Crisis capitalism

That Western capitalism may owe its dominance to the power of fossil fuels is not anything like consensus economic wisdom, but it also isn’t just a pet theory of the socialist Left. It was the core claim of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, probably the single most conventionally esteemed account of just how it was that Europe separated itself so dramatically from the rest of the world in the nineteenth century.

Global warming could cultivate emergent forms of eco-socialism on one end of the spectrum, and could also conceivably produce a collapse of faith in anything but the market, on the other. Trade will surely endure, perhaps even thrive, as indeed it did before capitalism — individuals making trades and exchanges outside a single totalizing system to organize the activity. Rent-seeking, too, will continue, with those who can scrambling to accumulate whatever advantages they can buy — the incentive only increasing in a world more barren of resources, and more mournful of recent apparent abundance, now disappeared.

The book The Shock Doctrine focuses on political collapse and crises of the technocrats’ own making. A very clear account of what kind of strategy to expect from the world’s money elite in a time of rolling ecological crisis.

How well will the shock doctrine be sustained through a new climatic regime, one that assaults the economies of the world with extreme weather and natural disaster at an entirely unprecedented rate and — just in the diminishing downtime between hurricanes and floods and heat waves and droughts — also threatens to devastate agricultural yields and cripple worker productivity?

The scramble for shrinking profits by the powerful will only intensify, a further self-entrenchment of the rule of capital; this is the outcome you might extrapolate from a consideration of the last several decades. But over those decades, capitalists could still count as a public-relations ally the promise of rising-tide growth. In fact, despite our many and divergent varieties of markets, that promise has served as something like the basic ideological infrastructure of the world since at least 1989 — and it is no coincidence that carbon emissions have exploded since the end of the Cold War.

Climate change will accelerate two trends already undermining that promise of growth: first, by producing a global economic stagnation that will play, in some areas, like a breathtaking and permanent recession; and second, by punishing the poor much more dramatically than the rich, both globally and within particular polities, showcasing an increasingly stark income inequality, unconscionable already to more and more. In an economic future doubly mangled by those forces, the near-monopoly on social power presently enjoyed by the world’s very wealthy will likely have much more to answer for, to say the least.

The market has justified inequality for generations by pointing to opportunity and invoking the mantra of new prosperity, which it promised would benefit all. This was probably always less credible as a truth claim than it was as propaganda, and, as the Great Recession and the deeply unequal recovery that followed showed unmistakably, income gains in the world’s advanced capitalistic countries have gone, for several decades now, almost entirely to the very wealthiest. That this itself represents a crisis of the entire system is clear not just from the raging populism, on both left and right, sweeping Europe and the United States in the aftermath of the crash, but by skepticism and lacerating self-doubt beaming out from the highest free-market citadels.

In the past, the promise of growth has been the justification for inequality, injustice, and exploitation, it will have many more wounds to salve in the near climate future: disaster, drought, famine, war, global refugeeism and the political disarray it unleashes.

The predictions of economic hardship, remember, are enormous—$551 trillion in damages at just 3.7 degrees of warming.

Present political arrangements, not to mention bankruptcy law, will conspire to limit climate liability — for oil companies, for governments, for nations.

If we do succeed, and pull up short of two or even three degrees, the bigger bill will come due not in the name of liability but in the form of adaptation and mitigation — that is, the cost of building and then administering whatever systems we improvise to undo the damage a century of imperious industrial capitalism has wrought across the only planet on which we all can live.

The cost is large: a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture, and perhaps even a meatless planet.

It took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line; the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world’s infrastructure in considerably less time.