{"id":287350,"date":"2021-08-25T17:09:25","date_gmt":"2021-08-25T17:09:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/08\/capitalism-climate-crisis-global-green-new-deal-clean-energy-fossil-fuel-industry\/"},"modified":"2021-08-25T18:14:28","modified_gmt":"2021-08-25T18:14:28","slug":"capitalism-cant-fix-the-climate-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/08\/25\/capitalism-cant-fix-the-climate-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Capitalism Can\u2019t Fix the Climate Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Neither corporations nor liberals will stop climate disaster. The Left can.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n The future of climate disaster isn't written in stone; the Left can push for more expansive climate policy. (Tim J Keegan \/ Flickr)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

We\u2019re facing down climate disaster all over the planet, and while the capitalist system is unable to properly respond to that disaster, it\u2019s also an incredibly resilient system. Without intervention from the Left, capitalists\u2019 embrace of green energy will leave the working class behind.<\/p>\n

But the future of climate disaster isn\u2019t written in stone. The Democrats\u2019 vague mandate to \u201cbelieve the science\u201d won\u2019t deliver a safe future for the millions of people, particularly in the Global South, who will be hit hardest by climate change. But pressure from leftist movements has brought us from the austerity of the Obama years to the current moment of potentially more expansive climate policy.<\/p>\n

To discuss how socialists can play an essential role in demanding a Green New Deal built on the principles of international solidarity and class struggle, Daniel Denvir, host of the Jacobin Radio podcast The Dig <\/em>and author of All-American Nativism<\/a><\/em>, spoke with Kate Aronoff, a staff writer at the New Republic<\/em> covering climate and energy. She is the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet and How We Fight Back<\/em>, coauthor of A Planet To Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal<\/em>, and coeditor of We Own The Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style<\/em>. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the episode here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

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Daniel Denvir<\/dt>\n \n

You write: “My argument in this book is not that capitalism has to end before the world can deal with the climate crisis. Dismantling a centuries-old system of production and distribution, and building a carbon-neutral and worker-owned alternative, is almost certainly not going to happen within the small window of time the world has to avert runaway disaster. The private sector will be a major part of the transition off of fossil fuels. Some people will get rich, and some unseemly actors will be involved. Capitalist production will build solar panels, wind turbines, and electric trains.<\/p>\n

But whether we deal with climate change or not can’t be held hostage to executives’ ability to turn a profit. To handle this crisis, capitalism will have to be replaced as society’s operating system, setting out goals other than the boundless accumulation of private wealth.”<\/p>\n

This argument provoked a bit of controversy in the audience a few years back in Chicago when we discussed it on a panel at the Socialism Conference. Both of us would love to live in a socialist world, and we’ve got to continue to fight for one. But why do you think that it’s important for people to understand that we need to deal with climate change before we win an entirely new mode of production? What’s entailed by the conclusion that we need to pursue radical social-democratic reforms on the road to socialism?<\/p>\n

Is this a theory of how radical social-democratic reforms can lead to socialism? Is it just a reality that the fast-ticking climate clock imposes on us? Or is it some of both?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n

Kate Aronoff<\/dt>\n \n

It’s a reality. If the climate crisis were playing out over the course of two hundred, three hundred, or a thousand years, one could have an interesting theoretical debate about whether we should change the system we have and tweak it slightly in order to take on the crisis, or whether we should create an entirely new mode of production and build up a workaround alternative.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, we just don’t have that time. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change outlined in its 2018 report on 1.5 degrees Celsius that we had roughly twelve years. That is now nine years in which to rapidly decarbonize the global economy, which is an enormous challenge. In order to meet that ever-shrinking twelve-year window, we have to use the productive system in which we live \u2014 which is not my ideal situation, but then again, neither is global warming.<\/p>\n

There are different ways of meeting that crisis; there are enormous political stakes in how we use those twelve years. There are different visions of climate action, which can put us on a path toward something like socialism or leave many of the extractive systems that define capitalism today in place. There’s nothing baked into capitalism that says it has to run on fossil fuels, and it’s an enormously resilient system. There’s no reason to think that it will be invulnerable to the climate crisis, or that it won’t figure out a way to extract profit off of renewables, solar, and wind.<\/p>\n

These are the stakes we’re talking about when making the case \u2014 as programs like the Green New Deal do \u2014 that the road toward dealing with the climate crisis should be one of non-reformist reforms, to use Andr\u00e9 Gorz’s framing<\/a>. We want a better world as socialists. The ultimate goal is to transcend capitalism, but we have a really short-term problem that gets lost in the mainstream liberal thinking about the climate crisis and how to take it on, which is that capitalism as a logic is incompatible with dealing with the climate crisis because it has a constant thirst for expansion.<\/p>\n