Climate Change, Capitalism, and Denial

The planet keeps getting warmer--2016 is on pace to be the hottest year on record--but the denial surrounding climate change remains entrenched. As Naomi Klein reported in This Changes Everything, 71 percent of Americans in 2007 believed that continuing to burn fossil fuels would affect the Earth's climate. By 2009--the peak for the Tea Party movement--the number had declined to 51 percent. In 2011, it was only 44%. A Harris poll in 2014--after Superstorm Sandy and so many other "natural" disasters--indicated that still only 45 percent of Americans agreed with the statement regarding climate change that "I believe it exists and humans are the main cause."

It's not hard to understand how this growth of mass denialism happened. The shift in public opinion about climate change should give pause to anyone who doubts the effectiveness of elite-sponsored propaganda. Between 2002 and 2010, anonymous billionaires contributed $120 million to over 100 groups and think tanks who were working to discredit the scientific findings about climate change. Nearly three-quarters of the climate denial books that began appearing en masse during the 1990s were connected to right-wing think tanks. Every single one of the 17 candidates for the 2016 GOP nomination either denied that climate change was being caused by human activity, or denied that it was happening at all. It's been quite a partisan shift from 2008, when Newt Gingrich appeared with Nancy Pelosi in a TV ad on Al Gore's Climate Reality Project to call for action on climate change. By 2011, Gingrich was calling his appearance with Pelosi "the single dumbest thing I've done in years."

It's also not hard to understand why billionaires and the right-wing politicians who serve them are so invested in denying the science of climate change. Many, like the Koch brothers, are directly involved in the fossil fuel industry. But for those who are ideologically invested in the neoliberal ideas of free trade, privatization, and deregulation, the specter of climate change signals the end of the party.  People with individualistic, competitive, and hierarchical worldviews are significantly more likely to deny that climate change is happening. Likewise, it threatens religious conservatives and fundamentalists who believe humans should exercise dominion over the planet and that nature is a gift from God for our consumption. Millions of Americans fervently deny climate change in the same way that they passionately espouse their views about taxes, guns, and abortion.

It's easy to mock these lunatic conspiracy theories of the denialists. Many of them believe that climate change is something like a Trojan horse for some kind of "Green communitarianism" involving the abolition of capitalism. And yet Naomi Klein suggests that they may actually understand the situation more clearly than the liberals and moderates who are searching for market-friendly, technological solutions to climate change. The reality, Klein suggests, is that capitalism and the climate are indeed incompatible, and conservatives understand this better than liberals who are still trying to work within the logic of the market, through carbon trading, offsets, and the like. She writes:

So here's my inconvenient truth: I think these hard-core ideologues understand the significance of climate change better than most of the "warmists" in the political center, the ones who are still insisting that the response can be gradual and painless and that we don't need to go to war with anybody, including the fossil fuel companies (p. 43).

Karl Marx once wrote that "the bourgeoisie creates its own gravediggers": the internal contradictions of capitalism would lead to its revolutionary overthrow. Marx, of course, assumed that this revolutionary force would be the working class. What Marx could not foresee was how the environment could be a second source of contradiction and limitation for capital. Capitalists have pushed the Earth to the brink of catastrophe, and our only hope for survival may be the end of capitalism and the growth of a more egalitarian, sustainable economy, one that puts people and the planet ahead of profits.

Neoliberalism and Climate Change: The Next Shock Doctrine?

The capitalist class is responding to climate change in a number of ways. There are of course those who deny climate change is happening or that it is caused by human activity, and who spend huge amounts of money in propaganda campaigns to sway public opinion, with much success.  Such propaganda mainly comes from the fossil fuel industries and neoliberal ideologues. On the other hand, there are those, like Michael Bloomberg, who recognize the reality of climate change but conceive of the consequences mostly in monetary terms. Superstorm Sandy revealed how much capital and real estate could be destroyed as a result of a rising sea levels.

But there is also a third group who are planning to profit from climate change, and those who see it as an opportunity for the U.S. to solidify its disintegrating global hegemony. In a 2011 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, right-wing blogger Jim Geraghty articulated this viewpoint in the most callous of terms.  "Despite the doomsday talk," he wrote, "global warming will be a net economic benefit to the United States, in at least the short term and probably for several decades." How's that? Geraghty quotes Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council: "Most developed nations and countries with rapidly emerging economies are likely to fare better than those in the poorer, developing world, largely because of a greater coping capacity." The rich will be able to hunker down in their sealed fortresses while the poor are left to burn, starve, or drown. And so Geraghty imagines that climate change could be thing to Make America Great Again: "Rather than our doom, climate change could be the centerpiece of ensuring a second consecutive American Century."

The catastrophic impact of climate change presents a number of possibilities. One is that it will push humanity into creating a better, more sensible world with ecologically sustainable economies that benefit communities in an equitable manner. But another possibility is that the world could get a lot worse. It's crucial to remember that as much as climate change threatens to destroy some sectors of capital, capitalism as a system thrives on chaos and catastrophe. Naomi Klein has called it "the shock doctrine":  neoliberal ideologues and capitalist vultures seize upon the opportunities created by disasters to impose their agenda of privatization, deregulation, and austerity in speedy, shocking fashion.  In her most recent book, This Changes Everything, Klein envisions what this dystopian world might look like:

The corporate quest for natural resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be seized to provide food and fuel to the wealthier nations, unleashing a new stage of neocolonial plunder layered on top of the most plundered places on earth (as journalist Christian Parenti documents so well in Tropic of Chaos). When heat stress and vicious storms wipe out small farms and fishing villages, the land will be handed over to large developers for mega-ports, luxury resorts, and industrial farms....In short our culture will do what it is already doing, only with more brutality and barbarism, because that is what our system is built to do. (pp. 48-9)

See: Klein, This Changes Everything, pp. 46-54