Capitalism needs a remake

Is the capitalist system the root of the problem or the solution to climate change? It depends on who you ask.

Bill Gates, one of the richest billionaires in the world, touches on the subject with his recent book entitled, How to avoid a weather disaster. In it, he emphasizes investments in new green technology and, for the most part, avoids politics as a solution. Gates argues that there are many things that can be done differently, but unsurprisingly, he is not a critic of capitalism.

Naomi Klein has proposed a largely contrasting view in her 2014 book This changes everythingand various other works. While Klein does not rule out the need to employ new green technologies, she strongly criticizes contemporary capitalism in its current form, which she claims is responsible for both great social inequality and the climate crisis. His solutions revolve around sociopolitical change.

We are now in a climate crisis, as has been declared in various political jurisdictions, such as the city of Vancouver, and organizations such as the University of British Columbia.

So what is the role of capitalism in tackling the problem? Asking this is relevant because struggles over how to tackle climate change are based on different assessments of capitalism. There are many important social justice issues in this debate, but I will focus primarily on a few environmental and political considerations.

Many of the solutions proposed to address climate change are consistent with capitalist approaches. For example, in his remarks last week at the UN climate conference in Glasgow called COP26, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau touted Canada’s national carbon pricing scheme. Carbon pricing leaves it up to businesses and individuals to cut emissions, reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, pay more taxes, or buy carbon credits. The development of the carbon market is a central part of the COP negotiations, particularly as set out in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.

On the other hand, people at the protests in front of the COP26 headquarters and activists around the world are calling for the dismantling of capitalism. The slogans on the posters read: “Capitalism is killing the planet” and “The fight for the climate is a class struggle” and “The fossil banks. No, thank you. “Some civil society groups, and even some government representatives, such as the Bolivian leader, have voiced similar criticisms at official COP26 meetings.

It is difficult to know if all the protesters and critics believe what they say, or if the slogans are simply a stance to pressure governments and corporations to make changes. There is evidence that not everyone who participated in the Black Lives Matters protests in the United States actually believed in the slogan “Defund the Police.” Many protesters adopted the catchy phrase as a way to push for police reform. Others, of course, really did, and really believe in the motto.

It is also difficult to know precisely which system a given protest is referring to, as there are a variety of notions as to what capitalism and socialism really mean. Capitalism in particular places can vary insofar as it includes free markets, strong social welfare systems, government intervention, and social inequality. This is also true for socialist societies, which have different levels of public ownership of key industries and level of democracy. People of a certain age tend to think of the former Soviet bloc countries as examples of socialism. For the youngest, the current Scandinavian countries may come to mind.

But the real question is how do economic growth and carbon emissions fit into the real world? Despite claims by green capitalists that they can dissociate, the evidence suggests that they are generally positively correlated. For example, the only two times that global emissions have fallen significantly in recent history were during the economic recessions associated with the Great Recession that began in 2007 and the economic fallout from the global COVID-19 pandemic.

On this note, when examining the Climate change performance index by 2022 (presented at COP26) shows that Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Sweden, Norway (which, by the way, are the top three ranked countries in the world) have a much better climate change performance than more capitalist countries like states States and Canada, which are near the bottom.

Why does this debate matter? Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their book, Merchants of Doubt, and the documentary of the same name, claim that many prominent climate change deniers believe that climate change is simply a hoax that was invented to promote socialism. The scientific evidence for the existence of anthropogenic climate change is unequivocal: it is not a hoax. But this political backlash from conservative climate deniers highlights the importance of unraveling the science of climate change from political solutions to climate change. It seems unlikely that linking climate science to socialism will help change the minds of conservative laggards on climate action.

A disproportionate number of climate activists are progressive (although this is a less partisan issue outside of the US and some other English-speaking countries). But as former Greenpeace USA forestry campaign manager George Marshall has observed, unless some people of all political persuasions (such as conservatives) join the fight, it will be difficult to get the boat right. In this regard, in his speech earlier this week in Glasgow, former US President Barack Obama emphasized the need to go beyond preaching to the choir to solve the climate crisis.

Capitalist financial institutions play a central role in current solutions to climate change. Therefore, making the abolition of capitalism central to the discourse around climate solutions has some limitations. Like the debate on the police, is it a better strategy to talk about abolishing capitalism or reforming it? Before making a decision, it is wise to assess how each approach resonates with public opinion and influences broad support for climate action.