Capitalism ensures environmental crisis and interlocking extinction events militating towards systemic collapse

Chris Stewart and Keishia Taylor, “Marx, the ‘Metabolic Rift’ and Capitalism’s Assault on Nature”, The Bullet, 4 January 2023, ,

Capitalism is destroying the earth’s ecosystems. Minerals, nutrients and other raw materials have been vacuumed up from nature while pollution has been vomited back out into the ground, sea, and air. In recent decades as capitalism has expanded into every corner of the globe it has turned 50% of the earth’s land into agriculture, cities, roads, and other infrastructure, driving land-use change that accounts for 14% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

This has driven a collapse in the planet’s biodiversity. Capitalism has wiped out almost 70% of mammal, bird, amphibian, fish, and reptile populations since 1970 and half of all insect populations are disappearing (leading to a decline in pollinators and, in turn, food production). Biodiversity is dialectically linked to the conditions of the climate – a stable climate has created the conditions for life to develop and diversify, but the diversity of life has also stabilised the earth system. Without it, the life-sustaining natural processes of the planet will be thrown into crisis.

This is just one of many epoch-making changes that capitalism has wrought on the planet. Climate scientists refer to the period since the 1950s as the “Great Acceleration” which has seen exponential “hockey stick” (named due to their shape on graphs) increases in: fossil fuel combustion, CO2 emissions, ocean acidification, species extinctions (and losses in biodiversity more generally), nitrogen and phosphorus cycle disruptions, freshwater depletion, forest loss, and chemical pollution. Because of this, it is argued that earth has left the “Holocene” and entered the “Anthropocene” (or more accurately “Capitalocene”) – a new geological epoch in which the Earth’s natural systems are dominated by human impacts.

Scientists now warn that at least five of the nine “planetary boundaries” have likely been crossed already. These are global environmental conditions that act as a “safe operating space for humanity.” When they are crossed a “tipping point” is reached, triggering a cascade of climate chaos which could bring systematic environmental collapse (the kind of collapse that occurred during the Earth’s historical mass extinction events). The crossing of these boundaries may signal “points of no return” in which the Earth’s systems will be irreparably changed, throwing them into crisis until they find some new equilibrium undoubtedly less suited to human survival.

A System in Decay

According to an assessment by the IPCC, 3.6 billion people are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (especially extreme heat, heavy rainfall, drought and wildfires) in the immediate future. At the same time, the capitalist system – increasingly desperate for profits – is only accelerating its destruction of the environment.

Today, all of the contradictions of the system are growing and, increasingly, the crises it creates are interacting with one another; war, economic crisis, climate breakdown, famine, mass displacement and so on. All of these crises stem from the fact that the private ownership of wealth, resources and industry, and the constant accumulation of profit by the capitalist class, are coming into conflict with the needs of humanity and the planet.

The energy industry is a stark example. Despite their nauseating greenwashing the big banks have poured some $4.6-trillion into the fossil fuel industry since 2015 and oil and gas companies plan to spend some $4.9-trillion in exploration and extraction in new fields by 2030. This is because fossil fuels – on which an entire global infrastructure is built – provide far greater short-term profits than undergoing years-long productive investment in renewables would.

The IPCC says that by 2050 80% of the world’s energy supply could come from renewable sources. This would be necessary to keep greenhouse gas concentrations to less than 450 parts per million, the level scientists estimate is the limit of safety beyond which climate change becomes catastrophic and irreversible. But achieving this is an impossibility for the market. Undergoing this kind of transition would mean investors writing off around $20-trillion worth of untapped fossil fuel assets already being traded on the market and held as “futures” by corporations – highly profitable from the point of view of the market, but apocalyptic for the planet if they were ever to be realised.