The Capitalist Climate
I’ve been working on a climate change book for a number of years. The idea for this book germinated while I was living in China ten years ago. There, among other things, I experienced depressing levels of ecological devastation and severely diminished air quality. Upon return, as an attempt to understand intellectually what I was suffering from emotionally, I helped form a study group on climate issues called Parasol. In time this group of no more than half-a-dozen people developed into the Parasol Climate Collective, doing workshops and presentations at conferences, producing informational materials, and talking with other organizers and organizations about how climate disruption may impact their particular work. Out of this experience I decided to write the book that we in Parasol were always looking for to help us understand what is going on.
As I write this book I intend to share information here on Medium in an effort to better develop ideas and make progress on writing. Also, due to the urgent nature of our situation regarding the rapidly changing climate, asking folks to wait to read a book is a bit much.
I want to offer some thoughts on how I see things.
In accepting the inevitability of climate disruption and global warming, we are implicitly also accepting the inevitability of capitalism and the current organizational framework for society. What’s currently happening to society, and the climate that sustains it, requires us to step out of existing ways of thinking and into something new. Capitalism both exploits our labor for a few people’s immense profit, and threatens a future for humanity worth living. Solving the unfolding climate crisis is an opportunity to bring about the type of world we have always dreamed about.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, most recent report was written and edited by 91 scientists from 40 countries who analyzed more than 6,000 scientific studies. Some of their conclusions — which should be noted are criticized by some as being too cautious and conservative concerning actions that must be taken — include crucial information, such as: if greenhouse gas emissions were stopped today, the planet could be spared reaching temperatures so hostile to humans that the future of humanity is in doubt. Right now, we are in the worse-case scenerio, but that can be changed.
The IPCC report also urges to focus on limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius as the urgent target that we cannot afford to miss. And, most importanly, in order to avoid going past 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-capitalist levels necessitates a “rapid and far-reaching” transformation of civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before.
Finally, I think the type of understanding exhibited by Ray Patel and Jason W. Moore in this quote is very helpful: “By 2050 (in 30 years), two years after the last commercial fish catch is projected to land, there will be more plastic in the sea than fish. The intellectually slack explanation here is that humans bring destruction in their wake. (But this) so clearly demonstrates what happens when the metabolism of humans in the web of life becomes governed by the demand for profit.” From A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press, 2018)
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