Nina Bytes: Capitalist Mythology and the Climate

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Magic Science Beans Will Not Save Us

On a boiling planet controlled by genocidal capitalists, surrounded by people succumbing to both science fiction hopium and the propaganda of climate nihilism, it’s sometimes hard to know whether or not the unvarnished truth is your friend, or a foe. As such, I must confess that I found this recent longform essay by James Dyke, Robert Watson, and Wolfgang Knorr about what Pig Empire governments making net zero pledges aren’t doing to prevent climate catastrophe, the nonsensical rational behind their lack of action, and what actually has to be done to tackle the problem of climate crisis, both vindicating and terrifying.

Reading it was vindicating because I’ve spent at least the past eight years pointing out that all of these pledges are based on ideas that are at turns wholly monstrous, delusional, and openly dishonest. Promising to plant whole continents worth of trees in the developing world to offset the Pig Empire’s carbon production is a license to commit genocide because those trees have to go somewhere and you can sure as shit bet we’re not going to chase people out of the imperial core to plant them. By that same measure, putting our hope in junk science experiments like carbon capture, building gigantic mirrors, or literally blotting out the sun’s rays by filling the air with even more pollutants is clearly more about justifying a continuation of fossil-fuel based capitalism than providing any sort of solution to the deadly problem of a rapidly boiling planet. Finally of course arguments, favored by many Pig Empire politicians, that we have to extract even greater quantities of fossil fuels now, so that somehow we can magically burn less of them later, are clearly motivated lies being told for capital while the world continues to burn. The fact that this essay bursts all these bubbles by directly dismantling the false idea of “overshooting” our climate targets and relying on magic science beans to make up the difference later, is a welcome corrective to all of this nonsense.

As the authors of this August 20th, 2024 essay on the Conversation note, there is no future for humanity and a world habitable by billions of humans that doesn’t involve leaving fossil fuels in the ground, and with it, surrendering the delusional capitalist mythology of “overshooting” our climate goals to preserve the genocidal concept of “endless growth” under capitalism.

The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C

“The way to understand this doublethink: that we can avoid dangerous climate change while continuing to burn fossil fuels – is that it relies on the concept of overshoot. The promise is that we can overshoot past any amount of warming, with the deployment of planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal dragging temperatures back down by the end of the century.

This not only cripples any attempt to limit warming to 1.5°C, but risks catastrophic levels of climate change as it locks us in to energy and material-intensive solutions which for the most part exist only on paper.

To argue that we can safely overshoot 1.5°C, or any amount of warming, is saying the quiet bit out loud: we simply don’t care about the increasing amount of suffering and deaths that will be caused while the recovery is worked on.”

Which of course brings me to why this essay is also terrifying, because in it the authors more or less admit that it’s obvious our leaders aren’t confused about what combating climate crisis will entail, or ignorant of the catastrophic effects of continuing to play pretend while the world burns; they simply don’t give a fuck about anything but the rich people they serve, and are happily steering us towards mass extinctions, the destruction of whole ecosystems, and climate changes that will almost certainly lead to the deaths of billions (with a b) of people. It’s one thing for an anti-capitalist analyst like myself to draw these grim conclusions from a careful study of human history and the ongoing policy discussions I observe in the Pig Empire; it’s entirely another level of existential terror when I can read mainstream scientists with access to all the evidence I don’t have, repeating that same story back to me in real time.

Furthermore, while the researchers writing this piece draw most of the same conclusions I have in terms of how to actually prevent hellworld from boiling itself to death for the profit of oil companies and billionaire investors, they still stop short of discussing what doing all this would actually mean for the capitalist order; namely, end it. Despite all the green energy promises and science fiction fantasies our leaders have on offer, there remains no evidence that capitalism itself, which is underpinned by not only fossil fuel consumption but the wealth generated by the extraction of those fossil fuels, will survive these changes. Reading this otherwise magnificent article, I find myself wondering if the reason the authors don’t draw that conclusion is because they don’t understand it, or because they’re afraid to say it out loud.

One thing I can say however is that this essay isn’t a nihilist capitulation that accepts the end of the world as inevitable. The authors are very clear that we *can* still stop the worst case climate death scenarios; but they also acknowledge that as of now, nobody in charge actually is doing so. Maybe it’s time we as a species started thinking about forcing their hands, before it really is too late to save a world habitable by eight billion (and counting) human beings.

 

– Nina Illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

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