The Climate Coup. Mark Alizart

of the reasons for that are well known. Big corporations continue to oppose climate policies for short-term profit, if not up front then behind the scenes. Bad habits in agriculture and the food industry are tough to rein in. Pandering to populations aggrieved at the new norms and constraints called for by any politics with a vague sense of social responsibility is still fruitful. But this book argues there is more: all these years when environmentalism was gaining traction, the rejection of environmentalism has grown too, that is, the rejection of the very idea the world needs to be saved from climate breakdown. Some people now embrace climate breakdown; they desire it.

      A huge driver of the Trump vote relied in both presidential elections on the idea that climate change is not only not real or not dangerous, but actually ‘does good’, to quote former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott,¹ inasmuch as it ‘does bad’ to others. With characteristic political flair, the former president mused, to the great satisfaction of his electoral base, about the fact that rising sea levels would wreak havoc upon his enemies, the ‘coastal elites’.² Likewise, there is no other way to understand why Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil, would encourage the burning down of the Amazon forest, all the while knowing perfectly well what kind of a disaster it is for the rest of the earth. Or why Australia’s current prime minister, Scott Morrison, watched the bush burn from his swimming pool in Hawaii as if it were some kind of reality show to be enjoyed rather than a disaster to be averted.

This new perspective on climate change is, in effect, a huge shift in the politics needed to fight it and a new front environmentalists have to fight upon. We can no longer believe that convincing the public that climate change is real and dangerous is enough to make a difference. Neither can we imagine that the only resistances to overcome in order to fight it are technical or financial. As crazy as it seems, we now have to address the fundamental question as to even why climate change should be averted. Unless we manage to do it, the earth is – literally – toast.

Notes

      1 1. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/oct/10/tony-abbott-says-climate-change-is-probably-doing-good.

      2 2. ‘A massive 200 billion dollar sea wall, built around New York to protect it from rare storms, is a costly, foolish & environmentally unfriendly idea that, when needed, probably won’t work anyway. It will also look terrible. Sorry, you’ll just have to get your mops & buckets ready!’, @realdonaldtrump, 19 January 2020.

2 Short the World

      Greta Thunberg declared before an assembly of heads of state at the UN in September 2019 that inaction on ecology could only have two causes: ‘ignorance’ or ‘evil’.¹ Unfortunately she immediately ruled out the second possibility. One can well understand why. It is always a delicate matter to impute bad intentions to someone, all the more so when it comes to something as insane as wanting climate crisis to get worse. But perhaps it’s precisely a matter of understanding how such an intention may not be quite so insane.

There are in fact many ways in which the ongoing climate breakdown and collapse of biodiversity might benefit certain individuals and interest groups. Among the first that come to mind are speculators, short sellers and ‘disaster capitalists’.

As Naomi Klein says on the subject of Hurricane Katrina in The Shock Doctrine, in words reminiscent of Rosa Luxemburg, the deluge that struck Louisiana in 2005 offered developers a way to make an easy profit off the funds allocated for reconstruction and presented an opportunity for the governor to ‘gentrify’ the state by expropriating former residents, the majority of them black and poor.² Similarly, every global-warming-related heatwave that hits an agricultural region spells profit for the industrialists who make the drought-resistant seeds or the brokers that own the much-needed water which farmers have to buy. It’s only one step from this to positively ‘wanting’ heatwaves, a step now being taken cheerfully by those profiting from the privatization of water in California or Australia, and whose objective interests now happily coincide with global warming.³ The ecological crisis is a godsend that allows ‘scavenger capitalism’ to extend its grip over the entire planet. In this poker game, the last man standing at the world table cleans up, leaving the other players with nothing. Indeed, the effects of climate breakdown will not be evenly felt. What’s coming is not a global collapse, but a multitude of disasters large and small, spread over time and unevenly distributed across the surface of the planet. In other words, what is coming is chaos – and with it, opportunities for profit for those hovering over it. That is, essentially, white men living in temperate climates and their cronies, the other oligarchs and gerontocrats of the world living in air-conditioned jets.

Environmentalists often say that the ecological crisis proves capitalism is unfit to rule the world, and that the leaders and lobbyists denying it are pushing our societies over a cliff, in effect committing global suicide. But nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism is not suicidal, never has been. From a capitalist perspective, the ecological crisis only demonstrates that capitalism doesn’t work for 6 billion people, meaning that it would with 1 or 2 billion people less on the earth. By the time a third of humanity had perished from hunger, thirst, heat, drowning or bullets, pressure on the ecosystem would have dropped so substantially that we could go back to business as usual! Hollywood has made no mystery of the fact that this is how many in developed countries already envisage the future. In the penultimate film in the Avengers franchise, Infinity Wars, a sort of reincarnation of Malthus named Thanos decides that the only way to save the planet from collapse is to eliminate one half of all humans on the planet. And against all odds, he succeeds!

Capitalism is not made up of a homogeneous set of interests either. Needless to say, most corporations are interested in peace, and many are heavily invested in green technologies. It is obvious that the vast majority of businesses will be direly affected by climate change, even in Western countries. But in the same way that COVID-19 heavily affected small independent shops while spelling increased profits for Amazon, the ecological crisis will see money move from one set of owners to another. Capitalism is not (only) the business of ‘always more’. ‘Trees don’t grow to the sky’ was a banker’s proverb before becoming the motto of the Club of Rome. As Joseph Schumpeter said, capitalism is ‘a perennial gale of creative destruction’, where the destruction plays a role just as important as the creation. Not only does it make it possible to take advantage of the upturn that will follow the fall, but it allows a purging of the system. For capitalism is essentially a production of fictitious wealth via indebtedness. In the growth phase, the capitalist ‘takes risks’, which justifies their drawing dividends. But there comes a moment when the risk goes beyond what the investor can take on, because debt grows geometrically whereas the dividend grows arithmetically. There must come a moment of destruction which, in reality, is the moment of the transfer of risk. In a crash or a war, the capitalist passes off risk on to the minority shareholder or the taxpayer. Profits are privatized but losses are nationalized, as the saying goes. This is the very moment we are living through today. Debt has reached horrendous proportions. Rates of return are capped. The question now is who is going to foot the bill, or more exactly how we are going to get rid of this massive bad debt, through what kind of disaster. Ecological crisis fits the bill perfectly.

So, basically, a morally agnostic capitalist is faced with a very rational cost/benefit alternative: on the one hand, he can choose to fight global warming, which means finding substitutes for all the petroleum derivatives now used in the plastic, chemical and pharmaceutical industries, at cost and without any guarantee of success, only to save a few animal species, keep sea levels stable and avoid unnecessary famines in Africa – in other words, to maintain the status quo. Or he can choose to leave his beloved ‘invisible hand’ to do the job of finding a new market equilibrium, and make a profit both on the way up and on the way down, by withdrawing investments from those regions at risk of climate breakdown at the most opportune moment while investing, on the contrary, in seeds, water and even weapons in anticipation