The Capitalist Climate Catastrophe

“Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is…Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000.”

Environmentalist Rob Watson.

I developed this essay earlier this year and shopped it to quite a few publications in vain. I think it’s well stated, but I suspect the brutal truths it tells are just too edgy.

And believe me when I tell you truths they are. I’m not a scientist, economist, historian or political scientist. But I have spent over 40 years studying this issue broadly and in depth, reading dozens of authoritative books and technical articles on the subject, attending seminars, watching films and podcasts and discussing the matter with real experts. I also worked in the scientifically driven environmental services industry for 40 years.

So believe me when I tell you there is absolutely nothing difficult to understand about the science, economics, history or politics surrounding the current climate crisis. That’s what’s so hideously perfect about a Big Lie: its outrageousness and simplicity. Denying climate science and climate change is the very biggest of the Big Lies, displaying an insatiable depth of greed that willingly sacrifices the earth’s ecosystem.

Given the climate crisis cataclysm we are presently witnessing out west, I’m pushing the piece out again. I sent it to some friends a few months ago, so it may look familiar to you. Nonetheless, it’s a good time to revisit these grim realities, especially with the election coming up in November.

Some updated observations:

The same greed-driven, anti-science, unrestrained capitalism that precipitated the climate crisis precipitated the unwillingness to effectively control COVID-19 in the United States.

The most sustained and effective climate crisis denial globally comes from the radical right wing of the Republican Party and their wealthy individual and corporate donors in this country. They also called COVID-19 a hoax and belittled masks, social distancing, universal testing, contact tracing and coordination of a broad-based response by the Federal government.

The Republican Party in the United States has literally set the world on fire. Their leader is a climate science denier who has horribly mismanaged the response to COVID-19 with the Republican Party’s unwavering, cultish support. It’s not at all clear that the mismanagement of COVID-19 was a mistake.

The COVID-19 catastrophe is child’s play compared to the hellish effects coming from the climate crisis.

50 years of radically evolving, extremist movement conservatism reached its logical conclusion when a fascist authoritarian regime took control of our government in 2017.

Its policies including those on the climate crisis and COVID-19 preferentially cause the suffering and death of people of color, indigenous people, the poor, the infirm and the elderly. It can be reasonably deduced that these policies constitute genocide.

Only We the People can end the chaos, cruelty, corruption and criminality of this administration by removing the fascists and their Congressional sycophants from power November 3.

With that as an intro, here’s the piece I put together last spring.

Yet another Earth Day has passed, the 50th one this year as it happens, and with little fanfare as the world struggled with the immediate threats of COVID-19. Though not directly related, environmentalists connect COVID-19 and the climate crisis and suggest that COVID-19 is just a preliminary round of the monumental existential threats facing humanity.

They say that if you think COVID-19 is causing horrifying illness, suffering, death and economic devastation, just wait for the climate crisis to hit its full stride. A cynic postulated that COVID-19 is just Mother Nature’s way of sending a powerful message to the planet’s most destructive invasive specie: mankind. “It’s not wise to fool Mother Nature.”

May 2020 was the warmest month globally ever recorded. Why? Principally because of a scorching heat wave blanketing Siberia. Yep, that’s correct: Siberia. Last summer it was Alaska. My wife and I were in Anchorage the week of July 4, 2019 and on most days it was about 90 degrees and wildfires surrounding the city made the air quality sickening. Residents there are understandably freaked.

They see their life style and livelihoods slipping away incrementally each year as temperatures warm, weather becomes disturbingly unpredictable, more permafrost turns to something that resembles chocolate pudding and wildlife shows increasing signs of stresses associated with the radically changing ecosystem. Tourism, while not exactly environmentally friendly but a mainstay economically to Alaska, was already starting to lag before COVID-19 hit.

So today we’re now into another hurricane season and a summer of undoubtedly heavy weather. What insanity can we expect this year? Torrential monsoon rainfall events? Catastrophic wind damage? Biblical flooding? Gargantuan tornadoes? Another horrifically deadly wildfire season?

Data shows conclusively that climate crisis related disasters are escalating in frequency and intensity each year, causing human misery, death and property and economic destruction on an epic scale in the United States and around the globe. Crazily though, Congressional Republicans are cruelly nonchalant or simply deny the factual reality. They went so far as to gleefully dredge up a Red Scare smoke screen (“Socialism!”) in response to the proposed Green New Deal last year.

The Green New Deal proposal is fundamentally sound at its core in seeking to drive us to urgently do something about the catastrophic effects of climate change we are now feeling. Government action with a Green New Deal concept behind it would quickly and dramatically jumpstart our economy coming out of COVID-19 and keep it humming for decades to come. The United States can become the leader in developing and deploying sustainable technologies and sell them to the world, rather than the Chinese. Why wouldn’t we want to do that?

Yet Republicans giddily ridicule such an effort to protect property and save lives as some crazy Liberal fantasy. They offer no proposed solutions of their own, and their ranks include apparent “flat-earthers” who still deny the scientific facts and obvious truths about climate change. They cynically fear monger and label proponents radicals pitching socialist orthodoxy, hoping to make political points with their shrinking and scientifically bereft base of supporters.

Yet the facts that have brought us closer to ecological catastrophe on a global scale remain straightforward. As the resulting human pain and suffering increases it is clear we must as a nation quickly face the truth about man made climate change and act decisively to mitigate its effects. It is no longer an inconvenient truth; it has become an increasingly deadly one.

The uncomplicated science behind the causes of the modern warming of the earth’s climate has been well understood for over a century, and no legitimate debate about the causes has existed within the accredited scientific community for decades. Carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gasses from human activity accumulate in our atmosphere and cause the earth’s temperature to rise.

The effects are being felt now: melting glaciers, rising sea levels, increasingly extreme severe weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes, drought, torrential precipitation, massive flooding and more frequent and intense wildfires. Even the polar vortices that cause winter deep freezes and deadly snow storms are fueled by warming arctic temperatures and an unstable jet stream, which tend to drive colder arctic air our way in the winter.

These are observable and verifiable scientific facts, about which the scientific community has warned us for the last 50 years. Yet, special interest driven denial of this scientific reality has stymied action and sown seeds of doubt about the certainty of climate models and projections for years.

Why? The well-financed and highly orchestrated climate change deniers are driven ruthlessly by a common strain of simple self-interest. Why else would they embrace complete ignorance of experiential data or obstinately reject scientific fact? Political orthodoxy, religious dogma, economic protectionism, racism, xenophobia and pure greed also motivate climate science denier behavior. Scientific reality and the effects on human beings are furthest from their minds.

Climate change deniers deny because accepting the science means acknowledging that man made climate change is a by-product of global economic systems that have exploited natural resources and used the planet’s ecosystem as an open sewer for the chemical by-products of living the good life for centuries. As a capitalist nation, the United State’s failure for the last 50 years to participate in a meaningful way in the effort to stop climate change makes this crisis principally a capitalist driven climate catastrophe.

Modern societies have traded the natural environment for creature comforts for many and wealth for the privileged few, and corporate interests and the wealthy have benefitted grotesquely by stalling action to address climate change for decades. Corporations and the rich will continue to aggregate wealth while fossil fuel reserves remain available for exploitation and consumption, and science deniers want these truths to be hidden or ignored.

Meanwhile, the devastating impacts of the climate crisis preferentially injure, sicken and kill the most vulnerable: poor people, the elderly, the infirm, people of color, indigenous people and children. The sad truth is we understood decades ago that what we were pumping into our atmosphere was likely to cause widespread property destruction and pain and death to people. Yet, powerful and wealthy special interests created doubt around this truth and benefitted monumentally by stalling action for decades.

Thankfully, affordable and viable technical solutions exist and are being deployed to cut emissions of greenhouse gasses. The development of these technologies has shown that they can drive economic growth and create new jobs. Cities, states and businesses in the United States have acted to cut harmful emissions, and have demonstrated that they can create vibrant new commerce, better protecting human health and saving money in doing so.

Yet, at the Federal level, the climate crisis is not only not a priority, the current administration, supported by Republicans in Congress, continues to roll back progress to reduce emissions made by its predecessors. Especially disingenuous, conniving and egregious, they use the COVID-19 pandemic as a convenient excuse to gut environmental regulations and enforcement to save businesses money.

While deregulatory schemes reduce business cost in the short term and undeniably have increased executive bonuses, stock prices and shareholder dividends, the social cost of the resulting illnesses, injuries and deaths of the most vulnerable are deferred until today’s political incumbents are no longer in office, a heartless tactic only a Machiavellian would wholeheartedly embrace.

We as a society must aggressively confront climate science denier propaganda at every turn and vote obstructionists to the reality of climate change out of office and remove them from all leadership positions. Once failed political leadership is replaced, opportunity exists to reverse the destructive environmental course we have been on for decades. November 2020 brings the opportunity for effective change at all levels of government, from the City Councilperson to the President of the United States.

As well, activist investors, consumers and human rights advocates must reconfigure corporate and non-profit institutional boards that have failed to act to preserve a habitable planet for humanity. Each believer in science and our children’s future health and prosperity has an obligation to act and act now to assure that leaders in government, business and non-profit institutions act responsibly as trustees to preserve, protect and ensure a healthy planet for the prosperity of future generations.

Once corrupt leadership has been removed, we should evaluate whether culpability exists for a consistent pattern of overt acts by corporations, their Directors, CEO’s and leaders in government to prevent action on climate change, while knowing full well what disastrous effects would ensue, and thereby profiting from that obstruction.

Do such acts constitute a crime against humanity? We need to look hard at that question.

(Original artwork by J. E. Hargate)