This is part of a series on writing climate change for fiction
Once again, this is a long one. Instead of apologizing about length, I’m going to experiment with putting some writing prompts at the end as a summary.
If all you want are some quick ideas for a project, jump to the end. If you want to understand why these ideas matter, read the article!
The core challenge of climate change is an economic challenge. We need to shift the production and consumption of goods and services (also known as “People Doing Stuff”) onto a new energy system. This green energy transition is physically achievable.
We can get off fossil fuels. We will get off fossil fuels. In fact, Exxon-Mobil even runs some of its oil fields on renewable energy now.
Cool?!
Mineral, processing, and manufacturing supply chains are an issue in the short-term. But in the long-run? We will have access to cheaper and more efficient power sources, do less mining, and have less pollution.
Great!
The energy transition is happening now. In thirty years this world will be a different place.
And yet...
We are on track for over 2°C of global warming. We are failing even as we succeed. At current rates this transition is going to take a long-ass time.
Economic Failure
Climate change is the result of economic activity. Our particular style of fossil fuel powered economic activity kicked in with the industrial revolution. It’s called capitalism. Maybe you’ve heard of this?
Here’s the key point:
All societies must find a way to organize themselves. That organization consists of a set of structures combined with a set of supporting beliefs. We looked at the beliefs previously. Liberalism is the politics. Capitalism is the economics.
This means:
Society is organized via the act of buying and selling. Money is power. Power is money. Do you want something to happen? You’ll need to do buying and selling.
That’s capitalism.
True, we do have other social structures (like government), but under capitalism all of them have been subsumed under the power of buying and selling. Therefore the fate of the world rests with our beloved friend, Mammon.
And Mammon is one son of a bitch.
Not Just Capitalism
Okay I lied.
The Soviet Union burnt a lot of fossil fuels too. Stalin was super into factories (just ask Magnitogorsk). Stalin-emissions are understandable on the basis of nation-states gunning for power so they can fight wars against Germany. Also understandable is that both liberalism and socialism are focused on questions of wealth and progress. Neither ideology was created to solve planetary questions like climate change. Marxist-Leninism was not great for the environment.
That said, we shall leave aside Communism. The Cold War is over. Stalin is dead.
Capitalism baby!
Development Economics
Okay, sorry I lied again.
We forgot about Chairman Mao.
A lot of attention gets paid to the United States and the developed world. Meanwhile, a huge portion of global emissions in the past thirty years came from the industrialization of China. They took their chance to be the last country on Earth that can ever grow their economy on coal without being labelled genocidal and/or suicidal.
Every country in the Global South also has the option to industrialize using fossil fuels. Their former colonial masters did it. China did it. Why can’t they? India is the one to watch here.
Anyway, Chairman Mao is dead too. Even in China this is a version of capitalism.
Mammon rules the world. And Mammon loves gasoline.
Post-Capitalism?
…and yes, I am leaving aside the whole question of whether or not capitalism has in fact already died and we now live in Neo-feudal techno-Hell.
Either way, Mammon is still very much in charge.
Money, money, money!
Fossil Fuel Primacy
Before anything, we need to recognize that the world runs on fossil fuels. These are the incumbents. The default.
That’s really hard to shift. The peak oil scare of a while ago was overblown with bad math, but still, the sheer inertia is huge.
A colossal amount of value has been sunk into fossil fuel based activities. The people who own that stuff expect a return. They expect those activities to continue, or better yet, increase in value. Shifting off fossil fuels means those people giving up on getting that return.
How is that going to happen? Hmmm?
Here is what Mammon requires: Renewables need to be more than merely cheaper than fossil fuels. They need to be more profitable.
Seriously, just pass some time thinking of all the no-brainer cheap, sensible, efficient solutions that simply don’t make money and therefore do not happen. We are optimized for maximum profit, not lowest cost. Yes, solar panels are getting cheaper. But fossil fuels are more profitable. Oil and gas can give you a 20% to 50% internal rate of return. Solar and wind only get you 5% to 10% (apparently).
Mammon has spoken.
You can make electricity with solar. You can make money with oil. Therefore money flows towards oil. This is how we allocate resources under capitalism. Therefore you live in Mammon’s burning oil world.
A quick note on Stalin again...
Because Mammon built the world out of oil, that means oil is power. Economic power. Military power. Therefore governments love oil too. Nobody wants to screw up the energy supply. If fuel prices get out of hand, chaos cascades through your economy (just ask Europe about Russian gas).
Fossil fuels are like food.
The supply must keep coming. Steady. Cheap. Forever. So you do what it takes. Do you need to subsidize the industry? Go for it. Do you need to invade the Middle East? Sure. You do you.
Okay. Back to Mammon.
Renewables can be profitable. Renewables get subsidies too. Mammon is developing a distinct taste for lithium (and not to treat his manic-depression). We are slowly heading for a Green New World.
However...
Actually getting there fast enough would require detonating a Stalin-level regulatory neutron bomb on the fossil fuel industry. Billions in wealth would be annihilated into a smouldering pile of toxic financial waste, lost profits rotting in the sun of a scorching Solar day.
Mammon cannot do that.
He doesn’t know how.
Market Failure
Markets are only capable of solving a fairly limited set of problems. Being under capitalism, and neoliberal capitalism in particular, means that our world can only do what markets can do. Mammon has limits.
Get your Bingo cards ready.
Market failures include...
Public & Common Goods: Sellers have able to sell something. Consumers have to be able to buy something. That rules out all the actions which do not involve buying and selling. Scientific knowledge, the global atmosphere, refugees, public utilities - none of this stuff is easy to fit into a market.
Lack of Advocacy without Profit: You are far more likely to see sustained promotion for mega-projects than for a cycle-way in your local neighborhood. Gee-whizz techno-projects have the potential to earn concentrated profits by big players. Small local (and cheap and efficient) solutions don’t make the mega-bucks.
Lobbying when Profit is Threatened: A transition means financial losers. Those losers are currently winners, and therefore have both the power and motive to prevent a transition. At the very least, they have the motive to ensure the transition ends with them remaining winners – that means we get stuck focused on nonsense solutions which exist to maintain someone’s business model not solve the actual problem. Clean coal anyone?
Externalities: The money you pay for a car is not what the car truly costs. The true cost includes things such as acid mine drainage and traffic jams and climate change. When all decisions are based on market prices alone, huge aspects of life get ignored.
Failed Carbon Markets: The point of carbon trading is to internalize the price of climate change. Pricing systems have been gripped with problems, principally that prices are typically very low (because the politics and modelling is broken), meaning we still don’t actually value climate damages anyway.
Unfair Markets: Is the consumer king? Markets are riddled with lies, confusions, and manipulations that prevent the ethical consumer truly guiding markets to some better place. You can’t get there from here.
Markets Serve Market Demographics, not Societal Needs: Markets meet the needs of those who pay. Therefore markets meet the needs of certain consumer demographics and the wealthy, not the general interests of humanity (much less unborn generations, or non-human species). We don’t get a green transition as such, instead we get gluten-free organic olives for the LOHAS consumer demographic.
Lack of Information, Skills, & Capacity: Wanting to transition your business to a new greener system doesn’t mean you are able to do so. What do you even do? Where do you get staff? Materials? The money? A lot of this involves high upfront costs for long-term gain. You’ve got to get that investment from somewhere. That means proving to investors that this is profitable.
Network Effects: The problem with buying an electric car is that there’s nowhere near enough charging stations, while even bug-all Hicktown has a gas station. New networks like this are hard to get established because the existing system has such an overwhelming advantage. If they’re feeling evil, they’ll leverage that power to kill the competition.
Lack of Innovation: Given how much businesses laud innovation many are surprisingly unwilling to pay for it. Knowledge is often one of those things that just can’t be bought and sold, especially that early blue-sky development work.
Techno-fixation: Technology is a necessary part of any climate plan, yet the way we idiotically fixate on technology reflects something deeper. Being in business means being in a technological arms race. For climate change, new technologies are not merely a solution – they’re a business opportunity.
Monopolies: The neoliberal era has seen the rise of concentrated power in almost every sector. Such powers can block anyone from telling them what to do, or doing anything they don’t like. Monopolies can block transitions to anything new. Economic monopolies can turn into political monopolies when they control critical industries – like the media.
Irrationality: Just because money is pouring into something doesn’t mean it is of any value. Mammon has serious manic-depression. Neoliberalism took him off his meds. He immediately started buying dangerous dumb garbage he didn’t need, then crashed into a suicidal depression.
The Necessity of Market Failure for the Existence of Capitalism: This one is more controversial. The basic argument is that capitalism can only exist by producing the above “failures”. In this view the entire point of business is to privatize what was commonly owned, shift your true costs onto others, amass unequal wealth, then form a monopoly. After that you can engage in as much unfairness and irrationality as you please. Therefore market failure is misnomer, this is market winning. Problems like climate change are an inevitable outcome. Workers of the world unite, etc etc.
Consumption is Economically Non-Negotiable
A common call from environmentalists is for the world to abandon consumerism and embrace lives of material simplicity. We’ll grow vegetables. It’ll be groovy.
Sadly, that’s not a viable pathway for a capitalist economy. That drop in consumption needs to be replaced by something else of equal or larger value, like pointless mega-projects or military spending.
After all, this is only the plainest common sense. For if you buy goods, someone will have to make them. And if you do not buy goods, the shops will not clear their stocks, they will not give repeat orders, and someone will be thrown out of work.
Therefore, O patriotic housewives, sally out tomorrow early into the streets and go to the wonderful sales which are everywhere advertised. You will do yourselves good....
This is what it means to live in a world where social organization is based on buying and selling. Under capitalism, everyone living lives of simplicity is called a Depression.
The structure breaks down. People starve.
Consumerism is Socially Non-Negotiable
The social contract of capitalist society is founded on continually rising standards of living.
Violating that expectation is an instant non-starter. It would blow the whole system to bits. This is why people are pissed off about the 2008 crash. This is why they elected Trump. This is why people are angry. Life is shit. We were promised better.
Where is it?!
A lot of environmentalists have what is essentially a spiritual vision for how to solve climate change. I get it. It’s a beautiful dream. Lives of simplicity and higher values are great.
Right now though?
Abandoning materialism just doesn’t fly. Our entire economic system is built on that never ever happening. The push back is fast, hard, and will not relent.
The net zero story for me shouldn’t be a hair shirt story of giving everything up and your bills going up. That’s not the vision of net zero that I think is the right one for the UK.
You Don’t Get to Just Turn This Thing OFF
All the IPCC’s scenarios assume growth. Every “sensible” politician on Earth is committed to economic growth. The economy must be big. The economy must run hot and fast. If it doesn’t the whole thing will crash.
Again, in step the environmentalists. Can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet! Let’s have degrowth. Make the economy smaller. Emissions will go down. Problem solved. Indeed, planetary limits are real. They do have a point.
Only, capitalism can’t do this.
Therefore it won’t.
Therefore it isn’t.
With the Covid lock-downs we saw exactly what happens when you try to turn the global economy off, even just for a brief moment. All hell breaks loose. People lose their jobs. Farmers start destroying their own surplus crops. Supply chains go haywire. The financial system destabilizes. Suddenly you’ve got social unrest and riots.
The system must keep churning or it dies.
The Covid lock-downs also just happen to be the only time we’ve come close to meeting our climate targets.
Metabolic Rift
Economics is the process of turning nature into human beings.
Fossil fuel powered industrial capitalism has done this in a very particular way. The neoliberal totalizing Buy-n-Sell world version is the extreme version.
Sitting here writing this, my life has little connection to ecology surrounding me. The land is asphalt and exhaust fumes. I keep the windows closed. Nature exists as a $4.95 cactus on the windowsill. My own body is built with synthetic nitrogen. My food comes from unknown sources.
Humanity is out of sync with the rest of the planet. We harvest more than can grow back. We produce more waste than can be absorbed. Our economics doesn’t seem to care.
Why is our economy like this?
It’s because we live in Buy-n-Sell world. Our society is organized on the basis of buying and selling. If you want to buy, you must sell. If you want to eat you must sell something.
So, sell what?
You must sell a piece of the world. You can sell anything from frogs to philosophies. Most people sell themselves. We call that jobs. Economics is the process of turning nature into human beings, therefore we are ultimately selling bits of nature. Plants, water, rock. We turn the planet into commodities to purchase.
A commodity is something that can be traded. An object. A thing. Something to lift up and take away. Exchangeable. Substitutable. Measurable with money.
A capitalist economy consists of transforming planet Earth into commodities. That which cannot be traded is not valued. Non-entities exist only to facilitate the creation of commodities.
Some commodities are necessary for human survival, like food. However, Buy-n-Sell world can only distribute those necessities via buying and selling. Most people are not farmers. Other commodities must be produced simply to allow the buying and selling to occur. If all those pointless and trivial exchanges stop, we suddenly discover that we don’t know how to feed people. We could give people food any number of ways. We, however, live in Buy-n-Sell world. If I have nothing to sell, then I cannot buy food.
Therefore most of humanity is striving daily to turn nature into a set of tradable objects. We do this so we can survive living in Buy-n-Sell world.
What does this commodified nature look like? Go outside. Have a look. It stinks of exhaust fumes.
Nature crumbles when you slice it up into bits, take it away, and dump the results someplace else. An accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is merely one result.
Bullshit Jobs, or Why This is All Unnecessary
Since at least the Great Depression, we’ve been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work—Keynes at the time coined the term “technological unemployment,” and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come—and while this might make it seem such claims have always been somewhat alarmist, what this book suggests is that the opposite was the case. They were entirely accurate. Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up. A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes, already noted by George Orwell in 1933, of what the laboring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes to official unemployment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent. But if one eliminates bullshit jobs from the picture, and the real jobs that only exist to support them, one could say that the catastrophe predicted in the 1930s really did happen. Upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work.
Mull on that for a moment.
Climate change is caused by economic activity. If Graeber is correct, then most of this activity is pointless nonsense. We don’t need to do any of this. It only exists to keep the machine going. Nothing more.
And it gets worse...
Financialization
Buy-n-Sell world has been struggling lately. To understand why, we need to understand magic duck pictures.
Here’s the thing. Buying and selling is an abstract process conducted using magic rituals. The process is purely symbolic.
Think it through.
I go to the fruit store. I pick up a banana. I approach a bored looking Chinese woman. We conduct a ritual using a magical token invoking the powers of Queen Elizabeth II, Kate Sheppard, a camellia flower, the Reserve Bank governor, and a duck. Social power over the bananas is transferred from Fruits-R-Us to myself. Now society recognizes my right to do with the banana as I please. The ritual of Buy-n-Sell is complete.
Here’s the fun thing: this ritual can become 100% symbolic and 0% bananas.
We call that finance.
This 100% symbolic process is forever at risk of detaching itself from reality. Floating free and joyful. And yet, because that ritual involving the Queen and a duck has real social power, the symbolic absurdity can touch back down into reality where it completely f*&%s things up.
Welcome to financialization – the process of turning the entire economy (and therefore the entire planet, refer to commodities above) into a purely symbolic form.
100% symbols. 0% bananas.
How did this happen?
Neoliberalism took Mammon off his meds, and that dude immediately started hallucinating.
Profit making has shifted away from actually making things (bananas), and towards finance (magic duck pictures). The big businesses are in finance. The wealthy are in finance. The power is in finance. Our world is shaped by finance.
What does finance want?
In finance you make profits two ways:
1) You buy and sell assets (e.g. shares, debt, houses). Constantly rising prices and volatility are good for you here. Bamboozling people is good too. You want to maximize the gap between what your buy price and your sell price.
2) You extract rents. People pay you for owning stuff. Landlords get land rents. Shareholders get dividends. Creditors collect on debts. You want these rents to be as high as possible, because the rents go to you.
In theory the finance sector is the nervous system of capitalism. Finance directs money to flow to where it’s needed. Under conditions of financialization, something else is happening.
Value gets sucked out of the real world.
Rents don’t produce anything real. They just redistribute wealth towards the wealthy. Volatility and bamboozlement make the world more fragile. Real world businesses get dismantled to make financial profits. Government functions get privatized and handed over to financial parasites. Maximizing shareholder value overrides creating actual value. Corporations blow their cash buying their own stocks to make Line Go Up. The venture capital tech-world is awash with scams. The entire global economy was crashed by bullshit financial derivatives. The entire economy has become self-eating.
Cannibalizing the economy causes problems.
When everyone in the real world is broke and homeless because life has become 100% symbols and 0% bananas, no profits can be made by actually making real things. The big corporations have gigantic piles of cash and nothing to do. More money flows into finance, sloshing around doing nothing. Meanwhile anyone who wants to eat needs to get into finance and the housing market (or if you’re desperate enough, Bitcoin, NFTs, and GameStop shares). As the economy lurches and crashes governments are forced to bail out finance, followed by massive austerity – further destroying society.
We could be making solar panels. We could be planting trees. We could be using the social power that money embodies to solve climate change.
But no.
Mammon is having a psychotic break.
Skin in the Game
An uncomfortable chunk of the world economy consists of gambling with other people’s money.
A system without feedback is stupid.
That a system of organized stupidity just happens to be catastrophically self-destructive is fairly unsurprising.
In a market prices are supposed to provide the feedback mechanism (buy more! buy less!). That works great when we’re talking about a pencil factory in a perfectly functioning capitalist utopia. However, it all goes catastrophically wrong when we’re talking about the global environment in an era of social breakdown where the economy has entered a financialisation death-spiral.
Buy-n-Sell world constantly separates people from the consequence of their actions. Buying and selling is by its very nature something that can be done between strangers, with an absence of accountability and responsibility. This is why every market in history has involved scams.
Separation of cause and effect is routine.
When I buy a can of tuna I don’t have to deal with overfishing – that’s hidden by the metabolic rift. When Wall Street traders gamble with world food prices they don’t have to deal with riots in the Middle East. That chain of cause and effect is obscured by the diffusion of markets. When private equity dismantles the real economy, they don’t themselves become homeless. They go out and buy a yacht.
Financialisation makes a virtue of this irresponsibility. Layers of tax havens, trusts, corporate liability laws, and sheer outrageous trickery all exist to shield wealthy people from the consequences of their actions.
A system without feedback is stupid.
Climate change is stupid.
Elites, Oligarchs, and the 1%
A world in which Mammon has escaped from the psych ward, is having a full blown manic episode with florid psychosis, and no one is holding this guy responsible for anything he does creates a very particular kind of society.
We get massive concentrations of power in the hands of the wealthy. They then abuse that power.
In particular, the super-rich 1% are key to the climate story in three ways:
1. through the carbon they emit in their daily lives from their consumption, including from their yachts, private jets and lavish lifestyles;
2. through their investments and shareholdings in heavily-polluting industries and their vested financial interest in the economic status quo; and
3. through the undue influence that they have over the media, the economy and politics and policymaking.
In 2019, the super-rich 1% were responsible for as much carbon emissions as the poorest 66% of humanity (5 billion people).
Who are the 1%? We’re talking globally, so that’s anyone earning over US $140,000 (according to Oxfam). That means all the world’s top professionals and above. Literally everyone who is involved in running the world just happens to be personally responsible for the bulk of the problem.
Why haven’t they fixed it yet? Why?
This gets even more egregious when we talk about the top 0.1%. A single super-yacht emits more than hundreds of average people combined.
Climate change is a problem created and sustained by the rich. Because so much of the world’s wealth is tied up in the hands of a tiny minority, we are essentially trying to fight climate change with one hand tied behind our back.
The Criminalization of Elites
Financialisation has involved the world’s richest people doing some very dodgy things with their money. In doing so these “innocent” rich people have ended up alongside drug cartels, terrorists, dictators, and anyone else who has piles of dodgy money.
The infrastructure that supports the super-rich also supports criminals. Both of them engage in questionable behavior. That criminality spills over, corrupting everything. Criminals are uninterested in creating a functional economy that can solve real world problems. Instead the world is burdened by an extractive loot machine dedicated to plundering the world. Criminals do not care about their victims, or climate change, or you.
What is the 1% View of Climate?
Billionaires trend strongly towards eco-modernism. It’s a world in which political and economic questions do not get asked, and billionaires continue to rule the world. This is the vision into which all that concentrated power gets poured.
I think more like an engineer than a political scientist, and I don’t have a solution to the politics of climate change....
Here’s the key point: Although heavy emitters like me should use less energy, the world overall should be using more of the goods and services that energy provides. There is nothing wrong with using more energy as long as it is carbon-free. The key to addressing climate change is to make clean energy just as cheap and reliable as what we get from fossil fuels.
As an aside, don’t get fooled by the Iron Man & Batman fantasy.
A super billionaire’s dragon-horde is on order of maybe a hundred billion dollars. Global GDP is more like hundred trillion dollars. Individual billionaires are still small men in a gigantic world. They have just enough power to distort the whole system, but not enough power to actually save the world. They have power, but not God Emperor levels of power.
State Capture
Government is the other big force in the world.
In theory government could go full Stalin and obliterate the rich. In practice many of the world’s nations can be considered one party states run by finance. This is why both left-wing and right-wing parties do the exact same thing when it comes to core economic policy.
The right openly embraces trickledown economics achieved via making the country “competitive” (i.e. friendly to the rich). The left embraces much the same, just with different language, like with the Third Way politics of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Because economics cannot be touched, the battleground of politics is moved into the arena of identity issues instead.
Clinton: Not everything is about an economic theory, right? If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism?
Crowd: No!
Clinton: Would that end sexism?
Crowd: No!
Clinton: Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community?
Crowd: No!
Clinton: Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?
Crowd: No!
- Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, 2016 campaign speech.
If we want to do something about climate change that’s going to involve some fairly hefty economic policy.
What we have instead is the erosion of democracy by money, and the financialization of the very concept of nations and citizenship. Citizens are reframed as taxpayers and clients. The nation is reframed as a corporation competing in a global market place. Meanwhile our political energy is squandered fighting over transgender toilets.
Putting Mammon Back on His Meds gets Complicated
Here’s a quote from economist Karl Polanyi back during World War Two. He’s talking about classical liberalism, from which we get our current neoliberalism. He’s trying to explain why his world just exploded.
Nineteenth-century civilization has collapsed....
Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark Utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way. It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it.
- Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944
That “disruption” involved the total breakdown of the global order: World War One, Communist Revolutions, the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism, Totalitarianism, World War Two, the dissolution of the colonial empires, and a new world order divided between a Communist East and a socially democratic West locked in a nuclear armed cold war.
So then, we have the possibility that as our free-market world writhes in self-inflicted pain, and as people around the world try to intervene, the result is not successful reforms leading to a new stability.
Instead the world goes BANG!
The Ideology of Property
None of this economics is natural per se. It has to be created and sustained by institutions and beliefs. The central concept driving this entire economic system is the concept of property.
Ownership. Mine. Yours.
What does it mean to own something?
Consider the differences between stealing, borrowing, gifting, inheriting, or purchasing. The physical actions involved can be identical (I pick up object X and walk home with X). The difference is the laws, institutions, and beliefs that surround those actions.
In the modern neoliberal world, my freedom hinges on my freedom over the things I own. The government can’t tell me what to do with my stuff. Those property rights are sacred. Climate change as a political-economic problem is a conflict between some people’s rights over property (fossil fuels, cars, etc) crashing into the welfare of society at large.
For the system to maintain itself, it must find a solution which maintains those property rights.
This is why the abolition of slavery involved compensating slave owners. Abolition was an egregious violation of their ownership rights. Likewise, this is why people have suggested we’ll need to compensate oil companies. To simply rip the oil out of their hands would be an egregious violation of the central pillar of the entire economy – the very idea of private ownership rights.
Hence why the issue of climate change rapidly gets caught up in some long running conflicts between capitalism and socialism.
Conclusion
Our current economic system would appear to be incompatible with meeting climate targets. You just can’t get there from here. Austerity and market incentives will not get us out of crisis.
At a minimum environmental action means something like a Green New Deal – an attempt to fix the machine. Potentially we’re talking about something much more serious – destroying the machine.
This raises all the terrifying questions faced in the early twentieth century. Will revolutions plunge the world into fascist or communist dystopias? Can reform be enough? What can we do? What should we do? How do we get there? How do we get there fast? How do we avoid the world going BANG?
And why haven’t we done this already?
Writing Prompts
Have a character who refuses to ever buy or sell anything, in any way imaginable, ever.
How complicated does their life get?
What would it take for their attempt to be easy?
Why isn’t it easy already?
Have a character who refuses to ever use fossil fuels in any way imaginable, ever.
How complicated does their life get?
What would it take for their attempt to be easy?
Why isn’t it easy already?
Imagine some positive climate project. Explore what happens to this project due to living in a market dominated world.
Which parts of the project succeed because of markets? Why?
Which parts of the project fail because of markets. Why?
Does the project drift away from what was originally intended? What does it become?
Explore concepts of “The Good Life” and standards of living:
How much material wealth is too little?
How much is too much?
What is considered normal? Desirable? Shameful?
What would happen if “normal” changed dramatically? Why isn’t this already “normal”?
Write about the Covid lock-downs (or similar times) when the normal economy was suddenly suspended.
How was life different (specifically in terms of money, work, and material objects)?
Why did we immediately go back to how it was before?
Have a character relate to nature only via tradable objects (e.g. packaged food, pets at a pet store, lumber).
What kind of relationship is the character able to have with these money-valued objects?
How does this compare with interacting with the exact same object out in the wilderness?
Set a scene in a workplace:
What are they working to do?
What impact does this work have on the environment?
Why is this work being done? Why is this much people, machines, land, and money needed? How much does society really need this work?
Confront a character with a choice where one option can be measured in money, and the other option cannot.
How does money shape their entire sense of value?
Does money tip their choice towards the high consumption fossil fuel burning option?
Try some of the techniques from The Weird to de-familiarize monetary value, and reveal the reality underneath, as the character gets lost in an illusory world of mere symbolic value.
Explore the consequences of a climate damaging economic choice (anything from opening a coal-fired power station, to gambling on the stock markets, to eating a hamburger):
Who makes the decision?
Who or what is harmed?
Who (if anyone) is aware of the link between the decision and consequences?
Have two perspectives look at the same climate event or action:
One from the ultra-rich.
One from the ultra-poor.
Have both characters… commit a crime / do a good deed / try to change the world / etc.
How do they differ, how are they similar?
Have two leaders go head to head:
One is openly challenging the power of money.
The other is avoiding the issue.
What tactics do they each use? How does this turn out for both of them?
Society tries to bring self-regulating markets back under control.
One set of actions tries to overthrow the entire system. What are they aiming for? Does it work?
A second set of actions tries to reform the system. What are they aiming for? Does it work?
A third set of actions tries to maintain a failing system unchanged. How does that turn out?
What happens to the world that had grown dependent on that market system? Is the world thrown into crisis? How do they avoid catastrophe?
Have two characters clash over conflicting ideas of ownership.
Who has the right to do what?
Does this lead to one character ignoring or justifying the damage they are doing to the world around them?
Explore how much of their life and world is shaped by concepts of ownership.
Imagine a scenario where the fossil fuel industry gives up all their reserves, preventing oil, coal, and gas from ever being burned happily ever after the end.
How does this happen?
Seriously… how?
And now we’re done with the gigantic abstract structural stuff. Next time we’ll get into psychology.
Return to menu.