As the Paris climate talks close next week, there will probably be little discussion of capitalism. Although it is the economic structure that got us here today, with its inherent need for endless and unsustainable growth and immediate profit, most political leaders wouldn’t even think about challenging the system that has created such material advancements over the past century. As far as most Western leaders are concerned, the question of whether capitalism is the system of the future was squashed a quarter century ago with the collapse of communism.
But as we are quickly learning, history is not over, and free market capitalism is far from sustainable in the long run. It is like a ship that has sailed civilization into modernity and provided humans with immeasurable material advancements; but today, it is full of holes and in need of modification, or, better yet, complete replacement.
There is no doubt that humanity has experienced unparalleled material progress since industrial capitalism developed in the eighteenth century. Life expectancy, for example, has nearly doubled in developed countries since the nineteenth century. Innovation is inherent within the system, where capitalists must constantly revolutionize the means of production (and other technologies) to stay afloat. The endless need for growth and capital accumulation is what fuels the system, but this growth also requires energy and natural resources.
One has to only look at the growth of carbon emissions over the past century in capitalist states to see this process at work. In 1911, the United States emitted 1,256 million tons of carbon dioxide; by 2011, this number had grown to 5,333 million tons (which was lower than at the start of the century, probably because of the economic recession). China’s CO2 emissions grew even more rapidly after it became a state capitalist economy under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, going from 1,465 million tons in 1980 to 9,035 million tons by 2011.
Clearly, this is a massive contradiction of capitalism, and unlike other problems with this economic structure -- e.g. wealth inequality, economic instability -- this is not a social question, but a survival one. For corporations, profit is the only goal, and the future of civilization is not generally discussed at board meetings. As Friedrich Engels wrote nearly a century and a half ago:
“As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers.”
This would explain why ExxonMobil decided to keep the topic of climate change quiet, even though they knew about it as early as 1981, seven years before it became a public issue. It would also explain why the company has spent millions of dollars over the years to promote the denial of climate change. When the sole goal is to make a profit, society and human beings are low on the totem pole.
As Naomi Klein points out in her book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate,” free market fundamentalists understand that climate change is a threat to their ideology, so they deny its very existence. In their ideal world, the invisible hand of the market solves all major societal problems, making government regulation and intervention unnecessary and actually harmful. The financial crisis revealed this as the utopian nonsense that it is, and climate change further proves this. As shown above, leaving the free market and corporations like ExxonMobil alone and hoping that they solve the problem of climate change would be like taking a compulsive gambler to a casino and hoping that he just sit and watch everyone else have all the fun. The free market cannot solve the environmental crisis that it has created -- it can only make it worse. And yet, we continue down this path, and the voluntary pledges for future carbon reductions that are being put forth at the Paris summit would, as Mark Hertsgaard points out in The Nation, “still result in global emissions continuing to increase for decades to come, soaring well past the goal of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above the level that prevailed prior to the Industrial Revolution. Temperatures would instead rise to 2.7 to 3.5 C above the pre-industrial level, a catastrophic amount.”
It is almost too late. Our addiction to profit and growth will be the end of us. As Naomi Klein writes:
“If we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, major cities will drown, ancient cultures will be swallowed by the seas; our children will spend much of their lives fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extreme droughts. Yet we continue all the same. What is wrong with us? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things needed to cut emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have struggled to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck, because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and benefit the vast majority – are threatening to an elite minority with a stranglehold over our economy, political process and media.”
We are approaching a point in history that Science fiction writers have long feared, when humanity, unable to control unruly passions and myopic self-interest, destroys itself (although many thought a nuclear holocaust would do the trick). Climate change is the major threat of our time, and the only way to limit future calamity is to throw free market fundamentalism into the dustbin of history, where it belongs.