Capitalism structurally and causally drives global warming and environmental destruction. Only we account for how production is organized.

What does it mean to say that capitalism is the principal sociohistorical driver of global warming? At one level, this claim is empirical, a statement of cause and effect. Contrary to the usual vague references to "anthropogenic climate change," it pins the rap not on "humanity" in general but on the class of profit-driven entrepreneurs who engineered the fossil-fueled system of production and transport that released a flood of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That's a claim I shall defend empirically later on, when I turn to the historical portion of my argument. But there is more at work here than historical causality. Capitalism, as I understand it, drives global warming non-accidentally, by virtue of its very structure. It is this strong systematic claim, and not its weaker empirical cousin, that I unpack now.

I begin by preempting a possible misunderstanding. To say that capitalism drives climate change non-accidentally is not to say that ecological crises occur only in capitalist societies. On the contrary, many precapitalist societies have perished as a result of environmental impasses, including some of their own making-as when ancient empires ruined the farmlands on which they depended through deforestation or failure to rotate crops. Likewise, some self-proclaimed postcapitalist societies generated severe environmental damage through relentless quotidian coal-burning and spectacular one-off disasters such as Chernobyl. Such cases show that ecological devastation is not unique to capitalism.

What is unique, however, is the structural character of the link between ecological crisis and capitalist society. Pre capitalist eco-crises occurred in spite of "nature-friendly" worldviews and largely thanks to ignorance--for example, the failure to anticipate the consequences of deforestation and overplanting. They could have been prevented--and some times were--by social learning that prompted shifts in social practice. Nothing in the inherent dynamics of these societies required the practices that spawned the damages. The same is true for self-proclaimed postcapitalist societies. "Really exist ing socialisms," paradigmatically the Soviet Union, practiced unsustainable agricultural and industrial regimens, poison ing the land with chemical fertilizers and fouling the air with CO2. Unlike their precapitalist predecessors, of course, their practices aligned with worldviews that were not at all "nature friendly," and their actions were shaped by ideological commit ments enjoining the "development of the productive forces." What is crucial, however, is that neither those worldviews nor those commitments arose from dynamics internal to socialism. Their roots lay, rather, in the geopolitical soil in which these socialisms germinated--in a world system structured by competition with capitalist societies, by the "catch-up" extractivist mindset that environment fostered, and by the fossil-fueled models of mega-industrialization it favored. To say this is not to let the rulers of these societies off the hook; they will remain forever culpable for disastrous decisions made in bureaucratic authoritarian milieus saturated with fear and obsessed with secrecy-qualities they deliberately cultivated. The point is rather that nothing in the nature of socialist society requires such milieus or such decisions. Absent the prevailing external constraints and internal deformations, such societies could in principle develop sustainable patterns of interaction with nonhuman nature.

The same cannot be said for capitalist societies. They are unique among known social systems in entrenching a deep seated tendency to ecological crisis at their very core. As I shall explain, capitalist societies are primed to generate recurrent environmental crises throughout their history. Unlike those of other societies, their ecological impasses cannot be resolved by increased knowledge or green bona fides. What is required is deep structural transformation.

To see why, we must revisit the concept of capitalism. As we've seen in previous chapters, capitalism is not an economic system but something bigger. More than a way of organizing economic production and exchange, it is also a way of organizing the relation of production and exchange to their non-economic conditions of possibility. It is well understood in many quarters that capitalist societies institutionalize a dedicated economic realm--the realm of a peculiar abstraction known as "value" where commodities are produced on privately owned means of production by exploited wage laborers and sold on price-setting markets by private firms, all with the aim of generating profits and accumulating capital. What is often overlooked, however, is that this realm is constitutively dependent--one could say, parasitic--on a host of social activities, political capacities, and natural processes that are defined in capitalist societies as non-economic. Accorded no "value" and positioned outside it, these constitute the economy's indispensable presuppositions. Certainly, as I argued in chapter 3, commodity production is inconceivable absent the unwaged activities of social reproduction that form and sustain the human beings who perform wage labor. likewise, as we'll see in chapter 5, such production could not exist without the legal orders, repressive forces, and public goods that underpin private property and contractual exchange. Finally, as I'll explain in detail here, neither profit nor capital would be possible apart from the natural processes that assure availability of vital inputs, including raw materials and sources of energy. Essential conditions for a capitalist economy, these "non-economic" instances are not external to capitalism but integral elements of it. Conceptions of capitalism that omit them are ideological. To equate capitalism with its economy is to parrot the system’s own economistic self-understanding, and thus to miss the chance to interrogate it critically. To gain a crit ical perspective, we must understand capitalism more broadly: as an institutionalized societal order that encompasses not only "the economy" but also those activities, relations, and processes, defined as non-economic, that make the economy possible.

What is gained from this revision is the ability to examine something crucial: the relation established in capitalist societies between the economy and its "others”—including that vital other known as "nature." At its core, this relation is contradictory and crisis prone. On the one hand, the system’s economy is constitutively dependent on nature, both as a tap for production's inputs and as a sink for disposing its waste. At the same time, capitalist society institutes a stark division between the two "realms"-constructing economy as a field of creative human action that generates value, while positioning nature as a realm of stuff, devoid of value, but infinitely self-replenishing and generally available to be processed in commodity production.

This ontological gulf becomes a raging inferno when capital enters the mix. A monetized abstraction engineered to "self expand," capital commands accumulation without end. The effect is to incentivize owners bent on maximizing profits to commandeer "nature's gifts" as cheaply as possible, if not wholly gratis, while also absolving them of any obligation to replenish what they take and repair what they damage. The damages are the flip side of the profits. With their ecological reproduction costs discounted, all the major inputs to capitalist production and circulation are vastly cheapened--not "just" raw materials, energy, and transport, but also labor, as wages fall with the cost of living when capital wrests foodstuffs from nature on the cheap. In every case, capitalists appropriate the savings in the form of profit, while passing the environmental costs to those who must live with--and die from--the fallout, including future generations of human beings.

More than a relation to labor, then, capital is also a relation to nature--a cannibalistic, extractive relation, which consumes ever more biophysical wealth in order to pile up ever more "value," while disavowing ecological "externalities." What also piles up, not accidentally, is an ever-growing mountain of eco-wreckage: an atmosphere flooded by carbon emissions; climbing temperatures, crumbling polar ice shelves, rising seas dogged with islands of plastic; mass extinctions, declining bio diversity, climate-driven migration of organisms and pathogens, increased zoonotic spillovers of deadly viruses; superstorms, megadroughts, giant locust swarms, jumbo wildfires, titanic flooding; dead zones, poisoned lands, unbreathable air. Systemically primed to free ride on a nature that cannot really self-replenish without limit, capitalism's economy is always on the verge of destabilizing its own ecological conditions of possibility.

Here, in effect, is an ecological contradiction lodged at the heart of capitalist society--in the relation this society estab lishes between economy and nature. Grounded deep in the system's structure, this contradiction is encapsulated in four words that begin with the letter d: dependence, division, disavowal, and destabilization. In a nutshell: capitalist society makes "economy" depend on "nature," while dividing them ontologically. Enjoining maximal accumulation of value, while defining nature as not partaking of it, this arrangement programs economy to disavow the ecological reproduction costs it generates. The effect, as those costs mount exponentially, is to destabilize ecosystems--and, periodically, to disrupt the entire jerry-rigged edifice of capitalist society. Simultaneously needing and rubbishing nature, capitalism is in this respect, too, a cannibal that devours its own vital organs. Like the ouroboros, it eats its own tail.

The contradiction can also be formulated in terms of class power. By definition, capitalist societies devolve to capital, or, rather, to those dedicated to its accumulation, the task of organizing production. It is the class of capitalists whom this system licenses to extract raw materials, generate energy, deter mine land use, engineer food systems, bioprospect medicinals, and dispose of waste--effectively ceding to them the lion's share of control over air and water, soil and minerals, flora and fauna, forests and oceans, atmosphere and climate--which is to say, over all the basic conditions of life on earth. Capitalist societies thus vest a class that is strongly motivated to trash nature with the power to manage our relations with it.

Granted, governments sometimes intervene post hoc to mitigate the damages--but always reactively, in the mode of catch-up, and without disturbing the owners' prerogatives. Because they are always a step behind the emitters of green house gases, environmental regulations are easily subverted by corporate workarounds. And because they leave intact the structural conditions that license private firms to organize production, they do not alter the fundamental fact: the system gives capitalists motive, means, and opportunity to savage the planet. It is they, and not humans in general, who have brought us global warming--but not by chance or simple greed. Rather, the dynamic that has governed their actions and led to that outcome is baked into the very structure of capitalist society.