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
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