Why Demanding Action on Climate Change Simply Isn't Enough (201909220927)

We must specify what kind of action. "Capitalism cannot confront climate change." This overly-alliterative paraphrase represents sentiments I at one time accepted, and which I have lately heard repeated often enough that I fear such thought has ascended to something like a leftist common sense; unfortunately, no analysis of neoliberal capitalism supports this claim. It is undercut by the one hand whose analyses credit capitalism with intense creativity in self-reinvention, and by the other hand whose analyses demonstrate capitalism's talent for appropriating innovations unfolding at its margins. Either way, confronting the climate catastrophe and dismantling capitalism must not be mistaken as identical. It is quite easy to imagine green futures in a double-sense: carbon-neutral or -negative infrastructure and industry oriented towards endless accumulation of surplus-value and the endless perpetuation of social dominations such requires: corporations collect and process waste into re-rawed resources for new production; shipping companies replace behemoth container ships with greater numbers of smaller, slower sail- and solar-driven container cutters, manned by crews of silicon and code, as aerospace corporations scale-up and mass-produce electric planes; wielding powers ascribed by the climate emergency, private-public ventures seize all remaining indigenous lands for the development of solar-, wind-, and battery-farms, built by "contracted" prison laborers; disposable plastics are replaced with biodegradables which consumers are legally required to return to the producers for controlled disintegration and repurposing; species extinction events are reversed by biotech corporations whose patented genetic material becomes gradually more entwined with the genetic commons, gradually and automatically extending those corporations' property claims, power, and value; industrial intensive animal farming is replaced by carbon-neutral meat labs where various proteins are vat-grown from stem-cells, as industrial monoculture agriculture is replaced by carbon-negative indoor fields stacked within silos located within urban areas, reducing both agriculture's required landmass and energy required for transporting food, while lower-tech methods of food production are outlawed, permanently solidifying corporate control over sustenance; with a very small rocket fuel investment, space exploration and mining companies send self-replicating robotic mining infrastructures up and out of our gravity well, dispersing automated resource exploitation networks throughout the inner solar system, extracting minerals and metals from the moon, asteroids, and Mercury, materials used to expand the network and to feed Earth industry with much-needed resources without the environmental impact of terrestrial mining; patented genes to improve the processing efficiency of the human digestive system become commonplace, as corporations incentivize consumers' relinquishment of a portion of their self-ownership, all in the name of reducing their individual carbon footprint, and therefore "doing their part to help fight climate change"; to off-set the growing environmental impact of server farms and to improve network latency, tech companies send self-replicating server-bots into low Earth orbit, where repurposed space junk and the raw materials from off-world mining coalesce into an expanding orbital mesh providing every inch of the planet with wireless terrabyte connectivity--and surveillance; and so on...; all of this is overseen by the world's new true--if hidden--legislators, the privately-produced and -owned artificial intelligences which keep the increasingly-complex system running, while detecting and preventing any attempts to break corporate holds over all of life, attempts met by coalitions of state and private military might, for now that corporations have become the vanguard against climate change, any assault on them is an assault on the future of humanity. Capitalism can confront climate change. Climate change is neoliberalism's crisis, but capitalism has never met a crisis that wasn't an opportunity for it to reinvent itself and reconsolidate its own power and control. Such outcomes, however, are not inevitable. The current climate crisis presents another opportunity, a moment between the recognition of our situation and capitalism's reinvention of itself, a gap within which anything is possible. But in order to find that gap, we must once and for all dispel the delusion that defeating climate change necessarily means defeating capitalism.