{"id":10842,"date":"2023-10-15T13:38:33","date_gmt":"2023-10-15T11:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/?p=10842"},"modified":"2023-10-15T16:53:18","modified_gmt":"2023-10-15T14:53:18","slug":"jeremy-lent-slon-v-pokoji-aneb-reseni-klimaticke-krize-vyzaduje-konec-kapitalismu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/jeremy-lent-slon-v-pokoji-aneb-reseni-klimaticke-krize-vyzaduje-konec-kapitalismu\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeremy Lent: "The Elephant in the Room" or Solving the Climate Crisis Requires the End of Capitalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeremy Lent is an American philosopher, writer, and lecturer whose work explores the root causes of our civilization's existential crisis and seeks ways to create a life-sustaining future. He explores this in depth in his recently published book The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and traditional Wisdom to find our Place in the Universe<\/em> 2021). In this essay, published in Salon magazine (October 9, 2021), he argues that it is time for us to admit that solving the climate crisis will require a fundamental shift away from our current growth-driven, corporate-dominated global system. Translation: Ji\u0159\u00ed Zem\u00e1nek. More at jeremylent.com<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The global debate on climate change has largely ignored the \u201celephant in the room.\u201d It\u2019s strange because this elephant is so big, obvious, and all-encompassing that politicians and executives have to go to great lengths to avoid naming it publicly. That elephant is called capitalism, and it\u2019s high time we acknowledged that as long as capitalism is the dominant economic system in our globalized world, the climate crisis will not be solved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the UN\u2019s landmark climate talks, known as COP26, approach in early November 2021, the public has become increasingly aware that the stakes have never been higher. Once ominous warnings of future climate shocks caused by fires, floods and droughts have now become a staple of daily news. Yet governments are failing to meet their own emissions commitments under the Paris Agreement of six years ago, which they themselves have acknowledged are insufficient. Renowned Earth scientists are increasingly warning not only of the devastating impacts of climate disruption on our daily lives, but also of the potential collapse of civilization itself unless we drastically change course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elephant in the room<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And while humanity faces perhaps the greatest existential crisis in its history, the public debate on climate barely mentions the underlying economic system that got us to this point and that continues to drive us further down the drain. Since its inception in the 17th century, when the first shareholder-owned limited liability companies were created, capitalism has been based on treating the planet as a resource to be exploited \u2013 its primary goal being to maximize profits from that exploitation as quickly and as widely as possible. Current mainstream strategies for addressing the twin crises of climate collapse and ecological overshoot without changing the underlying system of global capitalism, based on growth, are structurally inadequate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea of \u201cgreen growth\u201d is promoted by many development advisers and is even included in the official UN agenda for \u201csustainable development,\u201d but it has proven to be an illusion. Ecomodernists and others who profit from growth in the short term often argue that, through technological innovation, global economic output can be \u201cabsolutely decoupled\u201d from resource use and carbon emissions, allowing for unlimited growth on a finite planet. However, careful analysis shows that this has not yet happened, and even the most aggressive assumptions of greater efficiency would still lead to unsustainable consumption of global resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, the root cause is the very nature of capitalism. In capitalism, which has now become the default global economic context for virtually all human enterprise, efficiency improvements intended to reduce resource consumption inevitably become a springboard for further exploitation, which paradoxically leads to increased rather than reduced consumption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This dynamic, known as Jevons\u2019s paradox, was first recognized in the 19th century by economist William Stanley Jevons, who showed that James Watts\u2019s steam engine, which greatly increased the efficiency of coal-fired engines, paradoxically caused a dramatic increase in coal consumption, even as it reduced the amount of coal needed for a particular use. Jevons\u2019s paradox has since been shown to be true in an endless number of areas, from the invention of the cotton gin in the nineteenth century, which led to an increase in slavery in the American South instead of a decrease, to the improvements in the fuel efficiency of automobiles, which encouraged people to drive longer distances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we generalize Jevons\u2019s paradox to the global marketplace, we begin to see that it is not really a paradox at all, but rather a built-in defining characteristic of capitalism. Shareholder-owned corporations, as the main actors in global capitalism, are legally structured around the overarching imperative of maximizing shareholder returns first and foremost. While they are granted legal \u201cpersonhood\u201d rights in many jurisdictions, if they were truly human they would be diagnosed as psychopaths, ruthlessly pursuing their goal regardless of the collateral damage they may cause. Of the one hundred largest economies today, sixty-nine are multinational corporations, which together constitute a relentless force with a single overriding goal: to rapidly convert humanity and the rest of life into food for the endless expansion of profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In global capitalism, this dynamic holds even without the involvement of multinational corporations. Take bitcoin, for example. Originally designed after the global financial crash of 2008 to wrest the monetary power of money from the control of central banks, the currency relies on building trust through what\u2019s known as \u201cmining,\u201d a process that allows anyone to verify a transaction by solving increasingly complex mathematical equations and receive new bitcoins in return. In theory, it\u2019s a great idea. In practice, however, the unfettered market for bitcoin mining has led to a frenzied competition to solve increasingly complex equations, with the vast warehouses housing the \u201cplatforms\u201d of advanced computers consuming vast amounts of electricity. As a result, the carbon emissions from bitcoin processing are now equivalent to those of a medium-sized country like Sweden or Argentina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Since 1978, real progress has been declining even as GDP continues to grow (Credit: Kubiszewski et al., Beyond GDP: GDP: Measuring and Achieving Real Global Progress).
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

An economy based on constant growth<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The relentless pursuit of profit growth, which takes precedence over all other considerations, is reflected in the world\u2019s stock markets, where companies are valued not by their contribution to society but by investors\u2019 expectations of future profit growth. Similarly, when aggregated into national accounts, the main indicator used to measure the performance of politicians is the growth of gross domestic product (GDP). While GDP is commonly assumed to correlate with social well-being, once basic material needs are met, this is not the case. GDP merely measures the rate at which a society transforms nature and human activity into a money economy, regardless of the quality of life that results. Everything that causes any economic activity, good or bad, contributes to GDP. When researchers developed a measure called the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) that captures the qualitative components of well-being, they found that there was a dramatic difference between the two measures. The GPI peaked in 1978 and has been steadily declining ever since, even as GDP continues to accelerate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the mainstream discourse is largely silent on the possibility of shifting our economy away from constant growth. In preparation for the COP26 climate conference, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has developed five scenarios that explore possible pathways that could lead to different outcomes for global warming this century: from an optimistic path of just 1.5\u00b0C to a likely catastrophic path of 4.5\u00b0C. One of the most critical variables in these scenarios is the amount of carbon reduction achieved through negative emissions, which relies on the massive deployment of unproven technologies. Keeping global warming below 2\u00b0C \u2013 the minimum target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement \u2013 involves, according to the IPCC, the heroic assumption that we will remove 730 billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere this century. This enormous amount is roughly twenty times the total current annual emissions from all fossil fuel use. Such an assumption is closer to science fiction than to any rigorous analysis worthy of the model on which our civilization bases its entire future. While the IPCC seems willing to model humanity\u2019s fate on an impossible dream, none of its scenarios explore what could be achieved by gradually reducing global GDP every year. Such a scenario was deemed too improbable by the IPCC community to even consider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a serious error on the part of the IPCC. Climate scientists who have modeled the planned reduction in GDP show that keeping global warming below 1.5\u00b0C this century is potentially achievable under this scenario, with a significantly reduced reliance on speculative carbon-reduction technologies. Leading economists have shown that a carefully managed \u201cpost-growth\u201d plan could lead to improved quality of life, reduced inequality, and a healthier environment. But it would undermine the fundamental business of capitalism \u2013 the pursuit of endless growth that has led to our current state of obscene inequality, threatened ecological collapse, and climate meltdown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A path to disaster based on profit<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until this \u201celephant in the room\u201d is addressed, our world will continue to spiral toward disaster, even as politicians and technocrats move from one salvation story to the next. Along with the myth of \u201cgreen growth,\u201d we are told that the solution lies in monetizing \u201cecosystem services\u201d and incorporating them into business decisions\u2014even though this approach has been shown to be deeply flawed, often counterproductive, and ultimately self-defeating. For example, wetlands may have value in protecting a city from flooding. However, if they were drained and the reclaimed land were used to build a new luxury resort, it could be more lucrative. And that\u2019s the end of the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new moniker for corporate titans at the World Economic Forum is \u201cstakeholder capitalism\u201d: a catchy term that seems to suggest that stakeholders other than investors will play a role in determining corporate priorities, but in reality it is a deeply anti-democratic process in which corporations are taking an ever-increasing role in global governance. This month, the UN Summit on Food Systems was effectively hijacked by the same giant corporations, including Nestl\u00e9 and Bayer, that are largely responsible for the very problems the summit was supposed to address \u2013 leading to a widespread boycott by hundreds of civil society and indigenous groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The UN Summit on Food Systems was essentially controlled by corporate interests (Source: Food Systems for People).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With COP26 officially announcing net-zero targets that are decades away and implicitly based on a combination of corporate procrastination and speculative technology, we can expect the climate crisis to deepen. Ultimately, if negative-emission technologies fail to live up to their grandiose expectations, the same voices that currently advocate reliance on them will support the techno-dystopian idea of geoengineering\u2014that is, large-scale, planet-changing engineering projects designed to temporarily manipulate the climate and thus delay climate apocalypse. One leading candidate for geoengineering, funded by Bill Gates, envisions spraying particles into the stratosphere to cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space. But the risks involved are enormous, including the likelihood that it will trigger extreme changes in precipitation around the world. Moreover, once this spraying had begun, it could never be stopped without immediate catastrophic back-heating; it would not prevent further ocean acidification and could turn blue skies into a perpetually hazy haze. Despite these concerns, geoengineering is beginning to be seriously discussed at UN meetings and in journals such as The Economist <\/em>They predict that, since geoengineering would not disrupt ongoing economic growth, its implementation is more likely than drastic and binding emissions reductions that would prevent climate catastrophe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is an alternative<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is the \u201celephant in the room\u201d so rarely mentioned in mainstream discourse? One reason is that since the fall of communism and the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, it has been assumed that \u201cthere is no alternative,\u201d as Margaret Thatcher famously declared. Even committed environmentalists like Business Green are quick to dismiss criticism of our growth-based economic system as \u201cknee-jerk anti-capitalist agitation.\u201d However, the conventional dichotomy between capitalism and socialism, to which such conversations inevitably lead, is no longer useful. Old-fashioned socialism was just as ready to swallow the Earth as capitalism, it differed mainly in how the pie should be divided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is an alternative. A wide range of progressive thinkers are exploring the possibilities of replacing our destructive global economic system with one that offers the potential for sustainability, greater justice, and human flourishing. Degrowth advocates show that it is possible to achieve planned reductions in energy and resource consumption while reducing inequality and improving human well-being. Economic models such as Kate Raworth\u2019s \u201cdoughnut economics\u201d offer a coherent alternative to the classic outdated framework that ignores fundamental principles of human nature and humanity\u2019s role in the Earth system. Meanwhile, large-scale cooperatives such as Mondragon in Spain are showing that it is possible for companies to effectively meet human needs without resorting to a shareholder-based profit model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another reason people ignore the \u201celephant in the room,\u201d even when they know it\u2019s there, is that we don\u2019t have time for structural change. The climate emergency is already upon us, and we need to focus on actions that can happen right now. That\u2019s true, and nothing in this article should be taken as a reason to avoid the drastic and immediate changes that need to be made in business and consumer practices. These are indeed necessary\u2014but they are insufficient. Ultimately, our global civilization must begin to transform itself into one that is not based on wealth creation through extraction, but one that is built on fundamental principles that can create the conditions for long-term prosperity on a restored Earth\u2014an ecological civilization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even in the short term, there are countless steps that can be taken to put our civilization on a life-sustaining path. Indigenous peoples around the world, who are on the front lines of the climate crisis, desperately need support to defend the biodiverse ecosystems they live in from the attacks of extractive corporations. There is currently a growing campaign to criminalize the widespread destruction of natural living systems by introducing an ecocide law that would be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court in the same way as genocide. The powers of transnational corporations themselves need to be addressed, ultimately by having their charters converted to a triple bottom line \u2013 people, planet and profits \u2013 and subject to strong enforcement powers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The necessary transformation may take decades, but the process must begin now, with a clear and distinct realization that capitalism as such must be replaced by a system based on pro-life values. Don\u2019t expect these issues to be discussed at the official COP26 session. But look beyond the hallowed halls and you will hear the voices of those who advocate for the continued flourishing of life on Earth. Only when their ideas are seriously debated in the main halls of a future COP can we begin to harbor authentic hope that our civilization may finally be able to turn away from the abyss it is currently rapidly approaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Indigenous people on the front lines of the climate emergency desperately need support (Source: Amazon Watch | Kamikia Kisedje)<\/figcaption><\/figure>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeremy Lent is an American philosopher, writer, and lecturer who explores the root causes of our civilization\u2019s existential crisis and seeks ways to create a life-sustaining future. He explores this in depth in his recently published book The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and traditional Wisdom to find our Place in the Universe. Continue reading Jeremy Lent: "The Elephant in the Room" or Solving the Climate Crisis Requires the End of Capitalism<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[90,59],"class_list":["post-10842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-texty","tag-jeremy-lent","tag-preklady","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10842"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10858,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10842\/revisions\/10858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}