The death of the party— why capitalist ideas will never fix climate change
How can our system of infinite profit on dwindling resources ever repair its devastating ecological legacy?
How can a system of infinite profit on dwindling resources ever repair its own devastating ecological legacy?
The difference between medicine and poison is in the dose.
Every economic system in history has been built on a collection of connected expectations, contracts and human understandings. Regardless of the actual ideology (capitalism, communism — each have their own shortcomings), this series of unwritten co-operations are vital to keeping the chosen system’s central idea alive. Some of these ideas are easier to build allegiance to than others, and some of these ideas barely need any work at all — they’re tied into our biology, and once planted, the roots take hold and sprout quickly and aggressively.
Capitalism’s gooey, caramel core is in its name. It is an economic and political system by which trade is controlled by private owners for profit (rather than by government). Thanks to globalism and the Internet, the latest form of this idea (late capitalism, if you will) is now woven deeply into the trade systems of almost every country on the planet, even if only a few of its hosts have the proper protections, regulations and safeguards to stop its primary resource — people — from being aggressively and helplessly exploited.
Capitalist rhetoric is an easy thing to fall in love with. The dream of enormous wealth, freedom and status is an easy thing to drool over. Greed, disguised as ambition, is an easy thing to fall in love with — because survival and abundance is wound into our biology — so that we extract, accumulate and provide the strongest chance of survival for our own gene pool. It exists in us despite the fact that history’s greatest achievements are based on mutual benefit, strong relationships and close co-operation — something that free-market capitalism needs specifically to reject, to create the individualist, human work ethic that powers infinite growth. Biologically, we are all capitalist tyrants. But we’re too smart for that now. Animal biology, in self-observing creatures, is no longer an excuse for what the strongest of us take from the weakest of us.
Capitalism’s success in certain arenas can’t be disputed, and it would be intellectually dishonest to say otherwise. In real terms, it has dramatically addressed global poverty and bankrolled a series of technologies and freedoms that are frankly, miraculous. It’s thrown technological progress into overdrive —for better and for worse — but the largest rewards, by an obscene measure, are not for the many. A parallel: Lionesses make the kill — but the lion eats first, most and best. The rest, is upto nature — and it is a brutal, unforgiving competition. And remember — lions don’t create food. The rest of nature does.
In human societies, this is not a system that is sustainable. That is not a controversial opinion unless you reject how trade, the environment and human social systems need to work together.
A 300-tonne dream, balancing on a blade.
For it’s successes, achievements and inspirations, there are a number of main ways that this form of capitalism fails, and will eventually pull it apart:
Chasing infinity — Core capitalist ideology is based around the idea of creating infinite financial returns from an environment with fixed material resources. It is ravenous for the nourishment it needs to grow, and the current ways that we provide for it are devastating to our ecologies, communities and habitats that function within them. It cannot work without bleeding these things dry and returning them upwards, and on a global scale, that has created a system of winners and losers that has only just begun.
Disproportionate rewards — The winners of capitalism — and I mean, the ‘true’ winners (net worth of >$25m, as a thin-air benchmark, although you could happily debate this) are continually rewarded disproportionately for having won. This is epic success but it is nowhere close to the top. The Walton family is worth $150bn - one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand million dollars — part of an exclusive club of 2,600 humans (out of 7.8 billion humans) worth more than $1bn. This is the reason that widening wealth inequality is such a huge problem. Huge money, in our system of money, creates time, resources and new, passive money - and loopholes that allow it to be protected from the structures (taxes) that sustain the infrastructure that platforms the creation of that wealth in the first place. This creates business monopolies that are outrageously cleverly constructed, and that operate outside of the possibility of any proper government regulation — ever.
House of cards — As if that wasn’t enough, this form of capitalism is built on an imagined set of cheap consumer and commercial credit products, usually represented and provided on the back of imaginary, forecasted earnings and risk models. The rich sell money to the poor, inside a financial system that regularly implodes and then requires government-backed socialism in order to bring it back to its feet. Government bailouts are common — necessary — and now built into capitalism all over the world — most recently in 2008. This is a magical system that is now too large, too delicate and too complex for governments allow it to stay down for any length of time. This carousel of plate-spinning philosophically rejects regulation and sharing — despite desperately relying on both to keep rebuilding it when it can’t carry it’s weight any longer.
“But son, I have something you will never have — enough” — Built into our social success narrative, wealth and status are tightly interwoven and represent a sort of pseudo-zen that every member of society should aspire towards. This narrative — that the rich are the true winners, regardless of the cost to anyone else, is a formalised chaos — where for one person to win, someone else, generally speaking, has to lose. This mindset is impossible to nourish, and it is now mirrored in communities all over the planet. This is why people vote for their own servitude — they don’t realise that the economic system, although it can be climbed, is deeply, deeply rigged against their interests. Uncapped social mobility for everyone doesn’t work. If it did, who’d clean the buildings?
What most people don’t realise is that really, they are not capitalists, at all. They are capital, being deployed, by capitalists. That they will never have the platform or insulation required to become ultra wealthy — but that’s fine(!) — and there’s a better way of living than spending 85 years destroying the rainforest to have a newer car than your neighbours.
The revolution will not be televised
Every era has its revolution, and every revolution its revolutionaries. Between 1999 and 2019, our historic, 20-year revolution was an Internet-connected, digital, globalist industrial one — with the revolutionaries the technologists, thinkers and creators in incubation systems like Silicon Valley, (although there are plenty of others, too).
They’re also the money-makers, bankrollers, networkers and mobilisers (generally in the financial and venture capital markets) that facilitate this growth. Simply put, these are people that have access to so much money that they can invest it across a series of commercial ventures like a number of long bets - accepting that many won’t return or come to fruition because out of hundreds of bets, a few will return enormously, balancing the rest of the losses on the P&L sheet. Sounds made up. It ain’t. That’s what ‘ventures’ are.
There is nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with this and it’s not to moralise over — but undeniably, this is capitalism in it’s purest, rawest sense of itself. This is Terminator, Skynet, 80s Arnie capitalism. A risk-evaluated gamble by a player with access to so much money that the damage of losing is drastically less than the reward of winning. Venture capital is responsible for powering some of humanity’s most unbelievable innovations, but I don’t know why they all have to wear Allbirds and hang out in Aspen and call their really average twin sons Tarquin and Quarquin. Sorry, I’m being ridiculous now.
“Can climate change deliver financial returns?”
Anyway. I suppose now, I can roll into my point. I was thumbing through Twitter, one of my favourite digital hellholes, and rolled across this tweet, by a reasonably prominent investor and digital product expert.
Can climate change deliver financial returns?
(Full disclosure, I don’t know Jeff, at all, although I know of some of his work, which is formidably successful. This is not a slanging match against Jeff or his group , who as far as I know are good dudes — it is just a point of discussion.)
The final lines, they shook me:
“In 2020, there is renewed VC interest in climate change. The big question: can climate change make financial returns?”
My reply was immature and unhelpful, but really, I was staggered by the question, the concept, and the context:
Jeff, to his credit, replied to my cretinous response with some grace — and he highlighted that he was referring specifically to this specific asset class’s role in capitalising on the climate crisis, not of wider investment generally. Fair enough:
This exchange stuck with me, though, because it implies a central idea, which is completely realistic and expected, given the guts of the industry, but deeply affects me when I think about it:
There are a small group of financial experts and technology-first innovators, that now have such a surplus of investable assets to spread (that operates far outside the bounds of ‘regular’ trade) — and they’re only interested in helping literally save the earth if it creates a financial return for them.
“…for this asset class to invest, there needs to be returns.”
And I suppose it’s when I realised that because of this series of connected systems and psychologies that late capitalism is now flatly and unambiguously incapable of fixing itself. It requires aggressive extraction to remain feasible, in a world where extraction is destroying our only place to live.
Climate change needs a massive rebrand.
The problem with climate change is that it’s demonised as reactionary hippy bullshit by liars in hemp t-shirts that softly explain that if we use less q-tips the world won’t get hot anymore and we’ll save the baby seals.
This is one of life’s very rare mixtures of insane and wrong.
In a very simplistic crash course, join me:
Climate is different than weather - Sure, the weather is slowly heating up, but the issue is not whether we can fucking SUNBATHE in OCTOBER — it’s how this affects the incredibly delicate balance of things that run our CLIMATE.
Climate controls everything — We’re talking about two major practical concerns here: the most common, is ice melting, and flooding enormous swathes of the world. The second is how climate is wired into OUR ENTIRE GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL (read: FOOD) SYSTEM. You see, when it stops being possible to grow food in areas that are ruined or inhospitable, we are going to see a complete and utter unwinding of global human co-operation as we battle to stay alive.
What does that mean, though?
Well, unless you’re a billionaire that moves to an underground bunker in New Zealand, it means this:
Mass global immigration and cross-cultural human movement.
Shortages of food and clean water.
Devastating issues with public sanitation, waste and hygiene.
New diseases, and old ones, based on the above.
Global inequality stretched paper-thin while the people that worked for this system are brutally undone by it.
An entire planet that is thrown into chaos by the fact that our trade system has become so extractive it has permanently ruined the entire environment it uses to stay upright.
Mass civil unrest — historic, civil unrest.
This is what climate change means. Fuck losing the beauty of the forest. That’s the least of our damn problems.
Christ, so now what?
I don’t know, man, stop harassing me, I’m just a guy on Medium. No, but seriously, although I don’t know, I do have some suspicions about the main things we’re going to, as a species, at pace wrap our heads around:
Re-imagined, non-financial incentives
The ‘cash is king’ philosophy needs to be destroyed and replace with a ‘together, do we have a system of trade that provides comfort, sustainability, and enough — and protects our most vulnerable?’. We are currently debating the benefits of a fairer system on capitalism’s dying body and we’re about to debate ourselves into global chaos.
We need a new social contract, immediately. We cannot continue to imagine that we can all be millionaires at the expense of everybody else, and we need to completely decouple the connection between wealth, success, innovation and provision.
We need to build a culture of care, respect and community. We cannot always do exactly what we want to do on our own terms — and that starts with living arrangements, purchase behaviours and diet.
We need to work on this pathological obsession that we have built around private ownership. Not everyone can own everything and that be a good and sustainable thing. Owning as much as possible is an absolutely savage philosophy that we have outgrown and broken into pieces. Better transport, better shared infrastructure, temporary rentals of non permanent items, less single-use shit and repairing our broken stuff. We need to resuscitate the planet we have gutted to impress our neighbours.
We need to commit fully to working together to survive — and that being the goal in and of itself. “For this asset class to invest, there needs to be returns.” Holy shit. This idea needs to die immediately at both the micro and macro levels.
Wealth redistribution
When one family is worth $150 billion dollars and we’re telling people that they need to stop using plastic straws in order for the world not to descend into a global humanitarian food crisis, we have taken a wrong turn, somewhere.
The wealth of the ultra-rich needs to be practically and strategically redistributed. I’m not talking about making the Walton’s poor, for christ’s sake. But that money, and the wealth that sits in tax domiciles — that needs to start being put back to the earth that they brutally clawed it out of. It needs to be deployed on international programmes of work designed to create meaningful , long-term energy and waste policy based on a common goal and not a singular one.
At one point, we put a robot on Mars, and it was Tweeting. This is possible.
Immediate cross-cultural co-operation
We need to mobilise cross-cultural, without-borders style teams to:
Design immediate, measurable programmes of work to keep fossil fuels in the ground and generate renewables. We need to build distributed teams of the world’s best thinkers — and instead of paying them $475k a year to work out how they’re going to get me to buy more absolute horseshit through Facebook advertising, use this talent and motivation to create genuine ecological innovation that can be applied across the planet.
Understand who can invest what — and that some countries are going to need to provide factors more money and resources than others. This cannot be a sticking point. The Ukraine cannot provide the same resources as the USA and if that’s where we come unstuck we deserve to drown in our future dystopian starvation hell world anyway.
Account for the results. Iterate and redeploy. Likely, forever. This is not a singular fix. This is a new respect for our mission and meaning on Earth, forever.
A brand new fanaticism
We need to become obsessed with solving this problem at every level of society. That’s quite simple. If we’re not obsessed with becoming champions for the cause, it’ll just never work. The earth and sustainable economics need to become our new God.
Multi-region, low or no returns-based investment
We need to be prepared to say goodbye to this money. ‘Can climate change make financial returns?’ Do you think the concept of financial returns is going to be important when the clean water starts running out in the poorest communities on the planet?
We dragged the money out of the earth screaming and now it’s time to address the equilibrium.
Evaluation and redress of globalist capitalism
And more than anything, we need a complete re-imagination of how our economic expectations work, and the virtues that we live our lives by. Economics textbooks have barely changed since the 1950s and we live in an unrecognisable world with billions more people at home in it. The stress is profound and it’s time we ask once and for all what to do about it and become committed to its answer — whether we like it or not. A good start for this is Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth. Because the world is utterly, utterly different now.
It is possible to imagine a world into existence that is habitable, hospitable and sustainable. But we need to completely re-imagine our markers of mission, meaning and success. New problems need new names and new tools. Cause as the adage goes, Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.