To overcome climate change, we require system change.
Climate change is the greatest existential crisis facing humanity today. Capitalist industrialization has led us to the edge of the precipice, and avoiding the end of civilization as we know it may require the development of a view in direct opposition to the way in which capitalism “values” nature, according to John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the socialist magazine Monthly Review.
C. J. Polychroniou: We live in a period of massive environmental disturbance, such that it has led to the claim that we are no longer in the Holocene epoch but instead in the midst of the Anthropocene era. Assuming that this claim, popularized in the West by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, is scientifically correct, to what extent can economic growth itself be blamed for the catastrophic effects of human activities on the environment, including influencing the climate by burning fossil fuels, cutting down rainforests and farming livestock?
John Bellamy Foster: It is worth noting that the Anthropocene concept originated in the early USSR. It first appeared in the English language in the translation of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia in the 1970s. This arose out of discussions of anthropogenic change and the biosphere pioneered in Soviet science, pointing to today’s Earth System perspective and to our current, more developed notion of the Anthropocene.
It now appears to be the consensus in natural science that the Anthropocene epoch in geological history commenced in the early 1950s, marked by a Great Acceleration of anthropogenic impacts on the Earth System. The 2018 special report of the IPCC released last month emphasizes the shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene as signifying that anthropogenic factors are now the leading sources of change in the Earth System, most notably in the form of climate change. Economic activity at present, as you note, relies heavily on burning fossil fuels, cutting down rainforests, and livestock farming, all of which lead to the emission of greenhouse gases that are accelerating climate change.
Today’s planetary ecological crisis is due first and foremost to the increasing scale of the capitalist world economy. The greater the scale of the economy the more it rivals the fundamental biogeochemical cycles of the planet. All of this is connected to the nature and logic of capitalism, understood as a system directed at the accumulation of capital. Capitalism is a grow-or-die system. If accumulation declines, the result is economic crisis. The answer of the system is to boost accumulation. This, however, intensifies global environmental crises as the already visible impact of the economy on the Earth System increases.
To speak of economic growth as a principal problem, and of the need for a steady-state economy as a solution, immediately raises the specter in people’s minds of the end of human progress. However, we should be careful not to identify economic growth, as that term is used today, with human advancement as a whole. Economic growth was deified in the 1950s, following the introduction of national income accounting during the Second World War. The system of national or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) accounting is rooted in capitalist notions of value added, profit and accumulation. It accurately reflects the logic of capital accumulation but it is far removed from growth in the wider sense in which people usually think of it.
This can be understood by looking at some of the details GDP measurement. The work of subsistence workers in agriculture (or women working in the household) is not included in GDP since their production is outside the commodity market. If an oil tanker hits an iceberg causing an oil spill, GDP increases, due to all the cleanup costs, insurance payments, and lawyer fees. However, there is no deduction in GDP for the effects of the oil spill on the environment. Social and environmental costs, in this sense, are treated as “externalities,” that is to say, they are excluded from national-income accounting. The growth of a forest adds nothing to economic growth. But the cutting down of the same forest (viewed as so many millions of board feet of standing timber) for sale on the market counts as growth. A war that kills millions drives up economic growth, and leads to faster growth afterwards because of the need to replace capital destroyed. The lives lost in the war, however, count for nothing in economic growth terms.
The problem here is not GDP accounting itself. Rather this way of measuring growth accurately reflects how the capitalist system works. It conceives progress only in terms of the cash nexus (whatever passes through the market), as opposed to what benefits people or the planet. In the advanced capitalist economies by far the greater part of production consists of waste in terms of negative use values, that is, products that are unproductive, superfluous, and destructive, while the most basic human needs are often not met. This is “rational” for today’s monopoly-finance capital, but it is irrational for society as a whole. All of this means we have to move away from economic growth as it is understood in the current system and toward a society of sustainable human development.
Some mainstream environmentalists believe that the problem is that nature is not fully internalized within the system of market value, and that all of nature should therefore be seen as “natural capital.” However, we must remember that value isn’t everything: real wealth, life itself, cannot be reduced to the logic of market valuation without undermining the very basis of its existence.
You have been arguing for doing away with the concept of “value” when it comes to nature. Does this mean that capitalism is unavoidably bad for the environment?
As far as its inner logic is concerned, the answer is yes. For capitalism, accumulation of capital is everything, the Earth and its inhabitants nothing. If value is created by the exploitation of labor, this nonetheless requires constant expropriation of a natural environment which is considered a free gift to capital. In its narrow pursuit of profits, the capitalist system points inexorably to creative destruction on a planetary scale. Karl Marx theorized this as the problem of the metabolic rift, in which capitalism robbed the Earth itself as a basis of the accumulation of capital.
At the current carbon-emission rate, the world will break the global carbon budget (i.e., will reach the trillionth metric ton in cumulative carbon emissions) in seventeen years, threatening out-of-control climate change. Other planetary boundaries are also being crossed: resulting in the sixth extinction, ocean acidification, the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, loss of forests, global freshwater shortages, etc. These urgent problems have to be addressed in the context of the present reality. This requires creation of a massive, irrepressible, global movement toward socialism that goes against the logic of the system: igniting a long ecological revolution.
I suppose then that you are not optimistic about technological solutions curbing climate change and dealing with other environmental challenges like air pollution, cleaning up the oceans and so on.
New technology is indispensable in addressing global problems. But we have to have a critical social theory of technology, and not see it as a deus ex machina. Today’s planetary emergency is partly the result of technologies aimed almost exclusively at promoting profits. Destructive technologies are employed, undermining living beings and the planet as a safe home for humanity. We need a massive shift to solar and wind and other alternatives, but the fossil-fuel economy and the goal of capital accumulation stand in the way. Rational development and application of technology in accordance with scientific and human criteria necessitates a major transformation of our social relations.
The big mistake is to fall for a crude technologism, viewing technology as a magic solution to all problems. This ideology is heavily promoted by the system because it inculcates the idea that the current acquisitive order can continue unchanged in its social relations. We are told that some futuristic technology will enter in to save the day. The fact is that a simple technological fix that would make it possible for capitalist business as usual to continue indefinitely defies both the laws of physics and the results of critical social science, which are set aside in such technological fantasies…
The consumerist strategy — that is, the idea that we can in effect do good things for the environment and bring about overall social and economic change — is probably hopelessly romantic, at least for those of us who subscribe to the materialist view of history.
