material from three lectures given at the Kirchner Cultural Center of Buenos Aires on 29 June 2019 and the Brooklyn Library on 2 February 2020, which were updated after the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020 and Joe Biden’s win in November 2020.
All my thanks go to the French Cultural Services in Buenos Aires and New York, who invited me to the two venues. I also thank Laurent-Henri Vignaud for having agreed to review my text, Brune Compagnon-Janin, who encouraged me to publish it, Laurent de Sutter and Monique Labrune, who published it at the Presses Universitaires de France, Robin Mackay for translating it into English, and John Thompson for publishing it at Polity.
In its final phase, catastrophe is the intrinsic, normal mode of existence for capital.
Rosa Luxemburg (1913)
1 A New Front
Ecology has come a long way.
Forty years ago, only specialists and political militants were worried about global warming, loss of biodiversity, and pollution by pesticides or plastics. Only twenty years ago, people were still dismissive of organic food. Today everyone has a view on climate issues. For the first time in a US presidential election, the topic of climate change was addressed during the debates. Joe Biden has committed to a great plan to fight it and even appointed a ‘climate czar’. Indeed, it is now laid bare for everyone to see with each new hurricane and wildfire that hits us that climate is changing, for the worse.
Nevertheless, environmentalists have only won a battle, not the war. Despite the commitments made at successive Conference of the Parties (COP) summits, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than ever. Despite displays of good intentions here and there, the use of pesticides continues to increase, as do deforestation, urbanization and ocean acidification. The Greens are still political minorities in political majorities. Worse still, climate denialists are still overwhelmingly powerful. The US election results were tighter than expected. The Senate is tied. Seventy million Americans are still fed fake news and propaganda on a daily basis by the Republican party and Fox News. Along with the first wave of Trumpism that hit America in 2016, politicians with heavily climate-sceptic agendas have been voted in in Brazil, in the Philippines, in Australia and in Hungary and are still very popular.
Some of the reasons for that are well known. Big corporations continue to oppose climate policies for short-term profit, if not up front then behind the scenes. Bad habits in agriculture and the food industry are tough to rein in. Pandering to populations aggrieved at the new norms and constraints called for by any politics with a vague sense of social responsibility is still fruitful. But this book argues there is more: all these years when environmentalism was gaining traction, the rejection of environmentalism has grown too, that is, the rejection of the very idea the world needs to be saved from climate breakdown. Some people now embrace climate breakdown; they desire it.
A huge driver of the Trump vote relied in both presidential elections on the idea that climate change is not only not real or not dangerous, but actually ‘does good’, to quote former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott,1 inasmuch as it ‘does bad’ to others. With characteristic political flair, the former president mused, to the great satisfaction of his electoral base, about the fact that rising sea levels would wreak havoc upon his enemies, the ‘coastal elites’.2 Likewise, there is no other way to understand why Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil, would encourage the burning down of the Amazon forest, all the while knowing perfectly well what kind of a disaster it is for the rest of the earth. Or why Australia’s current prime minister, Scott Morrison, watched the bush burn from his swimming pool in Hawaii as if it were some kind of reality show to be enjoyed rather than a disaster to be averted.
This new perspective on climate change is, in effect, a huge shift in the politics needed to fight it and a new front environmentalists have to fight upon. We can no longer believe that convincing the public that climate change is real and dangerous is enough to make a difference. Neither can we imagine that the only resistances to overcome in order to fight it are technical or financial. As crazy as it seems, we now have to address the fundamental question as to even why climate change should be averted. Unless we manage to do it, the earth is – literally – toast.
Notes
2 2. ‘A massive 200 billion dollar sea wall, built around New York to protect it from rare storms, is a costly, foolish & environmentally unfriendly idea that, when needed, probably won’t work anyway. It will also look terrible. Sorry, you’ll just have to get your mops & buckets ready!’, @realdonaldtrump, 19 January 2020.
2 Short the World
Greta Thunberg declared before an assembly of heads of state at the UN in September 2019 that inaction on ecology could only have two causes: ‘ignorance’ or ‘evil’.1 Unfortunately she immediately ruled out the second possibility. One can well understand why. It is always a delicate matter to impute bad intentions to someone, all the more so when it comes to something as insane as wanting climate crisis to get worse. But perhaps it’s precisely a matter of understanding how such an intention may not be quite so insane.
There are in fact many ways in which the ongoing climate breakdown and collapse of biodiversity might benefit certain individuals and interest groups. Among the first that come to mind are speculators, short sellers and ‘disaster capitalists’.
As Naomi Klein says on the subject of Hurricane Katrina in The Shock Doctrine, in words reminiscent of Rosa Luxemburg, the deluge that struck Louisiana in 2005 offered developers a way to make an easy profit off the funds allocated for reconstruction and presented an opportunity for the governor to ‘gentrify’ the state by expropriating former residents, the majority of them black and poor.2 Similarly, every global-warming-related heatwave that hits an agricultural region spells profit for the industrialists who make the drought-resistant seeds or the brokers that own the much-needed water which farmers have to buy. It’s only one step from this to positively ‘wanting’ heatwaves, a step now being taken cheerfully by those profiting from the privatization of water in California or Australia, and whose objective interests now happily coincide with global warming.3 The ecological crisis is a godsend that allows ‘scavenger capitalism’ to extend its grip over the entire planet. In this poker game, the last man standing at the world table cleans up, leaving the other players with nothing. Indeed, the effects of climate breakdown will not be evenly felt. What’s coming is not a global collapse, but a multitude of disasters large and small, spread over time and unevenly distributed across the surface of the planet. In other words, what is coming is chaos – and with it, opportunities for profit for those hovering over it. That is, essentially, white men living in temperate climates and their cronies, the other oligarchs and gerontocrats of the world living in air-conditioned jets.
Environmentalists often say that the ecological crisis proves capitalism is unfit to rule the world, and that the leaders and lobbyists denying it are pushing our societies over a cliff, in effect committing global suicide. But nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism is not suicidal, never has been. From a capitalist perspective, the ecological crisis only demonstrates that capitalism doesn’t work for 6 billion people, meaning that it would with 1 or 2 billion people less on the earth. By the time a third of humanity had perished from hunger, thirst, heat, drowning or bullets, pressure on the ecosystem would have dropped so substantially that we could go back to
