Climate Rhetoric & the Marketplace of Rationalizations

Jag Bhalla

August 18, 2024

Our fate hangs on a hot war of words. But influential language hides the shape and  scope of the political and resource battles being fought. Thus, few of us can see the enemy clearly or grasp that our paths to a safe and fair future are blocked by lexical landmines that serve the rich. Thankfully a potent book brings intel on spotting camouflaged enemy phrases and offers tactics to fight these treacherous terms. Everyone who feels they have a stake in future conditions needs the lessons Genevieve Guenther lays out in The Language of Climate Politics. Unless we recognize and counter certain subtle strategies of linguistic subterfuge, we risk inadvertently abetting the enemy’s narrative and mission.

In just 200 agile pages, Guenther surgically exposes and explodes the logic behind six key terms that currently drive and deform our politics to divert us from climate sanity: “alarmist,” “costs,” “growth,” “India and China,” “innovation,” and “resilience.” That last term, for instance, misleadingly implies that all we have to do is shore up existing systems, when in fact deep transformation is essential. Only a fool could deny that our material infrastructure is creaking under today’s conditions, never mind what’s coming (“global boiling” as UN secretary-general recently dubbed it). Likewise, much of our linguistic, conceptual, political, and ethical infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose. Guenther’s book is an invaluable resource in reorienting our thinking to fit the tasks of our times. But, “scientists, economists, journalists, politicians, and sometimes even activists, all of whom sincerely intend to advance climate solutions,” are often entrapped into “unwittingly normalizing fossil-fuel disinformation.”

Here’s how Guenther distills the enemy master narrative that’s woven by those keywords: “climate change is real but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist—and anyway phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost us too much. Human flourishing relies on the economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, so we need to keep using them and deal with climate change by fostering technological innovation and increasing our resilience. Besides, America should not act unilaterally on the climate crisis while emissions are rising in India and China.” She bluntly calls this leading storyline “incorrect and dangerous.”

Guenther’s laser-focus on fossil energy as the enemy has tactical benefits, but as we’ll see, it risks neglecting other potent forces in the opposition alliance. In a news interview (stream here), Guenther candidly called fossil-fuel interests “essentially evil.” They are “sociopaths who are happy to burn the planet to a crisp for money.” This fearsome well-funded foe wants to “ruin my kid’s future … just so they can continue to make a little more money for another decade or two. I think it’s absolutely disgusting.” Yet similar motives, which so repulse Guenther, animate many formidable forces far beyond the fossil-fuel biz: indeed, well-guarded highly-organized greed obstructs decent action on many fronts.

As you can see from those quotes, Guenther uses powerful and un-sugarcoated language when speaking publicly. This is vital since too much climate discussion adheres to a decorum that hinders crisis-commensurate action. Guenther does far better than most on breaking these taboos, but many climate campaigners fall succumb to the temptations of tact which is a tactical error. Wars aren’t won by being too polite to bring up the most threatening facts. And fears about the social costs of rocking prestigious boats only abet the enemy (in this war it’s not loose lips but silence that sinks ships).

At a book launch (stream here) featuring influential climate journalist Dave Wallace-Wells, Guenther decries any “shirking of the profound duty that we all have, every single one of us who is alive today, to do everything we can to try to save a livable future.” She reports that what “makes people really respond … is when you talk to them about love, their love for their families, their love for their friends, the love … they feel for things that they think are beautiful and worth taking care of.” This little-used potent logic of love is “more effective than the economic argument … [or] political indignation.”  

Speaking of such feelings she adds, “I try not to think about hope versus despair … I feel like it’s my duty to do it. It’s an expression of my love for my kid.” Instead of the “optimism versus doomism, hope versus fear, dichotomy that still grips climate communication … we need to start talking about duty.” Novelist and critic Amitav Ghosh has previously expressed similar sentiments: climate “action shouldn’t be framed around hope and despair, but around duty.” It is simply “our duty to do what we can” (Ghosh may have an advantage in seeing clearly seeing thi s moral imperative due to being raised in a story tradition that centers dharma, a richly complex concept orbiting duty, more details here). The dominant focus on feelings that Guenther rightly faults, exposes an enormous incoherence. In any real emergency what truly matters is what we do, not how we feel. Alas, many who loudly use crisis language and feelings-talk simply don’t act as if they really believe what they say. And of course, their lack of action transmits a meta-message that’s far louder than their words.  

Appeals to love and duty are (or should rapidly become) powerful political language, yet they merit little space in Guenther’s book. Love appears seven times, only twice in a capacity approaching her comments referenced above—first when she recommends talking about love of e-bikes or EVs and then in the afterword, on the laudable legacy of those who “fought for … the people they love.” “Duty” occurs twice, both times in an impersonal sense (its synonym “responsibility” gets 16 mentions, only one of which is mainly individual, the rest are national). Our politics must become able to talk far more directly about the duties and investments involved in protecting what you love, or what you love will suffer at the hands of the enemy. A term often usefully allied to “duty” is “courage,” and Guenther writes that being alarmed is “a sign that you are willing to look at the danger head-on and not look away. It is a sign of courage. You should talk about it as such.” Wars are rarely won without duties courageously done.   

At another event at the UN bookstore (stream here; cued links aren’t available), Guenther calls current climate plans “the most horrific injustice … that the global north has ever perpetrated” (38 minutes). That’s an astonishingly tall claim, given the grotesque history, but it’s startlingly plausible. Fossil fuels today, in fact, already harm people on scales similar to the grievous sins of transatlantic slavery. The UN puts the number of people directly trafficked as slaves at 15 million, and although counting those initially taken doesn’t exhaust the criminal damages (e.g., to descendants), researchers estimate that the air pollution alone from fossil fuels currently kills five million people worldwide every year. The accuracy of such figures isn’t so crucial here, since the scale of chaos from the continued use of fossil fuels will affect not millions but billions. Guenther reports that “roughly two billion people may need to migrate away from regions that global heating could make uninhabitable.”  

And  let’s not forget that billions of the planet’s poorest people are already struggling needlessly—the UN estimates that in 2021 2.3 billion1 people suffered from food insecurity. Climate impacts will only worsen such troubles. What’s more, few seem aware that the carbon pollution impacts will last longer than the 250,000 years in which anatomically modern humans have existed. Unless we remove it by as yet largely unproven or unknown means, carbon emitted today will heat the biosphere for around 400,000 years, which makes it a “10,000-generation thermotoxin.” Guenther forcefully confronts the follies of gambling on unproven carbon-removal technology. She quotes a review of evidence published by the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council: “we conclude that these technologies offer only limited realistic potential to remove carbon from the atmosphere.” Yet led astray by the miliary-grade mendacity of “innovation,” used as propaganda, political leaders use the touted potential for future carbon removal magic to excuse continued expansion of the use of fossil fuels. This is a fantastically foolish error but a powerful victory for enemy propaganda.

Also at the UN bookshop, Guenther said it makes her “sick to [her] stomach” (39 minutes) that invoking global climate justice does not increase support for climate action among those already alarmed or concerned. Rather, she finds it raises fears about lifestyle constraints and limits on “freedom.” The mindset behind this kind of invocation of freedom exposes gigantic rationalizations at work. For it violates the very logic of any viable freedom. Your “freedom” ends wherever harm to anyone else begins. Again, excess carbon pollution is on track to harm billions of people for thousands of generations. Are we free to do that?

On global justice Guenther brings a commendable and ridorous moral clarity that remains all too rare. She writes that it is “morally wrong and repugnant to talk about any danger to the affluent without centering the fact that their prosperity was built on relations of colonial domination.” And we should stress that this “danger” to the wealthy is, at least initially, largely only to their lifestyle frills. So, we must clearly morally distinguish such luxury-limiting “dangers” from tangible threats to the survival needs of the poor.  Guenther is correct to note that the living standards we in rich nations (often thoughtlessly) enjoy are the sedimentation of centuries of colonial suffering, cruelty, and exploitation (for more on this see Free Market Genocides). We who are lucky enough to enjoy resource-blessed lives in wealthy countries now face a generational moral test. Will we choose to be complicit in harm on a scale greater than slavery? Our current way of life imposes many kinds of burdens on poorer nations. While we can’t rightly be blamed for ancestral crimes, we will surely be justifiably judged for failing to act to stop their ill-gotten inhumane effects from being extended on our watch. As philosopher Harry Shue has argued, we are The Pivotal Generation—indeed this is the pivotal decade: we have a moral duty to counter climate change in a fair way. That principle of justice has been explicit in international climate agreements for 30 years. Sadly, it seems little more than empty and inert language, and present rich nation policies amount to a form of “climate apartheid.” The aptness of that phrase is strongly reinforced by the recent ugly and shameful case of covid “vaccine apartheid” in which rich nation elites ended up putting profit above protecting the lives of the global poor.   

It’s worth expanding on Guenther’s vital observation that half of humanity live on less than $6.85 per day ($2,000 per year), and while they produce little carbon themselves, they will be harmed “first and worst” by the pollution we the wealthy cause (by we here I mean roughly the global top 10 percent, with incomes over $60,000). But treating the bottom half of humanity as a single category risks underplaying the deeper woes of those in the worst circumstances. World Inequality Lab data puts the average income in the global bottom 20 percent in 2018 at $365 per year2 (that figure is adjusted to represent today’s dollars and for purchasing parity, meaning it roughly reflects what that amount would buy here). Compare that to the US poverty line of $14,600 a year ($40 per day). So, 1.6 billion people live on an average of 97 percent less, or about 1/40th, of what America calls poverty. And the world’s wealthy pay almost no attention to the inexcusably, excruciatingly slow response to such enormous resource gaps (this mocks decades of decorous diplomatic language about equal human dignity). The average bottom 20-percenter’s income grows by only about $5 per year, whereas the average global top-10-percenter gains around $750 per year, or 14,000% more. Pause and let that sink in. Under today’s arrangements, nicer lives for us get a resource priority 140 times greater than getting more of the rock-bottom basics to the global poor (like the 2.3 billion people who are more food insecure than rich nation pets). And even before factoring in disastrous and disproportionate climate burdens, these diabolical disparities are set to go on for centuries. As a UN special rapporteur for poverty writes it will take “200 years to eradicate poverty under a $5 a day line and would require a 173-fold increase in global GDP.” Unless we make rapid radical changes, that’s an ecologically and morally disastrous eight generations to get to 1/8th of our poverty. That is unacceptable.

A ghastly Western supremacism lurks behind these gigantic injustices. At a recent climate event, Wallace-Wells said the quiet part out loud: “The global story … [is] even uglier … [it] is not that rich westerners are unmoved by the climate suffering of people living elsewhere in the world. It’s that they’re gratified by it. They see it as a confirmation of their superiority and their privilege … They look at climate suffering in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and … they think this is the natural order of things.” The racist logic of the attitude Wallace-Wells refers to must be squarely faced. As must the taboo topic of the global racial resource hierarchy: average incomes in nations “of color” are one-seventh that of majority-white nations, and the median income in Africa is only one-twelfth that of the global North’s. These facts on the ground differ starkly from cheerful tone of elite-comforting narratives about reductions in extreme poverty, the gap in resources per capita between rich and poor nations has never been shrinking (here’s the World Bank chart).

Returning to Guenther’s book, she usefully maps the devastating degree of infiltration that enemy language has achieved. She finds their propaganda phrases and narratives undergo “amplification by climate journalists, who powerfully shape the way that most Democrats understand the climate crisis.” For instance in New York Times articles like the 2022 piece “Beyond Catastrophe” by Wallace-Wells, which in Guenther’s view conveys that “climate change no longer threatens the affluent.” She documents the ample reasons for why that rosy-eyed view is mistaken. It is certainly represents a substantial and rapid shift in elite liberal thinking, given that Wallace-Wells just three years earlier wrote a Times op-ed called “It’s Time to Panic” (based on his book The Uninhabitable Earth). So Wallace-Wells went from saying “it is right to be alarmed” and “even reasonable” to “freak out,” to describing a future that Guenther characterizes as “in the end not that different from now” for Americans but “horrifically bad for the world’s poor.” Wallace-Wells writes that the climate crisis has moved “beyond  catastrophe” to return to a more ordinary “plane of history: contested, combative, combining suffering and flourishing — though not in equal measure for every group.” That’s code for things will be fine for the rich, who can now relax. And of course, that same “plane of history” is where rich nations currently ruthlessly practice neocolonialism as the sequel to centuries of slavery and imperial exploitation (now by debt and financial means). I fear that this elite-soothing stance is seen as sufficient lipstick on the global racial resource-disparity pig for many wealthy liberals to look away from those hit hardest (to return to the more pressing business of lifestyle fulfilments, like pursuing the next elegant consumer trend the Times deems a must-have).

Another high-profile instance of the new mandatory mood of media climate “optimism” can be seen in the Harper’s cover shown below. It announced “The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday” alongside a tag line “how the media stopped worrying about climate change.” The logic of that tagline has cashed out in the appalling fact that the climate crisis has since received less media climate (despite 130 national global temperature records and many escalating dramatic impacts). It’s a safe bet that future historians will study the minute details of this shift away from a brief period of flowering of climate prudence (initiated in no small part by Greta Thunberg’s global movement, and indeed by Wallace-Wells’s own book). Here this episode of sanity lasted just a few years before being quickly quashed by what Guenther exposes as covert fossil fuel propaganda. The picture is different in China, as we’ll see shortly, but America’s climate response has been fundamentally unserious and ethically inexcusable. As Guenther notes Biden’s supposedly big-deal climate bill nominally allocates only 0.13 percent of US GDP to addressing humanity’s greatest challenge (that’s $24 per month per household, so on a par with a premium streaming service, or a third of average household’s lawn-care costs). And Biden’s “all of the above” approach has US dirty fuel extraction at an all-time high, and it has so far subsidized twice as many new dirty gas boilers as clean electric heat pumps (such moves would horrify military strategists: you don’t raise your chances of winning by making your enemy stronger).  

Another Times piece that Guenther references is “Your Kids Are Not Doomed” by Ezra Klein. In 2022 he wrote that “richer people and countries will buy their way out of the worst consequences,” and he rejects constraints on consumption, calling them a “sacrifice” that’s too politically unpalatable. He is fully aware of, and wants to signal his moral concern for, the plight of the global poor: “we will have looted the future of billions of people to power a present we preferred.” But in his view that worse-than-slavery-level moral catastrophe obviously can’t be allowed to limit a “politics of more” (first and foremost for elites, like his largely-global-top-decile readership, who he believes can’t countenance the living standards that 9/10ths of humanity experience). To judge by the time Klein devotes to his pet peeves on other forms suffering that he finds morally repellent, he’s more concerned about the woes of chickens or hypothetical future digital beings than he is about the global poor or their kids (millions of whom are already being burdened by conditions akin to doom today). Klein reveals the severe moral poverty of the circles he moves in by using economics-focused language like the “suffering [of farmed animals] is not priced into the meat.” Well, there’s a vast amount of human misery that isn’t “priced into” current rich nation lifestyles (the “imperial mode of living” that Klein deems politically sacred). Is there an acceptable price for the shorter and immensely impoverished lives the global poor lead? Consider that Nigerian life expectancy is 54 years, and they get only 3 percent of the “lifetime resource expectancy3” of the average Brit (their old colonial oppressor). And the typical global top 1-percenter garners more financial resources in 12 days than a bottom 10-percenter does over their entire lifetime. Since America is home to half of global 1-percenters they’re likely a prominent portion of Times readers.

Guenther rightly draws attention to this genre of elite-pampering articles which appear to have created or spread a consensus among climate-concerned Democrats that amounts to being okay with protecting/enhancing their lifestyles by sacrificing the life prospects of generations of the global poor. I’d argue that Klein’s distasteful use of the word “sacrifice” to describe changes in elite consumption is also a potent covert enemy codeword since it stacks the deck against decent and sane action. It improperly puts changes in affluent consumption on a moral par with the burdens or forced sacrifice of the livelihoods or lives of the global poor. Some of this is captured in the term green “sacrifice zones” which is being used for those areas, often in poor nations, destinated for ecological degradation to supply resources for Green New Deal or green growth policies that Klein and crew advocate. Guenther includes this sort of “growth” as one of her six covert enemy phrases. She explosively demolishes the idea that its green-tweaked version of business as usual is even possible, by dropping a bunker-busting bombshell: the “belief that wealth will enable the rich to escape” has “no real basis.” It rests on utterly unsound science-denying economic fantasies and incredibly iffy math models (more on the related “climate Lysenkoism” here, and on mathematical model malarkey here).

Despite her blitzkrieg of high-precision word-weaponry, Guenther has chosen not to pursue certain powerful allies of her enemy in this book. I argue that many who aren’t fossil fuelers themselves also obstruct or constrain decent climate action to protect high-status lifestyles (I should note that Guenther has written elsewhere about the vital role of curbing elite carbon footprints). Many non-fossil-fuelers are also driven by a desire to make a little more money while discounting the ecological and moral harms entailed (akin to the stance she called “absolutely disgusting”). Plus, I suspect that many in our elite could see themselves doing what fossil fuelers do were they in their shoes. Since they serve the same kinds of voracious corporate masters in parallel profit-über-alles missions. Their prestigious lifestyles depend on operating similarly sociopathic systems of institutionalized greed (they are often handsomely paid to squeeze out “efficiencies” by externalizing human and ecological harms). After all, they’re just capitalists doing what they’ve been trained to do. Indeed, most of our professional class is edu-indoctrinated to believe that maximizing personal gain is “rational” (but it’s a ruinous kind of rationality where profit by degrading the conditions of collective survival is encouraged, individually and institutionally). I’ve called this global capitalist and professional class alliance “the greedocracy.” Biosphere degradation won’t end unless these greedocratic allies of the fossil-fuel industry are also aggressively countered. Even if a magic wand transformed all fossil-fuel infrastructure to be instantly clean, that would leave untouched the nearly one third of global emissions caused by food production. Many food companies, fast food chains, and beef ranchers actively abet Guenther’s enemy. Or consider that in 2023 half of new-car buyers worldwide opted for the “appeal of SUVs as a status symbol.” Few of those 40 million people are directly in the fossil-fuel production biz, but they voted with their wallets against climate sanity (if they were a nation, SUVs would bethe fifth-largest carbon polluter). Guenther knows all this but seems to prefer to defer these battles. But any delays in this war against eco-degradation are surely a severe strategic error.

Speaking of strategy, Guenther observes that 90 percent of humanity will be better off in a world that has transitioned to green energy. But sadly, it’s the other 10 percent, the globally affluent, who largely control the levers of economic and political power. They shape what are deemed “politically realistic” paths, typically to suit what they see as their interests. Many of them seem to feel their current privilege is at stake. That is a foolish reflex: is anyone really better off living in a degraded, chaotic, and fragile biosphere? But as economist J.K Galbraith notes such “intellectual myopia” isn’t unknown: “people of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage4.” A similar myopia seems to afflict the New York Times folk who won’t adjust (or “sacrifice”) their current high-status high-energy high-resource consumer comforts to fit now-known biosphere realities. Never mind if that harms the biosphere, the poor, or even the life prospects of their own supposedly precious children (see How Best to Love Your Kids in a World on Fire). Guenther makes the high-caliber point that this amounts to an ecological “Ponzi scheme in which we are exhausting a livable climate, taking it from our children” (again, this “we” is roughly the global top 10 percent). Even if you are attracted to Klein’s optimistic morality-shirking stance, that the kids of the rich aren’t “doomed,” their lives, too, will be materially worsened compared to if we had taken decent and assertive crisis-fitting action. Not to mention the moral shame and baggage of benefitting from arrangements where elite trifles were given priority over avoiding resource wars and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

The structure of the war we are in is such that to protect your kids you will have to stop elites from consuming beyond what the biosphere can bear. Part of the difficulty in people like us (global top decilers) doing what’s right is a fear of social costs—many self-focused greedocrats are our peers, colleagues and friends. But the choice is clear: either you work to stop peers/friends from living ecologically irresponsible lifestyles, or your kids will pay a steep price.  What is your most heartfelt priority, protecting your kids? Or your social position? Imagine your kids asking “didn’t you love us?” as in the story that former US secretary of energy Steven Chu offers here.

Carbon has in a sense changed the basic moral structure of our times. Even many climate activists seem reluctant to face up to what this enormous ethical restructuring means. Prior carefree unconstrained consumption can’t continue. Consumer choice can’t any longer be seen as a largely a private matter (it has stupendous spillovers that can’t be ignored). Every kilogram of carbon adds to collective woes. As Guenther reports, China’s leadership appear to have taken on board the logic of our radically reshaped situation. Their climate response is far more ambitious than any western nation. Around the same time our media and policy elite “stopped worrying about climate” the Chinese published their “1+N” climate policy framework. It “takes a whole-of-government approach,” to decarbonization and includes integrating “carbon neutrality into public education.” This will “advocate simple, moderate, green, and low-carbon living patterns,” to “curb luxury, waste, and unnecessary consumption.” They detailed plans to make a whole-of-culture effort to promote “eco-friendly low-carbon living patterns.” It may already be bearing fruit in early signs that China’s carbon may peak this year. Contrast that to the free world’s inability to face the scientific logic of the need for limits on consumption (which should rationally target elites). Guenther writes “establish[ing] authoritarianism as the form of governance that can best resolve the climate crisis … would be a tragedy for human freedom that American leaders should do everything to prevent” (see also Liberalism’s Failure By Fun).

Guenther is a superb forensic rhetorician; she honed her SEAL Team Six–level semantic sharpshooting skills as a scholar of Renaissance literature (she makes persuasive case for the salience of the discursive and cultural upheavals of that earlier era here). Astonishingly a still influential renaissance writer pondered issues that have a vital role in our present ecological difficulties. Shakespeare was much concerned about how easily elites can be cut off from harsh realities by sweet-talking sycophants. To counter this he has multiple scenes where kings talk to troops in disguise to get unvarnished views. He wrote about the incentives courtiers had to offer flattery that could lead to disaster instead of harder-to-swallow truth (“sweet, sweet poison for the age’s tooth”). And Shakespeare foresaw that financial greed was an “operant poison.” Unbridled pursuit of  money would “break religions” and invert key binary norms, turning “black white, foul fair, wrong right.” He even saw the escape route, in expressing admiration for those who are not “passion’s slave” (freedom in his day meant not being  enslaved, even by your own impulses and potentially irrational desires). Without limits on elite passions for resource-intensive lifestyles, the greedocracy’s biosphere-gobbling binge will continue.

Much of the language of climate politics is shaped by elite-flattering gatekeepers who are rewarded for filtering out anything that might hint at political unpalatability (a sad inversion of the once-influential and noble “speak truth to power” ethos). Instead of the  plain reality-facing truth they promote optimistic language and feel-good narratives conveying the idea that current resource-intense elite lifestyles can continue largely as before. This is its own form of science denial, since it ignores a widely held consensus; the UNEP, World Inequality Lab, and IPCC, for example, all have explicitly stated that elite consumption limits are unavoidable. As Ghosh noted in The Great Derangement, our climate quagmire is a “crisis of culture, and … of the imagination,” hence a crisis of desire—especially disordered elite desire. A swift change in elite culture is needed. Guenther’s tactics provide only part of the ammo, but they don’t address the general elite greed-driven derangement.

History shows that moral innovations and once-deemed-impossible behavioral shifts can occur quickly. Scholars have documented the role of social pressure in prior moral revolutions (details here). In his latest book, Smoke and Ashes, Ghosh notes how important fear of  “reputational damage” was in curbing the global opium trade (once as powerful as today’s fossil-fuel industry). He believes a similar transnational coalition of civil society groups could repeat that feat on the climate crisis. To quickly end our current intergenerational insanity, irresponsible use of ecological resources must rapidly become reputationally damaging. Flaunting biosphere-depleting consumption should be seen as the flagrant abuse of freedom that it is (it expresses a shameful disrespect for others). The desire to resist facing up to this logic indicates how deeply ill-suited many of our current conceptual tools are to the tasks of our times.

Yet much of our politics and culture operate as a lucrative “marketplace of rationalizations.” That’s a great coinage by philosopher Daniel Williams for “social structures in which agents compete to produce [elite-serving] rationalizations in exchange for money and social rewards.” There are copious compensations for the bringers of good news (shunning or exile for bearers of less sweet tidings). This perverse dynamic envelops our elite in an exceedingly unhealthy epistemic climate, unmoored from realities.

Guenther’s analysis and tactics are invaluable, but we’re in what Kim Stanley Robinson calls “a discursive battle” for the “long-term health of the biosphere,” which he paints as a contest of “science versus capitalism.” I suggest that might be better cast as morality + science against unbridled capitalism. Notice that the Chinese use markets to serve their collective goals of building an “ecological civilization.” Meanwhile our governments, of both parties, bend over backwards to serve capitalist goals, which are typically short-sighted and often ecologically suicidal (more details on the related need for economic cancer suppression here). Even some ardent fans of capitalism can see that this is monstrously mistaken, for instance Martin Wolf chief economics correspondent of the Financial Times recently wrote that “Market forces are not enough to halt climate change. Investor returns imply that the welfare of future human beings is close to irrelevant.” The great gamble of relying on economic pressures to avoid battling politically powerful industries isn’t working at anywhere near the pace needed. Even as the price of clean energy has fallen sharply dirty fuels remain very lucrative (record profits in 2023). Again, this is simply bad strategy, it leaves the enemy richer and stronger.  

Guenther is completely correct that we must quicky win the fight against fossil fuels. But that industry is just one battalion in capitalism’s many rapacious rampaging armies. To fulfill our duty — to act consistently with our love of the young and to protect the stable biosphere conditions that they need and have a right to — we must name and tame the greedocracy. If we do not, our legacy will be all the cascading, compounding dangers that come with a destabilized and degraded biosphere. Pursuing elite comforts that add to the suffering of the poor is “essentially evil,” and history will surely judge us for the moral folly and “horrific injustice” of outsourcing our ethics to markets.  

1. That’s 1.3 billion moderately food insecure and almost a billion severely food insecure.

2. Screencap of the World Inequality Database (August 12th 2024). They often update the data, but this captures the source of the numbers used above..

3. Lifetime resource expectancy is a rough relative measure for comparative resource availability in a nation, estimated by life expectancy multiplied by average GDP per capita.   

4. The full J.K. Galbraith quote, from Age of Uncertainty, is” People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich. So it was in the Ancien Regime when reform from the top became impossible, revolution from below became  inevitable.”

   
   

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