Capitalism Made This Mess, and This Mess Will Ruin Capitalism: Interview with Jason W. Moore (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis (Published 2017)
This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow historicization, I argue for the Capitalocene, understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life. In Part I, I pursue two arguments. First, I situate the Anthropocene discourse within Green Thought’s uneasy relationship to the Human/Nature binary, and its reluctance to consider human organizations – like capitalism – as part of nature. Next, I highlight the Anthropocene’s dominant periodization, which meets up with a longstanding environmentalist argument about the Industrial Revolution as the origin of ecological crisis. This ignores early capitalism’s environment-making revolution, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities. While there is no question that environmental change accelerated sharply after 1850, and especially after 1945, it seems equally fruitless to explain these transformations without identifying how they fit into patterns of power, capital and nature established four centuries earlier.
THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: CAPITALISM VS. THE CLIMATE
Energy Law Journal , 2016
Naomi Klein is a public intellectual with a passion for investigating issues affecting the public interest. She is an astute observer of how political and economic power are exercised in fashioning public policy. Klein devoted five years to research, reflection, and writing on climate change and the fossil fuel industry—to understand these phenomena, those who downplay their adverse effects (or doubt that climate change is “man-made”), and those struggling to avoid their adverse effects on their local environs and the future of humanity. Klein concludes that what is required to avoid or mitigate the worst effects of climate change directly clashes with our prevailing capitalist, globalized, free trade paradigms. Her most startling conclusion is that if humanity acts effectively to address climate change and establish a sustainable “steady-state” economy—which it must to survive—the oil and gas industry is doomed. The unanswered question is whether the end of that industry will leave us in a dystopian or utopian future. That question will be answered, Klein believes, and the future unalterably determined, in the next two or three years. (Published Sept. 2014)
Climate change and corporate capitalism
Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations
Climate change and corporate capitalism Climate change is the biggest challenge of our time. It threatens the well-being of hundreds of millions of people today and many billions more in the future … No one and no country will escape the impact of climate change. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (2014) The future looks bleak. As an opening remark, this might seem unduly downbeat; but it is necessarily realistic. Every day we are confronted by fresh evidence that humanity is shuffl ing ever closer to the abyss. New data and studies are now habitually underlined by dramatic events all around the globe. Fundamental assumptions of our weather, our climate, and our ecosystem are collapsing before our eyes. As environmental activist Bill McKibben (2013a : 745) has argued: 'We don't need to imagine the future of climate change, because it is already here.' Of course, the notion of destruction is hardly novel. Any student of economic history knows the idea has been a grim constant in attempts to characterise the relationship between capitalist dynamism and ever-spiralling consumption. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ([ 1848 ] 1998) warned of enforced destruction. Joseph Schumpeter (1942) championed a dauntless culture of creative destruction. Yet we now fi nd ourselves in a new and altogether more frightening era of so-called progress: the age of creative self-destruction. We are destroying ourselves. It is as simple as that. Economic growth and the exploitation of nature have long gone hand-in-hand, but they now constitute the most ill-fated of bedfellows. Climate change, the greatest threat of our time, is the defi nitive manifestation of the well-worn links between progress and devastation. And as we continue to shamble towards a tipping point from which any meaningful return will be utterly impossible, a familiar message rings out from the corporate world: 'business as usual'.
Real-World Economics Review, 2023
Just as we know who was responsible for the slave trade, and who profited from it -- in some cases right down to the specific families and firms -- so too do we know who is responsible for the climate crisis. And we know who has profited from that death drive towards the planetary inferno. In the words of the radical folksinger Utah Phillips, we know who is responsible, and they have names and addresses. This is the spirit of the radical challenge to the Environmentalism of the Rich and its superconcept, the Anthropocene. To them we say, Another biosphere is possible! Real-World Economics Review 105 (2023), 123-134.
Introduction: Book Review Symposium of "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate"
In Naomi Klein’s latest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014), the activist, journalist, and author lays out an argument that will probably be familiar to many readers of Human Geography. Carbon is not the problem, but rather a symptom of the real problem: global capitalism. The purpose of this Human Geography book review symposium is to give serious academic consideration to Klein’s ideas, arguments, and visions of a carbon-free future. Thus in the pages that follow, six geographers—Noel Castree, Juan Declet-Barreto, Leigh Johnson, Wendy Larner, Diana Liverman, and Michael Watts—weigh in with their readings and critiques of Klein’s book. Following these six reviews and concluding the symposium is the full text of the hour-long interview conducted by John Finn with Klein in late 2014.
Climate Change and Capitalism: A Reevaluation
(This article first appeared on the LA Progressive website on 3/22/2024.) Akshat Rathi’s new book, "Climate Capitalism: Winning the Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of Our Age," claims “it’s possible to harness the forces of capitalism to tackle the climate problem” and indicates how on a global scale “the work has already begun.” But only if there is a general recognition that “government policy” will need to play “a crucial role.” He seems to have in mind something like what the economist Joseph Stiglitz has called “progressive capitalism,” which combines a market economy with government regulation. Rathi realizes that his urgings are no guarantee that his wishes will be followed. And future events--one thinks for example of the possible election of Donald Trump--could fatally halt “the race to zero emissions.”