There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other will not do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain Earth’s life-support systems within the present economic system.
Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.
Much discussion of energy leads to the fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism somehow put at the service of environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates around wealth. The corporation will outflank every puny law and regulation that seeks to constrain its profitability. It therefore stands in the way of the functioning democracy needed to tackle climate change.
Many career environmentalists fear that an anti-capitalist position is what’s alienating the mainstream from their irresistible arguments. But is it not more likely that people are stunned into inaction by the bizarre discrepancy between how extreme the crisis described and how insipid the solutions proposed?
Once we pass the planetary oil production spike (when oil begins rapidly to deplete and demand outstrips supply), there will be less and less net energy available to humankind. Petroleum geologists reckon we will pass the world oil spike sometime between 2006 and 2010. It will take, argues peak-oil expert Richard Heinberg, a World War II effort if many of us are to come through this epoch. Not least because modern agri-business puts hundreds of calories of fossil-fuel energy into the fields for each calorie of food energy produced.
Catch-22, of course, is that the very worst fate that could befall our species is the discovery of huge reserves of oil, or even the burning of all the oil that is already known about, because the climate chaos that would unleash would make the mere collapse of industrial society a sideshow bagatelle. Since we have got to make the switch from oil anyway, why not do it now?
Solutions need to come from people themselves. But once set up, local groups need to be supported by technology transfers from state to community level. Otherwise it is too expensive to get solar panels on your roof, let alone set up an energy grid. This has a precedent: back in the 1920s, the London boroughs of Wandsworth and Battersea had their own electricity generating grid. So long as energy corporations exist, however, they will fight to stop districts seceding from national grids.
There are many projects we can learn from. The Just Transition Alliance, for example, was set up in the United States working with unions to negotiate alliances between ”front-line workers and fence-line communities”, that is to say, between members who stand to lose their jobs if the plant is shut down, and those who live next to the same plant and stand to lose their health if it is not.
To get from here to there we must talk about climate chaos in terms of what needs to be done for the survival of the species. We have lived in an era of cheap, abundant energy. The petroleum interval has led us to believe that the impossible is possible, that people in northern cities can have suntans in winter and eat apples in summer. But much as the petroleum bubble has got us out of the habit of accepting the existence of zero-sum physical realities, it is wise to remember that they never went away. You can either have capitalism or a habitable planet. One or the other, not both. — Â