The Insatiable Appetite of Global Capitalism for Carbon.

Capitalism needs to grow, and if it does not grow, it dies. Production must increase, therefore consumption must do so, both driven by the imperative of increased revenues and increased profits, required by shareholders requiring increased dividends, banks and other financial institutions requiring increased interest payments, and owners of 'land' (which, in economics jargon, includes the sources of raw materials for industry) for rents.

Workers, deprived of collective bargaining power by anti-trade union laws and firms preventing them from joining trade unions, struggle to keep wages in line with rising prices. Capitalism wants them to consume more, but doesn't want to pay them more! 

Capitalism, in order to grow, requires an increased supply of energy. Some of that energy, it's true, is supplied by renewables and nuclear power, but the vast majority of it is still supplied by fossil fuels - by carbon.

According to the Guardian on Monday 26th June 2023, citing a report by the Energy Institute, fossil fuels supplied 82% of the world's total energy consumption in 2022, with an increase in total energy consumption of 1.1% swallowing up all the extra renewable energy, despite big increases in the supply of it.

According to the NOAA, in May 2023, the atmospheric CO2 level was at 424 ppm = 822 mg/m^3 = 3,309.032 GtCO2 (billion tonnes of CO2)*.

In their study of CO2 levels during the Mid-Piacenzian Warm Period of the Pliocene (3.35-3.15 million years ago), de la Vega et al find that the maximum CO2 level was 428 ppm, yet the mean sea-level was 20 metres higher than today, and maximum mean annual global near-surface atmospheric temperature was +3 °C above the Holocene pre-industrial (i.e., 1750) norm, in spite of Earth's then orbital configuration being very similar to what it is now.

I have argued, in my papers 'Optimum Population Size Revisited', and 'Why a Transition to Renewable Energy On Its Own is Not a Solution to the Climate Emergency', that economic and population growth ensure that no increase in the supply of renewable energy can solve the climate emergency, the urgency of which is becoming only too apparent in the light of de la Vega, et al's work. The fact is, capitalism is irremediably addicted to not one, but two, fatal drugs: carbon and economic growth, the latter both essential to its survival, and a guarantor of its death.

For the truth is, we live on a finite planet, with finite resources and a finite capacity to absorb our waste and pollution. We are already overtaxing it - overexploiting its resources and its ability to cope with our pollution, and our wanton destructiveness.

The smash is inevitable, and imminent. There is now no avoiding it, but, as we are not willing to do what is necessary of our own free will to solve the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis by reducing the sizes of the global economy and population humanely, nature will do it for us, inhumanely, and drastically.

What we are pleased to call our global 'civilisation' is doomed to collapse, and richly deserving of it. Sadly, that will entail the deaths of billions who do not deserve to die, whereas it is only-too-likely that some who do - wealthy individuals, for the most part - will escape the fate that ought to be theirs, at least for a time. It is a grim prospect, and one I do not relish. It is my earnest hope I will be dead before my predictions come to pass, and that my young relatives will be among the survivors of humanity. I hope that is not too selfish of me.

*Multiply by 7.80432 to convert ppm to GtCO2.