01.09.2022

Background to the Capitalocene

It is capitalism which lies at the heart of the climate crisis. Jim Moody explores possible technical solutions to what is, he argues, a social question

We inhabit a planet that is heading for disaster. Our environment is becoming less and less conducive to life, including human life.

In recent years, acceleration towards a generally agreed tipping point has led governments worldwide to agree targets for tackling the causes. But now the Nato-backed war dragging on in Ukraine provides capitalist apologists with the latest excuse to sideline their own (extremely modest) goals. Responding to the immediate needs of profit, bourgeois politicians feel free to downgrade or completely refute solemnly agreed climate targets. As ever, profit determines ideology, foot-dragging on climate reigns once more, and humanity’s future looks extremely bleak. This is an existential period for our time on Earth.

Carbon dioxide is far and away the main product of combustion, whose rising concentration in the atmosphere generates global warming and climate change. The proportion of CO₂ in the air has differed over geological time, dependent on many natural factors: there has been considerable variation between the amounts of carbon held as CO₂ in the atmosphere or dissolved in seawater; as carbon and its compounds in coal, gas and oil deposits; in carbon-based plant and animal life forms; and as solid carbonates in sedimentary rocks. Natural warming or cooling of the Earth relative to the balances of carbon held as CO₂ in the atmosphere and in these other carbon-captured sources is part of prehistoric Earth’s story and our history up to the present.

Once early humans discovered the use of fire and started to burn wood as fuel to cook food and keep warm, this added relatively small amounts of CO₂ to the air. Only with the advent of capitalism in recent centuries have fossil fuels been used massively as sources of energy, releasing captured carbon stored eons previously back into the atmosphere as CO₂. For these purposes, climate researchers often mark 1750 as an arbitrary, but useful, start point for ‘industrialisation’ (ie, the start of capitalist industry). Statistics plotting the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ over the last 250 or so years show an accelerating upward (exponential) curve to the present day. Capitalism’s universal spread, with its integral use of fossil fuels as energy sources, has led directly to degradation and destruction of the whole world’s environment - an effect unseen on anywhere near this scale during previous human epochs or in the millennia of preceding forms of class society.

All but the most swivel-eyed now recognise CO₂ as the foremost culprit among the three main pollutant groups causing global warming and what has come to be called anthropogenic (human-produced) climate change. Methane (CH₄) and several nitrogen oxides (NO_x) are also major greenhouse gases, on similar growth curves to CO₂ during the centuries of capitalism.

Around half of methane emissions come from anthropogenic sources, and half from natural sources. Methane is released in large quantities by the fracking industry during the processing of shale deposits to produce natural gas, as well as leakage in all natural gas production. As a contributor to global warming, methane has an effect many times higher than CO₂, thus wholly contradicting the greenwashed ‘less polluting’ label that the fossil fuel industry has tried to affix to natural gas in recent decades. Methane also enters the atmosphere from the digestive systems of farm animals. Methane’s global warming potential (GWP, where CO₂ = 1) is very high: a leak of one tonne of methane is equivalent to emitting 27.9 tonnes of CO₂.

Depending on conditions, methane persists for around a decade in the atmosphere, whereas CO₂ lasts for at least a century.

The naturally occurring carbon-13 isotope (¹³C) makes up around 1.1% of Earth’s carbon; its presence can be used to track sources of carbon compounds, including methane. Methane from fossil sources contains more ¹³C than atmospheric methane, while that produced by microbial sources in wetlands, cattle and landfill contains less. Until 15 years ago, atmospheric levels of ¹³C had been increasing over the preceding 200 years’ growth of capitalism, but then a reversal was detected, suggesting that microbial sources were outstripping methane escapes from natural gas production (which are nonetheless still increasing). Biomass (eg, wood chip use by power stations) and biofuel are large contributors to methane levels in the atmosphere. However, what specific changes in wetlands, cattle production and landfill utilisation may be contributing is the subject of further scientific investigation. But we may fairly hypothesise that human (ie, capitalist) agency is heavily involved, exemplified not least in the over-industrialisation of pastoralist agriculture and the effect of present-day global warming on Arctic permafrost.

According to Durwood Zelke of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development (Washington DC):

If you think of fossil fuel emissions as putting the world on a slow boil, methane is a blow torch that is cooking us today … The fear is that this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop . . . If we let the earth warm enough to start warming itself, we are going to lose this battle.¹

NO_x emerges in exhaust gases of internal combustion engines. Higher compression ratios during combustion mean that diesel engines produce around 20 times more NO_x than petrol engines. NO_x emissions are even more dangerous than methane: for instance, discharge into the atmosphere of one tonne of nitrous oxide N₂O (‘laughing gas’) generated by manure is equivalent to the emission of 273 tonnes of CO₂.

Of course, how to deal with this crisis depends on class viewpoint. That is why from the get-go, using the adjective ‘anthropogenic’ and labelling our times as ‘Anthropocene’ have been consciously preferred by the mass media, loyal partisans of the ruling class, to avoid naming and blaming the actual cause and obscuring the clear and present danger posed by the continuation of capitalism. So it is not simply that human agency has produced this catastrophic effect (it has), but that it has been produced under the aegis of a specific class society - capitalism - which exploits the majority of human beings. The unadulterated truth is that humanity is being forced to live through an ongoing ‘Capitalocene’ era of the worldwide, anti-human, capitalist system. Capitalogenic climate change may see the death of all of us.

Biosphere

From its beginnings, capitalism has considered our biosphere ‘free as the air’, to exploit as it wished. Bourgeois ‘reality’ in the marketplace demanded this as of right. Only after gross effects and intermittent hard campaigning have even partial reforms been granted by the ruling class, hedged around with qualifications and get-out clauses. In the nature of the beast, reforms have been as much at the expense of the working class as legislators can make them. Thus, the bourgeois state may step in to keep individual capitalist enterprises in line, but capitalism’s underlying thrust and heart’s desire continues to be to exploit nature at minimal cost, primarily to its profit.

Capitalist industry polluted the air of the towns and cities where it grew and despoiled the water sources. Mass-produced food contained contaminants and unhealthy preservatives. City smog - the result of industrial and domestic use of coal - destroyed workers’ health and killed thousands. Soil lost trace elements necessary to healthy plant growth through intensive capitalist agriculture, which then imposed ‘improvements’, including landscape-scarring economies of scale and massive use of chemical industry pesticides and fertilisers, which added further to the energy burden and more atmospheric pollution.

As with all components of the biosphere, the atmosphere works dynamically with all other parts: cryosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere. It is primarily in its rising carbon dioxide content, and close behind in its rising methane content, that the atmosphere predicates our future.

In April 2022, Earth System Science Data published a scientific paper from researchers based in 70 research institutes worldwide. Its conclusions were damning:

The concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere is set to reach 414.7ppm [parts per million] in 2021, 50% above pre-industrial levels … The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from approximately 277ppm in 1750 … the beginning of the industrial era, to 412.4 ± 0.1ppm in 2020 … While emissions from fossil fuels started before the industrial era, they became the dominant source of anthropogenic emissions to the atmosphere from around 1950 and their relative share has continued to increase until the present. Anthropogenic emissions occur on top of an active natural carbon cycle that circulates carbon between the reservoirs of the atmosphere, ocean and terrestrial biosphere on timescales from sub-daily to millennial …²

Indicators of climate change are now numerous. European mean temperatures are already 2°C above the long-term norm, compared to the 1°C rise worldwide. In the UK, temperatures have reached over 40°C for the first time; 2022 saw the driest July ever recorded in the south of England (officially documented since 1836); and August has seen an official drought over the southern counties, with consequent substantial crop losses. On a much larger scale of population and somewhere where agriculture is very much the dominant industry, India has been experiencing more erratic monsoons in recent years, with the country’s national meteorologists declaring recently:

Climate over India during 2021 was above normal. The annual mean temperature for the country was +0.44°C above the 1981-2010 average, thus making the year 2021 as the fifth warmest year on record since 1901 … 11 out of the 15 warmest years were from the recent past 15 years (2007-21). In addition, the past decade (2011-20/2012-21) was the warmest decade on record with anomalies of 0.34°C/0.37°C above average. During 1901-2021, the annual mean temperature showed an increasing trend of 0.63°C/100 years with a significant increasing trend in the maximum temperature (0.99°C/100 years), and relatively lower increasing trend (0.26°C/100 years) in the minimum temperature.³

Big CO₂

Coal has been extensively mined from early capitalism in order to power steam engines for factories, railway transport and agricultural machinery, as well as for domestic, office and factory heating. It has been integral to steel production and to the manufacture of coal gas for the heating and lighting of domestic and commercial buildings and for street lighting in towns and cities. Its mining has employed millions - and killed many thousands of coalminers. Although coal’s use to generate electricity has been reduced through hydroelectric dam projects, nuclear power and natural gas, there are still today over 8,000 coal-fired power stations providing a third of the world’s electricity. Perhaps surprisingly, fossil fuels as a whole generated 64.5% of worldwide electricity in 2017 compared with 61.9% in 1990.⁴

Oil has supplanted coal in numerous fields. Refined petroleum products overtook coal in many areas within living memory: internal combustion engines using petrol/gasoline and diesel fuels provided motive power by road and rail. It became possible to replace horses and oxen in agriculture with tractors - a changeover occurring in living memory in Britain and other parts of Europe.

Natural gas going on-stream in recent decades further undermined coal production. Its adoption led to cessation of coal gas production in many regions of the world, with natural gas becoming the fossil fuel of choice for commercial and domestic heating, as well as a feedstock for chemical and other industrial processes.

But there is no escaping the fact that burning any fossil fuel, whether coal, oil or natural gas, produces climate-changing pollutants, mainly CO₂. And, while more CO₂ is emitted for every kilogram of coal burned compared to oil or natural gas, as the latter two fossil fuels are comprised of hydrocarbons, this hardly ameliorates their other harmful combustion products: CO₂ is nonetheless produced aplenty, increasing its concentration in the atmosphere. Air, sea and land transport are responsible for significant amounts of CO₂ pollution and share responsibility for climate change.

Production of Portland cement, the commonest cement in modern construction, entails generation of CO₂ as a by-product; emitting this in significant quantities as at present requires urgent remedial action, including carbon capture and utilisation (see below). It is a major reason why demolition and rebuilding as well as new builds have such a high carbon footprint.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been floated as a solution under capitalism, including within the working class movement, for dealing with emitted CO₂. There have even been letters in the Weekly Worker assuring readers that underground CO₂ storage for thousands of years is quite safe … just because coal, gas and oil were ‘stored’ there for past millennia. This is a false hope: after all, oil and gas seepage is a recorded phenomenon and sea coal was historically picked off beaches. CCS efficacy arguments have an insufficient proven basis in science and engineering and exhibit unwarranted faith in the centuries-long quality of a hermetic seal achievable in abandoned coal mines and redundant gas and oil wells - as if the massive disturbance of fossil fuel extraction were a mere bagatelle. Anyone who knows underground coal mining will attest that, as a coal face advances, the propped rock above the already mined coal seam falls in a controlled roof collapse; this immediately and permanently changes the permeability and stability of adjacent rock formations.

CCS has not taken off big-scale anywhere in the world: while the UK government has paid lip service to it, in reality they have kicked the can down the road to the 2030s; it remains an economically expensive, unproven Promethean wild card, intended to allow fossil fuel-extractive industries to continue their profit-making destruction of the planet. Carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) might have a limited future, dependant on CO₂ being utilised in chemical processes that need energy input, but which must be provided clean and green in order to make any real CO₂ savings.

Largely imported wood chip (‘biomass’) burning for power generation scandalously continues to receive a subsidy in the UK, despite zero evidence that this lessens CO₂ pollution: quite the opposite. Biomass is at least as polluting as coal, but official sleight of hand (ie, lying) tries to suggest that, because trees are planted, this replaces those burned in this way (it never does) and that this therefore compensates for the CO₂, etc emitted during its combustion. Biofuel, biomass, biogas, ‘carbon-neutral’ fuels - all are in a class of fake solutions floated with the aim of allowing capitalism to carry on making profits and continuing the planet’s fall into runaway climate change. In other words, biomass is greenwash hogwash.

Power from nuclear fission has been a problematic, capitalist state-backed substitute for fossil fuels since the 1950s. At present, most electricity in this sector is produced by nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium, whose very long half-lives present problems of radioactively contaminated materials during scheduled decommissioning decades after commissioning.

In addition, the risks of release of fissile material during the operation of nuclear plants are all too real and have plagued the industry. Disastrous accidents in 1979 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, USA, in 1986 at Chernobyl in Ukraine (then USSR) and in 2011 at Fukushima in Japan have understandably increased opposition to nuclear fission plants. These events threatened the health and lives of many millions due to subsequent widespread dispersion of radioactive material. For example, in spring 1986 heavy rain over Welsh hill farms 2,400km west of Chernobyl contained significantly high quantities of radioactive caesium and iodine and all sales of farm animals were banned.

Currently, the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine - the largest in Europe by power-generating capacity - has been endangered by shelling nearby; it already suffered some damage during Russian seizure. Accidental or deliberate damage by Russian or Ukrainian forces cannot be ruled out, with unclear but likely widespread serious consequences across Europe, driven by prevailing easterly winds.

This summer, with official drought warnings and alarms over more than half of Europe, several nuclear power stations have had to suspend operations due to insufficient water for essential cooling operations.

Hydroelectric power (using dammed bodies of water) has been established for over a century: 40% of the USA’s power production was hydroelectric by 1920. Established hydropower generates 17% (around 4,500 terawatt-hours) of world electricity: more than all other renewables combined and more than nuclear fission.

Dam-building and operation are no different from all other activities under capitalism, and there have frequently been accompanying deleterious consequences: destruction of biologically rich, productive lowland and riverine valley forests, marshland and grasslands. In 2000 the World Commission on Dams estimated that dams historically had physically displaced 40-80 million people worldwide.Class alternative

Dams

What has made things even more problematic for hydroelectric dams is Europe’s summer 2022 drought, which dried up the rivers feeding them: several such dams in Norway and Portugal at this time have no energy output, as they now have insufficient water to operate. As climate change accelerates, dams in many areas are likely to grind to a halt for lack of their sole motive power: water.

The profit motive backed by the bourgeois state inevitably carries a constant threat of solving the climate problem in the negative, as with every problem tackled under this social system.

Nuclear fusion, the process that takes place within our sun, has promise as a form of nuclear power without many of the problems of nuclear fission. Though development is still only at the level of research, it is now at very large scale under the tokamak and inertial confinement (ICF) by laser iterations. Massive investment by bourgeois states would clearly be needed to move into industrial production in the near future. But who benefits? Will the results of state-funded research and development, as so many times before, merely go to line companies’ pockets? Can companies be trusted? On past experience, to ask these questions is largely to answer them.

Solar (photovoltaic) and wind power are already utilised practically and contribute significantly to renewable energy, albeit still at a woefully low overall level. Solar panels have appeared scattered seemingly randomly on roofs and in farmers’ fields, the latter at the expense of arable and pastoral land. Wind turbines are visible on exposed hillsides and off shore, but in nowhere near sufficient numbers as yet. Unless greatly increased economies of scale can be introduced rapidly, on an emergency basis, the necessary substitution of these renewables for fossil fuel and nuclear energy cannot take place in the timescale required, and nor can the energy inputs in producing solar panels and wind turbines be reduced by improving the production technology. The political priority to mobilise resources has already waned among leading bourgeois states, looking to junk already weak green position statements with a ‘keeping the lights on’ populist stance during Nato’s proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. Similarly, tidal and wave power deployment have yet to be properly started as the massive construction projects they are, even if they are in advanced development.

So many of these novel yet most practical and essential ways of reducing CO₂ emissions need urgently to be developed and introduced under a social system where human need has supplanted profit-taking. In short, a socialist society and worldwide planning are crucial to tackle the planetary problem of dangerously excessive, capitalocene quantities of CO₂ and CH₄ in our atmosphere.

Rapid abandonment of fossil fuels is essential if global warming and climate change are to be contained and reversed. The tipping point of no return is close; to all intents and purposes, were even a partial return to be contemplated after such a tipping point, it would be at a most exceptional human and societal cost, possibly akin to battling a nuclear winter’s level of devastation. Present political discussion of efforts to combat the effects of runaway inflation have begun to compare the necessary funding to government spending during the Covid-19 emergency; but that is as nothing, compared to what is needed immediately to combat our existential climate change emergency.

Simply substituting capitalist alternatives in present energy-use situations is far away from the ideological leap that is needed: for example, production of private, individual cars already involves the use of unacceptable levels of energy for them to be a viable universal mode of land transport, especially as most sit unused for at least 95% of the time. Public transport, on the other hand, consisting of buses, rail, community share cars, taxis and water craft can be far more energy-efficient and are already available in non-fossil fuel modes. In addition, bullet and other fast transit trains can replace many journeys taken by air. Private aircraft, which provide no benefit for the mass of humanity, need to be retired. Electric helicopters/large drones could be developed as air ambulances. And so on.

Transportation is just one area of concern that must be drastically modified, as exemplified within advanced capitalist societies. Goods transported vast distances inevitably incur high levels of fuel consumption and combustion product pollution (large ships burn the cheapest, foulest, heavy fuel oil there is). Production closer to end use must largely ameliorate transportation excesses. Many other such changes aiming to reduce CO₂ and CH₄ emissions can be identified, but ultimately capitalism is incapable of acting fully to effect them. Only if there is profit will capitalism act unprompted; but if profits or the present social system are under threat, then capitalism will clearly never expedite the enormous changes required. Technically, the most advanced capitalist societies could make these changes; however, as profit, short-term gain and the next few years are the limit of a bourgeois apologist’s view, the organised working class has to remove the class enemy in toto. As capitalism cannot do the job, then socialist revolution shall and must. Capitalism urgently needs to be overthrown, for the sake of all humanity. One solution - revolution.

Human society and the environment are part of one whole and we must proceed holistically: each intrinsically affects the other. Change has to come, but, if through the agency of capitalism, humanity’s plight will not be pretty.

Human liberation from capitalism’s active environmental threats requires revolution. For that we need a revolutionary party of the working class, recognising nature and human society as an intertwined and intra-dependent entity, with humankind fully playing its knowing part in safeguarding the planet we call home. The choice is clear: revolution or barbarism.