3

Capitalism versus the Biosphere

As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions.

—FREDERICK ENGELS1

THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM in late eighteenth-century England resulted in air and water pollution and degraded soil. Marx and Engels followed the scientific studies and political literature and concluded that negative social and ecological side effects of capitalism, today commonly referred to as “externalities,” are unintentional, but are nevertheless logical outcomes of a competitive economic system predicated on profit maximization. Engels gives this example:

What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees—what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.²

The concept of metabolic interactions between humans and the environment was used as framework to help explain what was happening. In biology, “metabolism” refers to the basic chemical processes that occur within cells and organisms, which require an exchange of materials with the outside environment. For example, we need to eat, drink water, and breathe air to get oxygen into our bodies but we also return materials to the environment in our solid and liquid waste and when we exhale CO₂-enriched air. Marx extended the concept of metabolism to refer to all human interactions with the environment: as we go about making clothes, building houses, factories, and machinery, drilling for oil, producing food, and so on. He argued that when capitalists followed their singular goal of making money, some of these interactions created disturbance so great that they caused irreparable rifts “in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”3

Why do metabolic rifts and disturbances happen? A fundamental assumption of capitalist economics is that there are unlimited sources of natural resources and unlimited “sinks” to absorb the pollution associated with the production, distribution, use, and disposal of products. Environmental and social considerations play only a small role (if any) when making decisions on production and distribution because the overriding goal is to make the highest profit. Thus, “externalities,” the negative side effects of profit-driven production decisions, are inevitable. As new, larger tools and technologies are developed to increase production and more energy is required to run them, damage to nature occurs more frequently and with much longer-term impacts. Individual capitalists (and the system as a whole) are unable to rationally manage human interaction with the rest of the natural world in ways that preserve the integrity and healthy functioning of the biosphere. It is this reality that leads to severe ecological disturbances and rifts, in the natural cycles and processes on which we and other species depend.

THE GREAT ACCELERATION

The United States economy experienced a boom following the Second World War when the productive capacity built for the war effort was repurposed to fulfill the increased demand for domestic commodities resulting from savings built up during wartime austerity and to rebuild war-torn economies abroad. The economy was also greatly stimulated by governmental programs such as the GI Bill, helping war veterans go to college and buy houses with zero down payments, and a huge burst from the increased production and use of automobiles. The building of the vast interstate national system of highways, begun under President Eisenhower in the mid-1950s, led to the growth of suburbs and stimulated new businesses such as restaurants and hotels and gas stations to service highway travelers and stores for the new suburban population. This is period also marks the beginning of the effort to turn the U.S. public into voracious consumers. From the 1950s to the mid-1970s, economic activity more than doubled in the United States, Britain, and Japan and increased rapidly in other already developed countries.

The dramatic expansion of the capitalist system during this period reoriented relations in much of the world toward commodity production of all manner of goods and materials. Global trade increased exponentially, as did energy use, world population, and the global economy as a whole. Production of new and old materials took off: global production of synthetic pesticides went from about one-tenth of a ton in 1945 to about 3 million tons in 1980; plastics jumped from around 2 million tons in 1950 to 52 million tons in 1976, 109 million tons in 1989, and over 300 million tons in 2015.4 The Working Group on the Anthropocene, a committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences, has dated the start of the proposed new geological epoch to the post–World War II period, with its “Great Acceleration” of economic activity and resultant damage to the metabolic interactions needed to maintain healthy and fully functioning ecosystems (see Figure 3.1, pages 78–79).

In capitalism, critical economic decisions are often far removed from where the primary effects will be felt and without input from those who will be directly affected. This makes it especially difficult to fully grasp and combat the extent of environmental degradation. Mark Campanale, founder of the Carbon Tracker Initiative and “sustainable investment analyst” of multibillion-dollar projects, illustrates this when describing a meeting “typical of those which happen every day in the City of London”:

Figure 3.1: Social-Economic and Ecological Trends and the “Great Acceleration.”

Source: Graphs created by R. Jamil Jonna based on data in Steffen et al., “Trajectory of the Anthropocene,” 81–98.

A group of Indonesian businessmen organized a lunch to raise £300 million to finance the clearing of a rain forest and the construction of a pulp paper plant. What struck me was how financial rationalism often overcomes common sense; that profit itself is a good thing whatever the activity, whenever the occasion. What happened to the Indonesian rain forest was dependent upon financial decisions made over lunch that day. The financial benefits would come to the institutions in London, Paris, or New York. Very little, if any, would go to the local people…. The rain forest may be geographically located in the Far East, but financially it might as well be located in London’s Square Mile.5

Accelerating changes in our metabolism with the biosphere, generated by the activity of our economic system, have created deep ecological disturbances and rifts, resulting in the global environmental crisis we now face. But even when these disturbances are recognized, after-the-fact attempts to fix the situation frequently go on to cause their own unforeseen negative effects, creating even larger problems.

NUTRIENT CYCLES

In ecosystems relatively undisturbed by human activity such as remote forests and grasslands, the flow of matter and energy tends to remain in a dynamic but relatively stable equilibrium. Essential nutrients such as phosphorus and calcium cycle through this healthy ecosystem with very small amounts lost. Nutrients, though removed from the soil by plants, are maintained within the local ecosystem by their return as animals die and plants shed their leaves or die and decompose. A variety of microorganisms can make nitrogen available to plants and help make the elements in minerals and organic matter soluble and thus usable by plants.

Traditional hunting-gathering communities had relatively small impacts on the cycling of nutrients, not that different from those of other hominid species. Beginning around 10,000 years ago, the invention of agriculture in several locations led to increases in the size and mobility of populations. Many communities depended on slash-and-burn, or swidden farming, whereby if the fallow is sufficient to allow strong regrowth of forests, nutrients naturally accumulated in the vegetation and in the residues on the forest floor. By the time these patches went through another cycle of cutting and burning, sufficient nutrients accumulated to grow crops for two or three years. In ancient civilizations such as those in Mesopotamia and Egypt, with agriculture based on the inundation of soils near rivers by annual flooding, sufficient nutrients were added with the sediments that arrived with the water to replenish the soil. While soil fertility was maintained without much additional effort in slash-and-burn and flood-based farming, other long-term farming systems found ways to perpetuate fertile soils such as using lake or pond sediments as soil amendments or rotations with clovers that enriched soil with nitrogen.

With the growth of industrial capitalism centuries later, agricultural land was put into permanent production. As we described in the last chapter, a large proportion of the population was forcibly removed from the agricultural land and migrated to cities to find work. This created a growing rift in nutrient cycling: most of the nutrients from the soil, transported to cities in the form of foodstuffs, were not returned to the fields. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx described the consequences of such a rift in nutrient cycling:

Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centers, and causing an ever increasing preponderance of town population … disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil.6

Some seventy years after Marx published Capital, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace wrote that society was pouring “fertility year after year into the cities, which in turn pour what they do not use into rivers and the ocean.”7 This was the first large-scale nutrient cycle rift.

A second rift in the cycling of nutrients developed in the mid-to-late twentieth century. With farm animals raised on large industrial farms far removed from the land that produced their food, crop soils lost large quantities of nutrients that were never replenished with manure. Thus farm products for both human consumption and animal feed, containing large quantities of nutrients removed from soils, are transported long distances from croplands to cities and factory farms. (See Figure 3.2.)

These rifts in the cycling of nutrients have led to the impoverishment of soils, while in cities huge quantities of nutrients accumulate as waste and sewage and as manure on factory farms. Simultaneously, the massive amounts of synthetic fertilizers that are brought in to replace the lost nutrients leach into groundwater and run off into lakes and rivers. This causes water eutrophication: huge algal blooms that deplete the oxygen when they decompose, creating giant low oxygen zones where rivers enter the ocean.

Most pronounced in the United States, the shift to raising beef cows in large feedlots was based on feeding them diets high in corn and soy to fatten them more quickly, shortening the time needed to get them to marketable weight so as to increase profits. But this means that less land is devoted to growing perennial crops for pasture or hay, once the near-exclusive diet of domestic ruminant farm animals. For a year or two following a productive legume or grass-legume hay crop, all the needed nitrogen for grains or vegetables can come from nitrogen stored in soil. Without legume forage crops in rotation, nitrogen fertilizers must be applied annually to supply that key nutrient to grow grains. Less land covered in perennial crops leads to an increase in other problems, such as accelerated runoff of rainfall and soil erosion.

The development and extensive use of synthetic fertilizers was a capitalist attempt to work around the massive loss of nutrients from agricultural soils. Most of the human waste in the cities of the developed world is chemically and biologically treated in sewage treatment plants, ensuring that relatively clean water is discharged back into rivers and oceans. It is estimated that half of the treated sewage sludge (referred to as “biosolids”) in the United States is used for landscaping and on farmland; the remainder is consigned to landfills. Farm fields are the logical destination for the nutrients in human sludge. However, use of sludge on farmlands is a highly questionable practice unless stringent actions are taken to reduce the potential toxic heavy metals and organic chemicals from industry and services such as healthcare (with its use of radioactive test materials), and the chemicals in household products before it is applied to soils.

Figure 3.2: Nutrient and Engergy Flows during Different Eras

Source: Modified from Fred Magdoff, Les Lanyon and Bill Liebhardt, “Nutrient Cycling, Transformation and Flows: Implications for a More Sustainable Agriculture,” Advances in Agronomy 60:1–73 (1997).

The “solutions” to the rupture of nutrient cycling result in their own problems. For example, the large quantity of fertilizer needed to replace the exported nutrients requires a lot of energy to manufacture (especially to produce nitrogen fertilizer) and damage to land and water occurs as phosphorus is mined and refined. With respect to phosphate, its continual application to agricultural soils is not possible indefinitely. By the end of the century, the currently known high-grade phosphorus deposits may be depleted.8

Use of inadequate rotations—either no rotation for a number of years or alternating between corn and soybeans—results in lower yields than would have occurred if the crops had been grown as part of the more complex rotation needed when farm animals and crops are raised on the same farm. Only about half of the applied nitrogen fertilizer is actually used by corn plants. A lot of excess fertilizer, therefore, remains in the soil at the end of the season, and much of it can leach out, causing stream and river pollution with nitrate (NO₃⁻). According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “Forty-six percent of the nation’s river and stream length has high levels of phosphorus, and 41 percent has high levels of nitrogen…. Poor biological condition (for macroinvertebrates) is almost twice as likely in rivers and streams with high levels of phosphorus or nitrogen.”⁹ Although urban sewage systems and storm runoff make significant contributions, agricultural production is responsible for a huge proportion of nitrogen and phosphorus water pollution. Excess use of nitrogen fertilizer has an additional effect, causing an increase in release of nitrous oxide (N₂O) into the atmosphere. N₂O is a powerful greenhouse gas as well as the leading cause of depletion of stratospheric ozone (O₃), which protects the Earth’s surface from UV radiation.

The magnitude of nitrate losses from cropland in the U.S. Midwest is staggering. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Van Meter continuous monitoring station—in the Raccoon River just upriver from Des Moines, Iowa—samples river flow and nitrate concentrations at fifteen-minute intervals around the clock. Over the span of a year, from April 1, 2015, to March 31, 2016, approximately 100 million pounds of nitrogen (as nitrate and nitrite) flowed down the river on its way to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.10

A third rift in nutrient cycling occurred with the drastic reduction in populations of sea birds and large land and sea animals. Migratory herbivores once moved huge amounts of nutrients long distances on grasslands; sea birds and anadromous fish (that live most of their lives in the ocean but return to their home rivers to spawn such as salmon and smelt) carried nutrients from sea to land and whales brought them from the deep ocean to surface waters.

Though extinctions of mammoths and other megafauna happened in precapitalist times, much of the damage to populations of remaining large land and sea animals occurred very recently under the pressures of capitalist resource extraction and land use changes. With regard to the oceans, researchers estimate:

For phosphorus (P), a key nutrient, upward movement in the ocean by marine mammals is about 23% of its former capacity (previously about 340 million kg of P per year). Movements by seabirds and anadromous fish provide important transfer of nutrients from the sea to land, totalling ~150 million kg of P per year globally in the past, a transfer that has declined to less than 4% of this value as a result of the decimation of seabird colonies and anadromous fish populations.¹¹

Three rifts in the natural cycling and flow of nutrients have opened as a result of the functioning of capitalist economies. Trying to remedy the consequences of the first two of these has led to other serious ecological problems. (There has been no attempt to deal with the third rift.)

THE CARBON CYCLE

The preindustrial terrestrial carbon cycle consisted of atmospheric CO₂, together with the energy of sunlight and the photosynthetic process of plants, to create carbon-rich organic compounds. Respiration of plants and organisms feeding on plants or other organisms returns CO₂ to the atmosphere. Oceans also absorb huge quantities of CO₂, which is then incorporated into photosynthesizing organisms such as phytoplankton. Dissolved CO₂ is combined with calcium by shell-forming animals to produce calcium carbonate (CaCO₃), which they take to the ocean bottom when they die, safely sequestering the carbon.

Before the use of fossil fuels, humans burned wood and, later, crop residues, manure, and peat for heating, cooking, and light, returning to the atmosphere more CO₂ captured by plants than by food consumption and bodily respiration.

The dramatic changes to the carbon cycle brought about by human activity, and greatly accelerated during the period following the Second World War, was caused by land use changes (about 25 percent of the increase in greenhouse gas release) and the use of fossil fuels (about 75 percent of the increased emissions). As a result, the average concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere has climbed from a pre-industrial baseline of 280 parts per million (ppm) to over 400 ppm—a level last reached some 23 million years ago.12 The longest continuous monitoring of atmospheric CO₂ is from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Figure 3.3 shows the rapid increase in CO₂ from 1960 to mid-2016.¹³

Approximately 45 percent of the excess carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming, while 30 percent dissolves into the oceans, causing them to gradually acidify, and 25 percent is removed by terrestrial plants. Hotter, more acidic seawater leads to coral bleaching and makes it more difficult for animals such as oysters and lobsters (as well as corals) to form their calcium carbonate shells.

Figure 3.3: Atmospheric CO₂ Concentration (through August 2016).

Source: R. F. Keeling, S. J. Walker, S. C. Piper, and A. F. Bollenbacher, Scripps CO₂ Program (http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu), Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), University of California, La Jolla, California.

Land Use Changes

The world’s soils contain enormous stores of carbon as organic matter, composed of animal and plant residue in different stages of decomposition as well as living organisms. Altogether, soils contain about five times more carbon than is found in Earth’s atmosphere.¹⁴ For every 1 percent of organic matter in a soil—and temperate-region agricultural soils normally have between 1 and 6 percent organic matter by weight—the amount of carbon in the top 6 inches of a field’s soil is approximately equivalent to all the CO₂ in the atmosphere above the field.¹⁵

With the shift to agriculture, major changes occur. The original vegetation is frequently burned, releasing CO₂. In addition, soil disturbance such as tree removal and plowing result in soil organisms having greater access to organic matter and decompose it at an accelerated rate. Thus, converting forests or savannas to agriculture results in a large release of CO₂ into the atmosphere and a simultaneous loss of a significant portion of the soil’s organic matter, perhaps as much as half, as organisms use increasing amounts of newly available organic matter for energy. For a prolonged period following conversion, soils are a net source of atmospheric CO₂, though this can be reversed with suitable agro-ecological techniques.

From the very beginning of capitalism, land conversion accelerated due to the drive to produce profits. There was cotton to grow in the U.S. Southeast to feed the mills of England. There was sugarcane to grow in South America and the Caribbean islands. There was widespread destruction of grassland and forest ecosystems to grow crops, monoculture forests, and plantations. These practices contributed to the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

The imperatives of seeking profits caused increased production of crops to be processed into a variety of products to stock supermarket shelves, feed animals, and supply fuel to cars with crop-based ethanol and biodiesel. This problem persists today. The push to grow more soybeans for export to an expanding Asian market was one of the driving forces for the conversion of Amazon forest to pastureland and then to cropland in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. In addition to the accelerated decomposition of soil’s organic matter, the common practice of burning to clear land pumps CO₂ directly into the atmosphere and explains why Indonesia is the fifth largest carbon emitter.

The situation of today’s rain forests in Indonesia and Malaysia is especially problematic because many of its forests have soil composed of peat. It is estimated that the losses of organic materials following drainage and conversion to oil palm plantations have caused the release of about 3,000 tons of CO₂ per acre (about 3,000 metric tons per hectare) over fifty years.15 Although palm oil is used for foods and cosmetics, it is increasingly being used as a “green” biodiesel and pushed in the European market as a substitute for fossil fuel–derived diesel. It is estimated that it will take over 400 years of growing oil palm and using it as a substitute for petrochemical diesel to make up for the CO₂ generated by the destruction of the rain forest and the associated burning of land and loss of carbon from soils through accelerated decomposition.16 (Another consequence of this practice is the irrevocable social and ecological devastation of replacing biodiverse rain forest with palm oil plantations.)

In 2015, in the wake of El Niño, Indonesia’s rain forests experienced a spell of extreme dryness. Fires set to burn the felled trees from forest clearing for conversion to oil palm plantations got out of control. In August, the fires were so extensive that thick smoke settled over a region that included Singapore and Malaysia, parts of the Philippines, and Thailand. The fires sickened hundreds of thousands of people and took a severe toll on wildlife, including orangutans, our near-relatives. The New York Times reported about the fires:

Luhut B. Pandjaitan, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs … said the country’s “one mistake” was in approving palm oil concessions on 14.8 million acres of peatlands during the past decade, which when drained and burned to clear land for agriculture emit high levels of carbon dioxide into the air.¹⁷

Calling policies that caused such ecological and human tragedy a “mistake” is quite an understatement, particularly as it was all so predictable. The Indonesian fires were the most costly “natural” disaster of 2015, causing an estimated US $16 billion in damages.¹⁸ A study by researchers at Harvard and Columbia Universities puts the number of people who will die prematurely due to smoke inhalation from those fires at 100,000.¹⁹ The 1997 Indonesian fires, also a result of dry El Niño conditions, were estimated to have caused a significant portion of the world’s CO₂ emissions for that year.²⁰

Rise of Fossil Fuels

Over the last three hundred years, there has been large-scale burning of fossil fuels to provide power and heat. Coal and then oil and natural gas are used in ever-increasing amounts, pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere as a by-product.

Along with capitalist social relations and new inventions, the energy concentrated in fossil fuels was key to the speed and manner in which the Industrial Revolution took off.21 The system has grown to the point that today the burning of fossil fuels accomplishes the work equivalent of an estimated 25 billion people working 10 hours a day, 365 days a year.²² Tom Wessels, in The Myth of Progress, described the magnitude of fossil fuel consumption in other terms: “For the first time in Earth’s history, a single species is responsible for the entropic degradation of the biosphere by releasing more energy through transformation than is being replaced by global photosynthesis.”²³

As increased atmospheric CO₂ drives increasing temperature, feedback loops occur. Permafrost soils that have been frozen for millennia, comprising almost a quarter of the land of the Northern Hemisphere, are beginning to melt. They hold a huge amount of carbon, stored as both organic matter and as methane gas (CH₄). As these soils warm and thaw, they release large quantities of greenhouse gases—CO₂ from decomposing organic matter and methane—leading to even more global warming. It is estimated that this feedback loop may result in up to 15 percent of the carbon stored in permafrost ending up in the atmosphere by the end of the century.²⁴

This massive amount of fossil fuel combustion is one of the major interventions made in the carbon cycle. Instead of a relatively stable amount of atmospheric carbon cycling from the atmosphere to plants, soils, and animals and then returning to the atmosphere, which existed for centuries, ever-greater amounts of CO₂ accumulate in the atmosphere and the oceans. The results are the warming planet and acidification of the seas. The warming of the atmosphere, in turn, has led to drastic changes in climate and to much suffering.

Remedial Solutions

To date, attempts to counteract or reduce human-induced alterations to the carbon cycle and resulting climate change have all proved inadequate. These “solutions” don’t go far enough either because there has been no desire to disturb corporate profits or they offer new possibilities to profit through market-based approaches that can lead to further problems. A number of more desperate and even more destabilizing proposals have been made for large-scale geoengineering, such as shooting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to reflect a portion of incoming light from the sun, thereby lessening warming of Earth.

While biofuels are regarded by some as a significant part of the solution, their impacts are mostly negative: on people, land, water, and biodiversity. Many problems are the result from the many side effects of capitalist agricultural production in general, such as environmental contamination with pesticides and with synthetic fertilizers, but need to be considered as outcomes when growing crops for biofuel production. Additionally, land that could have been used to grow food for people is used to grow fuel for cars: some 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is used to make ethanol fuel. In addition, the land grabs and deforestation that occurs in order to grow oil palm in order to make “biodiesel” has enormous adverse consequence for people, wildlife, and the atmosphere as we described earlier. Some biofuels take even more energy to produce than they yield. The extent of their impacts depends on the particular biofuel crop grown, production and processing of biofuel feedstocks, the scale of production, and how they influence land-use change as to who gets displaced. Finally, while using some types of biofuels might reduce CO₂ emission to the atmosphere, others emit more CO₂ than with fossil fuels. Thus, this supposed remedy for the negative effects of fossil fuels has so many harmful side effects that is no solution at all.25

Some scientists advocate the expansion of nuclear power as the only way to effectively reduce emissions of carbon dioxide at the scale required. Aside from myriad safety problems with the operation of nuclear plants—and the high costs of electricity generation—a process for the safe disposal of nuclear waste, which remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, is not yet known.

One often-cited emerging technology, carbon capture and storage (CCS)—essentially capturing and permanently burying carbon dioxide below ground—is untried and untested at anything close to the scale needed to make a difference. Its advocacy promotes the idea that we can carry on burning fossil fuels because at some point we’ll be able to store the gaseous waste product. CO₂ captured in the pilot CCS projects is mostly pumped underground in order to pump out more oil.26

Even more fraudulently, individuals are encouraged to compensate the world for the carbon used in commercial airplane flights and other activities by purchasing so-called offset credits (see discussion later in this chapter on Putting a Price on Nature). There are a number of problems inherent in these schemes, especially a lack of accountability or oversight that encourages cheating and gaming of the system. A report by the Oakland Institute, an independent policy think tank, concluded that “there is mounting evidence that … corporate land acquisitions for climate change mitigation—including forestry plantations—severely compromise not only local ecologies but also the livelihoods of some of the world’s most vulnerable people living at subsistence level in rural areas in developing countries.”²⁷

ORGANIC MATTER FLOWS AND SOIL HEALTH

The organic matter cycle is a key part of the carbon cycle—after all, the material of life is built out of chains and rings of carbon atoms, assembled by the photosynthetic activity of green plants. Organic materials are stored aboveground in living plants and animals and in much larger quantities in soils as both living organisms and the residues of dead ones. As discussed earlier, agricultural practices have led to a large loss in soil organic matter, contributing to increases in atmospheric CO₂ levels. But because organic matter levels in soils have such profound effects on agriculture and the environment, it needs attention as a separate issue.

Ample amounts of organic matter are of critical importance to maintaining healthy and productive soils. As soil organic matter content decreases, biodiversity decreases and disease organisms and nematodes that feed on crop plants proliferate because of the decreased competition with other organisms. In general, the simpler rotations of modern industrial-style farming make crop pests—weeds, soil-borne diseases, and insects—more problematic when the soils are depleted of organic matter.²⁸ As organic matter decreases, soils become more compact and less water is able to infiltrate. Fewer nutrients are stored in soils and soil nutrients are more easily lost to leaching and erosion. Accelerated erosion causes a further loss of organic matter along with the lost topsoil. The loss of topsoil and organic matter creates a downward spiral of soil fertility. More aggregates break down and more erosion occurs. It’s a classic feedback loop: the original disturbance causes other changes that further magnify the first disruption. Drastic intervention with fertilizers, pesticides, extra irrigation, and equipment will temporarily remedy the situation—but at a great ecological, monetary, and social cost.

Some early agricultural practices reduced soil organic matter, such as when wheat was grown on the hillsides of Greece, resulting in erosion of topsoil rich in organic matter and negative effects for long-term food production. But other cultures developed methods to help maintain soil fertility. The Mesoamericans developed the chinampa system in the Valley of Mexico: planting beds were built, using sediments rich in organic matter from shallow lakes.

Disturbances in organic matter flows were recognized over a century ago. Three scientists examining the problem of “worn-out” soils in 1908 concluded that the “depletion of the soil humus [organic matter] supply is apt to be a fundamental cause of lowered crop yields.”29 Contemporary soil scientists have only recently rediscovered this reality.³⁰

Practices that developed and were made common during the industrialization of agriculture—such as inadequate crop rotations composed of relatively few commodity crops, reliance on nitrogen from commercial fertilizers instead of legumes, the concentration of large numbers of farm animals separated from the land that grows their feed, and intensive tillage that breaks up soil structure—have led to a great loss of soil organic matter. Agricultural soils in the United States have about half of the organic matter they contained before forests and grasslands were converted to agriculture.³¹ It is estimated that the world’s soils have lost between 50 and 70 percent of the organic matter they contained before they were farmed.³² Over 30 percent of the world’s soils are moderately or severely degraded.³³

Pesticides are routinely used to control organisms that limit crop growth. But more insecticides are needed because plants are more susceptible to insect attack when growing in soils depleted of organic matter and in fields and their surroundings that have low plant biodiversity. In other words, farming practices developed within the context of capitalist economies that focus on monocultures or use inadequate rotations have created large populations of insect pests (in the sense of attacking crops and reducing yields) by eradicating all their competitors and natural predators as well as decreasing the presence of organisms in the soil that stimulate plants to produce chemicals to defend themselves.

Pesticide contamination of farmers, farm workers, water, and the food itself is pervasive. Natural enemies are killed along with the target pests, frequently leading to the outbreak of previously insignificant secondary pests. As target pests develop resistance to the pesticides used, a treadmill is created, necessitating higher pesticide application rates, the use of multiple pesticides, and the continual introduction of new pesticides. This creates a chemical arms race between crop pests and pesticide makers, driving pests to evolve resistance to widely used pesticides. The occurrence of many pest problems on industrial agriculture farms is an outcome of farming under the constraints of capitalist economics and ideology rather than a product of nature. This is partially a result of practices that, among other effects, decrease soil organic matter.

More fertilizer is needed as organic matter decreases because the nutrient-supplying ability of soils is tied so intimately to the amount of organic matter present. And decreased organic matter reduces the amount of rainfall that can infiltrate and be stored in soils, leading to rifts in the hydrologic cycle. This is then counteracted by more frequent irrigation. While these so-called remedies—pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, more irrigation—help to maintain high yields in the short term, crop yields are usually lower than would occur with soils richer in organic matter.

THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE

Freshwater comprises less than 2 percent of the earth’s total water, and is unevenly distributed around the globe. Freshwater is needed for drinking, irrigating crops, raising farm animals, and many other human endeavors. Thus, the questions of how water cycles—where it rains and where it doesn’t, how much it rains and the intensity of rainfall, and how much of the rainfall infiltrates the soil and how much runs off the land—are all critical. Today the cycling of water is being significantly distorted in a number of ways: changes in rainfall patterns as global warming proceeds, pumping water from subsurface aquifers (permeable strata) faster than replenishment occurs, transporting water long distances to supply another region, excessive use during irrigation and growing water-needy crops in regions with inadequate rainfall, and contamination of surface and subsurface water with industrial chemicals.

Freshwater will soon be the key resource that nations will fight over. Already there are struggles between the states of Georgia and Florida over water use, and the disagreements among western U.S. states are legendary. Dams built by China and other countries along rivers, without being part of a regionally agreed-upon water allocation strategy, lead to headlines like the Guardian’s “A Waterfight Like No Other May Be Brewing Over Asia’s Rivers.”34 Upriver dams, used for irrigation and producing hydroelectric energy, lessen the downriver flows and change the annual flow patterns, harming river fisheries and other traditional uses.

The earth’s warming is projected to increase drought stress in northern South America and parts of Central America and Africa and decease water availability in the large river basins of Southeast Asia. On the other hand, greater precipitation, much of it in more intense storms, is anticipated for portions of the continental United States.³⁵ Regions with increased probabilities of intense storm occurrences includes parts of England, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific coastal regions of Colombia and Ecuador.

Perhaps as an indication of what is in store for the United States, for a period of a little over twelve months beginning in May 2015, “dozens of people [were] killed and thousands of homes swamped with water in extreme events in Oklahoma, Texas, South Carolina, West Virginia and Maryland.”³⁶ The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that eight 500-year storms occurred during this period. The devastating storms that hit Louisiana in August 2016 dropped up to 24 inches (60 cm) of water over a forty-eight-hour period. “The Louisiana flooding has been so exceptional that some places in the state experienced storm conditions considered once-every-1,000-year events.”37

During normal rainfall events, an estimated 60 percent of the precipitation that falls on land enters the soil and is stored there. The remaining 40 percent either flows through the soil into aquifers and springs or overland into streams, rivers, lakes, wetlands, and oceans. Removal of native vegetation and conversion of forests and grasslands to plowed fields decreases soil organic matter and disturbs natural soil structure, decreasing the amount of rainfall infiltrating soil, leading to accelerated runoff and erosion as flowing water carries soil sediments downhill.

Large-scale agriculture, stimulated by economic incentives that encourage growing row crops and covering ever-larger land areas, have accelerated the natural process of soil erosion.³⁸ For example, more than half of Iowa’s topsoil—originally fourteen inches deep—has been eroded by water flowing over soils used to grow corn and soybeans.³⁹

Huge expansions of urban and suburban areas have resulted in increasing portions of land being covered with impermeable structures: houses, commercial buildings, schools, roads, driveways, and, in particular, parking lots:

It’s estimated that there are three nonresidential parking spaces for every car in the United States. That adds up to almost 800 million parking spaces, covering about 4,360 square miles—an area larger than Puerto Rico. In some cities, like Orlando and Los Angeles, parking lots are estimated to cover at least one-third of the land area, making them one of the most salient landscape features of the built world.⁴⁰

Sealing so much of the soil surface contributes to large pulses of runoff from storms, swelling local streams and rivers and leading to flooding and water pollution.

Irrigating agricultural fields uses the largest amount of water by far, accounting for 70 percent globally. In California, agriculture accounts for 80 percent of total freshwater use. A sizable further portion is used (and polluted) by the oil and gas industry due to the huge increase in horizontal drilling (fracking) that produces enormous quantities of contaminated wastewater. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that up to 9.6 million gallons of water are used for every fracking well.41 Even the oil and gas industry recognizes its use of a huge amount of water. In a series called Measuring Success, the engineering firm Siemens, which builds monitoring equipment for wells, claims that “the biggest product of the US petroleum industry [is] water.” If the idea of oil and gas companies producing water sounds strange, that’s because it is. “Produced water” is an Orwellian term invented by the industry used to describe the toxic cocktail of fracking chemicals and contaminated water the industry disposes of by burying it underground.

Reinjection of fracking wastewater into the ground has dramatically increased the frequency of earthquakes. The state of Oklahoma, where earthquakes were rare, now experiences them as often as California.⁴² In the Dallas–Fort Worth area earthquakes had never before been recorded until 2008, after wastewater injection took off. Local resident Cathy Wallace describes having to contend with the knowledge that quakes could come at any time: “Every time it happens you know it’s going to hit, but you don’t know how severe it’s going to be…. Is this going to be a bigger one? Is this the part where my house falls down? It’s scary. It’s very scary.”⁴³ The USGS estimates earthquakes caused by wastewater injection will threaten the lives and livelihoods of up to 7 million people in the United States.⁴⁴

What’s most remarkable is that we have known for decades that injecting large quantities of high-pressure liquid into the ground is a direct cause of earthquakes. Experiments in the 1960s conclusively demonstrated the exact amount and pressure of liquid required to destabilize a fault. In reference to these experiments, Stanford University geophysicist Bill Ellsworth notes, “Scores of papers on injection-induced earthquakes were published in the geophysical literature in the following 40-plus years [1960s on], and the problem was well understood and appreciated by seismologists.”⁴⁵

One of the arguments against shutting down fracking operations (actually doing almost anything improves the environment) is the environment-versus-labor argument. It will cost jobs. But plenty of workers would be needed if society decided to invest in public transit, upgrade infrastructure, and design and build a new electricity grid based on renewable energy. Shutting down the fracking industry will free up workers to do more socially useful and ecologically sound jobs.

As water is withdrawn too rapidly from the earth, aquifers in dry climates become depleted. New York Times reporter Felicity Barringer wrote in 2015, “nearly a third of the world’s 37 largest aquifers are being drained faster than they are being replenished.”46 Drilling deeper wells is just another temporary fix. Sometimes it causes the land to collapse. This is what’s happening in California’s Central Valley, where one-quarter of the food consumed in the United States is produced annually. In 2015, after four years of drought, the land was sinking at the rate of two inches (5 cm) a month.⁴⁷

As the land sinks, roads, bridges, and pipelines need major repairs, costing tens of millions of dollars. The extent of underground water depletion has also led to saltwater intrusions into coastal aquifers and significantly contributes to sea-level rise because water that would have remained in aquifers on land reaches the ocean. This occurs mainly because evaporation and transpiration caused by irrigation later returns to earth as rainfall.⁴⁸

Capitalism’s top-down solution to insufficient regional supplies is to dam and divert rivers and build pipelines and canals that transport water long distances from water-rich regions. Such projects have been carried out in country after country, at huge ecological and social cost. One example in the U.S. context is the Colorado River diversion. In order to supply water for western U.S. cities and agriculture, more “than 100 dams were built across the [Colorado River] system. Where the river’s path was inconvenient, its reach was extended with tentacles of tunnels and trenches deep into Southern California and Arizona. Parts of the river were even reversed; water was sent eastward through pipelines beneath the Continental Divide.”⁴⁹

In addition to its huge social-ecological costs, the Colorado River diversion also uses enormous amounts of energy to move water thousands of feet up over mountains and through tunnels and canals to Phoenix and Tucson. The Navajo Generating Station, built primarily to provide the energy needed to move water from the river, uses 15 tons of coal a minute and emits a plume containing 16 million tons of CO₂ annually, along with other pollutants such as mercury and lead.50 The power plant has turned the Navajo reservation and surrounding region into a “national sacrifice area.” EPA records include complaints of a doubling in cancer rates in the Navajo Nation since the generating station began operating, as well as worsening asthma. The nonprofit environmental organization Clean Air Task Force estimates that emissions from the Navajo plant alone were responsible for twelve premature deaths in 2012.⁵¹

The amount of evaporation along the sun-drenched route of the diversion and in the associated dams further calls into question the overall long-term sustainability and benefits of moving such vast quantities of water to an arid region. The point is not that major infrastructure projects are inherently bad and should never be contemplated under any circumstances. Rather, such projects must be evaluated by different criteria than those currently used for capitalist projects—criteria that include social justice, equity, a genuine assessment of long-term sustainability and outcomes in a truly democratic decision-making process that involves everyone who may be affected.

Over half the world’s population, some 4 billion people, live in areas where for at least one month during the year water is being used at more than twice the replenishment rate.⁵² As supplies of freshwater become less dependable and the need for water grows in a warming climate, it will be the poor that suffer most. Because in our society, as Dan Baum writes, “the first law of hydrodynamics is that water flows toward money.”⁵³

BIODIVERSITY

The ongoing loss of biodiversity is creating rifts in the entire web of life. A 2012 article in Science sums it up as follows:

Ecosystems worldwide are rapidly losing taxonomic, phylogenetic, genetic, and functional diversity as a result of human appropriation of natural resources, modification of habitats and climate, and the spread of pathogenic, exotic, and domestic plants and animals. Twenty years of intense theoretical and empirical research have shown that such biotic impoverishment can markedly alter the biogeochemical and dynamic properties of ecosystems.54

Scientists have estimated that the loss of mammals and other vertebrates over the last century would have taken between 800 and 10,000 years to occur if extinction rates had remained unchanged.⁵⁵ This rapid decrease in species, now well underway, has been called the “sixth extinction.”⁵⁶

Rapacious exploitation of the oceans is also occurring. According to a 2010 report from the Pew Charitable Trusts:

Of the nearly 600 species groups monitored by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, only 23 percent are not fully overexploited. Many fisheries scientists consider even this estimate to be optimistic. Recent studies suggest that 90 percent of the world’s large fish have disappeared, that close to one-third of the world’s commercial fisheries have collapsed.⁵⁷

The harvest of ocean fish peaked at an annual catch of about 130 million tons in the 1990s and “the world’s annual catch is now decreasing by more than 1 million tonnes [about 1 million tons] every year—despite the availability of the latest fishing technology: nets big enough to engulf cathedrals, echo locators, satellite navigation, and powerful engines to drive boats.”⁵⁸ The downward trends of world catches are especially ominous because more than 2 billion people depend on seafood for their primary source of animal protein.⁵⁹

In addition to overfishing (including millions of tons of bycatch annually caught in huge nets and then discarded), pollution and warming seas are endangering aquatic populations. According to a 2016 study: “Without a dramatic shift in the business-as-usual course for marine management, our analysis suggests that the oceans will endure a mass extinction.”60 With regard to the largest of the marine vertebrates, though no whale species have become extinct, their numbers have declined between 66 and 99 percent (for blue whales) because of commercial whaling.⁶¹

As a result of the enormous changes brought about by the forces of the “great acceleration,” the World Wildlife Fund estimates that if current trends continue through 2020, there will be about two-thirds fewer wild animals on the planet than existed in 1970.⁶² Yet overexploitation of wild animals is nothing new: it occurred even in the early days of capitalism. In describing early commercial-scale hunting in the Cuyahoga Valley in what is now Ohio, John Tully wrote: “Foxes, otters, wolves, moose, elk, deer, cougars, buffaloes, and a variety of other animals fell before the settlers’ guns in huge numbers, some species never to recover.”⁶³

In addition to the genocide of indigenous peoples and the consequences for animals, settler colonialism has been similarly calamitous for native vegetation. The decline or elimination of original animal and plant populations was a result of exploitation of renewable and nonrenewable resources to feed an insatiable economic system.

Accelerated settler theft of land and increased trade encouraged the introduction of many invasive species that have displaced native species. Indeed many early colonists actively tried to reproduce their country of origin through the deliberate propagation of the seeds and animals they brought with them. Early humans may well have had a hand in the loss of a number of species as they spread throughout much of the world. However, the evidence of prehistoric human-induced extinction of large animals is sometimes ambiguous, and the coexistence of humans and mastodons in North America for a significant period of time certainly makes one question the rapid-extinction narrative.⁶⁴ Regardless of the extent of ancient human participation in the demise of many large animals, those losses pale in comparison to what occurred during and after the development of capitalism and is occurring right now as a result of the imperatives of capitalist production.

The removal of a top predator has numerous effects on species in other parts of the food web and the physical landscape, resulting in what is called a “trophic cascade.” When a top predator is removed, as wolves were in much of the United States to protect farm animals such as sheep or to eliminate predation of game species, populations of species that were once regulated by availability of food and the presence of a top predator may grow, causing overgrazing and a simplification of the remaining habitat. Returning a small population of wolves to Yellowstone National Park has led to dramatic improvements in biodiversity and the physical makeup of the park.65

Agriculture, whether on soils that previously supported rain forest, temperate forest, or grasslands, always involves eliminating most, if not all, of the native vegetation to grow crops and raise animals, thereby creating a biologically simplified system in place of what came before. However, capitalist agriculture has been especially proficient at decreasing biological diversity in the soil, in the fields, in the borders surrounding the fields, and in the genetics of crops and farm animals.

Much of the current loss of biodiversity, discussed earlier as part of the carbon cycle, is the result of conversion to industrially managed forests, plantations, pastures, or croplands. The Amazon rain forest is believed to be composed of 16,000 tree species.⁶⁶ When converted to soy production only one plant species dominates. And when converted to grasslands for animals to graze, only a few species of plants are present in the pastures. In addition, a wide diversity of animal life, small and large, aquatic and terrestrial, in and around the trees and in the soil, is lost during the habitat conversion.

Ecological simplification, using uniform genetics to produce a uniform “product,” also occurs on factory farms. Billions of domesticated animals are treated by the meat, dairy, and egg industry not as living creatures that can feel pain and distress, but as machines. Mass-produced in factory-like facilities, their bodies are shaped in accordance with industrial needs. They pass their entire lives as cogs in a giant production line, and the length and quality of their existence is determined by the profits and losses of business corporations. Genetically similar (some even uniform) livestock raised in crowded industrial conditions foster disease, requiring routine use of antibiotics to attempt to solve the problem.

Agribusiness in the United States has become so concerned about animal rights activists filming its abusive practices that the industry actively lobbied for legislation criminalizing the practice. With the passage of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006, anyone caught filming the horrifying conditions inside an animal processing center or factory farm (officially known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs) can be tried as a terrorist under federal law.67 The law applies not only to those filming the cruel conditions of the animals but also to workers who film unsafe or unhealthy working conditions inside the CAFO.⁶⁸

One of the key findings of a summit titled Seeds and Breeds for the Twenty-First Century Agriculture is that there is “increased vulnerability of agricultural systems to weather or pest disruptions due to the decline of agro-biodiversity on farms and in our commercial seed choices.”⁶⁹ Decreased biodiversity on farms occurs within fields, genetically, over time and space.⁷⁰ Biological impoverishment by species loss leads to reduced self-sufficiency and self-regulation of ecosystems, including agricultural ones, and leads farm animals and crops to greater vulnerability from pests.

CAPITALISM AS POISONING AGENT

With the growth of capitalism came the emergence of the synthetic chemical industry. Many useful and beneficial new substances and products have been created over the last few decades. But when the primary objective is profitability, examples abound of toxic materials and products routinely used in a wide variety of products and introduced into the air, water, and soil. These include metals such as lead, mercury, and chromium; minerals such as asbestos; and a large number of industrially produced organic chemicals such as polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs). The “overwhelming majority of chemicals in use today have never been independently tested for safety in the United States.”⁷¹

In its history, the EPA has mandated safety testing for only a small percentage of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available for use today. And once chemicals are in use, the burden on the EPA is so high that it has succeeded in banning or restricting only five substances, and often only in specific applications: polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, hexavalent chromium, asbestos, and chlorofluorocarbons.72

The most severe contamination of humans with toxic chemicals commonly arises in the workplace: farmworkers are exposed to high levels of pesticides, miners are exposed to high levels of uranium or coal dust, and so on. The general public is also exposed to a multitude of potentially toxic chemicals through household products, air, drinking water, and food. “Scientists have identified more than 200 industrial chemicals—from pesticides, flame retardants, jet fuel—as well as neurotoxins like lead in the blood or breast milk of Americans, indeed, in people all over our planet.”⁷³ Our bodies have become “toxic waste disposal sites.”⁷⁴ According to the 2008–2009 report of the President’s Cancer Panel, we are contaminated even before birth: “Numerous environmental contaminants can cross the placental barrier; to a disturbing extent, babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’”⁷⁵

Endocrine disruptors are one such example of this “pre-pollution.” These disruptors include “pharmaceuticals, dioxin and dioxin-like compounds, polychlorinated biphenyls [PCBs], DDT and other pesticides, and plasticizers such as bisphenol A [BPA]. Endocrine disruptors may be found in many everyday products—including plastic bottles, metal food cans, detergents, flame retardants, food, toys, cosmetics, and pesticides.”⁷⁶ The Endocrine Society, in its 2015 report on endocrine disruptors, stated the following: “Emerging evidence ties endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure to two of the biggest public health threats facing society—diabetes and obesity…. Mounting evidence also indicates EDC [endocrine-disrupting chemical] exposure is connected to infertility, hormone-related cancers, neurological issues and other disorders.”⁷⁷

The chemical industry has grown from $171 billion in 1970 to $4.12 trillion in 2010. Most chemical production still takes place in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, but there is significant industry growth in China, South Africa, and other developing countries. With hundreds of new chemicals emerging every year, production is predicted to continue to grow exponentially alongside economic growth.

Over the last forty years, as the power of capital has grown relative to labor, there has been a weakening in the enforcement of worker safety rules. This has reintroduced workplace hazards such as black lung, a disease of coal miners resulting from coal dust inhalation. It had decreased to almost zero following regulations of mine dust, but a strong resurgence has occurred since 2000. Over the next twelve years, black lung incidence in miners who had worked at least twenty-five years increased by 900 percent.78 After twenty-nine miners were killed in the 2010 explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia the state medical examiner autopsied the dead miners. Illustrating that black lung is really a social affliction caused by unequal power relations, there was:

sufficient lung tissue for postmortem examination in 24 of the 29 victims, and 71% (17 of 24) were noted to have pathologic findings of CWP [coal worker’s pneumoconiosis, aka black lung]. The 17 miners whose lungs showed CWP ranged in age from 25 to 61 years, including five who had less than 10 years’ mining experience; nine had been miners for more than 30 years. Of note, 16 of the 17 miners with CWP had started working after the modern dust limits were put into effect.⁷⁹

ESTIMATED COST OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS

It is next to impossible to put a true monetary cost on the ecological impacts of capitalism. How do you put a meaningful cost on the effects of human contamination by lead, or the disappearance of a species, or the destruction of a forest? Although we are skeptical about trying to do so, a number of groups have made such estimates, and these dollar amounts give at least some idea of the magnitude of the devastation.

For example, a 2015 UN-sponsored study estimated the annual unpaid costs of global industrial agriculture at over $3 trillion—significantly more than the economic value of the food produced.⁸⁰ An earlier study, also sponsored by the UN, estimated that in 2008 the environmental damage caused by the world’s 3,000 largest publicly traded companies was equivalent to $2.2 trillion.81 When the sportswear company Puma decided to “go green” and put together an environmental profit and loss account in 2011, it quickly found that, if implemented, the corporation would have to dissolve itself.⁸²

UNNATURAL NATURAL DISASTERS

The term “natural disaster” takes on new meaning when the activities of businesses and governmental bodies create conditions that both make the effects of potential disasters worse than they would otherwise be and ensure that it is the poorest that are most affected. We’ve already mentioned the “natural” disaster resulting from destruction of Indonesian rain forests.

For another example, the building of numerous dams on the Mississippi River has greatly reduced the amount of sediment reaching the delta each year. And because the land in the delta naturally subsides and because ocean levels are rising, this lack of replenishment of sediment results in land being swallowed by the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. However, there is an additional factor at work—the operation of the oil companies. Thousands of onshore and offshore oil drilling rigs and canals dug for transportation and pipelines have damaged wetlands and accelerated erosion of the low-lying delta lands, making them more susceptible to hurricane tidal surges. “In just 80 years, some 2,000 square miles of its coastal landscape have turned to open water, wiping places off maps, bringing the Gulf of Mexico to the back door of New Orleans and posing a lethal threat to an energy and shipping corridor vital to the nation’s economy.”⁸³

When a storm like Hurricane Katrina hits, the surge swamps communities in the low-lying delta. It is then able to travel farther inland than if there had been more land acting as a buffer. When Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005 the poorest residents were the most severely impacted. As distinguished geographer Neil Smith wrote:

It is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. In every phase and aspect of a disaster—causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction—the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus…. Unfortunately, shocking as it was, the tragedy of New Orleans is neither unique nor even especially unexpected, except perhaps in its scale. The race and class dimensions of who escaped and who was victimized by this decidedly unnatural disaster not only could have been predicted, and was, but it follows a long history of like experiences.84

Similarly, five years after Hurricane Sandy struck New York City in 2011, the community in Far Rockaway is still struggling. During the August 2016 rainstorm in southern Louisiana, eleven people died and tens of thousands of homes were destroyed or damaged. Although the storm was particularly severe, it was not primarily accountable for the loss of life and extensive property damage. Edward Richards, a professor at Louisiana State University, observed that the real problem was how the area was developed:

From a land use perspective, the primary problem was that local planning and zoning commissions have known that the areas are prone to severe flooding for at least the 30 plus years since the 1983 flood. Homeowners and small businesses were not warned about the risk and were not advised to buy flood insurance if they were outside the FEMA 100-year flood zone. They relied on planning and zoning commissions to determine if developers were building in safe locations.⁸⁵

In these examples, as developers and planners accommodate the profit-making desires of capital—ripping up natural flood defense systems, inducing people to move onto marginal land, and then neglecting to utilize sufficient resources to help them—made the disasters inevitable. As climate change progresses and brings both drought and more intense storms, the problem of unnatural natural disasters will only worsen.

THE ROLE OF WASTE IN CAPITALIST ECONOMIES

More production means more waste: more waste means more production. Waste is a sign of capitalism’s success. When people throw away a product after using it for a short period of time, in the spirit of planned obsolescence, they will buy a new one, contributing to growth and corporate profits.86

As early as the 1920s Stuart Chase identified four systematic sources of waste under capitalism: (1) the labor power used to produce “vicious or useless goods and services”; (2) labor power wasted due to unemployment; (3) the unplanned nature of production and distribution of goods leading to inefficiencies and overproduction; and (4) the senseless waste and overuse of natural resources.⁸⁷ Addressing the term coined by nineteenth-century writer and social reformer John Ruskin, Chase wrote that what capitalism produces is not wealth, but “illth.”

Illth abounds under capitalism. In Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, first published in 1966, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy included an appendix by Joseph D. Phillips titled “Estimating the Economic Surplus.” Phillips demonstrated that the economic surplus—aspects of the economy that served no socially useful purpose and would therefore be considered waste in a more rationally organized society—averaged over half of the gross national product of the United States.

Illth comes in many forms. One is conspicuous consumption by the very rich—the luxury cars, yachts, private jets, huge houses, and other forms of ostentatious living. World Bank economists calculate that the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population uses close to 60 percent of all the world’s resources. If this richest 10 percent reduced their consumption to the average consumption of the rest of humanity, total global resource use would be cut in half.⁸⁸ The New York Times estimated the amount spent on luxury items in the United States in 2012—leaving out the luxury homes—at $302 billion.⁸⁹ A 2015 report by the British charity Oxfam found that the wealthiest 10 percent were responsible for half of all emissions of greenhouse gases, whereas the poorest half of the world’s people were responsible for about 10 percent.90

The prison-industrial complex, expanded primarily due to the racist “war on drugs,” and developed in large part to control communities of color, is most certainly illth.⁹¹ Essentially all the enormous economic financial sector does is find ways to make money with money, providing little of social value. The same can be said for marketing, advertising, and packaging for brand promotion and the proliferation of products designed with built-in obsolescence or to stimulate new wants.

The system of giant multinational supermarket companies controlling food supply and sales produces vast quantities of wasted food. It is estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of the food grown in the United States goes to waste.⁹² Food is left in the field if it doesn’t meet certain cosmetic standards of large buyers, even if it is perfectly good quality. Supermarkets routinely overstock their produce shelves in deliberate displays of abundance, knowing that a portion will spoil and be thrown away. Globally, about one-third of food is wasted, amounting to about 1.8 billion tons and worth approximately $1 trillion.⁹³ All of this wasted food means wasted water, labor power, energy, and all the other resources that went into making it—petrochemicals for pesticide and fertilizer production, energy to run agricultural machinery and transportation to markets, and so forth.

The vast majority of food waste is due to an agricultural and food system set up to generate profit. However, a lack of storage infrastructure in the Global South is a major cause of spoilage and pest infestation before the food reaches markets.

The spread of online shopping was once touted as environmentally more benign than trips to the retail shops, but instead it is adding a new dimension to the waste of resources. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Giant warehouses are springing up across the country as surging online sales send retailers scrambling to find space to house products destined for delivery to customers’ homes.”⁹⁴ The huge increase in e-commerce deliveries means corresponding increases in cardboard boxes, the most rapidly growing part of the 35 million tons of containerboard produced in 2015. Transport of the packages from warehouses creates further environmental damage. Ardeshi Faghri, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Delaware, said that a 20 percent increase of various vehicle emissions that was measured was at least partially caused by more deliveries of goods: “Online shopping has not helped the environment…. It has made it worse.”95

U.S. per capita energy consumption is twice that of the most industrialized European countries despite a similar standard of living.⁹⁶ The United States consumes 25 percent of world energy, but it does so almost 50 percent less efficiently than Europe. Clearly, there is ample room for improvement, especially because Europe is not particularly energy-efficient in the first place.

Waste is also a routine by-product of capitalists’ tendency to overbuild capacity in good times, assuming that growth will continue at its same trajectory. The company that overbuilds capacity eventually comes up against a much lower cost producer or mistaken market possibilities or a recession, leading to abandoned factories and stores that are then repurposed, torn down, or just left to decay. Abandoned or torn-down facilities such as steel mills, clothing factories, movie theaters, and malls represent a huge waste of resources.⁹⁷ In many cases it makes no social or environmental sense to abandon or tear down such properties, but it becomes a reasonable thing to do in an economy in which decisions are made on whether more profits can be made by abandoning a facility than by repurposing the building or constructing a new one.

The same occurs with homes. Tear-downs are common in middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods. A Wall Street Journal article titled “Multimillion-Dollar Homes Face the Wrecking Ball” describes a fourteen-bedroom house being purchased for $11.5 million and the empty lot marketed three years later, after the house was torn down, for $14 million. According to the article, “It’s almost becoming routine: eight-figure listings treated as tear-downs—and marketed as such. Buyers see value in the land, especially in exclusive neighborhoods or on the waterfront. There, they can build brand-new homes with modern design and cutting-edge technology.”⁹⁸ In other areas, whole working-class neighborhoods have been torn down and residents dispersed in order to build highways through cities or advance urban “renewal” to gentrify or commercialize a district.

During the rapid growth in international trade in the early 2010s, large numbers of ships were constructed to haul raw materials as well as parts and finished goods. But with the decline in global economic growth in the middle of the decade, scrapping the ships became common. “About 1,000 ships that have the combined capacity to haul 52 million metric tons of cargo will be dragged onto beaches, cut into pieces and sold for scrap metal this year [2016]. That is second only to the record amount of capacity of 61 million so-called dead-weight tons that were scrapped and recycled in 2012.”99 While at least the steel is being recycled, the buildup of shipping overcapacity that ends with ships on the scrap heap when shipping prices plunge during a slowdown is a colossal waste of material and human resources.

In addition to all the other sources of waste we’ve discussed, the military needs to be acknowledged as a sinkhole into which large amounts of resources disappear. One example is the Obama administration’s $1 trillion plan to “modernize” U.S. nuclear weapons and the introduction of the most expensive weapons project in history, the F-35 fighter jet. This plane became notorious for escalating costs and failed tests. “With an American fleet of more than 2,400 planes planned by the late 2030s—projected total costs will exceed $1 trillion. One billion dollars will be needed just to pay for the highly advanced pilot helmets, running to $400,000 apiece.”¹⁰⁰ Imagine what might be able to be done to repair U.S. public schools if $2 trillion (the cost of the F-35 and nuclear weapon “modernization”) was used to create healthy and pleasant places for children to learn. The $178 million cost of just one of the planes is enough to provide 3,358 years of college money.¹⁰¹

And though the human costs of the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early decades of the twenty-first century are horrendous, the financial costs run into the trillions of dollars—money that could have done much good if spent on social programs in the United States and abroad.

The military also wastes incredible quantities of fuel. It is exempt from all international climate agreements and local environmental regulations at its hundreds of bases worldwide, allowing the U.S. military to be the single largest institutional user of fossil fuels and by far the world’s biggest polluter. A full 80 percent of the energy consumption of the federal government is for the operation of the Department of Defense.102 According to the CIA’s World Factbook, in 2006 only thirty-five countries used more oil per day than the Pentagon. The U.S. war in Iraq emitted more CO₂ each year than 60 percent of all countries on the planet combined.¹⁰³ Even within the military, a voluminous budget of almost $1 trillion and guaranteed cost-plus contracts facilitate gargantuan waste, such as the $385 billion for military contractors for U.S. overseas bases over a twelve-year period.¹⁰⁴

EFFORTS TO REMEDIATE ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES

Under capitalism, efforts to ameliorate or reverse the damage caused by ecological rifts and disturbances all have a common element: the underlying cause of the problem cannot be questioned. Whether it is water pollution, soil erosion, ruptures in nutrient cycles, or unsustainable extraction rates of an otherwise renewable resource, the problem is treated in isolation from its context and by technocratic means: We’ve contaminated the water, so let’s bury it underground. Nutrients are stripped from agricultural soils—add synthetic fertilizer. Pests abound—bring on the pesticides. And so on. The solution then often magnifies the original problem or creates a new one: wastewater disposal from fracking operations leads to earthquakes and contamination of aquifers; excessive use of fertilizers (if some is good, a little more must be better) causes runoff and algal blooms; pests evolve and more pesticides are needed, and so on. Remediation must be done in a way that does not fetter business but allows it to make as much profit as possible. So the original cause of the ecological rifts and disturbances—namely, the inability of capitalism to rationally regulate human interaction with the biosphere in ways that regenerate and maintain a healthy ecosystem—cannot be solved. Short-term, reductionist, and reactive technological fixes inevitably lead to new problems that widen the metabolic rift between humans and the rest of the nature.

INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE RISE OF RECYCLING

It clearly makes sense to recycle materials rather than to send them to a landfill. In our society, however, recycling serves an important ideological function by convincing people that they’re doing something positive for the environment while obscuring the question of why so many products are purposely designed for single use or ready disposal. This perspective puts the responsibility of waste on the individual, not on the company or the system as a whole.

A market-based approach to recycling is also subject to the vagaries of the market. In order for such recycling to work, basic commodities such as metals, paper, and plastics must command a high enough price to be profitable. When the global economy slows, depressing the cost of oil, metal ores, and paper, it becomes cheaper for the makers of water bottles, yogurt containers, and paper products to simply buy new feedstock, making the recycling industry unprofitable:

In Montgomery, Alabama, Infinitus Energy opened a $35 million recycling center in 2014. By last October [2015], it was hemorrhaging money and shut down. Montgomery’s recyclables are now going to a landfill, and a once booming local business, United Plastic Recycling, filed for bankruptcy last year…. Over the last three quarters, revenues from recycling operations [for Waste Management, the biggest recycler in the country] are down 16 percent from the same time a year earlier, to $878 million from just over $1 billion.105

Used electronics, or “e-waste,” is the fastest-growing stream of waste. As the lifetime of electronic products continues to shorten, more and more waste is generated. Recycling and disposal of e-waste is often toxic to humans, animals, and the environment. Many of the processes used to dispose and recycle e-waste are unsafe, releasing toxic emissions into the air and leaching heavy metals into the earth and water supplies. E-waste is most often exported from Europe and North America to developing countries. It was recently discovered that one in three shipping containers leaving the EU contains illegal e-waste. According to a spokesperson for Interpol, the agency tasked with checking the shipments:

Much is falsely classified as “used goods,” although in reality it is non-functional. It is often diverted to the black market and disguised as used goods to avoid the costs associated with legitimate recycling…. A substantial proportion of e-waste exports go to countries outside Europe, including West African countries. Treatment in these countries usually occurs in the informal sector, causing significant environmental pollution and health risks for local populations.106

Regardless of whether recycling makes money, can a focus on the behavior of the end user—via lifestyle changes or consumer preferences—really result in significant declines in environmental ills? The answer is an unequivocal no. Real consumer sovereignty is largely fictional under capitalism and, where relevant, only applies to the very rich, who have enough income to do most of the buying. As for corporations, CEOs do not sit around waiting for demand to materialize. They actively manipulate and stimulate it through advertising and the most profitable manufacturing methods. As Ian Angus and Simon Butler point out in Too Many People?, the vast majority of people have no choice in the matter: “The range of choices available to buyers is determined not by what is environmentally friendly, but by what can be sold profitably. As a result, we get micro-choices such as Ford vs Hyundai—but not real choices such as automobiles vs reliable and affordable public transit.”¹⁰⁷

Buying “greener” products with less packaging is little help because the biggest producers of waste are industry and agriculture, not individuals. EPA data shows that in 2013 individuals generated some 250 million tons of municipal solid waste.¹⁰⁸ However, this source represents only about 3 percent of the total solid waste generated in the United States.109 The remainder comes from extractive industries such as mining, industrial production, and agriculture. The EPA estimated in 1992 that waste from industrial, mining, extractive, and agricultural production was 12 billion tons.¹¹⁰ So even if all municipal solid waste could be recycled (instead of the usual 15 to 30 percent in the United States), it would barely make a dent in the vast mountains of waste generated by production. Thus, directing efforts to change consumption habits instead of production will not solve the problem. Even when industry does decide to take notice of the pollution it causes, “companies respond most strongly to consumer pressures by reducing their releases to air and transfers of wastes off-site, but also by increasing less visible releases to subsoil via underground injection.”¹¹¹ Out of sight, out of mind.

By making individual persons the solution to waste, we become the very thing capitalists want: consumers. Conscious and concerned or otherwise, it doesn’t matter. Efforts to change consumption habits instead of production will not solve the problem. As Samantha McBride writes:

What we have for producers is freedom: freedom to be green or semi-green or not green, freedom to do what is in their best interests, without strife or inconvenience. What we have for citizens are (1) a definition of their scope of political action as not just personal behavior, but the purchase transaction, and (2) an utter lack of knowledge needed to reenter the realm of the political and advocate for regulatory change.¹¹²

Stressing individual responsibility of ordinary people leads us to ignore the waste associated with production. It also ignores the waste associated with consumption by the very wealthy, the military-industrial complex, the vast incarceration system, and the advertising industry. It leads us to disregard that companies will always be striving to sell more products year after year.

REGULATION: ALWAYS INADEQUATE, NEVER PERMANENT

Pollution can be moderated to a certain extent through laws and regulations. However, as a testament to how inadequate this is at ameliorating pollution, the overall situation is now far worse than it has ever been. Even when there are regulations, they are usually not stringent enough. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof explains with respect to the chemical industry:

The United States is a laggard because of the power of the chemical lobby. Chemical safety legislation now before the Senate would require the Environmental Protection Agency to start a safety assessment of only 25 chemicals in the first five years—and House legislation isn’t much better…. The chemical lobby spent the equivalent of $121,000 per member of Congress last year [2014], so expect chemical companies to enjoy strong quarterly profits, more boys to be born with hypospadias and more women to die unnecessarily of breast cancer.113

Even when public pressure forces action against the most egregious and life-threatening pollution, corporate power seeks to water down legislation and weaken laws. With the collusion of state regulatory agencies or through budget cuts, environmental regulations are often minimally enforced. The extent of positive environmental and social changes over time depends on the relative political power of different classes and movements as well as political changes in the wider society.

In the 1960s and 1970s, social movements in the United States and elsewhere successfully fought for a range of beneficial changes to civil, political, and environmental laws. In the decades since, corporate leaders and business groups have lobbied and fought to overturn and limit any regulations and return to the status quo ante. In June 2015, the Supreme Court overturned an EPA regulation that set limits on mercury, arsenic, and acid gas emissions by coal-fired power plants. Had the limits been enforced, they could have prevented an estimated 11,000 premature deaths and 130,000 asthma cases annually. The Court maintained that the EPA had not adequately taken into account the costs of the regulation to the companies.114

When backed into a corner by social pressure, capitalists and their ideologues dream up counternarratives to make their case against enforced regulation: the problem will be solved by better, less polluting technology, which is just around the corner; or by market mechanisms; or by changes in consumer choices. One of the stated goals of the Trump administration is to roll back regulations on the environment and to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement.

Whenever companies have sufficient political power, they will work to water down or do away with regulations that they think might harm their bottom lines.

PUTTING A PRICE ON NATURE

Perhaps unwittingly stimulated by some academics in the field of ecological economics, the potential monetary value of nature’s “services” has taken on a new importance. In 1997, the ecological economics group headed by Robert Costanza estimated that global “ecosystem services” were worth $33 trillion annually, compared with a global economy of $18 trillion.¹¹⁵ An update in 2011 put the dollar value of the world’s annual “ecosystem services” at $125 trillion.¹¹⁶ Global GDP in the same year was estimated at approximately $70 trillion, making the monetary value of nature’s “services” about 80 percent larger than all human economic activity.

The assumption that a dollar value can be assigned to nature’s “services”—to plants that help clean the air, to marshes and mangrove swamps that protect coastal areas from stormy seas, to wetlands that slow down and clean flowing water, and so on—is a logical outgrowth of a capitalist worldview. Thus, nature as “natural capital” can be subjected to cost-benefit analysis, and schemes can be developed to “offset” any damage that results from a company’s practices. This is what lies behind the UN’s pollution-offset program, REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Program).

Here’s how one offset scheme works. A giant food processing plant discharges large quantities of nutrients into the local waterway. Cleaning up the discharge would require retooling, and that would cut into the company’s profits. Instead, the company buys “right-to-pollute” credits on the market, paying some other enterprise, commonly a farm, to pollute less. The outcome is, as Food and Water Watch notes, “a regulatory avoidance scheme fraught with unaccountability that is destined to destroy waterways and communities.”117 Unsurprisingly, REDD and other similar programs have encountered widespread resistance from indigenous organizations and environmental groups.

Dieter Helm, chair of Britain’s Natural Capital Committee, maintains that the “environment is part of the economy and needs to be properly integrated into it so that growth opportunities will not be missed.”¹¹⁸ The capitalist views the environment as just one part of the economy instead of viewing the economy as embedded in the environment, a more rational outlook. But as Andrew Simms, environmentalist and researcher at England’s Centre for Global Political Economy, points out: “The paradox of environmental economics is that we feel compelled to price nature to make its loss visible on the balance sheet, but in doing so we legitimise its commodification and validate its critical overconsumption in an unbounded market system.”¹¹⁹ Nature as profit-making opportunity provides the ideological sanctification to privatize even more of Earth’s natural resources and the commons.

Neoliberalism has achieved an incredible stranglehold on our thinking in recent decades. Even people who genuinely care about the environment have started to believe that market-based solutions like pollution offsets and carbon trading offer a better solution than government regulation and enforcement. But market mechanisms to reduce pollution have nearly always failed. They normally end up as another scam, ripe for stock market gambling. And since capitalism has been unable to solve smaller problems of pollution, environmental degradation, and loss of biodiversity, there is no evidence that the people who run the system will step in to solve the much larger problem of climate change. As George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science, observes, as soon as you monetize something in nature, nature always loses.¹²⁰

A WAR AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE?

Many environmentalists hold out hope that climate change will be the issue that finally puts us all in the same boat. Bill McKibben, a leading activist and spokesman for the climate movement, makes this point in his article “A World at War.”121 McKibben is right to argue that the climate crisis has reached a critical juncture and only a massive mobilization of people and resources can change the atmospheric greenhouse gas trajectory. But by his analysis, we are “facing a common enemy” and the only comparable analogy of what is required is the effort by the United States during the Second World War. This entailed retooling production and using government planning to redirect the entire economy toward warfare and military victory over Germany, Italy, and Japan. Now, instead of guns, planes, and tanks, U.S. corporations should be redirected to build the hundreds of new factories required to produce the millions of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles needed for a carbon-free economy.

But are we really all on the same side? And if we’re at war, who are we at war with and what’s the strategic objective? According to McKibben, the problem is carbon and the laws of physics: “The question is not, are we in a world war? The question is, will we fight back? And if we do, can we actually defeat an enemy as powerful and inexorable as the laws of physics?”

McKibben continues: “Carbon [dioxide] and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties…. In this war that we’re in—the war that physics is fighting hard, and that we aren’t—winning slowly is exactly the same as losing.”

Are the laws of physics really somehow malicious? Is nature possessed with a desire to punish, exploit, and oppress? And are we really all in this together, as McKibben implies? With physics and carbon as the enemy, this lets capitalism and its enablers—the real culprits—completely off the hook.

McKibben is using rhetorical devices that he hopes will shock people and mobilize them to action. He, of course, knows full well that physics is not fighting a war against us. Nor is chemistry or biology, for that matter, although our bodies are contaminated with exotic chemicals and species are disappearing overnight. Science is not our foe, and McKibben knows this. The problem he avoids is the way capitalism functions at its most basic level. Capitalists cannot take into account the consequences of their actions (the “externalities”) in their pursuit of profits. As long as there is no interference with the accumulation of capital, emitted pollutants (and how they behave according to scientific laws) are viewed by capital as irrelevant to the operation of companies. Actually, they are not considered at all unless strong government regulations exist and are enforced.

If the utilization of resources were decided upon rationally, rather than according to the laws of capitalism, unconventional sources of fossil fuels such as tar sands and fracked gas would never have been developed. Considering how abundant sun and wind power are, and how much we now know about harnessing those forms of energy, and with the additional formidable potential of energy from tidal power, society would long ago have made the move toward renewable energy sources. But in the normal operation of capitalism there is no room for rational social and ecological decision-making. Industries and technologies are developed—and must be developed—without concern for potential environmental harm.

As might be expected, some companies do much more harm than others. An August 2016 article in the journal Science, referring to earlier research, points out which human entities are most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions:

Heede’s research shows that nearly two-thirds of anthropogenic carbon emissions originated in just 90 companies and government-run industries. Among them, the top eight companies—ranked according to annual and cumulative emissions—account for 20 percent of world carbon emissions from fossil fuels and cement production since the Industrial Revolution.122

So why not just stop these companies from operating and promote the building of a clean energy system? There is no evidence that governments will discipline giant corporations and shift the global economy away from fossil fuels. To do so would require drastic downsizing or liquidation of many of the largest corporations on the planet. It would leave Wall Street in tatters. It would also require a huge investment to build a replacement consisting of renewable energy infrastructure. While costs for solar (PV) and wind energy installations have dropped drastically, and in some cases are cost competitive with new fossil fuel installations, it is wishful thinking of the most utopian kind to expect that capitalists and governments will allow public financing for an effort to replace existing electric power facilities. It is only when the elite feel a direct and immediate threat to their system of capital accumulation, such as a major war or civil insurrection, that they are willing to commit the vast amount of financial resources necessary and agree to have production directed by government.

We face a choice between keeping the old fossil-fuel based infrastructure that is burning up the planet or transitioning, at much lower economic, environmental, and social cost, to a new energy paradigm. Despite the rationale for such a transition, capitalism still won’t make the change quick enough. Energy analyst Chris Nelder’s figures and argument, framed within the limits of the system, are worth noting:

Instead of incremental spending on an effectively dead transportation regime, we should be thinking about one that can survive the challenges ahead, and deliver more economic benefits than costs. We should be setting an ambitious target, like replacing all commercial passenger air flights with high-speed rail for trips under 1,000 miles, replacing 90 percent of our city street traffic with light rail, and moving all long-haul freight traffic to rail. Even if the cost of all that rail infrastructure were in the range of $3 trillion, it would be a fantastic investment.

Against $6 trillion (minimum) in sunk costs and $1.6 trillion per year in maintenance, the $1.2 trillion per year estimate I offered in my article on infrastructure, plus building the high-speed rail network at a generous estimate of $1 trillion, looks very reasonable. Put another way: Would you rather spend another $32 trillion over the next 20 years just to maintain our outmoded, unscalable, aged, unhealthy system, plus another $2.8 trillion in lost productivity due to delays and gridlock, only to wind up out of gas? Or would you rather spend $25 trillion to repair our existing infrastructure, transition transportation to rail, transition the power grid to renewables, upgrade the entire grid, and solve the carbon problem, to have free fuel forever?123

As these examples illustrate, societal choices are not rational decisions about which technology works best in an objective sense of providing a better, safer, and more comfortable life for all. Rather, the choices conform to the political, military, financial, and ideological priorities of ruling elites.

There is another problem with the world war analogy for taking on climate change: Do we only want to change the source of our energy? Is that enough? But all the other environmental crises and social inequities would remain. In addition, if “we” somehow happened to win the war against the laws of physics and the power of fossil fuel interests, perhaps the same thing would happen that occurred after the Second World War—a rebirth and expansion of a newly invigorated and tooled-up hypercapitalism reasserting power over workers and the planet. Would we then need another world war to deal with new externalities?

PROFITS FROM POLLUTION

Although some capitalists may be hurt by climate change, others will actually benefit. Indeed, some are already busy figuring out ways to make money from it. To Wall Street, which sorts risk by its ability to maximize profit, “adaptation” to climate change simply means learning how to profit from it. And there are a variety of ways of doing so—for example, rebuilding after flooding offers a boost for the construction industry as does the building of coastal defenses against rising seas, already occurring along the East Coast of the United States. Miami is spending $400 million for pumps and other infrastructure to prevent flooding. Hoboken, New Jersey, received a $230 million federal grant to shore up protections, and Norfolk, Virginia, received $100 million from the federal government to carry out a plan to protect neighborhoods from flooding.¹²⁴ All of this spending adds to the measured national economic growth (GDP) and thus is seen as positive—even when the reason is negative.

The financial system also provides ways to profit from climate change. As David Ravensbergen writes:

Even as extreme weather wreaks havoc on crop yields and threatens coastlines, new custom-made financial instruments offer the savvy investor the chance to profit from destruction. Weather derivatives offer both a profitable investment today and an insurance policy against future damages by flooding or drought. While the estimated costs of climate change continue to climb, the profits to be made by betting on those costs keep growing faster.

In effect, what we have is a situation in which investors are busy betting on what’s going to happen with the climate. Depending on how they invest, they can make money if things get worse or if they get better. If they pick the wrong horse, their bad investments can also be insured by purchasing still more derivatives.125

One of the growing areas of financial speculation is the issuance and trading of so-called catastrophe bonds, referred to as cat bonds, offering insurance against catastrophic weather events as well as other types of disasters such as wildfires.¹²⁶ The $72 billion in cat bonds in 2016 is expected to double in the next few years.

An economic system that has the pursuit of profits as its primary motivating force is anti-environmental at its very core and cannot be made “green.” There is no mechanism by which a capitalist society can thoughtfully plan and carry out the rational human interaction with the rest of the natural world. Production of illth will continue as long as capitalism continues, in the form of weapons, overproduction, the prison and (in)justice system, luxury consumption (including McMansions), commodities without a social purpose, and products that easily break or are quickly outdated. The misuse of natural resources will also continue as will the loss of biodiversity and the contamination of the biosphere with toxins.