Climate change represents one of the major threats to human well being and personifies the excesses and inequalities of an economic system that demands ever expansion and growth year by year. The topic of climate change is vast; there is probably not a single discipline that is not touched or that cannot contribute to the field of climate change. To convincingly tackle the problem of climate change it is necessary to employ a multi-disciplinary approach and learn from fields such as climate science, political economy and history among many others. By definition is then impossible to be an expert on climate change and all its ramifications. Here I present a contribution, from the perspective of an ecologist and therefore a non-expert in many of the fields that define the climate change space. I describe the struggle we face and argue that the solution must be political in nature. Politics that goes beyond only protest in squares or international agreements, but also as a process of analysis and critique of the mechanism that brought us here. I specifically talk about the role of science, the historical context that has led us to the vast inequalities (in CO2 emissions, wages, ecological footprint) present today, the politics of the proposed solutions and I finally sketch the four futures we might encounter.
Current and projected impacts of climate change
CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have never been above 300 part per million (ppm) in the last 800,000 years1. In February 2023 the de-seasonalized average of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was 419 ppm2. Global surface temperature was 1.09 [0.95 to 1.20]°C higher in 2011–2020 than 1850–19003, with stronger warming over land (1.59 [1.34 to 1.83]°C) than over the ocean (0.88 [0.68 to 1.01]°C). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018 calculated that for a 66% chance of avoiding a 1.5°C in warming, the remaining budget of CO2 that can be emitted was 420 Gt4, which in 2023 is around eight years of current emissions. For a 50% chance of going over 1.5°C, they have a quota of 580 Gt of CO2 or about 12 years of current emissions5.
The warming of the atmosphere, land and oceans alters the Earth’s climate system, leading to changes in weather patterns and resulting in more severe and more frequent extreme events. Already with the current level of warming many human communities are feeling the impact of climate change. In Somaliland a prolonged drought between 2015 and 2018 has killed 70% of the livestock which is crucial to the region food security6. The decline in the horn of Africa rainfalls has been attributed to anthropogenic climate change7. In the Middle East and North Africa a number of conflicts have erupted and attributable to climate change-induced alteration in precipitation8. Climate-related disasters have already killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world, mostly in the Global South.
“300,964 killed in Ethiopia, 168,584 in Bangladesh, 150,362 in Sudan, and 101,473 in Mozambique. During that period, 62,553,000 were made homeless in Bangladesh, as were 8,679,282 in Pakistan and 7,823,102 in the Philippines.11 As Oxfam reports, on average, over 20 million people a year were internally displaced by extreme weather disasters over the last ten years. Small island nations like Cuba, Dominica, and Tuvalu, archipelagos like the Philippines, and immiserated states like Somalia are amongst the ten countries where people are likeliest to be afflicted by climate-caused disasters like cyclones and floods”9.
9 Ajl (2021), p.84
If current unconditional nationally determined contributions that have been ratified at the Paris agreement are fully implemented, there is a 66% chance that warming will be limited to 3.2°C by the end of the century10.
10 Anne and John (2019)
In a 3°C world 10% of animal and plant species face very high risk of extinction11. For human communities the threats are multiple; at 3°C yields of staples crops strongly declines. Maize yield in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America are projected to decrease by around 50%12, strongly increasing the risk of multi bread-basket failures and sustained food supply disruptions13. Flood damages at 3 degrees are up to 4 times higher than 1.5 degree14. Besides displacement caused by sea level rise, part of planet will become unlivable because of extreme temperatures. In 2021 alone 22 million people were displaced by extreme weather events15. By 2070 19% of the world population will reside in barely livable zones16 leading to 100s of millions of climate refugees.
Currently we are believed to live in the Anthropocene; a proposed geological epoch, estimated to have begun in the mid-twentieth century with the start of the great acceleration in population growth, industrialization and globalization17. Under human influence in the past 50 years around 17% of the Amazon forest has been lost18 and forest wildlife population has been reduced to half19. 40% of global top soil is currently seriously degraded20 and 68% of plants and animals have already been wiped out21. In fact, humans caused extinction rate to increase at least by a factor of 100022.
From 1990 to 2021 we emitted more carbon than in the history of humanity combined23, but not all humans are equally responsible for the emissions. 92% of emission in excess of planetary boundaries have been caused by nations of the Global North, with the USA alone responsible for 40%24. The Global South contributed only to 8% of excess emissions, but has suffered 90% of the economic cost and 98% of deaths related to climate change25. The entirety of the excess resource use is all from Global North. The vast differences in contribution and effects of climate change between Global North and Global South are caused by specific factors that have to be addressed in order to seriously tackle climate change. These are economic, imperialist and colonial in nature and will be addressed in detail in the next chapters.
The causes of climate change are relatively straight forward to analyze nowadays, while the solutions are trickier. The question presents itself. Why did we not start to act on climate change fast enough? One thing is certain: if the only thing we needed was scientific consensus, we would have fixed climate change decades ago. What is actually needed is a massive re-organization of production, consumption and allocation of resources, which requires collective action, whose decisions are inherently political.
A climate of changing politics
The concept of the political varies among the different schools of political philosophy. Broadly within the liberal tradition politics can be defined as the battle of ideas, where conflict is resolved through argumentation and appeals to universal ideals. For Karl Marx politics is the class struggle, for Carl Schmitt is the friend-enemy distinction. At a fundamental level politics is a power struggle among people.
I like to imagine politics as the process of moving a very heavy object from A to B, where you have a set of people pushing towards B and another set of people pushing from the other side in the opposite direction, resisting, slowing down or reversing the movement. So to move to B it is not only needed to apply a force in B direction to overcome inertia, but the force needs to be larger than the opposite force to result in the desired movement. In politics you can either have a few strong forces, or many smaller forces, but the many in order to be powerful need to push in the same direction, conscious of their collective power. If we want to take this analogy one step further, in the context of climate change the mass of the object that we are trying to move is increasing every year at about 3% and the floor is starting to crack under its massive weight.
In the context of climate change, politics is then a force towards a movement that must occur at all levels of society. In the squares, at town halls, at the workplace, but crucially also within and towards institutions.
Inside institutions, politics is as a process of criticism and reshaping of the power structures that have led us to a world characterized by vast inequality and climate crisis. Countless examples of institutions that can be targeted for climate action might be found, but in this text I’ll mostly focus on two; the first one is perhaps the largest structure of rules and norms that shape human behavior, which is the economic system. Capitalism is the overwhelmingly dominant economic order nowadays; it is absolutely pervasive in every aspect of life and shapes other institutions such as the media and advertisement. The second one is the institution of education and research. Universities and research institutes faced with the climate crisis seem to be content with just existing and maintaining their own power structures instead than being a vehicle for social progress.
Science has been absolutely crucial for better understanding and raising awareness to climate change. Without scientific research we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But science is not done in a vacuum; it is a social process that lives within a culture and has therefore to be continuously constructively critiqued. Let’s start then with the role of science in relation to climate change.
The concept of the apolitical scientist
The scientist often (consciously or unconsciously) sees itself as a member of the intelligentsia, an intellectual class detached from society, that has the duty and burden of producing objective knowledge. The general public admires and respects the scientist exactly because of the its perceived objectiveness, at least relative to other methods of inquiry. But what is objectivity? And can the scientist be objective? Scientific objectivity can be interpreted as willingness to stick to the facts, as a commitment to value-freedom or as a removal of personal biases from scientific reasoning26, and is the subject of many debates in the field of philosophy of science. What is certain is that a scientist can try its best to be objective in the process, in order to maximize transparency and replicability. But the way questions are framed, the kind of questions that get asked (and not asked) and the kind of answers that get accepted or even entertained are the subject of subjectivity (and often the funding agency).
26 “Scientific Objectivity (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)” (2020)
Science is inescapably social. Rarely an individual scientist will make breakthrough on its own. Rather, scientific achievement is the result of collaboration between many different people and requires coordination and language. Therefore science will also have traces of the underlying social relations. Science is historical and a product of its time27. This is usually understood only in retrospect, but not applied to the present. Scientists are members of their culture and share the same kind of basic believes that our culture runs on. Inevitably this has an effect on the research, not on the methods or the results, but cultural biases find their way in our introductions, where we justify studying a particular ecosystem through the lens of ecosystem services, and in our conclusions, where we explain how a particular strategy might be used for adaptation to climate change. Of course there is no need to explain why it is necessary to justify studying a particular ecosystem on the basis of the monetizable service that it can do for us, or who should do the adapting.
27 Wainwright and Mann (2018), p. 71
Climate change is a problem caused by a specific economic system, that affects our natural world and society at large and that must be resolved by collective action. The science of climate change involves a beautiful mix of diverse disciplines such as physics, climatology, atmospheric chemistry, biology, political economy, international relations, philosophy and many more. It is an issue that must be studied across the natural science-social science divide, an issue caused by, and affecting humans. And it is indeed the human factor that complicates our analysis, as the influence of conscious human activity in social relations establishes deep complexities for social analysis28. For example, for “the discipline of economics, neither its object of study (“the economy”) nor its core concepts ( “discounting,” for example) can be separated from the history of conquest and empire that facilitated the emergence of global capitalism”29. We live within a culture and yet we must criticize the culture that allowed the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to rise so quickly. And science is certainly crucial in this endeavor, but science cannot win a battle which is in fact political. To quote Einstein in his 1949 essay “Why Socialism?”:
“We should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society”30.
30 Einstein (2018)
So we shouldn’t overestimate science, nor we should set our expectations too low. And from this point of view I am going to present two good faith criticisms of the most authoritative documents of climate science, the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC reports are divided in 3 groups; working group I (WGI) assesses “The Physical Science Basis”, working group II (WGII) focuses on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” and working group III (WGIII) assesses “Mitigation of climate change”. WGI presents a natural sciences view of climate change, based on physical processes and modelling. WGII has a much more of a human component, as it assesses and predicts how humans and ecosystems might be affected and how they might adapt to climate change. WGIII focuses on mitigation, whose future is essentially a question of political economy31.
31 Wainwright and Mann (2018), p. 85
The concept of adaptation, which is the focus of one of the chapters of the WGII, is particularly problematic as in the reports it is never stated who should do the adapting, and on whose terms we should adapt. Adaptation is defined as adjustment of our current system32. Examples of adaptations mentioned include levees, irrigation, enhancing food availability, restoring natural forest, cooperation with Indigenous Peoples, planned relocation, public works programs, improving access to potable water33. Adaptation options are listed in the typical dry and detached IPCC style. At first glance it seems a very thorough assessment, but it is essential to keep in mind that “when the world is offered a limited set of options, it is worth paying close attention to the fine print”34. No political adaptation seems required. Reading the IPCC, it almost seems that if only we built a few levees here and there and planned better relocations we could keep living large, just in a hotter world. To be fair, they mention the need of addressing social-inequities for effective adaptation by stating “inequity and poverty also constrain adaptation”35. But factors such as inequality and poverty are never integrated in a systemic view. Poverty is not treated as the result of an economic system that produces inequality by design, but just as an additional factor that it is going to influence negatively adaptation. Poverty exists, the world is getting hotter and people (in the abstract) need to adapt. Reading the summary for policy makers of WGII sometimes feels like an exercise in nihilist composure in the face of human suffering. The lack of any systemic view and the absence of a clear explanation of who will be forced to adapt and how much misery is going to involve, makes it so that it wouldn’t be too hard to believe that something like this made up quote was present in the text:
Sea level rise poses a substantial risk, but adaptations such as learning how to swim might enhance livelihood (medium confidence). The urgent provision of basic services such as swimming courses is constrained by financial access especially in low-income and marginalized groups and among Indigenous Peoples (high confidence)36.
36 How it feels to read the summary for policy makers of WG2. This is not in the IPCC.
The WGII report paints a picture of a world in which systemic risks to the political and economic structure are negligible. Calculating climate change induced risk to human welfare and “the economy” requires estimates of future atmospheric carbon concentrations and a theory of how societies might adapt to complex changes37. Because the IPCC cannot know the latter, it assumes that the current system, the liberal capitalistic order, will live through in the face of climate change.
37 Wainwright and Mann (2018), p. 85
The risk assessment is displayed to policy makers with an ingenious device that was invented by the IPCC in its third assessment38; a bar graph that shows for each degree of warming the risks (represented with “burning embers” colors) for various categories. Among the different categories there is “Unique and threatened systems”, which quantifies the risk for unique ecosystems as for example coral reefs, “Extreme weather events” and “Global aggregate impacts”. The last one is particularly puzzling because it is defined as “impacts to socio-ecological systems that can be aggregated globally into a single metric39, such as monetary damages, lives affected, species lost or ecosystem degradation at a global scale”. The unspoken assumption here is that dollars lost and lives lost are somehow interchangeable, two timeless and natural components of our system. But the loss of a person or of an entire species is an irreversible event, a catastrophe that has no place to be put next to monetary damage.
38 H.-O. Pörtner et al. (2022a), p. 2481
39 Although it says that the categories are defined in the same way across reports, in ar5 wg2 SMP, RFC4 was defined as “impacts to both Earth’s biodiversity and the overall global economy”.
At the current level of warming the risk of global aggregate impacts is undetectable. At 1.8 degrees of warming the risk for unique and threatened systems becomes very high, the risk for extreme weather event is high, and yet the risk for global aggregate impacts is only moderate40. So 1.8 degrees would cause significant stress to our Earth system, likely wiping out some ecosystems, and causing frequent extreme weather events. Nonetheless, according to this assessment our socio-economic system will barely feel an impact.
40 H.-O. Pörtner et al. (2022a), pp. 2486-2493
The effect of climate change on the economy is represented in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) lost in comparison to a world without climate change. This approach is useful because it allows to calculate “economically optimal” global emission pathways41. For example according to one study the predicted impact on income is -2.04 (± 2.21) % at 3 °C warming42. Now that we know the price of inaction we can rationally calculate how much to spend! After all, if until now we didn’t do much to solve climate change surely it is because there was not a price on it, otherwise the market would have fixed it. Often, this seems to be the logic of the IPCC in their numerous mentions of “market failure”.
A market failure is a situation in which markets do not mediate resources allocation efficiently or don’t exist at all. This is usually attributed to information asymmetry or the impossibility to privatize a public good. So a market failure is not a failure of the market, but a failure of the regulatory bodies and public policies43 to allow the market to do its magic. Here are two examples of market failure as shown in the sixth assessment report of WGII of the IPCC:
43 H.-O. Pörtner et al. (2022a), p. 1230
“In the Congo Basin, farmers are adapting to increasingly variable rainfall by expanding their cropping activities into forested areas, releasing carbon into the atmosphere through forest clearance activities and threatening biodiversity”44.
44 H.-O. Pörtner et al. (2022a), p. 1233
“In Melanesia, sea walls have been built out of coral by local people in an attempt to reduce the impacts of rising sea levels, leading to outright destruction of some of the world’s most productive and biodiverse coral reefs”45.
45 H.-O. Pörtner et al. (2022a), p. 1233
This seems to suggest that if only we had valued (in dollars) the service of CO2 sequestration of the forest of the Congo Basin, and if we had valued the service of protecting coastlines from erosion of the coral reefs in Melanesia, the market would have fixed this issue. So from this overall narrative it is easy to get the impression that when the IPCC talks about adaptation, it means that the people will adapt, but the market will stay, and might even save us from doom if we don’t stand in the way. It is in these moments that I wish that the IPCC had an additional working group; working group 0: “How did we get here?”. An analysis of how (mostly) the capitalist economic system through constant demand for capital accumulation and growth created massive inequalities and systematically shifted the social and ecological cost of their activities to the environment and future generations.
The current reports do not answer this question. And indeed, they barely mention capitalism. In the full report of AR6 WGII “capitalism” is mentioned 3 times. Once to explain how vulnerability to climate change is worsened by “historical and ongoing processes of colonialism and capitalism, which dispossessed Indigenous Peoples”46 and other two times in which capitalism is treated as a factor among many that complicates adaptation. “Imperialism” is mentioned once. In working group III “capitalism” is mentioned once in the body of the full report. And of course any mention of “capitalism” or “imperialism” is nowhere to be found when we look in the technical summaries (the shorter summary of the full report) and the summary for policy makers (an even shorter report that for working group II and working group III is approved line by line by IPCC member governments).
46 H.-O. Pörtner et al. (2022a), p. 594
A similar exercise can be done with the word “degrowth”. Degrowth is a policy and a set of theories that critique the paradigm of economic growth. Degrowth experts mention the impossibility or infeasibility to decouple GDP from ecological impacts, and that the only strategy to “remain within safe carbon budget is for high-income nations to actively slow down the pace of material production and consumption”47. “Degrowth” is mentioned 14 times in the body of the full report of AR6 WGII, and 8 times in the body of the full report of AR6 WGIII. And once again any mention of “degrowth” is scrubbed away from the technical summary and summary for policy makers reports.
47 Hickel (2021)
Of course the nuance of the IPCC cannot be captured in just a word search and it has to be mentioned that chapter 5 of WGIII report is the first instance in which a full IPCC chapter is dedicated to “demand-side” mitigation. Demand side strategies, especially around shifting and avoiding consumption mirror many of the policy options championed by degrowth48. Still, the chapter falls shorts of exploring system-wide strategies and instead of championing an overhaul of capitalism (as degrowth does), it mostly focuses on individual strategies such as going vegan49.
It seems degrowth is not a mainstream option yet. Is it too radical for the policy makers? Maybe. What is sure is that actually implementing degrowth would mean the end of economic imperialism50 that has massively benefited the middle class and the ruling class of the Global North and would also mean curbing unequal exchange and cancellation of most debt from low-income countries51. A far cry from what most people in the Global North think of adaptations, and what is fittingly represented in the first page of the AR6 WGIII: An ecovillage in Scotland, where each large house has a garden and solar panels on the roof. I am afraid that we are going to have to do more than just putting some solar panels on single family homes. So, what exactly must we do?
Individual vs systemic
Within the discourse of solutions to climate change, usually the division between individual and systemic actions is invoked. I believe this to be a good distinction, but it is also important to distinguish between principled solutions and opportunistic ones. Regarding the latter, opportunism goes beyond greenwashing and can apply to progressive sounding ideas. For example, healing from consumerism and adopting a “1.5 degree lifestyle”52 is not only an inadequate advice, but it is also contradictory because the 1.5 degree lifestyle itself can become commodified and something to be marketed to a “progressive” market demographic. An example of such suggestion can be found in “The climate book” (which I overall recommend, as it provides accurate and up to date information on climate change), where the author of the chapter 5.3 proudly proclaims that they renounced to their private vehicle, and rely now on a car sharing service. These type of advice not only seem to be sponsored content, but they are targeted only to the affluent metropolitan worker of the Global North. Similar types of opportunism are excessive focus on individual carbon footprint to the detriment of systemic solutions. The individual carbon footprint is a concept that was promoted by British Petroleum in the early 2000s to shift the responsibility of carbon emission to the individual53, and therefore cannot be the sole focus of the climate activist. Before moving on to systemic solutions I want to mention that of course there are individual actions that can have a positive influence and can be adopted by well-off people such as stopping flying, eating vegan54 and reducing consumption.
Systemic policies usually fall in three categories; incomplete solutions, “systemic” ones that actually end up reinforcing the status quo, and principled ones. Examples of correct, but incomplete systemic solutions revolve around critiques of the institutions of advertisement and the media. In “The Climate Book” George Monbiot blames British television channels for blocking most of the “environmental” shows being proposed as well as airing climate negationist shows such as “The Great Global Warming Swindle”55. It is certainly a valid critique, but from this it does not follow that “without the media the governments would have been forced to act”. A similar way of thinking can be found in Thunberg’s comments around the media:
55 Thunberg (2022), p. 514
“All of this is happening because we, the people did not fully realize the situation we were in or the consequences of what is going to happen. They lied to us. We were deprived of our rights of democratic citizens and left in the dark. This is one of our major problems, [..] and once understood the nature of the crisis we will surely act”56.
56 Thunberg (2022), p. 587. Quote translated in English from the Italian version.
Media criticism, especially around the profit motive and the ownership structure, has certainly a role to play in the climate equity fight, but it is not the cause of it, it is just one of the many manifestation of the rot of capitalism. Similarly, only focusing on the role of advertising57, without considering the economic system that originates from, will always result in a shallow critique. The real problem with advertisement within the climate space is that it will provide individual solutions to issues that are systemic in society, to the point that people themselves become commodified and personify advertisement.
57 Thunberg (2022), p. 460
Fake systemic (another case of opportunism) “solutions” that actually end up reinforcing the status quo revolve around only working within the current system to push politician to more sustainable development. Angela Merkel as Chancellor famously said that young people need to “pile on the pressure”58 to increase emission cuts. Was she referring to a political or cultural revolution? Of course not. A few seconds later in the interview she explains that Germany has to adopt technology and lead by example in the transition in mobility and in the transition in energy supply. In other words, sustainable growth. The fantasy that it is possible to keep growing and somehow decouple GDP growth from CO2 emission and environmental degradation. It has been clearly shown that it is impossible to decouple GDP and emission fast enough (or at all) to avoid catastrophic climate change59. And yet a myriad of “progressive” politicians fill their political programs with green growth proposals.
People who insist on the need to work within the system fundamentally do not understand the incentive structures that created the present day inequalities (in historical CO2 emission or wages). You end up with an army of self-appointed progressives stumbling over each other to provide a “nuanced” critique of the present economic system and passing it as radical. This if how nonsense such as green growth, or “1.5 degree lifestyles” become part of the mainstream discourse around climate change. You can also end up with good-faith actors demanding “the north should pay for the cost of climate justice”, but that fail to understand the dynamics of today’s global capitalism. A demand like that is essentially analogous to say “business owners are much richer than the workers that work for them. They should therefore divide their wealth equally”. In order to provide a principled critique and actual solution to our climate crisis, it is necessary to systemically criticize capitalism. I don’t believe that an in-depth understanding of capitalism is a condition to be a supporter of climate justice, but it is fundamental to avoid common pitfalls.
Working group 0: how did we get here?
In this section I will provide an overview of the development of capitalism as well as its tendencies today. It is not intended to be a comprehensive or complete description and I encourage anybody interested to check the references for more details. The purpose of this part is to explain how the present day inequalities are not an accident, but an intended feature of the global capitalist system, a system that requires incessant growth and expansion and is therefore not only fully compatible with, but necessitates imperialism. Today we live in a divided world with divided classes, with the clearest examples of this phenomenon being the massive differentials in wages or historical CO2 emissions. This fragmentation can seriously hinder the ability of an internationalist movement to achieve climate equity60. A note on terminology; in the next part I will interchangeably use the terms “Global North”, “North”, “core”, and likewise the terms “Global South”, “South”, “periphery”.
60 Ajl (2021), p.217
The story of capitalism is fundamentally intertwined with colonialism and imperialism. It is crucial to stress that colonialism, the expansion and oversea territorial control by European powers, provided the momentum for capital accumulation61, which was key to catalyze the first industrial revolution. Specifically, the plundering of the Americas played a pivotal role as the silver robbed from South America end up first in Spain and then in rest of Europe as repayment for Spain’s debts. Additionally, the surplus population created by the agrarian revolution in England found employment largely in sectors that presupposed the existence of colonies, such as the building of ships and harbors among others. The workers that could not find employment domestically were dispossessed to the colonies as settlers or indentured servants62. I will not go into an in depth description of how imperialism and colonialism enabled the development of capitalism because of lack of specific expertise and I instead refer to books such as “How the West Came to Rule”, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” and the “Colonial Tribute” chapter of the book “The Wealth of (Some) Nations”.
Nowadays we are often told a myth of western industrialization through brilliance. According to this story, Western Europe and North America developed as a function of superior technology, governance and institutions. Sometimes the same myth is told through the lens of Christian virtue. The protestant work ethic has been claimed to be allegedly an important force behind the uncoordinated emergence of capitalism63. These idealistic explanations, assume ideas to be the dominant driver of history and ignore the deeply uneven relationship in the last half a millennium between North and South. It is a convenient story that depoliticizes global inequality and takes power relations out of the economy. The inequality that we observe today among countries (in wages or historical CO2 emissions) are largely the result of the colonialism of yesterday. The last 500 years of relationship between the North and South were mostly characterized by violent appropriation of means of production, robbery, thievery and usurpation of system of governance and way of life.
63 Weber (2002)
Just to briefly mention one example among many; India, under British imperialism was the subject of British capitalist exploitation without being allowed to reap the fruits of capitalist development. India had more than 20% of the world’s GDP in 1820, and only 4% when the country became independent in 194764. The drain of Indian economy was carried out through the destruction of the domestic handicraft sector and by the application of exorbitant taxes and monopoly prices on imports from England to India. The colonial market was kept obligatory open while the metropolitan market was protected with high tariffs against rival products such as Asian textiles. Therefore, India developed not according the needs of the Indian people, but as market for British manufactures and as a supplier to Britain of raw materials. The public expense was used to finance the infrastructure required by Britain the plunder more efficiently the country65. The wealth extracted from India, not under the competitive rule of the game, but “through monopoly privileges, racial discrimination and outright violence” allowed Britain to industrialize quickly and accumulate capital66.
Violent forms of expropriation, expulsion and eviction continue today under modern capitalism, while fraudulence and lying and mystical stories cover the ongoing appropriation of wealth.
The end of formal colonialism carried the hope that formerly subjugated countries could finally develop independently. Spearhead by South American countries such as Chile, Argentina and Uruguay in late 1940s and 1950s, and later adopted by newly independent countries in Africa such as Ghana, Tanzania among others in the 1960s, a new type of economic development, inspired by Keynesian economics took place67. Encouraged by the success of the Soviet economy and by the fast growth of centralized European economies after WWII, they established a “development inward” type of economy, defined “developmentalism”, in which the state played an active part in the economy. A key aspect of developmentalism was the policy “Import Substitution Industrialization”, which was characterized by state subsidies aimed at developing strategic industries and by trade barriers to protect the nascent domestic production. Foreign capital flows were discouraged and foreign ownership of national assets was limited, often even nationalizing natural resources and key industries. Additionally, strong investments in public education, healthcare, social security and housing strongly reduced poverty and supported workers68. Developmentalism was widely successful in reducing the gap between rich and poor countries. Within a decade the income gap between USA and East Asia shrank by 26%, between US and Latin America by 11% and in the middle East by 23%. Additionally, new forms of international cooperation among Global South countries started to take place with the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 196169.
What followed this impressive level of development was a series of coups supported by Western Governments (mostly USA, Britain and France) who felt threatened by lack of control on “developing” countries economies. Import substitution industrialization had effectively made consumer goods in the North more expensive, whereas capital controls and higher taxes were cutting on their profits. The following is an incomplete list of western-backed coups aimed at overthrowing democratically elected leaders who wished to independently develop their economies, and that were replaced by dictators loyal to western commercial interests. The United States government, through the CIA aided the overthrown of the following leaders: Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 195370 (also aided by Britain), Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 195471, Patrice Lumumba in the Republic of the Congo in 1961 (orchestrated by Belgium), João Goulart in Brazil in 1964 (also assisted by Britain), Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 196672, Sukarno in Indonesia in 1967 and Salvador Allende in Chile in 197373. The US also supported right wing dictators in Bolivia, Ecuador, Haiti, Paraguay, Honduras, Venezuela and Panama and supported the apartheid regime in South Africa all the way through the 1980s74. France also played a large role intervening in the elections of countries that had been under its colonial power. France rigged Cameroon first election in 1982, picked the first president of Gabon in 1961. Additionally, Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, was murdered in 1987 by a rival faction who was against Sankara’s anti-imperialist stance in regards to French interests.
During the neoliberal era that followed, debt became the western weapon of choice to both fight domestic stagnation and to push their interest abroad. The 1970s was characterized by a spectacular increase in loans to developing countries, often to dictatorships the US helped install, and therefore whose population had not a say in the matter75. As the loans were denominated in dollars, with variable interest rates, many indebted countries had to default when federal fund rates hit a record 21% in 1981. What followed was a series of bailouts by the IMF in return for structural adjustment programs (SAPs), which essentially means that subjected countries had to radically deregulate their economies. SAPs were characterized by austerity, privatization and liberalization and beyond being extremely detrimental for the poor, were also undemocratic as essentially Western creditors had control of the economy of developing countries, disregarding national sovereignty76.
Debt is not the only mean of economic control. Most sectors today are monopolized by a few multinational companies whose headquarters reside in the Global North. A monopolistic position allows for price-fixing, and repatriation of profits. The vast majorities of commodities in labor intensive industries are produced by workers in the Global South, who are paid depressed wages. Both the labor and the commodities produced in the South are undervalued, but as soon as the commodity enters the Northern market its price is multiplied by several fold77. Meanwhile most of the North’s agricultural consumption originates in the South. An estimated 1 billion farmers (of which 85% are small scale) produce half the world food at very low price, while being charged exorbitant prices for fertilizers, seeds and pesticides78. The combination of undervaluing of Southern products and predatory loans has contributed to super-exploitation and continued dependency of the Global South even after the end of formal colonization. A “new international division of labor” has emerged. The majority of production (and therefore actual value added) is taking place in the South, whereas the jobs involving design, patent rights, organization of supply chain and distribution of the final product are monopolized by the North79. This polarized world where the South is organized around a production economy and the North around a consumption economy has created differences in wages that can be up to a factor of 1080. Inequality today is not mostly based by class, but driven by location, which contributes to 80% of global inequality. Under today’s economic imperialism workers in the South must therefore work for much longer to buy one-unit of wealth produced from their high-paid counterparts in the North81. What could the difference in wages be caused by? I can already image people pointing to the supposedly higher productivity in the North. However, differences in wages are not attributable to differences in productivity. In fact often workers in the South are more productive than workers in the North82. In truth, the difference is based on the forces described above; the monopolies of force, industries and finance. The militarized borders and the continuing economic dependency of the South83. These phenomena give rise to unequal exchange in international trade and facilitate the transfer of surplus from the South to the North.
“Unequal exchange occurs where there is a discrepancy between the value of a country’s exports and that of its imports as measured in terms of labor, world market prices (actual or ideal) or ecological footprints”84. The undervaluing of products and labor in the Global South gives rise to unequal exchange, which can be caused by several factors such as higher labor intensive work in the South, or wage differentials. For an extensive review of different types of unequal exchange based on labor see Ricci (2019)85. Hickel and co-authors estimated unequal exchange in 2015 by calculating Northern appropriation of raw materials, land and energy and they came up with an estimate of 10.8 Trillion dollars86.
If workers in the South involved in the production of commodities were to be paid as the same rate as in the North, the profit margin of the leading Northern powers would be annulled87. In practice the wage differential between North and South cannot be equalized under the current system because that would destroy capitalism driving engine; effective demand for products produced in the North88. Producing cheaply and selling at high prices are contradictory goals that must be balanced by governmental policy. So Northern countries erect protectionist barriers, subsidize their domestic industries, while at the same time demanding the ability to freely sell their products in the South89 (by tying loans to free market demands).
So, who in the North is benefiting from this massive transfer of value? Is it only the famous 1%? Under neoliberalism CEO salaries in the US grew by an average 400% in the 1990s and from 1980 to today the share of national income going to the 1% more than doubled90. However, economic imperialism benefits also everyday Northern workers.
90 Hickel (2018), p. 138
It is calculated that the spoils of economic imperialism are distributed in the following way: 15% contributes to higher profits, 15% to higher wages, and 70% to lower prices of consumer products. In particular the lower prices of consumer products has been estimated to be at least 4000 US$/year in benefits to metropolitan households91. This flow of value has arguable created a new class in the North; the labor aristocracy. The labor aristocracy is defined by having to sell their labor power for a wage, but because of the relatively high wages received and the comfortable working conditions they have an interest in the maintenance of current imperialist system92. Their interest is therefore more aligned with the ruling class of the North rather than with the proletarian of the South.
It has to be said that neoliberalism has also damaged the institutional advantages of the worker in the Global North, as their bargaining power has decreased and more and more public services have been privatized. Nevertheless, they still benefit from higher purchasing power of commodities produced in South under extreme exploitation93.
93 Cope (2019), p. 48
Our economy is today failing the majority of the world. By considering a poverty line that takes into consideration human needs and human dignity (7.4$/day) more than 4 billion people are today poor. From 1980 to today 1.2 billion people have been added to the poor. The World Bank would like us to believe the opposite. By setting their poverty line at 1.9$/day, an amount that has no human significance they claim that poverty has decreased since 1980, but even according to their estimate there is no decrease if we remove China from the calculation, a country that developed very much with a strong state control in economic affairs94.
Degrowth
Capitalism has created immense poverty and unimaginable inequalities between North and South. While a few “lucky” are living large off the spoils of imperialism almost a billion people are hungry. And the excessive consumption in the North is not taking place in the ether, but requires utilization of materials and production of CO2 emissions. It requires net appropriation from the South, the draining of the resources of poor countries and the offshoring of the cost of growth to vulnerable communities. It has needed the colonization and the systematic undervaluing of human lives and labor and requires today the colonization of the atmosphere.
The goal of the Paris agreement is to keep temperature increase well below 2°C and to pursue 1.5°C. The unfortunate truth is that 1.5°C is dead and 2°C is moribund. With the current government policies a median warming of 3.2°C is predicted by 210095. There is not a single country on track for 1.5°C (not even Sweden!)96. Capitalism requires constant growth for the sake of capital accumulation and somehow this idea has become accepted as common sense, as a sensible way of organizing human activity. This ideology is of course very popular within the political right, but also within the liberal left the delusion that we can heal the planet and improve living conditions, human health and happiness within the paradigm of continuous growth and private ownership of the means of production is widespread97. Capitalism requires on average a compound growth rate of 3% per year. That means a doubling of GDP every 24 years and a tenfold increase every 78 years. And we shouldn’t forget that growth under capitalism is exploitative; it requires the exploitation of marginalized groups and it needs large amounts of unpaid labor necessary for social reproduction, which have been historically largely carried out by women. Even proponents of so called “green growth” admit that at some point growth has to stop increasing, just conveniently not in the near future98. In the meantime there are plenty of people advocating for continuing growth; just a gentler, greener growth.
Green growth relies on the decoupling of GDP from carbon emissions (more about this in the Climate Leviathan chapter). It envisions a techno-utopia in which we will shortly achieve massive improvements in technology that will allow humanity to transition to green energy production, while keeping economic growth intact. At the center of the green growth paradigm are bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) technologies. These negative emissions forms of energy productions are promising and exciting, but it is not proven if they can scale up and would require biofuel plantation the size of 3 Indias99. Green growth is palatable to Western European and North American because it does not ask for a radical change and maintains the energy privilege of the Global North. Yes, it is theoretically possible to decarbonize energy production while keeping growth, but not fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change100. There is also the additional problem that keeping growth means increasing energy demand, which would further add to the challenge of decarbonizing the energy sector. Furthermore, transitioning to clean energy requires an energy investment, the so called “CO2 bump”. It follows, that if growth continues, the more energy will be required and the larger the “bump”101.
The alternative is a future not constrained by the necessity for growth. “Degrowth” recognizes that the only way to avoid the most extreme consequences of climate change is to reduce in the high-income countries the level of production and consumption102. It consists in a planned downscaling of energy and resource throughput by diminishing the parts of the economy which are more ecological destructive and socially unnecessary. Current economies are too concerned on GDP and not enough on humans needs. GDP assesses the welfare of capitalism, not people. Degrowth advocates to stop fetishizing GDP and re-focus the economy on concrete objectives, such as education, healthcare, housing etc. It argues that essential services need to be expanded and decommodified103, so that we wouldn’t have to overly rely on private income to lead fulfilling lives.
Degrowth is an old idea for a new and challenging time. Degrowth is by definition anti-capitalist; it is socialism without growth. It is important to stress the opposition to growth, because growth represents a very powerful ideology that has survived even the end of capitalism in certain contexts104. Chauvinist positions among self-appointed socialists are not a new phenomenon. And so it shouldn’t be surprising that critics of degrowth come from both liberals and “socialist” who cannot imagine a world where the Global North halts its increasing consumption105. Some even indulge in the same blind faith of technological progress and dream of a “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” where machines do all the work and humanity can enter the gates of a post-work paradise. This future is not even close, and there are serious doubts whether is even possible at all. Production is inexorably linked with the material world; the energy transformed during work follows the law of thermodynamics and moves to a less usable state106. Humans live and work within nature, not outside of it, therefore keeping growth means the continuous transformation and degradation of the natural world.
It is important to point out that degrowth does not envision a reduction of growth in the Global South, where in fact an expansion of energy use is needed to meet human needs. Degrowth in the North is necessary not only to keep within acceptable levels of global temperature increase, but also to reduce global inequality. Degrowth in the North would curb unequal exchange and therefore reduce the transfer of value from the South to the North. An additional key aspect of degrowth is the cancellation of most debt from low-income countries107. Many forms of debts are illegitimate because they were pushed by institutions under extremely uneven power dynamics or because they were accepted by despotic regimes. Often the debt has already been paid in full and countries are stuck paying interest rates.
107 Hickel, Kallis, et al. (2022)
Proponents of degrowth argue that this transformation in the North does not automatically mean a reduction of living standards, but rather a re-organization of the economy around human needs. A Northern post-growth society would require a reduction of the working week, the introduction of work guarantee with a living wage, democratization of the workplaces and punishing wealth taxes for the ultra-rich.
Most objection around degrowth revolve around feasibility108. Degrowth is often dismissed by pragmatist as politically impossible or unfeasible. But as Max Ajl eloquently says “Feasible is the watchword of reaction and a talisman of oppression”109. Too many in the North are content with the status quo and are scared of appearing too “political”. Given a choice between social democracy based on economic imperialism and right wing populism they choose the apolitical center. However, keeping the status quo is a political choice. Deciding to keep intact large scale private property regimes is a political choice. Choosing to struggle is also a political decision110. And struggle we must, because systems of power do not fall by their own, especially when it is not just the famous 1% that benefits from the current economic arrangement, but it is also the Northern labor aristocracy who lacks a material interest in abolishing their privilege.
Any rational person would say that despite the Northern sensibilities and the purported desire to live in equitable world, the material incentives to keep the current inequalities are just too strong. And that was my position as well, when I started to write this article. However, it is important to not make a fatal assumption. Yes, Northern workers currently receive economic benefits, mostly in the form of higher purchasing power, but money does not equal human welfare. The fact that we have associated GDP growth to human wellbeing is the symptom of capital hegemony on culture111. But culture changes, ideas can spread fast if the environment is right showing that system of oppression and domination are not built on strong foundations.
111 OxfordSmithSchool (2022)
There are however issues with the implementation of degrowth that have to be discussed. Reducing working time in the North, while keeping the same salary would be an artificial way to further increase the North’s “productivity”. A world in which people in the North work 20 hours a week and have lots of leisure time, while the majority of the Southern workers toil 60 hours a week is not acceptable. Additionally, if degrowth is established only in one country, companies spooked by the change in regime might just move their capital overseas, where better conditions for profit making are present112; the so-called “first mover” problem.
112 Hickel, Kallis, et al. (2022)
Climate change is a global problem and therefore necessitates solutions that go beyond the national borders. It is here that we enter in the realm of sovereignty and specifically international sovereignty. Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann in their excellent book “Climate Leviathan” argue that out of the global crisis of climate change a global sovereign will emerge to manage the emergency. The nature of this sovereign is impossible to predict right now, but there is no reason to believe that it has deterministically to be an anti-capitalist force. In other words, in absence of degrowth the world it is not going to end, it is just going to be much worse than now. That is because capitalism, as a system, has an incentive to take actions against climate change. Not enough to guarantee a decent life for everybody, of course, but just enough to keep the system going.
A Climate Leviathan
Within the context of climate change is it worth to ask: Where do national governments and supernational institutions drawn their legitimacy to act? The philosopher Thomas Hobbes in 1651 answers this questions by sketching out the social contract. Hobbes imagines the emergence of government out of the desire by man to leave the state of nature; a condition characterized by conflict and violence and where life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”113. So men surrender some of their freedom to an authority defined the Leviathan in exchange for stability and security. The Leviathan can be an authoritarian leader or a government elected by the majority, but it usually emerges from a period of crisis. Out of the confusion and panic of emergency the Leviathan appears and swiftly acts to restore the social order. Even in liberal democracies, when there is an emergency and there is the need to act, freedoms are suspended and the sovereign acts, often with the consent of the governed, to protect the people114. Think about the PATRIOT act in the USA post 9/11 or the lockdowns imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were unprecedented restrictions of freedom legitimized by an acute crisis. Governments often invoke the state of emergency during natural disasters or armed conflicts to rapidly put in place policies that would not normally be allowed to go through. So in periods of peace and stability the “Leviathan is never dead; it merely hibernates”115.
Wainwright and Mann posit two main conditions that will shape how future societies might organize in the face of climate change. The first revolves around the economic organization and specifically if economic formations will be capitalist or not. The second condition is whether planetary sovereignty will emerge. A coherent global sovereign can exist only if capable of invoking an exception, declaring an emergency and deciding who may or may not emit carbon. Within this conditions they define a capitalist “Climate Leviathan” and an anti-capitalist “Climate Mao”. But global sovereignty in the face of climate change is not a given. In fact a reactionary capitalist “Climate Behemoth” might emerge, united by nationalist sentiments and unwilling to sacrifice liberty for lower CO2 emission. Finally they sketch an anti-capitalist, anti-sovereign “Climate X”; a self-admitted utopic future, so hard to imagine that an X is put as a placeholder for what it might be.
Given the absolute dominance nowadays of capitalism and the emergence of forms of supernational sovereignty, Wainwright and Mann predict that the most likely response to climate change will take the form of Climate Leviathan. They define it as: “a regulatory authority armed with democratic legitimacy, binding technical authority on scientific issues, and a panopticon-like capacity to monitor the vital granular elements of our emerging world: fresh water, carbon emissions, climate refugees, and so on”116.
116 Wainwright and Mann (2018), p. 47
A Climate Leviathan is already starting to emerge at the United Nations climate change conferences (COP) where leaders from all around the world meet and discuss the best way to “save the planet”. The Paris agreement it is certainly inadequate to keep global temperatures under 2°C. With its nationally determined contributions, delivers commitments that are more guidelines than rules. In fact it admits its own failures, by acknowledging that the intended emissions contributions will not fall within the 2°C threshold117. And yet Paris and COP serve a different function. They are the institutional manifestations of a Climate Leviathan in formation. They are places where the global elite meets to discuss the contradiction which are inherent within the dominant economic system, but refuse to talk about structural changes or climate reparation.
“Thus the contortions required by the climate treaty planners to make such an agreement imaginable, let alone workable; a plan that is essential is impossible —yet something must be done. This is why the proposals always seem so formulaic and empty, and virtually never involve substantive targets or means and timelines for implementation”118.
118 Wainwright and Mann (2018), p. 164
The advantage of Climate Leviathan is that its ideology enjoys the status of liberal common sense. Even when people are fully aware of the myriad of problems of capitalism, any real alternative have been scrubbed out of people’s mind. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”119. And so a solution within the liberal values of universalism, individual freedom and freedom of the market is the only way forward. And yet market mechanisms commonly fail when resource access is not constrained and the “rational economic actor” is incentivized to maximize depletion to maximize profit. And so if the market cannot solve the problem, it is deemed a “market failure” an area in which in true neoliberal sense the government or international authority must intervene to create a market by commodifying, privatizing, restricting access and regulating the commons. And so like magic, new “inventions” such as cap-and-trade, carbon offsets, catastrophe bonds, mandatory risk disclosure, flood and hurricane insurances, carbon capture and storage, green finance, and ultimately, geoengineering are celebrated as either visionary or necessary120. Instead of admitting defeat and recognizing the impossibility of a global capitalist system in addressing the climate crisis, extravagant addendums are included to justify the dogma.
A similar stubbornness has historically been showed towards the theory of planetary motion. Geocentrism as described by the Ptolemaic system was actually able to predict fairly accurately planetary movement, but it had to assume very odd orbits where planets slowed down, stopped, and moved backward in retrograde motion, and then again reversed to resume normal motion; mathematically these curve are called “epitrochoids”121. The epitrochoids of green capitalism are numerous, but I want to focus on three specific ones: Debt-for-nature-swaps (DNS), REDD+ and solar radiation management.
121 Breitenbach (2018)
DNS are swaps of debt for nature, a transformation of nature into natural capital. Considered by major creditors present at COP26 as green financial instruments that can guarantee “sustainable development”122, DNS are usually implemented in a bilateral or trilateral framework. Within the trilateral framework an external NGO buys the debt from the creditor at a discount rate. The debt is then cancelled by the NGO on the condition that the indebted country raises a significant larger amount of money compared to the discounted debt in local currencies to fund conservation programs. Instead with bilateral agreement is the creditor itself that decides what policy agenda will be enacted in the debtor country.
122 Credit-Suisse (2021)
Indebted countries, through DNS, can lose sovereignty of part of their natural resources in favor of foreign creditors. The conservation agenda will of course benefit the creditor and not maximize the local conservation needs. For example in 1995 following the Costa Rica DNS investment a huge area of Costa Rican forest was set as protected area and as a result local inhabitants from 108 communities were expelled. Others, previously engaged in subsistence production were employed, under the direction of the World Bank, to produce inventories of local species that can be used to make pharmaceuticals123.
123 Isla (2001)
On top of this, indebted countries to be eligible for DNS need to meet several conditions such as having macroeconomic agreements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or equivalent, institute investment reforms, as evidenced by a bilateral investment treaty with the United States and show to not support terrorism and not violate human rights124.
124 Ness and Cope (2021), p. 465
In addition to realigning developing countries to the economic interest of the North with the criteria for eligibility, DNS aim at commodifying the natural resources which are starting to become valuable for their services such as carbon assimilation. The forest bond market could reach up to $100 Trillion125, therefore the interest from Goldman Sachs and the like in reaching into untapped markets and simultaneously shift the burden of carbon offsetting to the Global South.
125 Cranford et al. (2011)
A mechanism for commodifying forest is already taking place under the Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) framework. It is an attempt to value within the market the services of ecosystems. Note that neoclassical economy, never truly developed a theory of value, but rather a theory of price which is determined at point of consumption through the concept of marginal utility. The “value” of the forest service, such as carbon assimilation through photosynthesis, is therefore determined by the demand for the service and by the magnitude of the service. As a specialist in ecology and remote sensing I often thought that one can spend all of their career trying to perfect algorithms and models to better estimate photosynthesis from space, only to have contributed to enable a system of exclusion and expropriation incentivized by profit.
REDD+ is a framework that provides payment for carbon offsets, which can be traded in the market. At the moment it is a fragmented program which relies on the voluntary carbon market, but could be significantly expanded in case of scientific advancements regarding the monitoring of forest carbon flows. Additionally, in order to become a truly global project, a central authority (a Leviathan) would need to allocate a maximum amount of carbon credits to member countries, in effect regulating access to the atmosphere.
Despite the enthusiasm, often the people living inside the forests have been unconvinced. Communities of Indigenous People living in the Peruvian Amazon have reported immense pressure to waive their rights to the land to enable a REDD project which they have described as “carbon piracy”126. Often there is no community consultation or it occurs after high level decision has already taken place. In many REDD+ projects the indigenous population has experienced land grabs, violent expropriation and forced adjudication of carbon rights127.
Under colonial and post-colonial circumstances, people living in resource-rich areas have been systematically expropriated and dispossessed. Now that forest are starting to obtain a monetary value besides that of its timber, the same process of expulsion and extraction is continuing.
Finally, the last epitrochoid of green capitalism and definite marker denoting the rise of a global sovereign is solar radiation management (SRM). The most researched version of SRM is stratospheric aerosol injection, which would involve artificially increasing the level of aerosols in the stratosphere to increase the atmospheric albedo and induce a cooling effect. One of the proposed ways for this method would be to deliver with high-altitude balloons sulfur dioxide (SO2) in the stratosphere which would combine with oxygen and water to form aqueous sulfuric acid (H2SO4), subsequently condensating on existing aerosols particles128. Besides the concerns related to uneven distribution of impacts, and uncertain ecological consequences, such an intervention would require sovereignty over the whole planet. Only a fully formed Leviathan would have the authority to call the emergency and carry out the geoengineering. Stratospheric sulfur aerosols lifetime depends on the altitude at which are injected, but is less than 2 years129. SRM would then be a procedure that needs to be carried out regularly, as if the CO2 concentration continued to rise a sudden stop in SRM would cause a very rapid increase in temperatures and therefore runaway climate change with devastating consequences130. In effect SRM means taking responsibility for managing climate change ad infinitum. The state or sovereign that initiates SRM would also make itself needed in perpetuity for the survival of humanity131. Although this future seems unimaginable right now, it will become a concrete possibility if we continue, as seems probable, to live within the paradigm of infinite growth. In the words of David Harvey, “capitalism is too big to fail and too monstrous to survive”132; we cannot imagine the end of capitalism, but at the same time we cannot face the potential consequences of its continuation. This major contradiction of our time, must be resolved one way or the other, but in the meantime in the North it is easier to pacify the nervous population with a few green reforms.
In fact in the core there seems to be a resurgence of enthusiasm for Green Keynesianism, with progressives supporting increased government spending to boost the green economy, create green jobs and lead by example in adoption of sustainable technologies. Examples of this push are the American “Green New Deal” and the “European Green Deal”, that differ in their ambition and implementation but have in common an expansion of the welfare state with an emphasis on green technology.
The Green New Deal is a policy proposal put forth by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Edward Markey in early November 2018. The centerpiece of the 14 pages proposal is the creation of a smart grid and increased investment in renewable energy133. Although it has been praised for mentioning the historical role of US in total emissions, it does not mention climate reparations at all134. This makes a lot of sense when taking into account that the Green New Deal started not as bill to tackle climate change, but rather as a way to reorganize the entire economy135 (in a hotter world). Thus the emphasis on public investment to raise private capital and the description of climate change as “national security threat” and “threat multiplier”, words that would not be surprising to find in a Pentagon press release136.
The European Green Deal is instead a policy which has already been approved in 2020 and aims to achieve carbon neutrality in the EU by 2050. It proposes to accomplish that with market based mechanisms such as cap-and-trade, as well as carbon tariffs and public funding for renewable energy production. It is also considering to maybe stop subsiding fossil fuels. According to the EU Green Deal a reduction of 40% of emissions between 2019 and 2030 is planned. Even though there are serious doubts that this is going to be achieved, it would still be way less than the 57% cut between 2019 and 2030 (calculated for the whole World) in emissions which would be required to have a 66% probability of staying below 1.5°C of warming by 2100, with little or no overshoot137. The EU green deal is mainly an economic readjustment to be more energy independent – something even more pressing considering the Russian invasion of Ukraine currently – and an attempt to pacify with jobs guarantee and promises of stability the nervous European that easily gets spooked by (climate) migrants. The proposed carbon tariff aimed at protecting EU industries from competition has been hailed as historic. Historically, Northern countries have systematically employed protectionism, while asserting their right to freely sell their products to the South138. If the EU was interested in something else than greenwashing protectionism, they would lift intellectual property restrictions and facilitate the transfer to the South of technologies that can decarbonize production. One of the stated expected consequences of the carbon tariff is to make developing countries such as India to move faster to green energy. The same countries that until yesterday were pushed by the World Bank to expand fossil fuel infrastructure to produce exports for the North’s appetite139, are now suddenly punished with tariffs because their production is apparently too dirty for the wise European. A more human approach would involve debt cancellation, coupled with wealth and technologies transfers.
(Green) social democracy is often considered the just compromise between the hyper-capitalist United States and the Chinese dirigisme. Social democracy is first and foremost a compromise between capital and labor. It can survive only from the continuous growth, based on exploitation and extraction of value from the periphery140. It is also a historical process which was born out of class struggle. US Fordism or Swedish social democracy were possible only because of the threat caused by the example of the Soviet Union and the immense pressure from popular movements, including from domestic communist, which were agitating for revolution141. The ruling class is above all pragmatic. When their wealth and privilege is threatened they would rather throw a few more breadcrumbs to the working poor rather than losing it all. European green social democracy cannot be the vehicle to transition to climate equity, it can at best save European capitalism during crisis in a similar way in which Franklin D. Roosevelt saved US capitalism following the Great Depression142.
A Climate Leviathan spearheaded by USA and the EU would have the necessary authority to take the measures necessary to tackle climate change just enough to save capitalism. However, it would preside over a world characterized by deep inequality both within and between countries, which is going to prevent broad transnational coordination. Climate Leviathan’s hegemony would therefore be strongly contested both from the anti-capitalists left (Climate Mao) and from the reactionary right (Climate Behemoth).
Alternatives to Climate Leviathan
Until now, I haven’t mentioned a major global economic player; the biggest global economy according to purchasing power parity. China, with its mixed socialist market economy, characterized by both state-owned enterprises and a large private sector could very well end up supporting a capitalist Climate Leviathan. Although the private sector in China has been growing, especially among large companies143, China is a country governed by a communist party that considers the teachings of Marx paramount. As Xi Jinping famously said at the 19th national congress in 2017, China plans to be a fully socialist country by 2050144.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) considers China to be in the first stage of socialism, and as such the CCP judged that it was necessary to open up and liberalize the economy to some extent in the past four decades in order to expand the productive forces. But China plans to undergo a socialist modernization between 2023 and 2035, and between 2035 and 2050 plans to turn into a modern, prosperous, socialist country145. During the 19th national congress, besides including Xi Jinping thought in the constitution, Xi Jinping also defined a new principal contradiction; the one between balanced development and economic growth to meet people’s necessities146. The struggle between real-world conditions is considered by the CCP as the main driver of societies and history, and therefore by identifying a new principal contradiction Xi Jinping is providing the justification for the new focus of his administration.
If China in next decades achieves the goal of becoming a fully socialist country, while maintaining economic hegemony, it could lead the formation of what Wainwright and Mann define a “Climate Mao”; a global anti-capitalist sovereign armed with the legitimacy to take the necessary steps to tackle the threat of climate change. Climate Mao could have the capacity to coordinate massive amount of people quickly. It would represent a top coordinated bottom-up approach to the threat of climate change. Examples of this type of coordination can be found by looking at China during the COVID-19 response, in the massive state led engineering of the air quality in Beijing during the 2008 winter Olympics147, in the Chinese great green wall project to combat desertification or in the push from the Chinese health ministry to encourage new dietary guidelines.
The name Climate Mao underlines the belief by Wainwright and Mann that a potential anti-capitalist sovereign would rise in Asia, and not in other regions of the world that are also characterized by a resistance to capital and empire such as South America. That is because Asia not only has large states overseeing massive economies, but also possesses revolutionary histories and ideologies that can be mobilized for revolutionary action148. Additionally, China (and East Asia in general) is very vulnerable to climate change, especially with regards to extreme heat and floods, both having a negative effect on food security149.
In East Asia “too many people have too much to lose, too quickly - a formula for revolution”150. However, everyday people in Asia will not react to climate change per se, but to the failure of the state to act to material crisis like shortages of water, food and elite expropriation. The climate emergency could require China to return to a Maoist or New Maoist revolutionary program. Mao era massive mobilization such as the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution are instances in which an incredible amount of power was put into the hands of proletarian and students. A similar approach might be necessary to address the climate crisis.
150 Wainwright and Mann (2018), p. 60
Inside the CCP there is a large Maoist faction, but Maoism is on the rise also in the “red corridor” in India, in the Philippines and in Nepal. Within China the working class and the peasantry will play a massive role in defining which direction the CPP will take. The CCP, contrary to common beliefs, is somewhat responsive to people demands and requires a broad support to maintain its legitimacy. The protest against the zero-covid restrictions in November 2022 and the rapid response from the government to change policy is an example, although rare, of civic engagement and popular influence on national policies.
Currently China is believed to be on track to support the rise of a capitalist Climate Leviathan. Whether a bottom-up class struggle, fueled by changes in material conditions due to climate change, will take place in China —in direct contradiction with the CPP’s desire of maintaining “social harmony”— is going to determine if a formation such as Climate Mao will emerge.
If a concept such as Climate Mao seems very far and removed from the common imagination, the virulent reaction to even the seeds of global sovereignty —whether capitalist or not— is already very present nowadays. Climate Behemoth is the formation that can rise from the hyper-nationalist suspicion of all internationalist formations that can regulate sovereignty and national capital or can empower international elites. Reactionary Behemoth would try to block the ascension of a Leviathan because of the aversion to the liberal pretension to rational world government151, as well as the desire to not sacrifice individual liberty for lower CO2 emissions. Some manifestation of Behemoth clearly showed themselves in a few right-wing populist leaders such as Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro and Orban. The base of support for Behemoth is very broad; along with the most reactionary facets of big business, such as fossil fuel industry, also large parts of the middle class of the North, especially small and medium business owners conscious of their privileges have a stake in supporting nationalistic and protectionist policies.
151 Wainwright and Mann (2018), p. 64
Another source of support comes from the most reactionary elements of the working class, often part of ethnic or religious majorities that did not strongly benefit from globalization. The new division of labor associated with transnational capitalism has impoverished the South, but in the North the benefits have been distributed unequally. Because of the outsourcing of jobs many people, especially white and male, that were accustomed to be at the top of the social and ethnic ladder are rapidly and visibly losing their privilege. This is usually accompanied with a shift to right wing nationalism and fascism and a rejection of neoliberalism and globalization152 (usually referred as “globalism” in right wing circles).
152 Cope (2019), p. 280
Today neofascism has even an insurrection-like component as demonstrated by the Capitol riots of January 6th 2021 and can even develop antagonistic relationships with institutions that have historically worked to protect the privileges of their base, such as the police, FBI etc. Of course fascism never fundamentally threatens the property relations, it just redirects anger towards marginalized populations that are used as scapegoats such as immigrants. It has to be said that often within fascism there is a pseudo-left component, where an anti-immigrant rhetoric is accompanied by a purported desire to protect domestic workers as long as it’s at the expense of “inferior” races or nations153. In fact, there can be even a convergence in aims from the right-wing populist with left-wing nationalist as they can both share the same anti-interventionist, anti-globalization and often anti-immigrants language. A good example of this alignment can be observed in the tough-on-immigration comments from Bernie Sanders during his campaign that found strong agreement with the Trump voter154. It is important to point out that left-wing nationalism mainly aims at improving the redistribution of wealth —often dependent on economic imperialism— within the country, and is therefore very different from an internationalist socialist movement which prioritizes class over nation.
Behemoth’s concerns about the loss of national sovereignty in the face of massive climate migration will certainly intensify its fascist tendencies. So in a Behemoth dominated future we could expect larger and taller walls, an increase in economic protectionism and further paranoia about internal and external enemies. One area where Behemoth would still welcome international cooperation is defense. Although the anti-interventionist rhetoric, for Behemoth is preferable to use violence to “persuade” adversaries rather than lose its economic dominance.
A Climate Behemoth will surely be the most dangerous response to climate change; it wouldn’t even attempt to find solutions to the climate crisis as it would be limited by the suspicion of any type of internationalist collaboration. Even a failed Behemoth will be incredibly disruptive. The only thing left would be a “contradictory and unstable blend of fundamentalisms: the security of the homeland, the freedom of the market, and the justice of God”155.
155 Wainwright and Mann (2018), p. 65
Towards X
What is left? A world to build, but first to imagine. Wainwright and Mann do their best to describe Climate X, an anti-capitalist, anti-sovereign formation that can adequately respond to climate change, but the picture remains blurry. It is our responsibility to contribute to define it, because fighting against a system can only take us so far. The name “X” is a placeholder for something that still has to be created. It might represent another example of lack of political vision coming from the left, but I would argue that the void of X opens the space for the freedom to imagine a radical emancipatory movement.
Although different people call X different things, X’s critiques are not hard to find and come from both reactionaries with a plan and well-intentioned people that cannot imagine an alternative. The criticism that comes from Climate Mao is that we are too late and now to address climate change we need the power of the state. From the vantage point of Climate Leviathan, X is impossible by definition156. It is an unrealistic perspective. Often people cannot even imagine real change. I hear frequently: “Yes this system is terrible, but what is the alternative?”. We indeed built tall walls also in our mind. And so even when we realize that our economy is failing the majority of the world, still a sense of impotence, lack of agency, lingers, as if we had already accepted that we are heading towards a nightmare scenario, but can’t stop it. But it doesn’t take much to peer over the wall, to see that systems of domination and exploitation do not have clear legitimacy, and are standing on shacky cultural grounds that can and should be challenged.
156 Wainwright and Mann (2018), p. 227
Liberalism, the ideology of Leviathan, has hijacked and distorted the concept of equality and freedom and inextricably fused it with the freedom of the market. It is a very narrow concept that translates to the freedom of the few to exploit and privatize the social labor of many. Capitalism produces inequality and unfreedom by design, and needs the state to guarantee the protection of private property. X realizes this and can therefore be born only out of a struggle against capitalism and sovereignty. The two are of course linked157; The state or supernational authority has historically been used as an instrument of class oppression, but for our purposes it is useful to keep them separate, to highlight the dual nature of the fight ahead.
157 Escalante and O’Shea (2022)
So here is my how-to-guide to get closer to X, built on top of the great work of Wainwright & Mann; it is a two step process that aims at tackling both capital and sovereignty.
Against the unfreedom of poverty created by capital, equality, inclusion and dignity of all158. The starting point is to realize the vast inequality existing today among countries, and the mechanisms responsible for it; imperialism and colonialism motivated by the need to expand into markets that could be coerced through violence into submission. The same system that requires ever expansion in growth and consumption has already massively altered the climate and is leading us to ecological collapse. The material personification of the contradictions within capitalism. It is our responsibility to understand the system that created this inequality and work for its overthrown. For this, a theoretical understanding and critique of capitalism is paramount and can be found within the Marxist tradition; Marx himself, along with more contemporary intellectuals that developed the analysis to more explicitly tackle imperialism and colonialism, such as Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein. However, it is fundamental to go beyond criticism and provide a feasible alternative. I believe degrowth to be the way forward, to tackle both the climate and exploitation crisis. It may require losing in the North the privileges obtained by the continuous undervaluing of land, ecosystems and labor from the South, but more than that it would require a re-organization of the way of life. A shift of priorities, where food, housing, education and healthcare for all come first and profit is second or eliminated entirely. It is not an easy task and requires a bottom-up push from conscious, organized and angry masses, not content with the status quo. As for everything, education is the first step of action, and therefore I am going to leave here a list of books that I think have the potential to shift perceptions and kickstart change. “Climate Leviathan” by Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann, “A People’s Green New Deal” by Max Ajl, “The Divide” by Jason Hickel and “The Wealth of (Some) Nations” by Zak Cope.
Against sovereignty, a planetary vision shaped by solidarity to compose a world where many worlds fit. These principles are grounded from the struggles of climate justice that emerge from all over the world, mostly from marginalized communities. There is much to learn from “the knowledge and lifeways of peoples who have long historical experience with ways of being that are not overdetermined by capital and the sovereign state”159. What follows is a series of examples from several communities within the American continent that are struggling for autonomy. They present different characteristics and particularities, but I believe that what unites them is their fight against sovereignty.
The first example of this type of struggle can be found by looking at the Zapatistas. Their battle against neoliberalism, which in their case took concrete shape with the NAFTA agreement, aims at resisting the market forces that leave people landless, impoverished and stripped away of their identity. The Zapatistas did not wish Indigenous People to separate themselves from Mexico, rather they wanted to be “recognized as an integral part of the country, but with their particularities“160. They aim to place indigenous lands, rich in dignity and history (but also petroleum and uranium) at the disposal of people and not capital. And even if their movement is localized and flanked by all sides by the power of capital and the state, they are setting an example, creating pockets of resistance with an alternative economy and power structures161.
In a different part of the American continent, radical (from the West view) indigenous thinkers have grounded a powerful critique of sovereignty and extractivism on the basis of the concept of mother nature; a goddess which is central to the cosmogony of many Indigenous Peoples in South America. The U’wa people in Colombia are engaging in a struggle against the Ecopetrol company that wishes to extract petrol in their land162. In 2017, in a rare consultation between representatives of the Colombian ministry of environment, of Ecopetrol and representatives of the U’wa people, the latter shared their position and their unwillingness to compromise.
162 Tangarife (2017)
“This land has been ancestrally our mother, our territory and our source of life. They are contaminating the Cubugón river, which is sacred to us. They have brought us many conflicts where before we lived in peace, causing many deaths. We do not want extraction on our land. Their oil wells are a violation of our mother, they are taking her blood. In addition, the government has not fulfilled its commitments to title the land, to bring us health and to withdraw military forces from our territory, they are killing us little by little. We have been in meetings for several years and you have not done anything, we no longer trust your minutes and documents. We want you to leave and to respect our autonomy over the reservation. And if we have to give our lives to defend it, we will do it to the last U’wa”163.
163 Benito Cobaria, in Tangarife (2017) Translated in English from Spanish.
The concept of mother nature, or mother Earth, was also central to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth which took place in Cochabamba in 2010. The People’s agreement164 that resulted is a powerful document that challenges the logic of progress, competition and limitless growth that is taken from granted at the United Nations Climate Change Conferences. By explicitly starting from the rights of mother Earth, the Peoples’ agreement offers a robust alternative to the western conception of nature, where its services are considered valuable only when monetized and traded in the market.
164 “People’s Agreement of Cochabamba” (2010)
In yet another example of indigenous struggle for self-determination, the Mapuche people of Chile and Argentina have been fighting for decades, not to have their rights written on a piece of paper, but for concrete direct access to their land.
“Land, in the Mapuche struggle, is a transcendent concept. It is not simply a plot of terra firma demarcated by a set of boundaries, as it is in the liberal Enlightenment thinking that constitutes the earth-hating religion of the West. Land is a living, inalienable thing that serves as the basis for the community’s existence”165.
165 Severino (2013)
In another instance of refusal to compromise, the Mapuche are not willing to sign agreements with the Chilean or Argentinian state or with oil companies such as Chevron, thirsty to exploit their land for oil extraction. They are taking their land by employing protest, blockades and also economic sabotage which resulted in terrorism charges from the Chilean government. According to the IPCC, Indigenous Peoples can provide invaluable knowledge for successful adaptation to climate change and for socio-ecological resilience166. From the IPCC: “Different actors, the private sector and civil society, influenced by science, local and Indigenous knowledges, and the media, are both active and passive in designing and navigating climate resilient development pathways”167. However, often Indigenous Peoples seem to not want to collaborate or compromise with the powers of industry and the state that is destroying the way of life. Support for Indigenous People, within the context of climate change, means providing full and uncompromising backing for Indigenous rights, including to land, self-determination and cultural heritage. It requires reconceptualizing land, not as a commodity or the site of production and extraction, but rather as the basis for community existence. Indigenous lives have been undervalued for centuries. An opportunist and belated acknowledgment of their value for “successful adaptation to climate change” is at best hypocritical if not followed by a convincing rejection of the market structures that are causing their demise.
Additional inspiring cases of struggle against sovereignty, and tyranny are readily available and diverse, highlighting the need of adapting global struggles —such as neoliberalism, racism, imperialism and colonialism— to local realities. Lessons can be drawn, among others, from the histories of the Black Panther Party in the USA, the Italian resistance movement, the South African Communist Party, the Algerian National Liberation front and the African independence party of Burkina Faso.
The study of history of past resistances is invaluable not only to draw strength and inspiration for the fight ahead, but also to realize the inevitability of upcoming global crisis, given the inherent contradiction within capitalism. The production and re-production of capital requires continuous expansion and exploitation, and it is indifferent to human needs and ecological constrains. Within the paradigm of capital maximization exists tensions which have regularly —and inevitably will in the future— create periods of rupture. There is undoubtedly not going to be a shortage of global crisis in the future, that is certain. It is necessary however to acknowledge that often from the aftermath of economic crisis, through the general confusion and instability, the strong arm of the Leviathan has appeared to reinforce systems of domination and oppression. Examples of this type dynamics can be found by looking at the Greek sovereign debt crisis of late 2009168 which resulted in structural adjustment programs and punishing austerity in exchange for loans from the IMF and the European Stability Mechanism. Another clear instance is the series of structural adjustment policies in dozens of African countries including Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe and Zambia in the 1980s pushed by IMF and World Bank following the early 1980 recession169. The result was incalculable human suffering, massive increase in poverty and the reinforcing of cycles of dependency.
Nevertheless crisis can present also opportunities to radically reevaluate where value and power lays. The covid pandemic made clear who is an essential worker and who is not. The workers who are essentials —and therefore most valuable to society— are not the CEO, the financier or the tech executive, but rather the grocery store clerks, the sanitation worker and the nurse. Similarly, the housing crisis of 2007-2008 illustrated how something so crucial to human survival, such as shelter, is valued in the market. When the housing market froze houses could not be sold. Their sale value was 0 because there was no market for it170. A clear example of how price and value are radically different concepts, whose relationship must be reconsidered and challenged.
170 D. Harvey (2018)
The challenge ahead is therefore to reach a critical mass of informed, conscious people, ready and organized to make sure that the next crisis is exploited for radical social change and not for further repression.
This work represents my personal opinion and does not represent the position of universities or research institutes that I am, or was, affiliated with. David Martini 2023