, and the valuable phosphate shipped overseas for fertiliser.
Extractivism makes it clear that capitalism threatens not just the natural world, but the people that live in it too. It is a system built on exploitation — of people and of planet. It is a massive driver of increasing inequality.
Defenders argue that economic growth is essential for the relief of poverty. Again, this is simply not the case. A 2015 paper in the World Economic Review finds that the poorest 60% of the global population receive only 5% of any additional income generated from economic growth.
This is why the phrase “climate justice” is so important. It is not enough to limit global warming to 1.5°C. The climate crisis is a social crisis, as well as an environmental one. Any attempts to address it must recognise this.
In general, the wealthy countries that have contributed the most to climate change will be least affected by it. A 2016 Nature report identifies “free riders”, ranking in the top 20% in terms of emissions and the bottom 20% in terms of vulnerability, and “forced riders”, with relatively low emissions and high vulnerability. The Pacific island nation of Kiribati has emissions far below the global average and yet faces being completely lost to rising sea levels.
Capitalists have claimed time and time again that we can rely on market-based solutions to solve the climate crisis. The problem is we’ve tried these methods. They simply don’t work.
In 2006, Richard Branson pledged to spend $3 billion developing green technologies over the next 10 years, including biofuels to replace the oil and gas his planes were burning by the gallon. In 2013, he had invested less than $300 million and rebranded his “pledge” a “gesture”
As is often the case with influential businesspeople-come-philanthropists, there was a considerable disconnect between what Branson was saying and what he was spending. In 2015, while Bill Gates was regularly speaking about the urgency of tackling the climate crisis, the Gates Foundation had $1.4 billion invested in fossil fuels.
Greenwashing is not a practice solely reserved for billionaire businessmen — fossil fuel companies are at it too. In 2019, BP came under fire from environmental lawyers for their “potentially misleading” advertising campaign. Adverts claimed BP was “working to make energy cleaner”. In reality, more than 96% of BP’s capital expenditure remained on oil and gas.
Fossil fuel companies can promise “net zero”, fill their adverts with wind turbines and say they’re serious about investing in renewables. They still can’t be trusted.
According to a 2015 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, fossil fuel companies such as BP, ExxonMobil and Shell have known about the dangers of climate change since at least the 1980s. How did they respond? “They embarked on a series of campaigns to deliberately deceive the public about the reality of climate change and block any actions that might curb carbon emissions.”
This isn’t really all that surprising. It is in the interests of those who benefit from the current capitalist system to hold out for technological innovation to take the problem away. Nothing is a clearer example of this than the rise of geoengineering.
Advocates of geoengineering would have us believe we use technology to “take back control” of our atmosphere. Maybe we should stop worrying about reducing our emissions and start spraying reflective aerosol particles into the sky to dim the sun. Sound bonkers? It is.
Solar Radiation Management is one of the more popular potential geoengineering “solutions”. But there’s very little evidence it would work. This isn’t the kind of thing you can test in a lab.
The effects might not be evenly distributed. It could lead to serious droughts across Africa and have devastating impacts on rainforests in Asia and Latin America. Even the Royal Society acknowledges “Solar Radiation Management could conceivably lead to climate changes that are worse than the “no SRM” option”.
Geoengineering doesn’t come with a trial period either. If deployed, it imposes an obligation that extends over millennia. Having started, if we were to suddenly stop pumping particles into the atmosphere, future generations would suffer the consequences of an “unimaginably huge climate shock”.
The myth that technological innovation can magically solve the climate crisis extends far beyond geoengineering. As an engineering student, it’s a myth I’ve been fed over and over again. Electric planes, low-carbon cement, more efficient electricity grids, reducing industrial waste, biodegradable plastic — you name it, we’ve been told its part of the solution to the climate crisis.
These things might well make a difference, but we mustn’t overestimate their impact. We need to think big. We need to think bold. Technological innovation is not going to be enough.
At the start of this article, I asked if capitalism and climate justice could ever be compatible. The answer, in short, is no.
This can be difficult to accept, difficult to imagine and even more difficult to do anything about. My mum tells me it’s never going to happen, that I should just keep eating my lentils and catching the train and focus on doing my bit. But shorter showers and metal straws just isn’t the kind of change we need.
If we are to have any chance of meaningfully tackling the climate crisis, we need to completely rethink our economic system. Sound drastic? Good. We need drastic.
