Capitalism irreversibly produces climate change.

Climate scientists have documented that global greenhouse gas emissions began to increase during the era of the Industrial Revolution with the growing use of fossil fuels in connection with industrial production. The full emergence of the capitalist mode of production, the expansion of the market economy, and the subsequent process of industrialization were central elements of what Polanyi (1944) called the “Great Transformation” that emerged in Europe and later spread to other parts of the world primarily through the force of colonization. The discipline of sociology originated in the attempt to understand this transformation, which culminated in the rise of the “modern” world, the triumph of capitalism, the rise of the infrastructural power of the capitalist state, and the use of markets as the dominant mode for structuring economic relations, along with significant intellectual, cultural, and political revolutions such as the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Another transformational dimension of the emergence of the modern social world, unintended and unrecognized at the time, was that it set humanity on the path to the current climate crisis. Yet, despite the clear linkage between the development of capitalism, the process of industrialization, and the rise of markets, Perrow and Pulver (2015: 63) argue that “action by capitalist, industrial organizations in markets has been only a peripheral focus in analyzing the problem of global warming.”

There is a growing effort in macro­structural environmental sociology and green criminology to move this focus on the political economy of the climate crisis to the center of disciplinary concerns. One important contribution to this effort is Malm’s Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Malm (2016: 11) analyzes the historical origins of what he calls the fossil economy, “an economy of self­sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels, and therefore generating a sustained growth in the emissions of carbon dioxide.” He argues that the fossil economy emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries during the Industrial Revolution when “the fossil fuel of coal was coupled to the machine through the rise of stationary steam power in the mills of Britain” (Malm, 2016: 16). And he contends that British manufacturers turned from traditional sources of power such as wind and water mills (the flow) to an engine fired by coal (the stock), not because coal was a cheaper or more abundant form of energy but because steam power gave capitalists greater control over both labor and the energy source. Production could be concentrated at urban sites that were more profitable, during hours that were more convenient. The steam engine was a technology that had greater value for capital. Steam won because it augmented the power of the men who owned the means of production in the class struggle of the early Industrial Era. According to Malm (2016: 277), “capitalism gave birth to the fossil economy. The rise of steam power—the critical moment in the delivery—occurred in a country with a distinctly capitalist mode of production: two centuries later, the context remains the same, the umbilical cord as strong as ever.” His comment that, centuries later, the context remains the same is important. As we examine rising greenhouse gas emissions today, it is critical to understand the history and continuing influence of fossil capitalism.

Fossil fuel–based technologies became locked into the capitalist mode of production during the Industrial Revolution and laid the foundation for current levels of carbon emissions and global warming, although, as Angus (2016) points out, they increased dramatically after World War II during the Great Acceleration. While Malm acknowledges that a fossil economy does not necessarily have to be capitalist (the extractive, industrial, state socialist system in the Soviet Union and its satellite states were also responsible for a high level of carbon pollution and environmental destruction), only fossil capital remains today. At this point in history, Malm (2016: 278) argues, “the fossil economy is coextensive with the capitalist mode of production— only now on a global scale.” The climate crimes of today, therefore, must be analyzed in the context of this global capitalism. As Malm (2016: 273–274) observes, for the steam engine, and “all subsequent technologies of fossil fuel combustion in class societies: their stunning power to change the climate of the earth has followed from their value for their owners as distinct from non­owners.”

To analyze the dialectical relationship between nature and the economy, to develop a “world ecology of capitalism,” Jason Moore argues that we need to go much further back in history than the Industrial Revolution and the rise of steam power built on the stock of coal. In Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, Moore (2015: 173) examines the early modern origins of capitalism and “its extraordinary reshaping of global natures long before the steam engine.” He argues that during the “long sixteenth century” and the early “epochal transition” to capitalist social relations, a “new pattern of environment­making” began in the Atlantic world. This new pattern was so powerful and consequential that he raises the question of whether we are really living in the Anthropocene or in an era we should refer to as the Capitalocene. As Moore (2015: 172) sums up,

To locate the origins of the modern world with the steam engine and the coal pit is to prioritize shutting down the steam engines and the coal pits (and their twenty­first century incarnations). To locate the origins of the modern world with the rise of capitalist civilization after 1450, with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification, and relentless rationalization, is to prioritize the relations of power, capital, and nature that rendered fossil capitalism so deadly in the first place. Shut down a coal plant, and you can slow global warming for a day; shut down the relations that made the coal plant, and you can stop it for good.

Informed by these historical perspectives on the early modern origins of capitalism and the rise of the fossil economy during the Industrial Revolution, the field of environmental sociology contains many theories that analyze how the current deep­seated structural forces of global capitalism produce environmental harms and ecological disorganization. Treadmill of production theory, world system theory, ecological rift theory, regulation theory, and Marxian­rooted globalization theories all suggest that the climate crisis and other forms of ecological destruction that are occurring today are rooted intrinsically in capitalism per se (Antonio and Clark, 2015). These theories focus on the system imperative of economic growth and the enduring conflict between the capitalist mode of production and protection of the environment. They argue that the drive for endless economic growth and ever greater profits leads to increasing levels of environmental degradation. As sociologists Robert J. Antonio and Brett Clark (2015: 353) point out, these theories argue that under capitalism, “The highly stratified global interstate system imposes a division of nature that replicates the flow of economic surplus, while it also creates the structural conditions that accelerate climate change.”

Out of this group of sociological theories that link global capitalism to environmental harm, the one that has had the most impact within environmental sociology and green criminology is treadmill of production (TOP) theory. Initially developed by environmental sociologist Allan Schnaiberg in his 1980 book The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity and developed further by Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg (2008), TOP theory argues that there is an inherent and deadly contradiction between the political economy of global capitalism and ecological health. Human economic systems— particularly capitalism with its expansionary logic—extract natural resources and transform them through a production process that interferes with the organization of ecological systems and results in ecosystem disruption and ecological disorganization. The routine operation of the capitalist system with its built­in demand for endless economic growth produces both commodities and environmental devastation hand in hand, a suicidal strategy that Wright and Nyberg (2015: 32) term “creative self­destruction.”

Market organizations such as transnational corporations in the fossil fuel industry, state­owned oil and gas producers, military institutions, and other state agencies “can be interpreted as connected and embedded in the treadmill and are hence influenced by treadmill factors such as the drive to expand profits and production” (Stretesky et al., 2014: 13). In addition to these corporate and state actors, labor organizations also often have shortterm interests in supporting increases in production (Schnaiberg, 1980). According to TOP theorists, these organizational actors are driven by the logic of industrial capitalism to expand production by extracting natural resources (raw materials and fossil fuels), transforming them into products to be sold in the marketplace, and discharging various waste by­products such as carbon emissions and other forms of pollution into the ecosystem, causing environmental catastrophe. TOP theory defines the extraction of natural resources necessary for production as ecological withdrawals and the pollutants that are emitted during the production process as ecological additions—impacts that disorganize the ecology. According to Stretesky and colleagues (2014: 22), the concept of ecological disorganization occupies an important place in TOP theory, noting that “Ecological disorganization occurs because capitalist production negatively impacts the relationships between organisms and their environment and impacts the self­sufficiency of the earth’s biological system.” Climate disruption represents a major form of ecological disorganization.

Environmental sociologists who have examined global warming and the climate crisis through the lens of TOP theory generally find it to be empirically supported and theoretically convincing. It has been lauded as one of the “most influential research programs for investigating these socio­environmental dynamics” (D. White, Rudy, and Gareau, 2016: 93). Perrow and Pulver (2015: 71) point out that “global and cross­national comparative studies of carbon emissions trajectories suggest that the treadmill logic predominates.” Following their identification of TOP theory as one of the dominant theoretical orientations in the field, Eugene Rosa and his colleagues (2015: 52) observe: “One of the most important overall lessons of sociological research on the anthropogenic forces driving global climate change is that it is necessary to look beyond technical fixes and consider the social, political, and economic structures that condition human behavior and resource exploitation.” Contrasting the treadmill argument against other theoretical approaches, Wright and Nyberg (2015: 33) state that it “provides a much more convincing explanation for the climate crisis we now face.”