Markets Cannot Solve the Climate Crisis

How did we get to where we are now?  “Free range” capitalism could be the explanation for climate change, and needs taming, says one writer.

According to a new book, the profit motive, which drives capitalism above all other considerations, forces it to extract everything from the planet that will generate a surplus, at the expense of real benefits to humans and ecosystems.

Fossil Capital: the Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, by Andreas Malm, out in hardback from Verso in January 2016, analyses capitalism’s role in global warming by delving into its past.

The book builds on the work of Naomi Klein’s 2014 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate.  Both ask whether catastrophic climate change can be averted without at least a major makeover – or the outright elimination – of capitalism.

Malm, a professor of human ecology at Sweden’s Lund University, starts with James Watt’s patenting of the rotating steam engine in 1784.  This was also the first year that rising carbon dioxide and methane levels were observed in polar ice.

First Malm attacks the accepted theories of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. who developed and reinforced the capitalist notion that markets are the cure for all social ills.  He shows that mills adopted coal power instead of water only because it enabled mill owners to move to populated areas to find docile and skilled workers, who were in short supply in the countryside.

More biddable
Coal enabled this move because, once out of the ground, it is highly portable.  The machines, of course, eliminated many jobs and made others both simpler and more difficult.  Owners started hiring women and children because they were easier to control than adult men.

The demands of the machines set the pace of work, and it was only after massive strikes and riots in the 1840s that a ten-hour workday was established; but this, Malm shows, only caused the mill owners to speed up the machinery and make workers adapt further, producing more in less time.

This in turn increased the demand for coal.  The energy transition fostered a “bourgeois fantasy” that self-sustaining machines, godlike in their power but also biddable, would create a golden age.

Malm frames non-fossil energy – air, water and light – as “the flow”, a constant movement of forces not generated by humans that can sometimes be harnessed for human ends.  Coal – and by extension all further fossil fuels – is “the stock”, something manufacturers can buy, accumulate, and use at need.
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Insisting that the real authors of the climate crisis comprise a tiny, all-male, all-white fraction of the planet’s population, Malm objects to calling this the Anthropocene epoch; he would rather call it the “Capitalocene.”  And capital, he insists, is not capable of solving the crisis it created.

What we need instead, he writes, is a return to “the flow”:  distributed solar, wind and water power.  Moreover, in order to avoid severe damage to civilization, we need to abandon carbon immediately, and this can be accomplished only by intentional and decisive governmental action.

The governments that are doing best at this, Malm observes, are state and city governments, which have no obligation to generate profits and are not owned by Big Capital.

Malm recognises that “socialism is an excruciatingly difficult condition to achieve.”  He’s not envisioning a new Stalinist nightmare to replace runaway capital.  For one thing, Malm observes, capitalist ideology is so deeply ingrained in society that, quoting Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Still, he says, people must try at least to modify free-range capitalism, 

Read more at Markets Cannot Solve the Climate Crisis