Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen.
A quick snapshot of the twenty-first century so far: an economic meltdown; a frantic sell-off of public land to the energy business as President George W. Bush exited the White House; a prolonged, costly, and unjustified war in Iraq; the Greek economy in ruins; an escalation of global food prices; bee colonies in global extinction; 925 million hungry reported in 2010; as of 2005, the world’s five hundred richest individuals with a combined income greater than that of the poorest 416 million people, the richest 10 percent accounting for 54 percent of global income; a planet on the verge of boiling point; melting ice caps; increases in extreme weather conditions; and the list goes on and on and on.2 Sounds like a ticking time bomb, doesn’t it? Well it is.
It is shameful to think that massive die-outs of future generations will put to pale comparison the 6 million murdered during the Holocaust; the millions killed in two world wars; the genocides in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Darfur; the 1 million left homeless and the 316,000 killed by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The time has come to wake up to the warning signs.3
The real issue climate change poses is that we do not enjoy the luxury of incremental change anymore. We are in the last decade where we can do something about the situation. Paul Gilding, the former head of Greenpeace International and a core faculty member of Cambridge University’s Programme for Sustainability, explains that “two degrees of warming is an inadequate goal and a plan for failure,” adding that “returning to below one degree of warming … is the solution to the problem.”4 Once we move higher than 2°C of warming, which is what is projected to occur by 2050, positive feedback mechanisms will begin to kick in, and then we will be at the point of no return. We therefore need to start thinking very differently right now.
We do not see the crisis for what it is; we only see it as an isolated symptom that we need to make a few minor changes to deal with. This was the message that Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez delivered at the COP15 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen on December 16, 2009, when he declared: “Let’s talk about the cause. We should not avoid responsibilities, we should not avoid the depth of this problem. And I’ll bring it up again, the cause of this disastrous panorama is the metabolic, destructive system of the capital and its model: capitalism.”5
The structural conditions in which we operate are advanced capitalism. Given this fact, a few adjustments here and there to that system are not enough to solve the problems that climate change and environmental degradation pose.6 Adaptability, modifications, and displacement, as I have consistently shown throughout this book, constitute the very essence of capitalism. Capitalism adapts without doing away with the threat. Under capitalism, one deals with threat not by challenging it, but by buying favors from it, as in voluntary carbon-offset schemes. In the process, one gives up on one’s autonomy and reverts to being a child. Voluntarily offsetting a bit of carbon here and there, eating vegan, or recycling our waste, although well intended, are not solutions to the problem, but a symptom of the free market’s ineffectiveness. By casting a scathing look at the neoliberal options on display, I have tried to show how all these options are ineffective. We are not buying indulgences because we have a choice; choices abound, and yet they all lead us down one path and through the golden gates of capitalist heaven.
For these reasons, I have underscored everyone’s implication in this structure—myself included. If anything, the book has been an act of outrage—outrage at the deceit and the double bind that the “choices” under capitalism present, for there is no choice when everything is expendable. There is nothing substantial about the future when all you can do is survive by facing the absence of your own future and by sharing strength, stamina, and courage with the people around you. All the rest is false hope.
In many respects, writing this book has been an anxious exercise because I am fully aware that reducing the issues of environmental degradation and climate change to the domain of analysis can stave off the institution of useful solutions. But in my defense I would also like to propose that each and every one of us has certain skills that can contribute to making the solutions that we introduce in response to climate change and environmental degradation more effective and more realistic. In light of that view, I close with the following proposition, which I mean in the most optimistic sense possible: our politics must start from the point that after 2050 it may all be over.