Capitalism and the Climate Crisis

Hello Everyone, my name is Charlotte and I am honored to get the chance to speak with you today. I am going to be speaking on how capitalism has caused the climate crisis and why we cannot combat the climate crisis solely with capitalist solutions. 

The consequences of global warming have become an observable reality for many of us, but this has not been met by an uptick in urgency. 

Just in my own personal experience, I currently live in Houston, TX, and just in the past four years since I have been in college I have seen so many climate disasters. Right before I started my freshman year of college Hurricane Harvey hit Houston and the flooding devastated our community. My entire campus was flooded so I had to do online classes for most of my first year in college. Some of my friends’ houses were flooded and I helped them gut their houses after the fact and had to throw away all of their belongings and family mementos. Our neighborhoods were flocked with boats and helicopters looking for missing people in the flood waters and some people died.

 Since Hurricane Harvey, every time it rains a little too much here the streets flood. Two years ago, my car got flooded on my drive home from class. I left campus, it was raining but not flooding, and on my way home the water got so high I had to try to pull up to a higher spot but my engine stalled before I could. Thankfully, I was safe and some people helped me. Others have been in that situation and not been so lucky. 

In these past few years, we have seen an increase in wildfires, droughts, storms, flooding, and now the Covid-19 pandemic. Scientists say we will continue to see an ‘acceleration of pandemics’ which they attribute to climate change. As the planet heats up, animals are heading towards the poles to cool off. As they do, they come into contact with other animals they normally wouldn’t, creating opportunities for pathogens to find new hosts. 

What do all these disasters have to do with capitalism?  

Capitalism is an economic system which requires the constant exploitation of both people and resources. This is due to the fact that the main driving force of capitalism is an ever increasing profit margin. 

The definition of capitalism is ‘an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state’.  We hear that this is a good thing, that the free market inspires innovation and hard work pays off, and all that jazz pushed down our throats by the time we learn to walk but you cannot place the private interests of a few over the well-being of the masses and that is what capitalism does. 

Large corporations continue to grow larger and larger to the point that now- through corporate lobbying- the interests of corporations and our government are one and the same. Our government was elected by we the people and is supposed to work for us and look out for our interests but instead the existing political establishment continues to be an impediment to change especially when it comes to confronting the climate crisis. Confronting the climate crisis is going to require a complete upheaval of the status quo and our current economic system. For large corporations, who often depend on fossil fuels and exploitative practices, this is bad for business and they are quite literally paying off the government to make sure that doesn’t happen. Don’t buy into large corporations like Shell or Exxon “green-washing” and pretending like they care about the climate crisis all of a sudden. It’s virtue signaling, they have known about the climate crisis and how bad it is going to get for decades and yet have failed to make any significant changes. 

Capitalism has been around for only a few hundred years and yet already has caused irreversible damage to our planet. The United States is historically the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and yet we have exacerbated the harm in smaller, developing countries- who are currently being impacted by climate disasters- by continuing to exploit them for access to their resources, especially oil,  dump our own trash into other countries, and violently overthrow democratically elected leaders who wanted to nationalize oil in their own countries. We have everything we need to combat the climate crisis yet we are not because the need to keep the wheels of capitalism well-oiled takes precedence even against a backdrop of fires, floods, hurricanes, and pandemics. 

I want all of you to think about the stark difference in the United States’ Covid-19 response and other countries. If our country had done the smart thing, like some other countries did, and actually shut down everything for a few months and paid people to stay home so they could comfortably eat and pay their bills without worrying for those months we would be in an entirely different reality right now. Instead though, we are at over 14 million cases and rising and at over 280,000 deaths and rising. Our leaders claim they did all they could but we know they didn’t. 

Why has our response been so horrible? Because our leaders care more about keeping the economy running then they care about our lives. That wheel of constant profit gain was going to halt if we did a legit shutdown and everyone stopped working for a while, so we didn’t, and as a result thousands have lost their lives unnecessarily in the name of capitalist gain. That is a crystal clear example of how the climate crisis response, or lack thereof, is going to continue to be- completely botched and void of humanity- unless we address the underlying problem, which is capitalism. 

Here in the United States, the criticism surrounding the Green New Deal is utterly ridiculous. This is because the Green New Deal is far from truly radical and already represents a heavily compromised solution- frankly it is not urgent enough. 

The level of disruption needed to keep us at a temperature anywhere below “absolutely catastrophic” is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo. 

Right now, with a massive amount of effort coincided with radical change, we can just about keep the warming below 1.5 C- this is considered “bad, but manageable” territory. 

Hal Harvey- who is the CEO of Energy Innovation- wrote a book called “Designing Climate Solutions” and in this book he talks about how we are really already past the point of no-return. We are now in the stage of mitigating the damage. 

In the book Harvey says, “One of the most disturbing aspects of global warming is that as the world heats up, natural feedback loops kick in and intensify the warming. So although anthropogenic (human-caused) emissions may be the initial catalyst in warming the globe, Earth’s natural systems can exacerbate this impact, creating what physicists call a positive feedback loop- or a vicious cycle. Once in the atmosphere, CO2 and other greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, and the effects of that trapped heat manifest over time. As a result, we will continue to see increasing impacts on human society and natural systems for thousands of years after stabilizing the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere.” 

So basically, even if we manage to reach net-zero and stay there and live sustainably, we are going to be experiencing the issues from the damage we have already caused for thousands of years. 

If we don’t act now though and get to net-zero we will experience worse effects such as ecosystem collapse, ocean acidification, mass desertification, coastal cities being flooded into inhabitability, a continued acceleration of pandemics, and resource wars. 

Some countries have already experienced extreme droughts that have killed off crops and dried up their water sources and are already seeing resource wars. 

Just like in other areas of activism where we are advocating for “abolishing the police” “abolishing prisons” “abolishing the electoral college” etc.,  we already know incremental reforms do not work so policy tweaks such as a carbon tax won’t do it. The reason this “green capitalism” won’t work is because merely regulating the private sector rather than making deep in-roads into socialising capital and businesses’ private property doesn’t remove the profit motive from the economy, it only seeks to constrain it in various ways. As long as our economy chases after profit above everything else it will continue to seek ways to circumvent any regulation. 

In order to properly confront the climate crisis we have to fundamentally reevaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital. 

Our world leaders have resorted to a kind of political gaslighting in an attempt to maintain their grip on power. For example, Biden. Biden is as much of a centrist, corporatist as they come but many on the left are now celebrating like he is going to be our saving grace, he is not. Biden, as well as all of the people he is appointing to cabinet positions, work within our current system and do not wish to radically change it. Let me remind you, our current system is built on white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, patriarchal ideas, and capitalism at the forefront. It doesn’t matter if it’s an old white guy or a black trans women heading up this system, it is still the same exact oppressive system unless those in positions of power actively choose to change it- and as I discussed earlier our government is bought and paid for by large corporations who have a vested interest in making sure no ‘radical change’ occurs, so as long as they are running the show it won’t. 

The more progressive members of Congress who are pushing for change constantly get shut down and shut out by the centrist Democrats who tell them they are causing the party turmoil when in fact it’s the opposite. These changes the progressive wing is pushing are extremely popular amongst the working class- which is the majority of the country- they are extremely unpopular, however, with the ruling class- with more than 50% of Congress being millionaires, whose interests do you think they are really looking out for? 

Now- what you hear anytime you talk about radical change is the question- “What about the economy?”

The impact of a dramatic reconfiguration of the industrial economy requires similarly large changes to the welfare state. Universal basic income, large-scale public works programmes, converting to worker co-ops, everything has to be on the table to handle the economic shock of the radical changes needed to confront the climate crisis. 

My other response to the economy question when talking to someone either about the climate crisis or about socialism and communism in general is this:

We have enough resources to provide every single person on this planet a decent, comfortable life. Instead, we let a few hoard more resources than they could ever need while billions suffer needlessly. 

In an Oxfam International report published this year they stated, “The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population.” That is insanity. 

Of course, when I say things like “billionaires shouldn’t exist” I often get responses like “well they worked hard and earned that money, why shouldn’t they be able to keep it?” 

First of all- it is quite literally impossible to earn a billion dollars. Only through exploitation of workers can you have a billion plus dollars, one individual, by themselves cannot earn that much money. Second of all, why on a planet where billions live in poverty and don’t even have the basic necessities to live and are dying of diseases we already have the cure for should a small group of people be allowed to hoard all of that wealth? That is not ethical. 

Plus the argument that these people are only that wealthy because they “worked so hard” is completely false. The people who work the hardest often have the least. Think about people in many developing countries around the world where everyday is a fight for their survival. They have to walk miles to find a water source and hope that it is still there and not dried up or contaminated. They have to scour for food and live off of barely anything. Those people work harder than you and I living in the United States could ever possibly imagine. They watch their children die of starvation while billionaires have vacation homes they never go to and six cars. 

I know we have all grown up in this capitalist system and have been told this is normal and this is how the world is but I’m here to tell you it isn’t normal. We have enough to provide for everyone, the fact that we don’t is an active choice of the ruling class and until we as the working class step up and create our own change, this oppressive system will remain.  

I love this suggestion from Simon Hannah who is from Open Democracy, “With the housing crisis, we need to just seize the second homes of the rich or “investors” and turn them into social housing to end homelessness and no doubt deal with the massive climate refugee crisis coming our way.” 

There are many possible solutions out there but a continuation of capitalism is only going to lead us down a more destructive path. 

You have to see the climate crisis from a revolutionary perspective and rip up those capitalist laws that are protecting the ill-gotten gains of the rich who are plundering our natural environment. 

At this point, non-violent direct action is necessary. We need to occupy the offices of high polluting companies and politicians, disrupt their business, and hit them in the profit margins. We need to organize mass worker strikes.

This will no doubt be a huge challenge but at this point it is either revolutionary change or sit back and watch our loved ones die and our planet burn around us.