its own, it also inter-locks with other tendencies through neoliberalisation and commodification, which is evident in relation to the climate crisis, peak oil, food-system crisis and securitisation of democracy.
Climate crisis
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By the mid twentieth century, human influence had become the dominant cause of observed global warming through greenhouse-gas emissions despite natural variability. The US was for a very long time the leading emitter of carbon emissions in aggregate and per capita terms.6 At a systemic level of the global capitalist system, this means production, consumption, distribution, exchange and social reproduction are implicated in causing human-induced climate change. More specifically, capital as a geological force has been implicated in emitting greenhouse gases and causing climate change in three respects. First, through the extraction of fossil fuels and their use in economic processes. Second, through ongoing accumulation and growth driven by fossil fuels, greenhouse-gas emission rates are increasing. According to the fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC 2014), over the past two decades carbon emission rates have not been declining, while planetary temperatures are increasing. Third, with growing income inequality on a planetary scale, the wealthy have a higher carbon footprint and are therefore, as a class, a major contributor to greenhouse gases and climate change (Hertwich and Peters 2009). In short, the global capitalist system and capital as a geological force are driving the destruction of human and non-human life through human-induced climate change. The climate crisis is systemically driven and caused. Put differently, it is a capitalist-induced crisis, and not a human-induced one.
The US, supported by transnational capital, has failed to address the climate crisis. It did not sign the Kyoto Protocol, which was an attempt to ensure that the rich, carbon-polluting countries took legal responsibility to reduce their emissions. In fact, the Kyoto Protocol has been the harbinger of financialised, green neoliberal solutions, such as carbon trading (Satgar 2014). The protocol does little to address the climate crisis – and yet it was still too much for the US to commit to. Moreover, in 2009 at the UN-led Copenhagen Summit, the US (under Obama’s leadership), scuttled any attempt to find binding legal targets to reduce carbon emissions. Instead, a ‘pledge-and-review’ approach, embodied in an accord without binding targets, was agreed to between the US and other leading emitters, including China, Brazil, India and South Africa. This has become the dominant approach to solving the climate crisis, and more recently a similar agreement was reached between the US and China on the eve of the COP20 UN summit in Lima, in 2014.7 This is the approach that will be consolidated at the 2015 COP21 UN summit in Paris.
However, despite the global media hype about the US–China deal, both the Kyoto Protocol and the pledge-and-review approach embodied in the US–China deal affirm a corporate-led method of addressing climate change, and embed green neoliberal solutions in the UN multilateral process, such as carbon trading and offsetting. Where they have been adopted, these green neoliberal solutions have thus far failed to address the climate crisis. The window of opportunity to avert catastrophic climate change is closing very quickly (Bond 2011). Since these solutions have been put forward, carbon emissions have still increased over the past two and a half decades. The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has exceeded the threshold limit of 400 parts per million, which means we are heading for a planetary temperature increase of 2 °C. Continuing on the current trajectory, we will experience the impact of dramatic climate change within the next 20 years.
And crucial climate-change phenomena are already beginning to have an impact (see IPCC 2014). For instance, the western part of the Antarctic is going through irreversible collapse; methane emissions from the receding Arctic ice sheet are on the increase; glaciers are receding dramatically; and sea levels are rising, placing low-lying areas and islands in jeopardy. It is expected that as ocean warming increases, circulation patterns will be affected, aggravating climatic shifts. Moreover, the knock-on effects of climate change are beginning to be expressed in extreme weather activity. As the planetary environment changes, more extreme weather events have been recorded, such as heatwaves, droughts, floods and cyclones.8 These are becoming increasingly intense and reveal the extreme vulnerability of ecosystems, and many human systems, to climate variability. The poor and working class are likely to be worst affected by the climate crisis and will bear the brunt of capitalism’s logic towards species extinction.
Linked to the climate crisis is the historical tendency towards peak oil, which further reveals the destructive logic at the heart of capitalism today.
Peak oil
In the Industrial Revolution, coal became crucial for driving industrialisation by means of steam power. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, oil had become increasingly important to meet energy needs, particularly to drive the combustion engine. More importantly, oil became a strategic resource for capital accumulation and this necessitated its extraction and geopolitical control to secure supply to Western industrial economies during colonial imperialism. After World War II, during the Pax Americana, the US became central in organising the geopolitics of oil to advance its interests in line with the reproduction of the global capitalist system. With the rise of national independence movements in the Middle East, and the US drive to open markets through decolonisation, the US played a crucial role in the emergence of the Middle Eastern oil-producing sovereign states and ensured its supply through an Anglo-American axis (Van der Pijl 2006).
By the 1970s global oil supply was threatened with the formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Oil-price shocks reverberated through the international economy. The US in this context also had to contend with the economic rise of Europe and Japan since World War II, and this led to the tighter incorporation of these countries into a US-led bloc, including numerous oil-producing states as clients. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and, initially, Iran, were crucial clients for US geo-strategic control of global oil supplies during this period.
By the 1970s the US also faced peak oil in terms of its own domestic production. The notion of peak oil had been advocated by geologist M King Hubbert decades before to determine the output of an oil well (Greer 2008). The bell-shaped Hubbert Curve is one of the basic tools of petroleum geology. Ahmed (2010: 64) sets out Hubbert’s basic principles as follows:
Firstly, production begins at zero. Secondly, production increases until it reaches a peak which cannot be surpassed. This peak tends to occur at or around the point when fifty per cent of total petroleum reserves are depleted. Thirdly, subsequent to this peak, production declines at an increasing rate, until finally the resource is completely exhausted.
The peak-oil model applies to oil wells, oil-producing regions, national output and even global supply. With global capitalism addicted to oil, the rapid depletion of oil reserves and resources poses a major systemic limit on global accumulation. It also causes cost pressures as supply dwindles, which further constrains growth and accumulation.
According to studies conducted by oil corporations, global oil production peaked in the early 2000s, with some reports suggesting as early as 2000 or as late as 2005 (Ahmed 2010). Moreover, the International Energy Agency (IEA
