If fossil fuels keep burning at present rates, we are headed for apocalyptic civilisational collapse. Perhaps even more strangely, there is no longer much serious disagreement about this claim. It’s not just that the scientific consensus is so overwhelming: we can also increasingly see the evidence for ourselves. Deadly weather events are striking more regularly and more severely everywhere we look. Farmers are experiencing the impact of rising temperatures, unstable weather patterns and biodiversity loss first-hand. Most world leaders are committed to slashing carbon emissions. “There’s no denying the science,” Simon Harris tells us, “The planet’s on fire.” But every year, the targets are missed, fossil fuels generate colossal profits, and global carbon emissions continue to grow.
How can this be? Humanity itself appears to be locked in a grisly death-match, struggling desperately for its very survival. But against what enemy? What is this powerful force fighting humankind to extinction? Some people would have us believe that the answer is ourselves: that we are intrinsically greedy creatures, doomed to destroy whatever we touch. In reality, however, human beings have lived on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, and have only been emitting dangerous levels of carbon dioxide since the birth of industrialism in the 18th century. Most of the increase in atmospheric carbon is far more recent still. A staggering proportion dates to the last few decades alone – when the danger of climate change was already well understood. If our overheating planet is a result of human greed, then it must be a special kind of greed, a kind that emerged puzzlingly late in the long history of our species and then with a sudden vengeance. But we can give it a better and more specific name: capitalism.
Multinational corporations are destroying Earth for profit. If we want real change, we have to be willing to threaten those profits
Unlike other ways of organising economic life, the capitalist system produces – and is dependent on – exponential growth. Before the era of industrial capitalism, economic output did not tend to change much from decade to decade, or even century to century. The same fields produced roughly the same yields in 1200 as in 1600. The emergence of capitalism changed all that. Today, just as in the era of the steam engine, capitalist economies must grow constantly, and not toward some final state of perfect abundance, but ever onward: more resources, more production, more consumption, always more. Growth means return on investment, and return on investment is the bedrock of the capitalist economy. Those with capital to invest want their investment to grow, not because they are evil or demented, but because that is the basic principle of investment itself. As the political philosopher Kohei Saito explains, capitalism cannot just “slow down”. The drive to growth is the engine of the system. And that engine, like most others, runs on fossil fuels.
Of course, this picture is incomplete. Coal, oil and gas are just inanimate substances, with no intrinsic power to act on our economy. In order for fossil fuels to generate profit, people must exchange money for them or for the goods they help to produce. And indeed people do! From long-haul flights to luxury cars to disposable fast fashion, wealthy consumers are more than willing to desecrate our planet for their own entertainment and convenience. But consumption in and of itself, no matter how wasteful, does not produce or depend on exponential growth. If you buy 10 shirts this year, no economic logic impels you to buy 12 or 15 next year. Growth is the principle of the capitalist, not the consumer. And the disparity between the needs of people and the needs of capital is staring us in the face. Here in Ireland, while many families struggle to pay energy bills, private corporate data centres now use more electricity than all urban households combined.
What about democracy? Well, whose? Our political system is not a single global democracy, after all, but a hierarchy of unequal nations. In practice, a handful of voters in US swing states have more power to determine the speed and scale of planetary overheating than billions of other people on Earth. American colonists famously rebelled against the practice of “taxation without representation”. Is environmental devastation without representation any different? Even if carbon emissions were thoroughly democratically determined – which they are not – why would voters in the world’s richest countries have the right to poison the air, sea, soil and rivers for the entire population of Earth? Carbon emitted in the US and Europe wreaks havoc in Pakistan, in Haiti, in Somalia, in the Philippines. But the people of these nations have no right to vote in American or European elections. As a way of arranging our collective political life, that looks less like democracy and more like another political system familiar to us here in Ireland: empire.
Carbon molecules, however, know nothing of electoral politics or national sovereignty. The most heavily armed and gruesomely policed borders on Earth are effortlessly disrespected by atmospheric carbon. We may think of ourselves first and foremost as citizens of nations and participants in national democracies. But when it comes to the breakdown of planetary ecosystems, we are all first and foremost inhabitants of this shared Earth. The poorest people in the world – who work in sweatshops, fields and mines to enrich the wealthiest – are, as we know, already suffering the earliest and harshest climate shocks. But make no mistake: this crisis is coming for everyone. Devastating floods like those that have just claimed hundreds of lives in Valencia are growing more frequent and more disastrous. Destructive storms are increasing in regularity and intensity. In 2023 alone, an estimated 47,000 Europeans died as a result of extreme heat. And this is just the beginning.
Voters concerned about the future of human life on Earth can still choose to support the few radical left-wing parties that are trying to understand the scale of the challenge, like People Before Profit here in Ireland. Equally, consumers who are worried about the climate can reduce their own impact on carbon emissions by cutting out flights, eating less or no meat, buying fewer unnecessary items, and so on. These are in no way meaningless gestures, but neither are they sufficient to bring the fossil-fuel establishment to its knees. Global ecosystem breakdown and soaring temperatures require us to think outside – and against – the framework of our current political system. If we want the children of today to have a future on this planet, we cannot keep obediently colouring inside the lines.
So what’s left? Street protests, petitions, public campaigns? Throwing soup in public art galleries? But these are all tactics aimed at shifting public discourse. Multinational corporations are not destroying Earth because it endears them to the public: they are destroying Earth for profit. If we want real change, we have to be willing to threaten those profits – and to learn from the people who have. Here in Co Mayo, activists with the organisation Shell to Sea worked for more than a decade to oppose the construction of a local gas pipeline and refinery by the fossil-fuel giant Shell. Starting in 2005, the campaign picketed the construction sites, prevented workers from entering, and even sabotaged infrastructure, tearing up wooden roads laid over the bogland. Protesters were met with violence and intimidation from gardaí and private security contractors, but they persisted. By 2012 it was estimated that the delays caused by community action had tripled the cost of the project overall. Yes, the pipeline was ultimately built. But in a market economy, costly delays alone can make investment less attractive. If one local group of committed activists can cost Shell €1 billion or more, imagine how much a dozen or a hundred such groups could achieve.
What gives multinational corporations the right to pollute the air we breathe, drain our groundwater and exhaust our planet’s dwindling resources – and deprives us of the right to stop them? One powerful idea: private property. Because the rich own things, and the poor do not, it is legal for the rich to destroy Earth and illegal for the poor to stop them. In his 2021 book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the Swedish theorist and academic Andreas Malm wrote: “Property does not stand above the earth; there is no technical or natural or divine law that makes it inviolable in this emergency.” Either we confront the system that is threatening our civilisation – or “property will cost us the earth”. Every year, every month, the argument grows more and more difficult to refute. We know what’s already happening around us. And we know what’s coming next. When are we going to have the courage to stop it?
[ Corrib Gas: Was it worth it? Yes.Opens in new window ]
[ Corrib gas timeline: 20 years of protests and controversyOpens in new window ]
Perhaps the best-case scenario is that the children of today, and their children, will look back on us in horror, wondering how so many of us – including myself – could have been so quiescent, disorganised and cowardly when we knew that their lives were at stake. Another equally plausible scenario, of course, is that there will not be very many of them left, and they will not have the leisure to look back on us at all.
Copyright ©2024 Sally Rooney Sally Rooney is a novelist
