Fast capitalism guarantees extinction—climate change, disease, pollution—try or die for degrowth

The English edition of this book is quite different from its three editions in Portuguese (2015–2018). With the exception of the final three chapters, all the others have been partially or totally rewritten and enriched with new data, analyses, and projections. Since 2018, fresh scientific knowledge has further reinforced the perception of how much faster capitalism’s inherently expansive mode of functioning is destroying our bountiful biosphere and changing the stable climate of the last twelve millennia that has made mankind’s material and spiritual journey during the Holocene possible. A global environmental collapse is slowly unfolding and its first unequivocal signs are already here. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have experienced the most lethal heatwaves, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires ever recorded. We are witnessing accelerating defaunation and species extinctions in all taxonomic groups, less fertile soils, desertification, growing food insecurity, sea level rise at an unexpected speed, and the emergence of millions of people who fall into a new category of refugees – climate refugees. We are also suffering unprecedented sanitary crises, with increasing antibiotic resistance and the cancer burden jumping to 18.1 million new cases in 2018, up from 12.6 million cases in 2012 (+44%), more threatening pandemics such as Covid-19, more devastating plagues such as Africa and Asia and South America’s recent locust outbreak, more widespread pollution, intoxication, and hormonal disturbances. This new world is accurately portrayed not only by the flourishing dystopian fiction of the last decades, but also, and with even darker tones, by a growing sum of converging scientific data and projections. Acceleration is maybe the most defining feature of our time. In 2018, I drew attention to the fact that what had been previously expected to occur only at the end of the century was then expected by mid-century. These imbalances include a global warming of at least 2 °C above the pre-industrial period, the disappearance of several tropical forests, the transition of the eastern and southern parts of the Amazon forest to a savanna vegetation, the first iceless September in the Arctic, extensive thawing of land and seabed permafrost, global mean sea level rise of over 50 cm (above the 2000 level), and large-scale extinctions of species. This English edition shows that the possibility of these occurrences is now being projected for the second quarter of the century. The historical cycle of twentieth-century capitalism’s relative material success pertains to… the twentieth century. The world of which our parents and grandparents were beneficiaries has ended. GDP growth rates are now steadily decreasing and, most importantly, economic growth no longer translates into a better quality of life. No significant social improvement is possible in a rapidly deteriorating environment. The so-called “emerging” economies, such as those of India and China, are typically trapped in a devastating machine that is, in reality, making them sink more deeply, and before other countries, into extreme levels of pollution, very serious public health crises, lethal climactic anomalies, and acute water scarcity. Their high growth rates have, in short, put them at the forefront of the environmental nightmare with which our planetary society is contending. The truth is that the curve measuring environmental costs against the economic benefits of capitalism has irreversibly entered into a negative phase. Despite this, there are still those who argue that global warming, deforestation, biodiversity loss, pollution, and increasing intoxication of organisms are the price to pay for economic growth. They persist in the belief that states and corporations can be “educated” to have a more environmentally sustainable behavior. L’éducation fait tout hails the long-living enlightenment tenet... Most are also deluded by the empty words of the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, and the New  York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), among other texts that delight diplomats who are experts at negotiating new targets to reduce devastation, as long as they do not undermine the growth plans of corporations and their governments. Proceed on the path of GDP growth and fit back into the biosphere, thanks to the miraculous formulas of “sustainable capitalism”! Not many escape this magical thinking. But the few who do, know that any given quantity that grows at 2% rate per year doubles every 35  years, or every 23 years if it grows at 3% yearly. They also know that there is no available or future technology capable of allowing for more indiscriminate economic growth without having a further impact on the biosphere and on a climate that is already transitioning towards an additional 1 °C above the current averages. In short, these few people know that there is no longer a chance of escaping a cascade of socioenvironmental disasters unless we radically redefine the meaning and purpose of economic activity, reduce social inequality, and enforce democratic control of strategic investments. This means putting a new economy at the service of reducing environmental impact. This also means investing in widespread sanitation infrastructure, in local and organic agriculture, and in public policies of demographic degrowth, beginning with the right to free and state-assisted access to all forms of contraception and termination of unwanted pregnancies. In the history of mankind, there is no record of a rupture in the growth paradigm, nor of changes of this magnitude and at such speed. There is no record because such rupture and such changes have never been necessary. Now, they are. It is not a question of underestimating the extreme difficulty of putting this program into practice. But nothing can be considered impossible when what is at stake is the fate of our societies, if not our species. The few who perceive the causal relationship, in essence a very simple one, between corporate expansion and environmental collapse in a Preface to the English Edition ix finite world are growing in number and in persuasion. And they are beginning to have a weight on the balance. Not yet, it is true, on the balance of political power, but at least on the balance of ideas, and especially in the growing conviction that capitalism’s obsolete economic and political recipe will not offer a way out of the impasse and challenges posed by the Anthropocene. A new radicalism of philosophical thought and political action is required in our times. We need a recovered confidence, reborn from the ashes, that we, as a society, are capable of overcoming capitalism in the direction of a new social contract founded on a natural contract, as proposed by Michel Serres, among others. No social justice project is politically conceivable in a scorched Earth. This book seeks to raise a more acute awareness of the extreme gravity of our situation. Its aim is also to add more evidence to the fact, already highlighted by two or three generations of scholars, that “sustainable capitalism” is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is the disease. It cannot offer, therefore, any credible therapy to mitigate the ongoing environmental collapse. We are, of course, guided by science, but the question of whether societies will be able to significantly mitigate this collapse is not a scientific one. “Rather it is a question,” as pointed out by Damon Matthews and colleagues (2018), “of what we believe human societies to be capable of achieving.” The ultimate hope of this book is to contribute in some way so that this belief does not falter among its readers.