In Part One I argued that individual lifestyle changes, climate change advocacy and systemic change grounded in justice considerations are connected and mutually reinforcing. But what sort of change is required to meet the impending crisis of climate warming and avert multiple environmental disasters?
Generally, we can speak here of four interrelated systems that govern change in the modern world: political, economic, legal, and institutional. In Part II I will discuss the politics and economics of climate warming and the environment. In Part III I will say something about how our politics and economics are legally enframed and carried out through specific national and global institutional arrangements. Finally, in Part IV I will elaborate a few environmental ethical approaches that we might adopt, and then give some clues about how resistance against the current political, economic, legal, and institutional framework of climate warming global capitalism can be undertaken in a multitude of ways.
Climate warming, the proliferation of chemical toxins and contaminants, dwindling rain forests, and accelerating biodiversity loss are arguably the most important political issues in the world today. The bitter irony here is that although most political regimes are now willing to acknowledge the reality of climate warming, they continue to stubbornly refuse to make the sort of systemic and structural changes needed to cool things down. Political inaction is what author Seth Klein has recently described as a new form of climate denialism.[1] Yet as much as we may dislike it there is just no escaping politics. We are, as the Greek philosopher Aristotle rightly concluded, ‘political animals.’ In a very general and obvious sense, the telos (or purpose) of politics is to help us to live healthy and productive lives, to live peaceably with and among others.[2] Politics involves the practical activity and creative making of laws and constitutions that help us to live a good life and realize common goods all can share in.
Ideally, then, we would like the politics of cities and nations to articulate climate and environmental initiatives and ambitions, enact laws that set limits to greenhouse gas emissions, and put forward protocols on the release of toxic chemicals. We would like to see global political bodies establish (and strictly enforce) international guidelines to seriously address global warming. The fact is that governments can create and implement positive climate and environmental policies that meet future challenges, or they can set aside, distort, or obfuscate the realities of environmental degradation and climate warming. When they engage in the latter it is often because they have explicitly surrendered to powerful polluters and deep-pocketed fossil fuel industries, and no longer much care about the future, the rights of indigenous peoples, the common good, or human and environmental health, safety, and well-being.
To a depressing degree, this is where we are today—a place where thousands of fossil fuel lobbyists as well as the heads of several multinational oil companies are given access and agenda-setting power at climate conferences; a place where instead of taking seriously the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which described the present situation as ‘code red’ for humanity and called on world governments to immediately stop investments in and approvals of new oil and gas projects, governments seem to be desperately doubling down and doing everything they can to aid and abet the extraction of fossil fuels. [3] We need to ask why. Why have our politics largely failed so abysmally to mitigate climate warming, and instead hastened the possibility of civilizational collapse?
I think there is one big reason—the politics of the public commons has been captured by the interests of private capital. Instead of taking systemic far-reaching steps towards climate warming mitigation, our governments have very subtly shifted the burden of change towards individuals who are told that it is they, not their government that must change their lifestyles and behaviour. The effect of this shift of the burden of responsibility is to de-politicize the issues of climate and environment—in other words, to implicitly deny that climate warming and impending environmental collapse can be influenced or controlled by political decision-making.
A politics captured by corporate interests will constantly tell us that we are in the present situation because of our ‘consumer choices’. That is just false. The important choices about how to mitigate climate warming on a large scale are simply not made by the majority of working people, many of whom cannot afford to build a passive solar house or buy the latest electric bike or car. They are not invited to the table when it comes to making crucial decisions about the health of the planet, even though they are the most affected by these. By contrast corporations can easily choose to make their products greener and more sustainable but instead prioritize profits over the health of the planet. They are largely indifferent to the effects their acts have on ordinary people.
Secondly, it is corporations not individuals who are the biggest GHG emitters. The reality is that 80% of worldwide CO2 emissions can be traced back to 57 companies. The carbon footprint of militaries and weapons manufacturers (who are not legally required to disclose their GHG emissions) is approximately 5.5% of global emissions. If the world’s militaries were a country, this figure would mean they have the fourth largest national carbon footprint in the world.
Thirdly, not everyone is equally responsible for climate warming; The richest 1 percent of the world’s population produced as much carbon pollution in 2019 than the five billion people who made up the poorest two-thirds of humanity. Finally, the consequences of climate change are by no means distributed equally among the nations of the world. Throughout history, wealthy industrialized nations have released over three times more greenhouse gasses than poorer or developing countries, and the latter suffer the most devastating consequences of such emissions.
When liberal or conservative governments advance the idea of ‘limited government’ they put corporations and wealthy fossil fuel companies in the driver’s seat, and allow them to relentlessly exploit the natural environment. Indeed, the effort to atomize, isolate and depoliticize the masses has been the raison d'être of extractive, colonial and exploitative capitalist production since its very beginnings.
The enduring myth of capitalism has always been that it was designed as a mechanism for efficiently allocating scarce resources, encouraging human ingenuity, and improving the quality of life for all who opted to live under it. And yes, when it was properly regulated and policed capitalism generated an unparalleled degree of wealth and prosperity to many individuals. But as a result of neoliberal policies the world of regulated and constrained capitalism is no more. The result has been a massive theft of the wealth of the world into the hands of a very small opulent minority who realize their opulence at the expense of killing the planet.[4]
This seemingly inevitable result must give us pause. The logic of capitalism moves inexorably toward resource depletion and civilizational collapse. It has operated covertly as the most efficient means of justifying the colonial capture of Indigenous lands and waters, the exploitation of workers, and the eventual usurpation of the political realm. [5] Given this, the stark truth is that when it comes to climate and environment we are not so much living today in the Anthropocene but imprisoned within the Capitalocene. [6]
The evidence that climate warming, chemical toxification of the environment and biosphere diversity loss is a direct result of the capitalist mode of production is overwhelming. The result is that capital is directed not towards meeting the real needs of human beings or the planet, but into promoting endless consumption and realizing unconscionable profits. Moreover, it is very clear that widespread industrialization depends on expropriation, extraction, and exploitation of the earth's limited resources. This involves a limitless effort to subject all populations to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation. How does this take place?
On the one hand, national and international legal frameworks appear to forward progressive and utopian aspirations when it comes to climate warming and the environment. On the other hand, the latter repeatedly refuse to meaningfully rein in the corporate capitalist culture that enables the very climate warming priorities they claim they are fighting against. Much of this has to do with how laws are enacted and institutionalized. In Part III I will describe the constitutive role of law in creating and maintaining the contemporary capitalist system that accelerates global warming and environmental destruction, and then I will say how these laws are realized in specific institutional arrangements and promoted through corporatized media. Finally, Part IV will introduce a few ethical approaches to environment and climate warming and then say how each of these can be applied at both the individual and broader systemic levels of thought and action in ways that underscore our mutual obligations toward others and towards the planet that provides the very condition of possibility for life itself.
Notes
[1]“In the new form of denialism, the fossil fuel industry, and our political leaders assure us that they understand and accept the scientific warnings about climate change — but they are in denial about what this scientific reality means for policy and/or continue to block progress in less visible ways.” Seth Klein and Shannon Daub https://www.sethklein.ca/blog/the-new-climate-denialism-time-for-an-intervention
[2] “Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.” [ Aristotle, Politics 1252a1-5]
[3] This is especially the case in Canada. As Robert Hackett has noted “On a per capita basis, Canadians are the highest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet, drive the most inefficient vehicles, and rank as one of the world’s top ten climate polluters overall. Our atmospheric dumping nearly doubles when including the burning of fossil fuels we export to other countries, many of which produce manufactured goods for the wealthy global north.”
[4] For more on capitalism's destructive relation to human life and the planet see: Angus, Ian The War Against the Commons Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism Monthly Review Press, 2023
Foster, John Bellamy Capitalism in the Anthropocene, Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution. Monthly Review Press 2022; Foster, John Bellamy, Clark, Brett, York Richard, The Ecological Rift, Capitalism’s War on Earth Monthly Review Press 2010; Klein, Naomi, This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate, Knopf, 2008; Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Vintage Canada 2009
Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, 2015 Verso Books
Roy, Arundhati, Capitalism: A Ghost Story Haymarket Books, 2014
[5] See Palmer, Bryan D., Colonialism and Capitalism: Canada's Origins 1500–1890: A New History for the Twenty-First Century Volume One, James Lorimer and Company Ltd. 2024
[6] See for example Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, PM Press/Kairos
2016. Edited by Jason W. Moore. See also “The Capitalocene Part I: On the Nature & Origins of Our Ecological Crisis”, April 2017, The Journal of Peasant Studies 44(3):594-630
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