The following conversation is from Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin’s new book Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal. The authors are interviewed throughout by economist C.J. Polychroniou.
*
C.J. Polychroniou: The 2015 UN climate agreement signed in Paris, popularly known as the COP21 agreement, has been hailed by world leaders (with the exception of Donald Trump) as a huge diplomatic success, but it has been rightly criticized by environmentalists and others for lacking any teeth. There’s indeed nothing mandatory in the Paris Agreement. Noam, why is it so difficult to check climate change?
NC: Looking beyond COP21, there is a great deal to say about why checking climate change is so difficult. But as to why the limited Paris Agreement has no teeth, the answer is clear enough.
The original goal was to establish a treaty with binding commitments. Laurent Fabius, the summit’s president, reiterated that goal strongly. But there was a barrier: the US Republican Party, which controlled Congress, would not accept any meaningful arrangements.
The Republican leadership was admirably frank about its intention to undermine the Paris Agreement. One reason, hardly concealed, is that the Republican wrecking ball must smash anything done by the hated Obama; that goal was put plainly by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell when Obama was elected. Another reason is the principled opposition to any external constraints on US power.
But the immediate decision follows directly from the Party leadership’s uniform rejection of any efforts to confront the looming environmental crisis—a stand traceable in large part to the historic service of the Party to private wealth and corporate power, accelerated during the neoliberal years.
Following carefully worked-out Republican plans, McConnell informed foreign embassies that, according to sources reported in Politico, “Republicans intend to fight Obama’s climate agenda at every turn.” He also made it clear that any agreement that reached the GOP-controlled Senate would be “dead on arrival.”
“There is ‘no chance’ that such an agreement could clear the two-thirds hurdle, one Republican energy lobbyist said. ‘There are few certainties in life, but that is one of them.’”
Republicans also made it clear that they would “block Obama’s pledge to provide billions of dollars to help poor countries adapt to the effects of a warming planet,” and would sabotage other efforts to deal with global warming. “They are becoming the party of climate super-villains,” as one commentator put it succinctly.
It’s important to recognize the nature of this organization. For anyone who did not yet understand, it was made crystal clear during the 2016 Republican primaries, featuring political figures who were hailed as the cream of the crop—apart from the interloper who walked off with the prize to the dismay of the Republican establishment. Every single candidate either denied that what is happening is happening, or said maybe it is but it doesn’t matter (the latter message came from the “moderates,” former governor Jeb Bush and Ohio governor John Kasich).
“The Koch brothers launched huge campaigns to ensure that nothing would be done to impede the exploitation of the fossil fuels on which their fortune rests.”Kasich was considered the most serious and sober of the candidates. He did break ranks by recognizing the basic facts, but added that “we are going to burn [coal] in Ohio and we are not going to apologize for it.” That’s 100 percent support for destroying the prospects for organized human life, with the most respected figure taking the most grotesque stand. Amazingly, this astonishing spectacle passed with virtually no comment (if any) within the mainstream, a fact of no little import in itself.
It’s of some interest to see how this remarkable situation came to pass. There are general reasons (there is no space to go into those here), but also quite specific—and revealing—ones. A decade ago the Republican organization, while already well off the normal spectrum of parliamentary politics, was not firmly dedicated to denying what the leadership knows to be true. How this changed provides some insight into contemporary politics, under the impact of the most dedicated and reactionary elements of the highly class-conscious business world.
A glimpse into this world was provided after the death of David Koch in August 2019. This happened to coincide with the appearance of a major in-depth study of the Koch empire and corporate America by Christopher Leonard, who discussed some of his discoveries in articles and interviews. Leonard describes David Koch as the “ultimate denier,” whose rejection of anthropogenic global warming was deep and sincere.
Let us put aside suspicions that this might have something to do with the fact that he had an immense fortune at stake in this denialism, perhaps trillions of dollars of potential losses over a period of 30 years or more if denialism were to fail, Leonard estimates. Let’s nevertheless suspend disbelief and accept that the convictions were entirely sincere.
That would come as little surprise. John C. Calhoun, the grand ideologist of slavery, was no doubt sincere in believing that the vicious slave labor camps of the South were the necessary foundation for a higher civilization. And there are other examples, which, out of politeness, I will not mention.
The Koch brothers’ denialism went vastly beyond mere efforts to convince. They launched huge campaigns to ensure that nothing would be done to impede the exploitation of the fossil fuels on which their fortune rests. As Leonard recounts, “David Koch worked tirelessly, over decades, to jettison from office any moderate Republicans who proposed to regulate greenhouse gases.”
But the efforts did not entirely succeed. In 2009–10, the Republicans were flirting with reality, coming close to supporting a market-based cap-and-trade plan for green-house gas emissions. John McCain ran for president on the Republican ticket in 2008 warning about climate change. With the help of Mike Pence and others like him, the Koch juggernaut was able to derail the heresy, ridding the Party of moderates who might not toe the line on denialism and twisting the arms of the recalcitrant with a combination of public vilification and private funding. The consequences of which we now see before us. The lessons about “really existing democracy” as well.
The Koch network, Leonard writes, “has tried to build a Republican Party in its image: one that not only refuses to consider action on climate change but continues to deny that the problem is real.” With impressive success.
The juggernaut is indeed impressive. No stone was left unturned: networks of rich donors, discourse-shifting think tanks, one of the largest lobbying groups in the country, the organization of what can pose as grassroots groups to ring doorbells, pretty much creating and shaping the Tea Party. And it had many other goals as well, such as undermining labor rights, destroying unions, and blocking government policies that might help people: what’s called “libertarianism” in US usage.
The Koch brothers’ juggernaut stands out in its careful planning and successful use of the immense profits it has gained from polluting the global atmosphere without cost—a mere “externality,” in the terminology of the trade. But it is symbolic of the savage capitalism that is becoming more and more evident as the neoliberal project that has served private wealth and corporate power so well comes under threat.
Both political parties have drifted right during the neoliberal years, much as in Europe. The Democratic establishment is now more or less what would have been called “moderate Republicans” some years ago. The Republicans have mostly gone off the spectrum. Comparative studies show that they rank alongside fringe right-wing parties in Europe in their general positions. They are, furthermore, the only major conservative party to reject anthropogenic climate change, as already mentioned: a global anomaly.
“Why are populations so willing to look the other way when survival of organized human life is literally at stake?”The positions of the leadership on climate surely influence the attitudes of Party loyalists. Only about 25 percent of Republicans (36 percent of the savvier millennials) recognize that humans are responsible for global warming. Shocking figures. And in the ranking of high-priority issues among Republicans, global warming (if it is even assumed to be taking place), remains low and unchanged into the election year.
It might be considered outrageous to assert that today’s Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history. Perhaps so, but in the light of the stakes, what else can one rationally conclude?
Even apart from Republican obstructionism, it is unlikely that the US would have accepted binding commitments at Paris. The US rarely ratifies international conventions, and when it does, it is typically with reservations that exclude the US. That’s true even of the Genocide Convention, signed by the US after 40 years but excluding the US, which retains the right to commit genocide. There are many other examples.
Returning to COP21, the immediate reason for the lack of teeth is the Republican Party, but the chances that the US would have agreed to binding commitments were slim even without the obstructionism of the most dangerous organization in world history.
In the background of this obstructionism is a lingering question, the one raised by Alon Tal: Why is it so hard for governments to confront this crisis realistically? And still deeper in the background: Why are populations so willing to look the other way when survival of organized human life is literally at stake?
One answer was given by a participant in the remarkable Yellow Vest uprising in France. The immediate cause of the uprising was President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal in 2018 to raise fuel taxes with alleged environmental concerns, a move that would hit the poor and working people in rural areas particularly hard. But the background to the protests, more broadly, was the whole range of Macron “reforms” that benefited the rich while harming poor and working people.
The participant, perhaps a committed environmentalist himself as many were, said that you are talking about “the end of the world” but we are concerned with “the end of the month.” How are we to survive your “reforms”?
A fair question, which quickly became the slogan of the grassroots demonstrations sweeping Paris and much of the rest of the country. And a question that cannot be overlooked by the environmental movement.
Global warming has an abstract feel. Who understands the difference between 1.5oC and 2oC (2.7oF and 3.6oF respectively)—in contrast to having food to put on the table for your children tomorrow? True, there are more storms, heat waves, other disturbances today—but others doubtless can conjure up something like my own personal experience.
I’ve lived through many hurricanes in Massachusetts, but none as fierce as those almost 70 years ago. So maybe Trump is right when he says the climate always changes—sometimes it’s warmer, sometimes colder? It’s easy to fall into that trap when your prime concern is putting food on the table tomorrow.
And why follow President Carter’s gloomy prescription of turning down the thermostat and putting on a heavy sweater, and in general cutting back on our lifestyle while billions of Chinese and Indians—so we hear on Fox News—are pouring pollutants into the atmosphere with abandon?
Or consider the mineworker in West Virginia who was cheering at a Bernie Sanders rally until Sanders said that for any chance at decent survival, we must stop producing coal. No applause for that line. That would mean losing his job, and there’s not much attraction in an alternative in the growing service industries or installing solar panels, which, other reasons aside, would mean losing his pension and health care, which were won in hard union struggles and are tied to employment. Lose your job, and you lose not only personal dignity but also the means of survival.
Here we come up against a fateful decision by US labor in the 1950s: to choose class collaboration, making deals with corporate management for wages and benefits while abandoning control of the workplace and broader social reforms. That decision by US labor leaders contrasted with the choice by the very same unions in Canada to fight for health care for the whole population, not just ourselves.
The results are quite visible. Canada has a functioning health care system while the US is burdened by an international scandal, with costs about double those of comparable countries and relatively poor outcomes, thanks in no small part to the inefficiency, bureaucratization, and profit-seeking of the largely privatized US system.
By choosing class collaboration, US labor leaders left that mineworker and others like him at the mercy of the corporate owners, who were free to cancel the bargain. Which is what they have done, quite dramatically since the dawning of the neoliberal years. In 1978, UAW president Doug Fraser finally recognized that the business classes never abandon class war, even if labor leaders agree to do so.
Fraser criticized the “leaders of the business community” for having “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country—a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society,” and for having “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress.”
Hardly a surprise, particularly in the US with its highly class-conscious business community and bitter history of violent suppression of labor, unusual in the developed world.
There followed years of neoliberal globalization designed in the interests of investors and the ownership class at the expense of American workers, alongside the neoliberal “reforms” guided by the same fundamental imperatives. The results should be well known. Wealth concentrated sharply, with the obvious consequences for functioning democracy, while real wages stagnated. Workers now have about the same purchasing power as they did 40 years ago.
“Revival of the labor movement is an essential task for many reasons. One is the environmental crisis.”Unions came under bitter attack during the extreme anti-labor Reagan administration, a process carried forward under his successors. Demolition of the labor movement is a major achievement of neoliberal policies, following the Thatcherite doctrine that there is no society, only individuals, isolated creatures who face market discipline on their own, unorganized. That has been a core principle of neoliberalism going back to its Austrian origins in the 1920s.
It’s why the far-right “libertarian” guru, Ludwig von Mises, in the interest of preserving “sound economics” from interference, enthusiastically welcomed the crushing of the vibrant Austrian labor movement and social democracy by state violence in 1928, laying the groundwork for Austrian fascism; and in his major work, Liberalism, he praised fascism for saving European civilization.
To be sure, the atomization principle holds only for what Thorstein Veblen called “the underlying population.” Those who matter, private wealth and corporate power, are highly organized in pursuit of their class goals, manipulating state power in their interests while the rest become “a sack of potatoes,” to borrow Marx’s phrase in his condemnation of the autocratic regimes of his day. The sack of potatoes, unorganized and increasingly consigned to precarious work and lives, are much more easily controlled.
Returning to the mineworker and many others like him, it is not hard to discern good reasons why they should resonate to the Yellow Vest slogan and resist the mass mobilization that is essential if we are to overcome the environmental crisis.
For organizers and activists, all of this provides important lessons. Revival of the labor movement is an essential task for many reasons. One is the environmental crisis. If the sack of potatoes becomes organized, active, and committed, it could become a leading force in the environmental movement. These are, after all, the people whose lives and future are at stake. It’s not an idle dream.
In the 1920s, the vigorous US labor movement had been crushed by state and business oppression, often through direct violence. The title of labor historian David Montgomery’s classic The Fall of the House of Labor refers to that period. But a few years later, a lively and militant labor movement rose from the ashes and spear-headed the New Deal reforms that have greatly improved the lives of Americans through the great postwar growth period, before falling victim to the neoliberal assault. It’s worth remembering that Bernie Sanders’s revolution would not much have surprised Dwight Eisenhower, an outspoken supporter of New Deal measures.
It might be worth recalling the attitudes of the last conservative president, just to see how far we have come in the neoliberal age. Eisenhower declared:
I have no use for those—regardless of their political party—who hold some foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when unorganized labor was a huddled, almost helpless mass . . . Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice . . . Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things. Among them are . . . a few . . . Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
They were in fact far from stupid. They were well-organized, committed, and waiting for the opportunity to show that “you can do these things,” the basic thrust of the neoliberal age.
The revival of the labor movement in the 1930s is an important precedent, but there are more recent ones. It’s well to remember that one of the first and most prominent environmentalists was a union leader, Tony Mazzocchi, head of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW). The members of his union were right on the front line, facing destruction of the environment every day at work, and were the direct victims of the corporate assault on individual lives.
Under Mazzocchi’s leadership, the OCAW was the driving force behind the establishment in 1970 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), protecting workers on the job, signed by the last liberal American president, Richard Nixon—“liberal” in the US sense, meaning mildly social democratic.
Mazzocchi was a harsh critic of capitalism as well as a committed environmentalist. He held that workers should “control the plant environment” while also taking the lead in combating industrial pollution.
By 1980, when it was clear that the Democrats had abandoned working people to their class enemy, Mazzocchi began to advocate for a union-based Labor Party. That initiative made considerable progress in the 1990s but couldn’t survive the decline of the labor movement under severe business-government attack, reminiscent of the 1920s.
The project could be revived, just as it has been in the past. Recent militant action in the growing service industries might be a harbinger of things to come, along with the impressive strikes by teachers in the red states, aimed not just at overcoming their miserable wages but more importantly at improving the woefully underfunded public school system—another target of the neoliberal assault on society. The path that Mazzocchi tried to forge—militant labor as a driving force of the environmental movement—is not an idle dream and should be actively pursued.
CJP: We have known about the effect of greenhouse gases since the mid-19th century, and some scientists began warning us of the potential risks of a hotter planet decades ago, even while there are still some who deny that climate change is happening or that human activity is behind the phenomenon of global warming. But is it enough to point to human activity as the cause of global warming? Shouldn’t we understand this crisis as resulting from the specific economic system that has been guiding economic life for the past five hundred years? And, if so, how exactly are capitalism and the climate crisis interconnected?
NC: There was no more enthusiastic cheerleader for the achievements of capitalism than Karl Marx, who did not, of course, fail to emphasize and explore its horrifying human and material consequences, in particular the “metabolic rift,” a concept on which John Bellamy Foster has elaborated extensively: the inherent tendency of capitalism to degrade the environment that sustains life.
In considering the impact of capitalism, and the options it may make available, it is worthwhile to bear in mind the actual nature of the systems to which this rather vague term is applied. In the spectrum of major state-capitalist societies (personally, I’d be inclined to include the USSR, but put that aside), the US is at the extreme end of capitalist orthodoxy. No other country so exalts what economist Joseph Stiglitz, 25 years ago, criticized as “the ‘religion’ that markets know best” (exalts in words at least; practice is a different matter).
Consider, then, its economic system throughout its history and today—leaving aside the state role in emptying the national territory of the native scourge and stealing half of Mexico in a war of aggression, thus providing the US with historically unparalleled natural advantages.
The foundation of US economic development (and of Britain as well), was the most vicious system of slavery in human history, qualitatively different from anything that came before. It created “the empire of cotton” (Sven Beckert’s apt term): the basis for manufacturing, finance, commerce. A rather severe intervention in the holy market. The story continues. The Hamiltonian system of high tariffs enabled industry to develop domestically, as the newly liberated colonies firmly rejected Adam Smith’s recommendation to keep to sound economics, producing primary products and adopting superior British manufactures in accord with their comparative advantage.
It was also helpful to take superior British technology in ways now bitterly condemned as “robbery” when others do it. With justice, economic historian Paul Bairoch describes the US as “the mother country and bastion of protectionism,” well into the mid-20th century, when its economy had advanced so far beyond the rest that “free trade” seemed to be a good bargain—imitating what Britain had done a century earlier. From an extensive review, Bairoch concludes that “it is difficult to find another case where the facts so contradict a dominant theory [as the theory] concerning the negative impact of protectionism.”
Basic elements of capitalism, both ideological and institutional, lead directly to destruction of the basis of organized social life.”Skipping a lot, the American system of mass production that amazed the world—quality control, interchangeable parts, Taylorism—was mostly developed in government armories and military installations. Moving on to the present, what is misleadingly called “the military-industrial complex,” more accurately today’s high-tech economy, is substantially the outcome of taxpayer-funded R&D extended through a creative, costly, and risky period, often for decades before it is handed over to private enterprise for adaptation to the market and profit.
It’s a system that might be called “public subsidy, private profit,” taking many forms, including procurement and far more. That includes technology we use now, computers and the internet, but much more.
It is not quite that simple of course, and this barely skims the surface, but the relevant point for our discussion is that so-called capitalism can readily accommodate major initiatives of industrial policy, public subsidy, state initiative, and market interference, and has done so throughout its history. The implications for today’s ecological crisis should be clear.
To return to the specific question: basic elements of capitalism, both ideological and institutional, lead directly to destruction of the basis of organized social life—if unconstrained. We see that dramatically every day.
Take the well-studied case of the huge energy conglomerate ExxonMobil. From the 1960s, its scientists were in the lead in revealing the extreme threat of global warming. In 1988, geophysicist James Hansen issued the first major public warning of the extent of the threat. ExxonMobil management reacted by initiating a program of denialism taking many forms: typically raising doubts, since outright denial is too easily refuted. That continues to the present.
Recently ExxonMobil, along with the Koch brothers, filed a formal complaint with NASA objecting to its reporting that 97 percent of climate scientists agree on human-caused global warming. The 97 percent consensus is well established by very careful studies, but a crucial element of the denialist strategy has been to sow doubt about it, with no little success: only 20 percent of Americans realize that over 90 percent of climate scientists accept the overwhelming consensus.
All of this is done with full knowledge that they are engaged in pure deceit, with severely malignant consequences.
Even more malignant than the denialism is practice. ExxonMobil is in the lead in expanding fossil fuel production. Unlike some other oil majors, it does not want to waste even small sums on sustainable energy: “In a March [2014] report on carbon risk to shareholders,” the business press reports, “ExxonMobil (XOM) argued that its laserlike focus on fossil fuels is a sound strategy, regardless of climate change, because the world needs vastly more energy and the likelihood of significant carbon reductions is ‘highly unlikely.’ ”
In extenuation, it can be argued that ExxonMobil is only being more honest than its competitors in following capitalist logic. The same article reports the decision of Chevron to close its small and profitable sustainable energy projects because destroying the environment is more profitable. Others are not all that different. Royal Dutch Shell right now is celebrating the establishment of a huge plant to produce non-biodegradable plastic, in the certain knowledge that it will destroy the oceans.
The same cynicism also prevails elsewhere in the ruling class. The CEO of JPMorgan Chase understands as much about the extreme threat of global warming as other educated people—and in private life may well be a contributor to the Sierra Club. But he has been pouring huge resources into developing fossil fuels, including the most dangerous of them, Canadian tar sands—also a favorite of the energy industries.
It’s easy to expand the list. All are following impeccable capitalist logic, knowing exactly what the consequences are, but in a certain sense having no individual choice: if the CEO chooses otherwise, he will be replaced by someone who will do the same thing. The problem is institutional, not merely individual.
To this grim list we can add the regular euphoric articles in the finest journals on how fracking has propelled the US once again to the championship in production of the fossil fuels that will destroy us, achieving “energy independence”— whatever that is supposed to be—and providing the US with leverage to pursue its (by definition benign) international objectives without concern about energy markets, like seeking to impose maximal suffering on the people of Iran and Venezuela. Occasionally there are a few words about environmental consequences: fracking in Wyoming may harm water supplies for ranchers. But one will search in vain for a comment on what this means for the future of life.
“We can add finally a prime candidate for the most astonishing document in human history, produced by the Trump administration in August 2018.”Again, in extenuation, we must recognize that to refer to such side issues as human survival would violate the canon of “objectivity” and introduce “bias”: the story assigned by the editors is fracking and its contribution to US dominance of fossil fuel production. So survival must be left to the rare opinion column. The effect of course is to instill more deeply the sense of “don’t worry.” If there’s a problem, human ingenuity will figure out how to deal with it.
It might finally be worth noting that not only the management of major corporations but also the most extreme denialists are well aware of the impending disaster to which they are contributing. The capitulation to the Koch brothers a decade ago is one illustration. Or the president, who understands enough to appeal to the government of Ireland for permission to build a wall to protect his golf course from rising sea levels. Some things matter.
We can add finally a prime candidate for the most astonishing document in human history, produced by the Trump administration in August 2018: a 500-page environmental impact statement by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which concluded that no new restrictions are needed for automotive emissions.
The authors had a sound argument: their assessment concluded that by the end of the century temperatures will have risen 4oC above preindustrial levels, about twice the level that the scientific community regards as catastrophic. Automotive emissions are only one contributor to total catastrophe. Accordingly, since we are going off the cliff anyway in the near future, why not drive freely while the world burns, far outdoing Nero?
If one can find a document of comparable malevolence in the historical record, I would be interested in knowing about it. Even the January 1942 Wannsee Conference of the Nazi leadership called only for the destruction of European Jewry, not of most human and animal life on Earth.
As usual, the study was released and circulated with virtually no comment.
The Trump administration argument, of course, assumes that the criminal insanity of the Republican Party leadership is shared universally, so that nothing will be done to avert catastrophe. But, putting aside the attitudes, for which there are no appropriate words in the language, what is relevant here is their clear recognition of what they are doing as they pull out all stops to increase the use of destructive fossil fuels and fill the overstuffed pockets of their prime constituency, wealth and private power.
In brief, capitalist logic, left unconstrained, is a recipe for destruction. However, a simple consideration of time scales reveals that the existential issues must be addressed within the framework of state-capitalist systems. These accommodate radical market interferences and major state initiatives. To develop these options is one crucial task of social movements. And another, in parallel, is to undermine this logic at its roots and to prepare the ground for a sane society.
Opportunities abound. I already mentioned Tony Mazzocchi’s initiatives. For them to have succeeded was within the bounds of realism, and remains so. And there are others. Let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose that in 2008, when the Great Recession struck, a president had been in office who was not bound by strict capitalist logic; someone like Bernie Sanders, perhaps. Suppose further that the president had congressional support and was backed by activist popular movements. There were options.
One would have been to honor the congressional legislation that provided taxpayer bailouts for the financial institutions who were responsible for the crash as well as relief for their victims who lost their homes. That possibility was dismissed: only the first commitment was considered worthy of fulfillment, a decision that infuriated Neil Barofsky, the special Treasury Department inspector general charged with overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. (Barofsky later wrote an angry book outlining the crime.) Evidently, a different choice was possible.
But let’s be more imaginative, while still not straying from the real world. When the crisis struck, Obama virtually nationalized the US auto industry. This major part of the US industrial system was in substantial measure in government hands. That step too opened up options. One, adopted reflexively, was to return the industry to the former owners and managers, perhaps under new names, who would then proceed as before to produce cars for profit. Another option would have been to turn the industry over to stakeholders, the workforce and community, effectively socializing a core part of the US industrial system.
Perhaps, considering human life instead of mere profit, they might have decided to reorient production, realizing that efficient mass transportation yields a better life than spending hours a day fuming in traffic jams—and also alleviates the impending environmental threat in no small way.
“There are many opportunities to have a meaningful impact on consciousness and practice.”Socializing a central part of the US industrial system in the real sense—placing it under worker and community control—would be a complex enterprise, with many facets, and would likely have large-scale effects beyond revitalizing the labor movement and inspiring other developments. Is that a utopian dream, beyond imagination? It doesn’t seem so. Such opportunities arise constantly, even if on a lesser scale.
In recent years worker-ownership and cooperative initiatives have been proliferating. The Next System Project, initiated by Gar Alperovitz, is coordinating and initiating many such efforts, establishing the basis for a future free and democratic society within the present one, Mikhail Bakunin’s prescription. And considerably larger goals can be realistically contemplated.
We should also not overlook the potential of popular activism and pressures. To mention a few examples from early 2020, in a report to clients that was leaked to the environmental activist organization Extinction Rebellion, JPMorgan Chase revealed deep concerns about climate warming. The bank, reported the Guardian, “warned clients that the climate crisis threatens the survival of humanity and that the planet is on an unsustainable trajectory [with] irreversible consequences” unless the trajectory changes. It also recognized its own investment strategies must change because of the “reputational risks” of fossil fuel investment.
The phrase “reputational risks” refers to public pressures. Changing the investment strategies of “the world’s largest financier of fossil fuels” would be no slight achievement.
To mention another case, the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, announced in February that the new Bezos Earth Fund would provide $10 billion in grants to scientists and activists to fund their efforts to fight “the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share.” His announcement came, according to the Washington Post, “one day before company employees—members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice—planned to walk off the job in protest, saying the retailer and tech giant needs to do more to reduce its carbon footprint,” and on the same day that PBS’s Frontline was airing an investigation of the “Amazon Empire,” examining the company’s practices. Again, the result of public activism.
There are many opportunities to have a meaningful impact on consciousness and practice.
CJP: What about the argument that it isn’t really capitalism that should be blamed for the current climate crisis, but rather industrialization itself? After all, the environmental damage that the former so-called socialist world (the former USSR and Eastern Europe) caused in its rather short life is now well documented.
NC: I would emphasize the phrase “so-called.” This is not the place to pursue the matter, but we should view with caution the claims of major propaganda systems. There have been two primary ones: the huge US system and its pathetic Eastern counterpart. They disagreed on many things, but not everything. They agreed that the radical perversion of socialism in Eastern Europe was “socialist”—the US in order to defame socialism; the Soviets, to try to benefit from some of socialism’s moral aura. We’re not compelled to follow suit.
The fact that capitalist logic, unconstrained, leads directly to destruction of the environment does not entail that it is the only possible source of this outcome. There is a great deal to say about the harsh and brutal process that turned Russia from a very poor peasant society, continuing to decline relative to the West as it had been doing for centuries, into a major industrial power, despite the terrible traumas of wars. But there is no escaping the fact that the environmental impact was devastating.
The Western mode of industrialization relied on slavery (creating “the empire of cotton” and the basis for much of the modern economy), coal (found in abundance in England, then elsewhere), and, in the 20th century, oil. Was this a necessity? Were there other ways to develop an industrial society, perhaps of a very different kind, with radically different social and economic institutions and concern for the human and environmental impact of decisions and implementation?
The question has not been extensively pursued, and answers don’t seem obvious. Until they are investigated I don’t think we can go so far as to cast the blame on “industrialization itself.” There might well have been roads not taken, radically different ones.
CJP: Bob, how do you conceive of the relationship between capitalism and climate change?
Robert Pollin: The rise of capitalism was certainly tightly bound up with burning fossil fuels to produce energy and power machines. Contaminating the atmosphere with CO2 emissions was therefore also tied up with the emergence of industrial capitalism.
But this connection is not simply a matter of manufacturing capitalists needing energy sources in general to power machines as the industrial revolution emerged in the late 1700s and early 1800s. What really happened is that coal began being used intensively in Great Britain in the 1830s to power steam engines for producing cotton and then other manufacturing products. At that time, coal was in the process of supplanting waterpower as the primary energy source in manufacturing. As of around 1850, 60 percent of all global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were generated in Britain by burning coal.
However, as Andreas Malm has demonstrated in detail in his book Fossil Capital and elsewhere, the early 19th-century British manufacturers turned to coal and steam engines to supplant water wheels not because coal and steam provided a lower-cost, much less a cleaner, alternative to waterpower. Indeed, waterpower was less expensive at the time, and the technology for driving machines with water-power was more advanced.
Rather, the overwhelming advantage of coal and steam power was that they were not bound to specific locations. Waterpower could only be provided adjacent to where powerful streams of water happen to have been situated.
With coal, the manufacturing operations could be located anyplace where coal could be delivered and burned. This made it much easier for businesses to get people to show up in the factories to work, since, as was well known, the working conditions were mostly abysmal. As Malm writes:
When a manufacturer came across a powerful stream passing through a valley or around a river peninsula, chances were slim that they also hit upon a local population predisposed to factory labour; the opportunity to come and work at machines for long, regular hours, herded together under one roof and strictly supervised by a manager, appeared repugnant to most, and particularly in rural areas.
By contrast, as Malm explains:
Steam was a ticket to the town, where bountiful supplies of labour waited. The steam engine did not open up new stores of badly needed energy so much as it gave access to exploitable labor . . . an advantage large enough to outdo the continued abundance, cheapness and technological superiority of water.
Providing capitalists with this newfound freedom to locate their manufacturing operations wherever they could lure an exploitable labor force into their factories became, in turn, a propulsive force for the expansion of capitalism beyond Britain’s borders, into the rest of Europe, North America, and the colonies of the various European powers.
Marx himself described this explosive growth of capitalism vividly in chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, writing: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”
The manufacturing capitalists of Marx’s era could not have been capable of nestling everywhere, settling everywhere, and establishing connections everywhere if they had remained location-bound, as they were with waterpower.
At the same time, we do know that, for both better and worse, capitalism can operate just fine in our present era without having to rely exclusively on coal, oil, and natural gas as energy sources. Workers are exploited in China, the US, Brazil, and Russia, among other places, by operating machines driven by hydroelectricity.
“Global capitalism did indeed emerge as Andreas Malm has vividly described, on the foundation of a fossil-fuel-based energy system.”Yet it is also the case that the expansion of clean energy supply—primarily solar and wind power—is creating opportunities for smaller-scale enterprises, which could be organized through various combinations of public, private, and cooperative ownership structures—that is, a variety of capitalist, non-capitalist, and mixed ownership structures. The performance of these non-corporate business enterprises has generally been quite favorable relative to traditional corporate firms.
One area where this has been clearly demonstrated is community-based wind farms in Western Europe, especially in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Variations on this wind farm model are also emerging in the US Midwestern farm belt. Private farmers, large and small, are siting wind turbines on their crop-growing and cattle-grazing farmland. This second use for their farmlands provides an additional, and often significant, income source for the farmers.
In short, global capitalism did indeed emerge as Malm has vividly described, on the foundation of a fossil-fuel-based energy system. It is also possible that the necessary clean energy transition could provide one critical cornerstone for advancing more democratic, egalitarian societies. But we should be 100 percent clear that this outcome is by no means guaranteed. No technology, either clean energy or anything else, can, by itself, deliver meaningful social transformations.
Egalitarian social transformations only happen when people effectively struggle to build political movements. When such political movements do emerge, technologies such as clean energy can then certainly play a critically important supportive role.
CJP: Capitalism is all about profits, and fossil fuels constitute the energy source that feeds the beast. Aren’t capitalist profits at stake if efforts were pursued to shift energy resources away from fossil fuels?
RP: It is certainly the case that the profits of private fossil fuel capitalists are at stake. Indeed, fossil fuel companies will need to be either put out of business altogether, or at least dramatically diminished, within the next thirty years. According to the best estimates currently available, the reserves of “unburnable” oil, coal, and natural gas in the ground that these private companies now own amount to about $3 trillion. These reserves can never be burned and thus converted into capitalist profits if the planet is going to have a decent chance of stabilizing the climate.
Of course, the fossil fuel companies will fight by all means available to them for the right to profit lavishly from selling this oil, coal, and natural gas still in the ground. But it is also important to understand that it will not present a major problem for the rest of the global economy if the fossil fuel companies are indeed prevented from selling their $3 trillion in unburnable assets.
Let me illustrate this point with a simple numerical example. Yes, of course, $3 trillion is a huge sum of money. But, as of 2019, it equals less than 1 percent of the $317 trillion in total worldwide private financial assets—the total value of all equity and debt assets outstanding.Still more, the anticipated $3 trillion decline in the value of private fossil fuel assets will not happen in one fell swoop, but rather will occur incrementally over a thirty-year period.
On average, this amounts to asset losses of $100 billion per year, or 0.03 percent of the current value of the global financial market. By contrast, as a result of the US housing bubble and subsequent financial collapse in 2007– 9, US homeowners lost $16 trillion in asset values in 2008 alone—about 160 times the annual losses fossil fuel companies would face.
The fact that the decline in fossil fuel asset values will occur incrementally over two to three decades also means that the shareholders who own the fossil fuel companies will have ample opportunity to sell their stocks and move their money into other stocks. As one important example, in 2014 Warren Buffett, the best-known investor and third-richest person in the world, announced that his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, was doubling its holdings in solar and wind energy companies to $15 billion. This is even while Berkshire continues to hold large positions in conventional utility companies.
The fossil fuel companies could themselves follow the Buffett example by diversifying into clean energy. In fact, they are already doing so, if you believe their advertising campaigns. But the reality is that their forays into clean energy still represent a tiny fraction of their overall operations. Over decades, these companies have built up a capacity to earn super profits from producing and selling fossil fuel energy. They are not likely to achieve comparable levels of profitability with clean energy, because solar and wind technologies can generate power at a much smaller scale than fossil fuel technology.
We know, for example, that average homeowners most anywhere in the world can right now generate 100 percent of their entire electricity needs and save themselves money by putting solar panels on their roofs. Over time, the fossil fuel companies will have no way to compete against that.
“I am convinced that a viable Green New Deal for today needs to include substantial levels of public investment, public ownership, and hard-cap regulations.”This brings up a more general point. The profits of the fossil fuel companies are most certainly at stake through a clean energy transformation, as are those of ancillary industries, such as oil drilling and pipeline construction companies, the railroad companies that transport coal, and all the utilities that now burn fossil fuels to generate electricity. But there is no reason to expect that other capitalist enterprises should see their profits threatened because they have to rely on solar or wind power for their energy supply instead of oil, coal, and natural gas.
Electricity generated by onshore wind or solar photovoltaic panels is already at approximate cost parity with electricity generated by coal or natural gas. The costs of clean energy should also continue falling as the technologies come into more widespread use. Especially after the past forty years of massively rising inequality under neoliberalism, there is every justification for capitalists’ profits to be pushed waydown. But a clean energy transformation will not deliver this outcome on its own.
CJP: While there is no reason to think that capitalism cannot make a transition to clean energy resources, the fact of the matter is that short-termism guides the actions of most investors in the neoliberal age, so isn’t it a bit naive to rely on capitalists themselves to get us out of the climate crisis?
RP: To be fair, nobody really believes that capitalists on their own will get us out of the climate crisis. Even the long list of prominent orthodox economists that I referred to above who signed the January 2019 statement supporting a carbon tax are clear that government intervention is necessary to force capitalists to integrate the costs of ecological destruction into their calculations. That is exactly the idea behind their support for a carbon tax.
The real question then is: To what extent is public intervention in the normal operations of capitalist markets needed to mount a successful global climate stabilization project? In my view, as I discussed above, this will require much more forceful forms of government intervention than the carbon tax, certainly considering the carbon tax is a standalone policy. In fact, we also need public investments in the critical economic sectors, public subsidies for private green investments as well as strong regulations. This combination of policies will be capable of moving us off of fossil fuels much more quickly than what is likely through relying on a carbon tax–type intervention by itself.
If we look back at the mobilization project to fight World War II, the federal government did not just intervene through adjusting the tax system. The circumstances then called for much stronger measures, as they do now. Thus, as Josh Mason and Andrew Bossie show in a recent paper, during World War II, the Roosevelt government assumed a major role in the areas of public investment and ownership of the most critical industries.
This included 97 percent of the synthetic rubber industry, 89 percent of the aviation industry, 87 percent of shipbuilding, and 14 percent of even such an established industry as iron and steel.The Roosevelt government took over these industries because it was clear that, on their own, private capitalists were not about to assume the risks of raising production levels at either the speed or scale that the crisis warranted.
Our situation today is comparable. This is why, as I mentioned above, I am convinced that a viable Green New Deal for today needs to include substantial levels of public investment, public ownership, and hard-cap regulations. As one example, if some electric utilities are going to remain privately owned, then they must commit to reducing their level of CO2 emissions every year by set amounts that will ensure they reach the zero emissions target by 2050. The CEOs of the companies should then face jail time if they fail to meet these requirements. I flesh out these ideas in more detail in section 3, on the Green New Deal.
CJP: Noam, what are your thoughts on this matter? Can we realistically expect the current economic system, with profit-making as its driving force, to rescue humanity and the planet as a whole from the potentially catastrophic effects that lie ahead if we fail to contain the menace of global warming?
NC: If profit-making remains the driving force, then we are doomed. It would be the sheerest accident, too remote to consider, for pursuit of profit to somehow magically lead to the termination of such highly profitable activities as producing fossil fuels, or even far lesser forms of destruction. When we look closely, we commonly find that market signals are either wholly inadequate or are leading in entirely the wrong direction.
To take just one current case, developing technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere is of prime importance, but for venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, investing in long-term projects with no likely major profits is far less attractive than adding new bells and whistles to iPhones.
“National development projects, lucrative careers, and political power all depend on continuing the flow of large fossil fuel revenues.”The worship of markets is by now part of Gramscian hegemonic common sense, instilled by massive propaganda, particularly during the neoliberal years. The “religion,” to borrow Stiglitz’s term, is based on a particular view of human nature that is hardly compelling, to put it mildly. Do we really believe that humans would prefer to vegetate unless driven to action by profit? Or could it be, as a long tradition holds and ample experience reveals, that meaningful and creative work under one’s own control is one of the joys of life?
In fact, it is highly misleading to say that pursuit of profit has been the main driving force in the past, even in the domain of industrial production. Consider again what we are now using, computers and the internet, developed for decades primarily within the state-university system before the results of this creative work were handed over to private enterprise for marketing and profit. For the most part, the driving motive of those who carried out the essential work was not profit but rather curiosity and the excitement of solving hard, challenging, and important problems.
That’s commonly true of other research and inquiry on which the health of our society and culture has relied. True, what was created was integrated into the profit-driven economic system, but that is not a law of nature. Society could be constituted differently. Worker-owned and -managed enterprises, for example, can be expected to have different priorities than profit for bankers in New York—decent working conditions and ample room for individual initiative and leisure, for example.
And if those enterprises are linked together, and to truly democratic communities, something quite different might emerge: perhaps shared values of mutual aid and concern for a meaningful and fulfilling life rather than amassing commodities for oneself and enriching those who have capital to invest.
Can we realistically expect this? We don’t know. What will be “realistic” depends in part on our choice of action.
CJP: Having focused on the interconnectedness between capitalism and the climate crisis, we should not also forget that, in many cases, fossil fuel industries are publicly owned enterprises, which makes one wonder about the role of public entities under capitalism. Bob, how should we think of public entities and their contribution to the climate crisis?
RP: In fact, throughout the world, the energy sector has long operated under a variety of ownership structures, including public/municipal ownership and various forms of private cooperative ownership, in addition to private corporate entities. Indeed, in the oil and natural gas industry per se, publicly owned national companies control approximately 90 percent of the world’s reserves and 75 percent of production. They also control many of the oil and gas infrastructure systems.
These national corporations include Saudi Aramco, Gazprom in Russia, China National Petroleum Corporation, the National Iranian Oil Company, Petroleos de Venezuela, Petrobras in Brazil, and Petronas in Malaysia. None of these publicly owned companies operates with the same profit imperatives as big private energy corporations such as ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, and Royal Dutch Shell. But this does not mean that they are prepared to commit to fighting climate change simply because we face a global environmental emergency.
Just as with the private companies, producing and selling fossil fuel energy generates huge revenue flows for these companies. National development projects, lucrative careers, and political power all depend on continuing the flow of large fossil fuel revenues. We should therefore not expect that public ownership of energy companies will, by itself, provide a more favorable framework for advancing effective clean energy industrial policies.
__________________________________
Excerpted from Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal. Used with the permission of the publisher, Verso Books. Copyright © 2020 by Noam Chomsky, Robert Pollin, and C.J. Polychroniou.
