For the past two decades or so, environmental scientists have been referring to the present age as the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which, starting in the early 1800s, world ecological systems and environments have been continually shaped and reshaped by human activity. Where previously we were just another species on the planet, if a relatively successful and populous one, today we dominate the planet.
Perhaps ‘capitalocene’ would be the better term. A good number of critical ecologists, economists, and political theorists have come to the conclusion that our present way of organizing society is fundamentally unsustainable in ecological terms. We can’t keep going on the way we have for the past two hundred years or so. In particular, it seems that our basic mode of production, capitalism, is in conflict with the demands of environmental sustainability. They suggest that the contradictions of modern capitalism are expressing themselves in a fundamental disparity between how we organize society, and the ecological basis of life here on earth. What kinds of problems are we dealing with here?
Now we tend to think of this primarily in terms of climate change, which makes sense: it’s the most visible and obvious sign of the problematic consequences of how we are reshaping world ecological systems. But recently scientists have identified “nine planetary boundaries that are crucial to maintaining an earth-system environment in which humanity can exist safely” (see Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift):
- Climate change
- Ocean acidification
- Stratospheric ozone depletion
- Nitrogen and phosphorous cycles
- Global freshwater use
- Change and land use
- Biodiversity loss
- Atmospheric aerosol loading
- Chemical pollution
For the first seven of these, scientists have identified concrete physical measures of how far we can go before they start to produce catastrophic, system-wide ecological failures. The first three of these—climate change, ocean acidification, and stratospheric ozone depletion—are tipping points, where if we go beyond certain limits they threaten to destabilize earthly life as a whole. Scientists tell us that we should consider the other four as starting-points for irreversible environmental degradation.
We have already crossed the boundaries for three of these processes: climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss. In each of these cases, scientists have established preindustrial values, a boundary that we need to avoid crossing, and where we are today. Today there is more carbon dioxide in the air than is viable in the long-term and probably even in the near-term. In terms of biodiversity loss, scientists reckon we should try to limit the number of species that we should be losing per year at 10 per million; we are losing ten times that. Today, extinction rates are hundreds if not thousands of times higher than the baseline rate, the ‘normal’ rate at which species were going extinct in preindustrial times. We are losing between 150 and 200 species a day. Recently an international team of ecologists and economists predicted that the oceans will be empty of fish—empty!—by 2048. Already, 29% of edible fish and seafood species have seen their populations collapse by 90%. The causes for this rapid decline in marine life populations and biodiversity are overfishing, pollution, and habitat destruction owing to climate change.
This is dire. Just on these metrics alone, we are well beyond the limits that scientists tell us we need to avoid crossing if we are to avoid irreversible environmental degradation, system-wide ecological collapse. It is not an exaggeration to say that we appear to be standing on the threshold of a new extinction event, the sixth great extinction. Part of the reason why is that ecological systems are deeply interconnected and only conditionally stable; if one part of the ecological world-system starts to collapse, others start to fall apart along with them, and runaway cascading effects become increasingly likely.
As CO2 rises, average planetary surface temperatures rise. We are putting out more CO2 now than ever before, indeed at increasing rates, and so temperatures are increasing rapidly. One entirely predictable outcome of this is that the ice sheets in Greenland will start to melt. Trapped beneath those ice sheets is a huge amount of methane, which is much, much worse even than CO2 as a greenhouse gas—it has 80 times the warming power of CO2. Thus if those ice sheets melt—which is extremely likely at this point—the rate of temperature increase will accelerate even further.
And as I said, ecological systems are very closely interlinked. The effects of climate change aren’t limited to it being just a bit hotter, so that we’ll have to get used to warmer winters and longer summers. Even small increases in average surface temperature threaten to make a significant amount of our agricultural production unsustainable, since most plants require very specific climatological thresholds for viability. Large segments of farmland will become unfit for purpose. We can reasonably predict massive rises in crop failures, leading to food shortage crises and a generalized increase in food instability worldwide.
As ice melts, ocean levels rise. Again, even seemingly small changes here lead to huge consequences. If the oceans rise just a few feet, this will make areas at or below sea level uninhabitable. And a huge percentage of human beings live near coastlines, which is a consequence both of our biological and social need for water and of the fact that our economic system is trade-heavy. Especially in the global south, nearly all of the major population centers are in megacities situated along coastlines. Ecological economists are currently predicting that based on these factors alone, something like 110 million Africans will be displaced from their current homes by the year 2050. They’ll have to go somewhere, but where? Who will take them in, and how will they be received? If we are basing our predictions on current geopolitics, the prospects are bleak: immigration policies have become more, not less, hostile in the past few decades, and instead of building housing infrastructure capable of absorbing huge numbers of climate refugees, most global north countries have instead invested in increasingly militarized border policing and security apparatuses. We can pretty safely predict that when those 110 million Africans show up in boats at the European border, they will be greeted by guards armed with high-tech weaponry and thrown into refugee camps instead of being given a reasonable opportunity to make a decent life for themselves.
This is why we ought to add the question of global distributive justice to the way we think and talk about the climate crisis and the problem of sustainability. Distributive justice concerns the way in which we as a society—here, a global society—distribute the benefits and risks of our mode of social organization. In this context, there are three facts we should think about very seriously as challenges to global distributive justice:
- wealthy countries are historically disproportionally responsible for GHG emissions;
- poor countries are likely to experience its most devastating consequences; and
- rich nations are in a much better position to transition to green energy economies than poor ones.
In the example I’ve just given, we can see why distributive justice is deeply undermined by the current geopolitical and global ecological configuration. Historically it is those same global north countries that are most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, but they are the countries that stand to be harmed the least by the results of global warming. On the other hand, the mostly poor countries in the global south, who are much less responsible for putting out greenhouse gases—as underdeveloped economies, they mostly did not industrialize, which itself is part of the long legacy of colonialism—are the countries where people stand to be harmed the most by climate change. Moreover, transitioning to a sustainable economy is getting cheaper as green technology improves, but it’s still relatively expensive, and it’s still much cheaper to build coal plants than install high-tech solar panel facilities. That is why, for instance, over the past two decades, the vast majority of energy infrastructure investment that’s taken place in China, which has been industrializing and modernizing at an extremely fast pace, has been investment in coal. For this reason in the past two decades expanding Chinese industrial producting has been the proximate cause of the greatest increase in CO2 emissions across the globe, far outpacing the US’s rate of CO2 emissions.
But how do we think about responsibility in this context? A lot of the discussions here are dangerously myopic. In order to pull people out of poverty, some kind of economic development is obviously necessary. And the rise in the average standard of living in China during this same period has been undeniable. We need to ask difficult questions here, like: is it fair or reasonable to demand that other countries need to do more costly infrastructural development than we ever did, in order to save themselves from the mess we made? Does it make sense to tell underdeveloped countries—many of whom, again, are poor and underdeveloped due to the colonial rule global north countries imposed on them for centuries—that they do not have the right to the same standard of living we enjoy here, if that standard of living can only be achieved through building new fossil-intensive energy infrastructure?
Questions of distributive justice, here, demand that we take seriously the needs of redistribution. Indeed some thinkers, like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, argue that even very basic and minimal justice principles demand that we consider this a matter that can be resolved only through reparations: as the beneficiaries of the long legacy of both colonial domination and carbon-intensive industrialization, they argue, global north countries ought to use their resources to fund green economic development in the global south. The alternative is a deeply inequitable and unjust global situation, where we here enjoy the fruits of a catastrophic and ecologically destabilizing economic and historical process but then refuse to help those most likely to be negatively affected, and harmed the most, by the consequences of that same process.
If we think again about China, the context of globalization makes it even harder to maintain the position that they are to blame for recent CO2 emissions without further qualification. In the world of globalization, centers of industrial production have been progressively outsourced to places where labor is cheap and environmental protections are lacking in underdeveloped nations. But the industrial production that’s done there is predominantly export-oriented. And this has been true for the past two decades of Chinese development: after they joined the World Trade Organization, they’ve set up massive export processing zones where consumer goods are produced that are not meant to be purchased and used by Chinese people; rather, the vast majority these commodities are destined for the world market, and in the main this means shipping them halfway across the world to consumers in the global north, in the US and northern and western Europe. And notice that even if we leave aside the fact that the new Chinese energy infrastructure is heavily carbon-intensive, globalized trade is itself based almost entirely on fossil fuels: we’re using enormous shipping vessels that burn liquefied natural gas or heavy fuel oil as they crisscross the oceans to bring us iPhones. This is enormously environmentally harmful from start to finish, at every step of the process.
Now again consider the question of responsibility. Who is responsible for this overall situation: US consumers? Chinese workers? The governments of underdeveloped countries? None of these answers seem particularly satisfying. US consumers certainly didn’t ask for globalization, since for them that meant suffering all the social problems that come with deindustrialization, as their manufacturing jobs started vanishing in the 1970s. Workers in the global south, on the other hand, have essentially no power to determine the conditions of their labor, let alone any ability to refuse the fossil-heavy energy infrastructure that underlies the new industrial jobs they’re forced to accept. And if the governments of underdeveloped nations have an immediate obligation to try to bring their people out of poverty and raise living standards, it’s hard to say that they are in the wrong for following the same paths of industrialization that made better living conditions possible here in the global north; or to suggest that they should pursue modernization processes more expensively, more slowly, and without the support of the international community. In fact sometimes the international community discourages sustainable development. The neoliberal structural adjustment policies of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund have often included provisions that make environmentally sound investment impossible.
Let me give you an example, one that Klein relates in This Changes Everything. In the early 2010s the government of Ontario decided it wanted to try to transition from fossil fuels to a green energy infrastructure. So they passed legislation that involved shutting down coal plants, and investing primarily in solar energy. In line with good ecological sustainability principles, part of the deal was that they would source materials for the production of this new energy infrastructure as locally as possible—because it is hardly ecologically friendly to ship stuff halfway across the globe to build new plants on those fossil fuel barges we talked about earlier. And for the same reasons, a certain percentage of the labor involved in this production needed to be local. Now, for a while this worked beautifully: by 2012 Ontario was the largest solar producer in Canada, and by 2013 there was only one coal plant left in the province; and the ‘buy local’ and ‘hire local’ provisions proved to be a significant boost to the local manufacturing sector, which saw the creation of some 31 thousand new jobs.
I said this worked for a while. So what happened? Well, Japan and then the European Union voiced objections to these provisions in particular: they said that the requirement that a fixed percentage of renewable energy equipment be sourced from and produced locally violated World Trade Organization rules, which are meant to encourage free trade and prevent protectionist measures of this sort, in the name of increasing profitable economic growth. And technically they were right: the WTO considered the case and ruled against Canada, determining that this legislation was in fact illegal. The program was scrapped, investors withdrew, and the transition to green energy stalled out.
So this is the heart of it: the imperatives of capitalist social organization, namely to accumulate capital, to maximize profits, to increase rates of turnover, to grow at all costs—are directly in conflict with what is required for ecological and environmental sustainability. We can name local communities and environments as stakeholders all we want, but capitalism keeps pushing us in the direction of ecological degradation.
This is the case for at least two distinct reasons. First, capitalism is predicated on indefinite or potentially infinite expansion. Its model is unlimited growth. But the resources of the planet, while vast, are obviously finite. Thus we have a direct contradiction on our hands, between the unlimited, infinite growth model of capitalist expansion and accumulation, and the finite fund of natural resources, which obviously includes raw materials, but which also includes living beings in their biodiversity, and ecological absorptive capacities, such as the capacity for the atmosphere to absorb CO2 emissions. These are finite things and we are reaching their limits.
Second, the specific form capitalism has taken on since the industrial revolution has been predicated on cheap energy production and consumption. The development of modern industrial capitalism in the 19th century would not have been possible without burning massive amounts of coal; in the 20th century we saw the enormous rise in the burning of oil and natural gas. Thus in the past hundred and fifty years human beings, driven by the imperatives of endlessly expansive capitalism and its infinite growth model, have burned an unprecedented amount of fossil fuels, releasing incredible amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is the primary causal factor contributing to the climate disaster already underway, leading to the devastation of the earth’s biosphere.
In line with capitalism’s exponential growth model, the rates at which emissions are rising are speeding up, not slowing down. The Environmental Protection Agency says: “Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels have significantly increased since 1900. Since 1970, CO2 emissions have increased by about 90%, with emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes contributing about 78% of the total greenhouse gas emissions increase from 1970 to 2011.”
Now some might say that this way of framing things is unfair. For so much of this period of time, we didn’t know that burning fossil fuels would have such an environmentally damaging effect. And in part that’s true. But we’ve also known for quite some time. President Lyndon Johnson was already warning about the dangers of worldwide industrial civilization emitting CO2 from the perspective of ecological concerns in 1965. And even more directly, in 1988 James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, introduced the idea of global warming to the public when he testified before congress, saying he had 99% confidence that we were causing a global warming trend, and warned that it was time to stop ignoring the science. People often point to Hansen’s testimony as the moment when climate change became part of our common vocabulary, entering the public consciousness. That was 35 years ago; in the interim, we have ignored the science, and have continued to burn fossil fuels more and more. We are worse off now than we were then. Emissions goals set just a few years ago already appear increasingly impossible.
In 2020, Joe Biden won the US presidential election while stating his clear opposition to Green New Deal proposals, which aimed to create millions of jobs while constructing sustainable and more ecologically friendly energy and transportation infrastructures. On the other hand, Biden and Harris do support fracking, a very high-emission process by which we, using surely the most sophisticated scientific tools available, blow shale up to access small amounts of natural gas to burn. This is what we get from the supposedly more environmentally friendly of the two major political parties in the United States; something has gone terribly wrong. So we need to ask: what is behind this dynamic, since it seems to run counter to what we know to be true? If we have known for decades that this is a bad idea, a literally suicidal way to go about our business on a planet-wide scale, why have we persisted along this devastating path? The only answer that I find compelling is the capitalist mode of production: operating according to the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and expansion for the purposes of producing and extracting profit is revealing itself to be inherently and increasingly ecologically unstable and unsustainable. It simply remains the case that fossil fuels are the cheapest way to produce energy, and in a social system whose only ultimate concern is profit, which therefore means doing whatever is possible to minimize costs, the cheapest solution will always present the most attractive option. It’s just that in this case the cheapest solution is killing all the fish in the sea.
This is why I think we need a systematic and structural perspective when thinking about climate change, and it’s why DesJardins argues that a single business can’t be considered to be sustainable or unsustainable in isolation. It’s the system of production as a whole that is either sustainable or not, and evaluating whether or not it is requires a broader vision that situates businesses in the context of ecological processes and economic dynamics. In other words, transitioning to a sustainable mode of production means going against some of the most fundamental logics of capitalist social organization. It means prioritizing things like safeguarding biodiversity, the regeneration and protection of ecological resources, and developing sustainable production processes, even if doing those things is not profitable. Sometimes they may be profitable, too, but the historical record and what scientists are telling us suggest that we can’t wait for them to become profitable. Besides, ecologically damaging activities will still remain profitable. Even if, for instance, it definitively becomes cheaper to install new solar panels than to build coal plants, we have good reasons to think that even more coal plants will still get built: this is the Jevons Paradox. In opposition to capitalism’s endless growth imperative, we need, as DesJardins puts it, economic development without growth—endless growth is unsustainable in principle, but that doesn’t mean that development is impossible. It just means that economic development can’t take the form that capitalism prefers, which is infinite expansion and growth for the sake of profit. In the past few years some ecological economists have even started to argue that we need to develop a model of economic degrowth, directly contradicting capitalism’s inherent dynamics.
Let me give you another example to illustrate the point that it is capitalism as a specific mode of production that is behind most if not all of our major ecological problems. The dominant model for producing agriculture today is large-scale, industrial agricultural production. That means huge areas of land devoted to producing food commodities using all the tools of advanced industrial technology, including agrochemicals such as nitrogen inputs for fertilizer and pesticides. Most of this farmland is monocrop or near-monocrop, which means that the land is being used to produce one or only a small handful of crops, with little to no crop rotation.
As always the shape of contemporary agriculture is in large part determined by recent globalization processes, so a little history lesson is in order.
In the twentieth century, world agricultural production underwent a massive transformation. The US was the economic and political center of the world, and its model of industrial agriculture became dominant worldwide. This is the ‘breadbasket’ model, in which the majority of basic subsistence food production, which mostly means grains such as wheat, rice, and corn, is concentrated in only a small number of regions. Today, sixty percent of global food production occurs in just five countries: China, the US, India, Brazil, and Argentina. Even within these countries, breadbasket production is highly concentrated; in the US, for instance, 61% of grain production takes place in five Midwestern states.
What this ends up meaning is that outside of those countries, almost all other nations are net importers of grain. On the side of the third world, globalizing incentives to move from subsistence and grain farming to the production of agricultural commodities that would primarily be sold to the global north meant that their economies are bound up with exportation and participation in the world market—which is how the World Bank and the WTO redefined ‘economic development’ for underdeveloped countries starting in the 1970s.
On the side of the global north, increasing focus on breadbasket production means that US agricultural production is in large part intended to be exported to those foreign countries that are focused on cash crop production. By the late 1990s, some 1 in 3 acres of US farmland was being used for grains destined not for domestic consumption but for the world market. In other words, agro-export dependency has become the dominant condition nearly everywhere. So, by the end of the twentieth century most countries could not feed themselves using their existing agricultural mode of production, and this made them politically and economically beholden to the breadbasket nations in a serious way.
And again, in the breadbasket nations, the dominant model is large-scale, industrial agricultural production. This is highly environmentally damaging in a few ways. The lack of biodiversity on these farms—the fact that they produce only a few crops, and don’t do significant crop rotation—means that soils become depleted of their nutrients. In order to counteract this and keep production going, these operations are increasingly forced to use nitrogen-heavy fertilizers. This has cascading ecological effects, as fertilizer pollution winds up in nearby water supplies. Because of the focus on singular crops, these operations are also highly susceptible to pests, which is why there is also ever-increasing use of pesticides, and I don’t think I need to explain why spraying more and more poison into the air is environmentally harmful. And then, because we’re dealing with an export model, we ship a ton of these foodstuffs all over the world using fossil-intensive means of transportation.
Now you might think that even if all this is ecologically harmful, at least it’s an efficient form of production. But that’s actually not the case. These large-scale industrial operations are less efficient in terms of actual yield size and crop output than medium-scale agricultural operations that use more ecologically friendly practices. And the ecological damage means they tend to get less and less efficient over time: their very mode of functioning continually erodes the ecological basis for long-term production. However, the economies of scale involved in these operations means that they are on average more profitable anyway. So we have a less efficient model of agricultural production that is more environmentally damaging than alternatives that were common only a couple of decades ago—but this is the model we are using anyway, because it best suits the capitalist profit motive.
I’m going to wrap up here by suggesting that while the unfolding ecological crisis is very serious, and the political and economic obstacles to it are very powerful, we shouldn’t become fatalistic about it. I think there are real prospects for transitioning to a form of economic production that meets the needs of global distributive justice while being environmentally sustainable. But that is not going to happen automatically, and certainly not if we continue to accept the premise that the capitalist mode of production is necessary or inevitable, or that business as usual will ultimately save the day. Nothing about the logic of capital accumulation or the historical record suggests that we are moving toward anything other than disaster. I think we have a real chance to right some of these wrongs and develop a sustainable way of organizing social life and our interaction with the natural environment, but only if we correctly identify and name the problem and politically organize on that basis. The problem is capitalism, and there are no half-measures here.
Sources
Altieri, “Ecological Impacts of Industrial Agriculture”
DesJardins, “Business and Environmental Sustainability”
Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift
Kallis, Degrowth
Klein, This Changes Everything
Malm, Fossil Capital
McMichael, “Global Food Politics”
Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life
Schrecker, “Sustainability, Growth, and Distributive Justice”
Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations
Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice
gil morejón 