Unsustainable Lies of the Ruling Class
by Ben Lockwood
Photo by Natalia Danjon
If you scan major news outlets lately, it may seem as if the world has forgotten about climate change. War, financial markets, and the latest artificial intelligence claims dominate the headlines. Setting aside the direct and indirect impacts each of these has on the climate, and regardless of how the mainstream media chooses to cover them, climate change has very much not forgotten about the world.
On May 20th, the U.K.'s Climate Change Committee (CCC) published their fourth independent assessment on country's climate risks. The report states that "At a minimum, the UK should prepare for the weather extremes that will be experienced if global warming levels reach 2°C above preindustrial levels by 2050." This timeline represents a dramatic acceleration of global temperature toward the critical threshold. In fact, the Paris Agreement (in 2016) had the goal of keeping the total rise of global temperature "well below" the 2 °C benchmark. And yet, even the 2050 estimate may be too conservative.
Accelerating climate change is also shrinking available habitat for many plant and animal species, while agricultural intensification is degrading the environment and biodiversity loss is an increasing threat to human well-being.
In short, we are facing a planetary crisis. Which is to say that the ecological systems of planet Earth that allow humanity to survive are breaking down. Not only is the ruling class ignoring the issue, but they are also lying to us about it. Because of the seriousness of the crisis, it's necessary that we constantly confront these lies in the starkest way possible.
The first and oldest lie regarding climate change and environmental degradation is that there is no crisis for us to be concerned with. This lie comes in two forms. The simplest version is that climate change simply isn't real. This remains the default position of the reactionary, right wing movement in the US and elsewhere. However, it's getting more and more difficult for conservative politicians to maintain this lie in the face of overwhelming evidence and everyday, lived experiences in the new climate reality. This has led to the second, and more nuanced form of the "there is no problem" lie, which is that yes, climate change may be real, but it's actually a good thing. Pay no heed to all of the droughts, hurricanes, famines, pests, diseases, floods, heatwaves and tornadoes-the Arctic is melting and there's money to be made. This lie is also sometimes accompanied by other falsehoods, like the myth that climate change will be good for plants or that a warmer planet will be better for humans.
Even the more subtle versions of this lie are becoming crude and unworkable, though, which is why the it's important to point a second, more pervasive lie: that the planetary crisis can be solved by consumerism. The rise of "green" lifestyles is evident everywhere. If we simply buy enough reusable grocery bags, water bottles, vegan meat, and electric vehicles, the problem will solve itself. Of course, one must overlook the environmental harms that come with the consumption of these products at scale. But even that notwithstanding, who has access to such commodities? As Vijay Kolinjivadi and Aaron Vansintjan point out in their book, The Sustainability Class, it is often only the wealthiest who can afford to live such "sustainable" lifestyles. Although there's nothing sustainable about the way the ultra-rich live, and there's no amount of plant meat you can eat that will make up for Elon Musk's private jet use.
A related lie is that entrepreneurship will save us. Technological innovation, driven by private industry, will supposedly deliver a clean and carbon-neutral utopia for all via carbon capture and offsets and artificial intelligence. You'll just have to ignore the fact that carbon capture doesn't exist at anywhere near the scale required, carbon offsets are ineffective (at best), and "AI" is driving a fossil fuel investment boom.
These first three lies can be summarized into one Big Lie: capitalism is the solution. However, as the spectacular and rapid failure of the Paris Agreement shows, a system predicated on nonstop growth, expansion, and exploitation is incapable of solving the problems that arise from nonstop growth, expansion, and exploitation. The profit-logic of capitalism requires that more and more reusable bags, water bottles, vegan meat, and electric vehicles get produced, negating any potential benefit of their use. All the while, the uber-rich accumulate more wealth via their investments (often tied up in fossil fuels themselves), while they use carbon-spewing artificial intelligence to put the rest of us out of work so they can sale around on their mega-yachts.
It's unlikely that any of this will surprise readers. As the capitalist class accumulates grotesque and historically unprecedented levels of wealth, the broader public is getting wise to the scam. What is, perhaps, more insidious, is the lie that both the liberal and conservative established order are telling, which is that action on our planetary crisis must be slow, incremental, and non-destructive. Just look at the case of Jessica Reznicek, who in 2016 was convicted of terrorist charges for setting fire to multiple construction valves along the Dakota Access Pipeline. Even though no one was personally injured by Reznicek's actions, the prison industrial complex that upholds capitalism views property destruction as an extremist, terrorist act. As Andreas Malm writes in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, "The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time".
What the ruling class wants us to forget is that every single social movement in the U.S.-from the end of slavery, to women's suffrage, to the labor movements, to the civil rights movement, to the Stonewall riots-have involved not only the destruction of property, but often violence. Power has never conceded itself willingly, and at the foundation of the planetary crisis we face is the most concentrated power structure of wealth and military forces history has ever seen. To assume that a truly sustainable, ecological transition can happen without the destruction of the infrastructure preventing it is not only illogical, but ahistorical and nonsensical.
So then, what is the truth in response to these lies? What is the solution to ecological collapse at the planetary scale? Needless to say, it's beyond the scope of a single essay. But we can examine these lies to get some guidance. To be sure, a truly ecological future will require lifestyle changes for many, particularly those of us in the Global North. This will absolutely include things like eating less meat, driving less, biking more, transitioning to electric vehicles running on renewable energy, and so forth. The key difference being that these changes must be deployed to reduce production and consumption; something that capitalism simply cannot abide nor withstand. We will also have to dismantle our current modes of economic production, both physically and ideologically. The climate movement must learn from the militancy of historical labor movements to hit capitalism where it counts, by disrupting production. At the same time, the labor movement must learn from environmental movements. We need forms of production that are grounded in ecological relations, that resist capitalist wealth extraction, that erode class inequality, and that prioritize human and non-human wellbeing.
In short, we will need a wholesale transformation of our society, from the ground up. Many have already realized this, and there are promising experiments of cooperative economic activity and creatively disruptive direct action. But for these experiments to flourish we need to do something as a society; we need to stop lying to ourselves.
Ben Lockwood is the editor-in-chief at Brief Ecology. Ben is an ecologist and geographer in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management at The Pennsylvania State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from Indiana University, and a M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Biology from Ball State University. Ben’s writing has been published in Nature, Clarkesworld Magazine, Area, Literary Geographies, and elsewhere. He also serves at the editor for both The Eco Update and The Rotting Leaf.