Destroy the Economy to Save the Planet

Everybody knows the world is heating up; everybody knows this is a bad thing.

But few people understand just how bad it is, what’s going to happen as a result and what we can do about it.

I’m not going to talk to you about how many degrees the planet is going to heat up by; I’m just going to tell you about the effects this heating is likely to have.

We’ve already had a heat wave in Moscow that killed 700 people per day, we’ve had three hurricanes at once, an event which is only supposed to happen once every 500,000 years. And wildfires have become normal; we now have California and Portugal burning down every so often.

Of course the worst is yet to come. Soon there will be major cities where it won’t be possible to go outside without being burned, whole communities submerged and farmland turned to desert. This is all within our lifetimes; but of course there will be no end to the catastrophe unless extreme action is taken.

By 2050, the UN think we will have 200 million refugees. The International Organization for Migration thinks that number will actually be 1.5 Billion. This is roughly three times the population of the entire EU. A refugee crisis, even on the lower end of this range is going to have dire consequences.

The right already have a response to a migrant crisis like this, and we’ve seen it before. The ruling class will not want to cut their profits and they will need a scapegoat to turn your eyes away from the fact that they continue to torch the earth. Of course, just as happened with the Syrian civil war, the refugees will be that scapegoat. We can expect most of these refugees to either die during the journey to safety, to be shot at borders or to perish in concentration camps. I think we can also expect the finger to be pointed at natives who happen to share the heritage of these refugees, and who knows how far that could escalate.

Even if, somehow, we don’t get a fascistic response, the capitalist’s response will be no better. They will simply protect themselves and their families, and they will find ways to profit from the disaster which will inevitably make it worse. The models of which land is going to be uninhabitable will be used by capital to find the best places to buy up. But we’re skipping ahead…

Capital is money in motion; it’s what you get when a capitalist uses their money to invest and produce more money, which they then reinvest. The role of a capitalist is to do this endlessly; if they didn’t - they wouldn’t be a capitalist. This means that a capitalist economy must always grow. If it does not, it’s not working and you get one of two responses. The better of the responses is the Keynesian reinvestment so that there will be more demand for the products of Capital. The second is austerity - which has never worked in the history of the world. So we’ve established that the economy must always grow under Capitalism. Clearly this is incompatible with a dying planet. The OECD want 3% growth a year which means doubling production every 24 years. This is insane, but it’s what’s accepted.

Capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with the world we live in today. It’s predicated upon constant expansion and consistent overproduction. Waste, within capitalism is a feature, not a bug. What purpose is there for a capitalist to make something that lasts for a long time, when they’d much rather you just bought another one is 5 years? What purpose does advertising serve but to convince you to buy things you never would have wanted before? Why would a capitalist invest in a long term green energy plan when coal is so cheap? And finally, why would a capitalist care when they know whey can escape. It won’t be them who suffer; it will be the very poorest - in what famous marxist propaganda outlet - the UN - calls a ‘climate apartheid’. If we want to continue to live on this earth, we must end capitalism. You don’t have to take my word for this. There was a serious study done in April of this year that concluded that it is not possible to have green growth.

Profit, too, is part of the problem; the banks will happily lend to things they think are profitable, but there’s no money to be made in taking cars off the road, no profit in scuttling dirty old tankers and no hope of getting your money back from the new forests. This money will have to be given - not lent - and they will simply never agree to this. The costs must be offset against the price of dealing with future crises, not connected with any tangible economic output. If we are growing our economy and expanding production to pay for rewilding, we may as well be chasing our own tails.

Even when capitalists have pretended to take action on the climate, their solutions don’t work. The idea that electric cars that only the richest can afford will save us is lunacy. The idea that mere meddling in the market with silliness like a carbon tax will help has been proven wrong. Even a green new deal with huge investment in renewable energy is doomed without ending the constant cycle of overproduction and constant growth.

It is possible to stop and even to reverse climate change. What needs to be done is a very sudden halt on fossil fuel extraction and use. We need huge projects to create green energy at the same time as planting unimaginable numbers of trees. We need to stop shipping everything half way across the world because the labour is cheaper there, we need to eliminate as much waste as is reasonable - that means no more empty buildings, no nonsense distribution networks where I’m buying lamb from New Zealand and not from Wales. We also need to rethink our building materials; a huge amount of global energy production is mining and we could really reduce that with more wooden buildings, more communal transport to take cars off the road, and products that are built to last a lifetime and the education for everyone to repair their own things. Of course ramping down all this stuff doesn’t sound great fun, but of course reducing production also means we’ll have to work less; we’ll have more free time and more nature to enjoy.

It’s not just capitalism that is incompatible with climate change. The current model of nations is too. You can’t have these separate blocs working against each other in this world. Neither the heat, not the floods will stop at borders and we will have to work with every part of the world to solve this. We must stop the Amazon from burning, we must stop the Sahara from expanding and we must ultimately have some real global collaboration. That is why the only way to fight climate change is international collaboration. And if you told these people the entire world would flood without their investment in green technology and re-wilding, they would invest in a bigger yacht. And that is why we can not negotiate.