Capitalism creates oil shortages through internal contradictions that make warming inevitable --- capitalist responses to climate change fail --- means only the aff can solve.

My interpretation of oil in late capitalism implies a political ecology reading of the Marxian theory of the falling rate of profit. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is often interpreted as resulting from intercapitalist competition or overproduction of (fixed) capital.147 Here, Jason Moore’s holistic interpretation of underproduction crises is relevant. His model of capitalism as a regime underpinned by cheap nature creates the foundations for a political ecology of the falling rate of profit. This theorization is especially relevant when discussing world accumulation. Moore shows that an ecological surplus—delivering cheap labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials to the core sites of world accumulation—can check the tendency for global profitability to decline. Conversely, a falling ecological surplus can squeeze global accumulation.148 This has implications for theory and history that need to be examined. As noted earlier, time series data for rates of profit and various fossil fuel prices indeed suggest that drastic upswings in fossil energy prices contribute to drops in US and world profitability. The underlying logic of this argument is that—in dialectic with rising fixed capital costs—rising energy costs affect the OCC on the circulating side. To show the deeper theoretical meaning of this tension in the era of climate change, I work through the “materialized” organic composition of capital.149 The organic composition of capital here is defined not as the ratio of constant to variable capital. Rather it is the “ratio of dead to living labor.”150 In other words, the OCC is the ratio of constant capital, c, to all living labor, l, embodied in the commodity, OCC = c/l. In turn, l is the sum of variable capital and surplus value, l = v + s (where v is variable capital and s is surplus value). The rate of exploitation e = s/l is the share of profits in newly created value. The share of wages in all living labor, then, is v/l = 1 − e. The profit rate r is r=ProfitTotal Capital=Rate of ExploitationOrganic Composition+Wage Share=slcl+vl=eOCC+(1−e). Constant capital is composed of both fixed capital (machinery and infrastructure) and circulating capital (raw materials and energy). Unless its effect is negated by decline in fixed capital costs or by a rising rate of exploitation, higher circulating capital costs resulting from rising raw material and energy prices mean higher constant capital costs and lower profit rates.151 In line with the definition used above, constant capital is the sum of fixed (f) and circulating (n) capital c = f + n. An ecologically focused version of the OCC is the ratio of these two components to living labor, OCC = f/l + n/l. Abstracting from the questions of turnover time, unless there is a corresponding decline in the cost of fixed capital or a compensatory rise in the rate of exploitation, an increase in the costs of circulating inputs n that raises the general organic composition will put pressure on the profit rate: ⎡⎣ef+nl+(1−e)⎤⎦t>⎡⎣ef+(n+Δn)l+(1−e)⎤⎦t+1. The most significant insight here is the secular trend that is expected from this tension between circulating capital costs and profitability. The notion of the materialized composition of capital is useful here. First, note that the inverse of the materialized OCC describes the maximum profit rate: rmax=lc. This maximum is the limiting case where all living labor is captured as profits and workers live on air. A core insight, then, is that a tendential rise of the materialized composition—because of disappearing cheap circulating capital sources—implies a secular decline in the maximum rate of profit.152 This is a plausible consequence of all those productivity and yield declines expected to occur if the warming trend continues.153 Those declines will make inputs costlier to produce. In the coming decades, then, a rising materialized composition means that profitability revival would fall mostly on the capacity of capitalists to increase the share of profits in value added. As the system becomes increasingly dominated by primitive accumulation strategies, taking becomes more and more central than making. In some specific places this tendency is already visible.154 In the short run, capital can try to resolve this issue by pushing deeper into high-risk areas to extract more energy, recreating a new ecological surplus. This strategy also confronts limits. First, each increase in petroleum output fuels warming trends. Second, even the lowest annual oil prices of the neoliberal era are higher than the highest prices of the post–World War II.155 Although there might be cycles of relatively low oil prices, the secular trend is for the price floor to move up, just as the maximum profitability of the US economy, to cite one example, is going down. Capital accumulation cannot coexist with these conditions. Capital’s own structural requirement of cheap energy makes it incapable of reducing carbon emissions or confronting the effects of climate change. Marx’s model of the falling rate of profit predicts that—in the absence of significant declines in other input costs—rising costs of a strategic circulating constant capital will contribute to accumulation crises. However, low-priced oil boosts accumulation and CO2 emissions keep on their upward trajectory. As of today, capital is unable to overcome this double bind. Conclusion Examining the historical trajectory of oil in late capitalism shows that the current climate crisis is not an “external shock” on the global ecology. Rather, it is part of historical capitalism’s own internal dynamics. The rise of US-led accumulation in the twentieth century created a systemic demand for a growing ecological surplus. Checking the tendential rise in the OCC in the post–World War II era, massive amounts of oil fed global energy and transportation systems. Oil-fueled accumulation, then, was superimposed on coal-based accumulation to fuel the new boom. The accumulation of systemic contradictions, however, advanced further as this new source of CO2 emissions was added on top of coal. Oil was both an overcoming of the limits of coal and an element in the intensification of the greenhouse effect. The 1970s concatenation of oil price hikes and profitability decline showed the first signs of the contradictory relation between oil and accumulation. The generalized financialization of trade and accumulation combined with a neoliberal attack on workers emerged in the 1980s as a way out of the 1970s slump. But this way out only inaugurated a period of deeper crisis. In this context, historical capitalism is confronting a structural crisis, as oil-fueled accumulation and global warming contribute to a structural squeeze on profitability prospects. Any capitalist response to climate change, moreover, will intensify the system’s crisis tendencies. Even if emissions are brought to zero, there is warming that we would have to confront. If we confront such irreversible changes under a capitalist regime, it will be in a manner that will likely take us to another dangerous situation. A genuine response to the climate dimension of crisis will necessarily have anti-capitalist elements.156 In dialectical fashion, just as capitalist history has shaped Earth’s climate, climate history now implies a transformation of the present world-ecological regime. In that plausible scenario, the best alternative is still one that uses technologies critically and subordinates production to people’s needs, ecological sustainability, and democratic planning.