OPINION
CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE CASE AGAINST CAPITAL By Meghan Smith
O
n Earth Day—Friday, April 22nd—climate activist Wynn Bruce set himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court in an act of protest against climate change, tragically passing away from his injuries the next day. Kritee Kanko, a climate scientist and friend of Bruce’s, wrote on Twitter that this was “a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to the climate crisis.” His tragic death was motivated by a sense of grief and urgency in the face of climate inaction. At the same time, climate activist groups at Tufts and elsewhere have begun to pick up their efforts after being limited by the pandemic. Sophomore and member of Tufts Climate Action (TCA) leadership Ryan Kadet wrote to the Tufts Observer that TCA has recently “collaborat[ed] with other climate justice organizations from universities across the greater Boston area to create a coalition of Boston climate activists.” In a moment that provides renewed opportunities for action in the fight for a livable future, I urge Tufts students to begin evaluating the relationship between climate change and our global political economy which we take for granted— namely, the way in which it is structured around unceasing growth and consumption. At Tufts, we have to interrogate the way we live and the way that our world is shaped, and not take economic growth and extraction of profit as given “goods” when they themselves are the culprits in the crime of global environmental destruction. Two degrees of warming above baseline industrial levels was once regarded by the international community as a thresh-
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old of climate disaster not to be surpassed. Journalist David Wallace Wells found in his book, The Uninhabitable Earth, that the two-degree limit now appears more like a best-case scenario, with even higher global temperatures likely. However, this “bestcase scenario” is still catastrophic: according to Wallace-Wells, ice sheets will begin to collapse, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable due to high temperatures and high humidities, incidence of wildfires will sextuple or more in the United States, and droughts in Africa will extend by five years, impacting food production. With calamity incoming, our existing solutions—modifying consumer behavior, trading carbon, and gradually transitioning to renewable energy—seem inadequate. If we want to solve the climate crisis, we have to target its root causes. Increasing evidence suggests that there are limits to what we can achieve in an economic system that is fundamentally structured around continued economic growth, increased consumption, commodification of the natural world, and extraction of profit. Climate change and ecological collapse are inextricably linked to the capitalist mode of production and the incentives which structure its outcomes. Capitalism is the global political-economic structure that is centered around and defined by the production of commodities for sale on the market and the private ownership of production. The fundamental incentive inherent within capitalism—a need for expansion and growth—drives continued extraction of
the earth’s resources for the realization of a profit. Nature itself is transformed into something to be bought and sold, with its ability to generate profit prioritized over ecological value. Anthropologist Jason Moore wrote that “Capitalism’s governing conceit is that… [n]ature is external and may be fragmented, quantified and rationalized to serve economic growth…” Ecosystems and natural resources are valued to the extent that they may be utilized for profits. Capitalism also requires the creation of more and more commodities—using more and more resources—for sale on a market. The World Economic Forum concedes that, “Production itself is contingent on consumption. Without sufficient consumption… the production cycle would be paralyzed… mass consumption… is embedded in the core tenets of capitalism as an economic system.” On a finite planet with finite resources, however, consumption is a force behind energy usage and exploitation of the world’s resources. Anthropologist and activist Andreas Malm locates the beginnings of a capitalist mode of production in the extraction of fossil fuels. Economies were constrained by the natural world around them until they began to extract fossil fuels, allowing for continued growth. In his book Fossil Capital, he wrote that energy constraints “explain not merely the preference for fossil fuels, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the very conditions of self-sustaining growth.” This relationship continues to define the foundations upon
