The Climate Book is a collection of 102 essays written by various experts regarding different scientific aspects of climate change. Greta Thunberg is credited with creating the book and has written several pieces, although most of the essays were not written by Thunberg. The book was published last year (2022) by Allen Lane.
Introduction
Let’s put The Climate Book into context. The average global temperature is over 1.1°C warmer than it was before the Industrial Revolution. The extreme or bizarre weather events we are already experiencing occur in the context of a 1.1°C temperature rise.
Despite this already precarious situation, the 2015 Paris Agreement set itself a target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C within the next eight years (see p. 206). Stopping global warming reaching 1.5°C may limit its most serious consequences. Note the emphasis on “may”; we are not guaranteed to stop runaway climate change even at 1.5°C for reasons outlined below.
However, the 2015 Paris Agreement has a second target of 2°C. With the disruption we are witnessing at 1.1°C, one can imagine the impact of 2°C. At 2°C, extreme heat would be six times more likely, heavy rain is seventy per cent more likely, and, despite increased flooding, drought would be twice as likely. One might think humanity is, surely, on course for the less ambitious 2°C target at least.
Yet, the world is en route to reach between 3.2°C and 4°C by the end of this century. One can scarcely imagine the social consequences, but the environmental impacts would look like this: extreme heat, nine times more likely than at present; heavy rain, three times more likely; drought, four times more likely. This is not some “worst-case scenario” – this is our current trajectory.
Given all this, the importance of achieving the 1.5°C target as a minimum should be obvious. It should be obvious, but as Thunberg et al. show, most people are unaware of our actual situation. The Climate Book navigates us through the establishment spin and P.R. to clarify our position.
Summary
Capitalism and Climate Change
Humans are clearly responsible for climate change. However, Thunberg writes that to blame “all of humankind” for it would be “very far from the truth”. Most humans are living sustainably or “well within planetary boundaries”. It is the wealthy minority that has “caused this crisis”. She dismisses the Malthusian notion of overpopulation as misleading (see p. 19). “Population does matter”, she writes, “but it is not people who are causing emissions and depleting the Earth, it is what some people do – it is some people’s habits and behaviour, in combination with our economic structures, that are causing the catastrophe… it is the sufferings of the many that have paid for the benefits of the few” [author’s emphasis] (p. 19).
There is a massive disparity between the contributions of rich and poor to climate change; “The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as … the poorest half of humanity” (p.3) (actually this is no longer accurate; as I write, Oxfam have just released a report showing that the top 1% are responsible for the same pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity – 5 billion people (Oxfam, 2023)).
In her essay, New Yorker author Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “Our most dangerous weapon would prove to be… late capitalism” (p. 13). She explains that capitalism is making things worse, not better. Kolbert writes that people had been using fossil fuels long before the advent of the capitalist economic system. Still, it was in the twentieth century that “the problem of climate change was invented”. Carbon dioxide emissions were at about 1,000 gigatonnes in 2000 but have – “horrifyingly – increased to 1,700 gigatonnes”, a seventy per cent increase in two decades. If there’s something capitalism is excellent at producing, it’s C02 emissions.
Clearly, then, sufficient progress is not being made in tackling climate change – contrary to the impression governments and big businesses create. Thunberg shows that governments manipulate statistics and reports to exaggerate progress or conceal failings. Countries “report quite astonishing reductions in CO2 emissions… since the world first started negotiating the frameworks for how we manage our statistics”. In other words, a significant portion of actual emissions have been “successfully negotiated out” of figures in official reports. Emissions are reported as going down when they are actually increasing:
“Outsourcing factories to distant parts of the world and negotiating emissions from international aviation and shipping out of our statistics… we also erase the associated emissions – emissions that have, in reality, increased” (p. 4).
Uninformed and Misinformed
“The vast majority of us are still not fully aware of what is happening” for various reasons.
For example, how many among us are aware of the carbon budget? The carbon budget is “the maximum amount of carbon dioxide we can collectively emit to give the world a 67 per cent chance of staying below 1.5°C of global temperature rise” (p. 19). 90 per cent of the carbon budget has already been used up. In this sense, we are not just limited in time but also in how much fossil fuels we can afford to burn.
While many people are under the false impression that our situation is better than it is, business and political leaders have known for decades the actual damage being done (p. 20). The fact that the carbon budget has already been robbed of 90% of its capacity highlights that the capitalist class has simply seen it as against their interests to acknowledge the damage their system of private ownership and profit is causing. As Thunberg writes, “We have solid unequivocal evidence of the need for change”, but this need for change puts us “on a collision course with our current economic system” (p. 20).
Michael Oppenheimer shows that global warming was known about since at least 1896 when Svante Arrhenius published his prediction that the release of carbon dioxide would “gradually warm Earth by several degrees”. By 1969, knowledge of global warming was much more comprehensive, and by the 1980s, there was “a growing chorus of scientists raising the alarm” (p. 23).
Naomi Oreskes writes that “In the 1970s and ’80s, Exxon’s own scientists” told them the company was contributing to climate change. The company’s response? It “promoted a public message of high scientific uncertainty…” despite the clarity of the science. “ExxonMobil was a key node in …the ‘carbon combustion complex’… that deliberately created confusion about the climate crisis” [my emphasis]. Companies promoted “outlier scientists to create the impression of scientific debate” where there was none. This gave the impression that the “fossil fuel industry [is] supporting ‘sound science’ rather than protecting profits… The fossil fuel industry and its allies acted indirectly to prevent climate action by poisoning the well of public debate”.
Despite the big polluters’ “demonising…climate scientists and activists”, some well-meaning scientists nevertheless “insisted on the power of ‘corporate engagement'”, thereby contributing to the obfuscation that the polluters create among the public. The fossil fuel industry also deflected attention from the destructive role of the companies and onto ordinary individuals who, they said, “should take ‘personal responsibility’ by lowering their ‘carbon footprints'”.
This myth of ‘personal responsibility’ is also tackled by Nina Schrank in her enlightening essay, The Myth of Recycling. Schrank makes an important point about how corporations deceived us into thinking that pollution was solely the fault of the individual through effective P.R. campaigns like the “‘ Crying Indian’ T.V. advert”. Micheal E. Mann, too, exposes how “the focus on the individual’s role in solving climate change was carefully nurtured by industry” and how “the concept of a ‘personal carbon footprint’, was something that the oil company B.P. promoted in the mid-2000s. Indeed, B.P. launched one of the first personal carbon footprint calculators”. All this was to divert our attention from “their much larger footprint” (p.373 – 374). It’s worth remembering here that only a few years later, B.P. was responsible for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster – the largest marine oil spill in history in which 11 people were killed. The disaster also caused irreparable damage to the environment and countless deaths of marine species.
Analysis and Evaluation
Class
The personal contributions of Greta Thunberg to the climate movement have been immense. She first came to prominence in August 2018 at the age of 15. The Climate Book was published when Thunberg was still only 19. Despite her very young age, her essays are the most politically advanced of the book. Actually, it is largely the contributions of others where the book falls short.
The book’s aim, writes Thunberg, is to “use my platform to create a book based on the current best available science – a book that covers the climate, ecological and sustainability crisis holistically… My hope is that this book might be some kind of go-to source”.
As a “go-to source” for the science of climate change, the book achieves its goal quite well. It’s worth reading reading for this alone.
In terms of covering “the … crisis holistically,” it unfortunately fails.
Understanding something holistically means understanding that everything is interconnected and that, although things can be studied in isolation, they are not isolated in reality. The Climate Book does not achieve its stated aim of being “holistic” because it interprets natural science in isolation from the politics and economics of capitalist society. In other words, it does not consider things from a class perspective. It is disconnected from the experiences of ordinary people. And lest we forget, people are part of nature – our politics and society are not separate from nature.
Let us use Nina Schrank’s Myth of Recycling as one of many examples. In the essay, she shows how “the growing movement against throw-away plastic” in the 1970s USA had “led to protests across the country. The big food and drink companies are rightly held responsible…”. But her essay also omits the role of the organised working class in the movement. It’s worth contrasting Schrank’s essay with Conor Kilpatrick’s 2017 Jacobin article, which is about the same movements. Fitzpatrick’s article focuses on Tony Mazzocchi, an American environmentalist and labour leader. It is worth quoting at length. Fitzpatrick writes that:
“for nearly a decade in the 1960’s and ’70’s, environmentalism seemed to be on the cusp of a popular reckoning against the powers of capital… it found an ally in the labor movement… Mazzocchi and his union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International (OCAW), were the primary muscle behind the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA)… which mobilised both labor and the burgeoning environmental movement… By the late 1960s, industrial firms in the USA were in panic mode… the postwar P.R. that championed smoke stacks and steel furnaces as unambiguous symbols of progress, wealth and modernity had lost its ability to convince Americans to look the other way… a major oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara on January 29, 1969, then a fire on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland – caused by an oil slick – helped drive home the environmental crisis caused by a greedy corporate America. Public Relations consultant Clifford B. Reeves said in 1970 that environmentalism could become ‘a basis for a broad general attack on the entire industrial system … the thing that provides a basis for universal attack against private business institutions [emphasis added]… the new environmentalism would be the natural ally of the labor movement… And while consumers could boycott and raise awareness, only the workers behind that factory – tens of thousands represented by Mazzocchi’s union – could shut it all down [emphasis added]… As Mazzocchi saw it, those chemicals that poisoned his union’s rank and file eventually make their way into communities outside – through the air, soil, and waterways. The factory was, therefore, the demon core of the environmental crisis. But as a socialist, Mazzocchi also knew the job site was a place in which workers potentially had vast powers even under capitalism. ‘It was the workers in these industries who taught me that there was a systematic conflict between profits and health… when you start thinking that… you’re going to the heart of the beast [emphasis added]… For Mazzocchi, worker control over production was environmentalism. Their fates were intertwined… the environmental movement needed the labour movement and vice versa” [emphasis added] (Kilpatrick, 2017).
How did the owners respond to these labour movements? They began
“promoting voluntary alternatives to regulation and gaining market share among ecologically-conscious consumers… In other words, slip off the noose that activists wanted to place on corporate America’s necks and instead loop it around the public’s shoulders in a phony kind of universalism in which everyone is to blame for our environmental ills, particularly consumers” [emphasis added]. (Kilpatrick, 2017, p. 20)
What was the outcome of taking the movement out of the hands of workers and placing it in the lap of the corporations?
“the corporate drive to make such regulation a matter of voluntary consumer choices quickly made it a middle-class lifestyle, the antithesis of Mazzocchi’s vision. As companies moved jobs overseas to cut down on labor costs, it was all too easy to blame environmentalists and diffuse the power of the environmental-labor united front” (Kilpatrick, 2017, p. 22)
This vital, central role of labour, as outlined above, is absent from The Myth of Recycling essay, which discusses the same situation in the 1970s. The crucial political lessons one learns from Kilpatrick’s Jacobin essay are thus missed by readers of The Climate Book.
A sufficient appreciation of class politics is something contributors to The Climate Book generally lack. Thus, the essays avoid “going to the heart of the beast”, as Mazzochi put it. Overall, the book neglects a class perspective in favour of a superficial nation by nation perspective. The fact that class divisions exist in all countries is often overlooked. People of exploited or “underdeveloped” nations are portrayed as a homogenous group of poor people, thereby conflating the rich and poor classes of such countries.
Kevin Anderson’s essay, The New Denialism, offers another frustratingly bourgeois perspective, where he claims that we have been
“favouring hedonism over stewardship… we have been well aware what the climate impacts of frequent flying, buying SUVs, owning second homes… consuming more stuff year on year would be”.
He goes on,
“Where is the collective chorus of senior academics revealing the whitewash of Big Oil and Big Finance? Where are the CEOs of our established environmental charities, our policymakers and our investigative journalists? We aren’t asleep at the wheel; we’ve been actively steering society towards its own demise. Why? Because we fear rocking the boat and upsetting our paymasters. We enjoy the prestige of hobnobbing with the great and good, and we aspire to honours from the establishment. And because, ultimately, we’re afraid of our own conclusions. But we’ve also convinced ourselves that we deserve our high salaries and accompanying carbon-rich lifestyles. The limelight feels good” (p. 205).
This is a hefty dose of petit-bourgeois-oriented cynicism, completely disconnected from the experiences of most people. As Thunberg herself points out, “we are not all in the same boat” (p. 154). Very few working people are “frequent flyers” or “hobnobbing with the great and good”, at least in the sense that “the great and good” are ironically described here. Indeed, it’s highlighted elsewhere in the book that “80 per cent of people in the world have never travelled by aeroplane” and that “50 per cent of aviation emissions… were caused by 1 per cent of the world’s population”.
Vitally, economists Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty show that the “universalist” approach (i.e. that workers and capitalists share equal responsibility) does not work because “poorer people have less capacity to decarbonise their consumption” [my emphasis]. They argue that, in a logical world, “the rich should contribute the most to curbing emissions, and the poor be given the capacity to cope with the transition to” an environment suffering climate change. “Unfortunately, this is not what is happening – if anything, what is happening is closer to the opposite”. In other words, under capitalism, the working class and the poor are limited in what they can do to reduce their emissions and environmental impact in general – at least, as long as they exist under the conditions of capitalism. Chancel and Piketty write that:
“Countries have announced plans to cut their emissions significantly by 2030, and most have established plans to reach net zero somewhere around 2050. Let’s focus on the first milestone, the 2030 emission reduction target: according to a recent study, as expressed in per capita terms, the poorest half of the population in the U.S. and most European countries have already reached or almost reached the target [emphasis added]. This is not the case at all for the middle classes and the wealthy, who are well above – that is to say, behind – the target” (p. 407).
Chancel and Piketty’s essay is the sole acknowledgement of realities for working-class people who have “no way to reduce their energy consumption. They had no option but to drive their cars to work” and pay unjust carbon taxes for doing so (p. 407).
This un-holistic disconnect from class-based experiences is nothing new in recent books about climate change. Planet on Fire suffered from the same issue. “Even Rachel Carson’s massively influential Silent Spring said next to nothing about the workers exposed to the chemicals she wrote about… Carson’s blindness … was fundamentally rooted” in her class privilege (Kilpatrick, 2017, p. 19).
Deus Ex Machina: Capitalist Utopianism and Idealism
The following sentences may appear extremely obvious: We are not separate from nature; we cannot seal ourselves off from nature. We are natural beings, part of a natural world. When we see, it is nature seeing itself; when we think, it is nature interpreting itself (Foster, 2000). Thunberg states, too, that far from standing above nature or being separate from nature, humans are actually “a part of it” (p. 19). We depend on nature; it impacts us, and our actions have consequences on it.
Obvious as those materialist points may appear, there is a contrary idealism that maintains we simply need to trust that a person or technology will conceive of an as-yet inconceivable idea (nowadays, faith in the coming of an entrepreneurial genius has largely replaced faith in the Second Coming of “Christ”). This “saviour” will bring society a new technology (such as A.I.) which will allow us to continue with the the current mode of production whilst somehow avoiding environmental catastrophe. So far, we’ve had quite a few false prophets: Musk, Gates, etc.
In other words, the private owners of capital attempt to justify continued environmental destruction in the hope that a great idea or future technology will appear from the heavens, as if from the hand of God. Such a God-send will, somehow, allow the destructive and exploitative practices of capitalism to continue without consequence. That is bourgeois utopianism.
It’s often suggested that future technologies will solve climate change. In The Climate Book, Michael Oppenheimer touches on this point when he writes about reliance on future, fictional technology: “While some experts are exploring ways to artificially speed the removal [of CO2], no such technology is currently available” [emphasis added]. In this way, future technology can be seen as the deus ex machina of capitalist ideology. David Harvey also commented that “most other theories of technological change treat it as some sort of deus ex machina… attributable to the inherent genius of entrepreneurs… But Marx [was] reluctant to attribute something as crucial as this to some external power.” (Harvey, 2010)
Such bourgeois utopianism serves the purpose of duping people into believing that technology is the solution and that such “solutions” are forthcoming. Thus, it encourages polluting activities to continue as usual (see pages 302-303).
Furthermore, the suggestion that future technologies are all we need to solve the crisis misunderstands the role technology plays under capitalism. Technological efficiency is not used for environmental reasons but for improving business competitiveness by increasing the rate of productivity; it seeks to maximise what Marx called relative surplus value. In other words, technological efficiency is useful for the capitalist only as far as it intensifies the productivity of labour, thereby lowering costs and increasing commercial output.
This would be different under a system where production is rationally planned instead of profit-driven. Under such circumstances, improved efficiency would be used to reduce labour as items would be produced for need, not profit, i.e. for their use value, not their exchange value. Under capitalism, however, newer, more efficient machines must be used as much as possible to maximise the owner’s competitive advantage and to limit the effects of what Marx called moral depreciation. Moral depreciation is the depreciation of technology as other competitors also start using it or as competitors’ technologies begin to supersede it. Therefore, the capitalist will seek to produce more in the same space of time as he did with an older, less efficient technology. For the capitalist who has invested in the latest, most efficient hardware, downtime is seen as an unnecessary loss of surplus value, because it reduces competitive advantage and lowers the rate of relative surplus value that is otherwise gained by new technological efficiency for the capitalist owners and shareholders.
Therefore, the purpose of technological efficiency under the current global economic system is not to allow for more sparing use of machinery but to drive it as hard as ever to maximise its output rate. The Financial Times, for example, reports that A.I. has created an incredible “thirst” for microchips and servers. Cryptocurrencies, A.I., “smart” devices, the “internet of things”, and the increasing use of digital technology generally are placing a huge demand on data centres that are burning through servers – and coal (Milman, 2022) . As Thunberg et al. have shown throughout The Climate Book, the efficiency of “late capitalist” production is not improving the environment but is drastically worsening it.
So the suggestion that “hardware efficiency improvements” (de Vries, 2023) might help the environment “in the long term” (as if we have a long-term in this regard) misunderstands the nature of hardware consumption by capitalist businesses. The use of new technology may improve efficiency, at least from a business owner’s perspective, but it will consume as much energy as possible, not the least, even if the amount of energy expended per item is reduced. In fact, A.I. actually consumes more energy than current practices. Alex de Vries shows the massive difference in energy consumption between a Google search and using ChatGPT in his paper, The Growing Energy Footprint of Artificial Intelligence (de Vries, 2023). The exploitation of labour by capitalism is also intensified by new technology, not relieved (see Morris-Suzuki, 1984). As capitalism must always expand its markets, energy consumption will continue to increase.
“isms”
Thunberg is understandably weary of what could be called “isms”. Anti-ism is a refutation of “all current political ideologies – socialism, liberalism, communism, conservatism, centrism, you name it”.
The problem with the anti-“ism” mentality is if “all current ideologies” are to be refuted, then one must depend on an “idea” that hasn’t yet been developed – a non-existent future “idea”, another deus ex machina. Instead of critiquing and building on philosophy where appropriate, anti-ism is a rejection of the ideas that work as well as those that don’t.
There’s nothing new in such arguments. Supposed critics of Marxism often base their arguments on what they imagine Marx wrote about but are actually ideas Marx himself had already criticised and transcended. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre,
“an ‘anti-Marxist’ argument is only the apparent rejuvenation of a pre-Marxist idea.” Hence, nothing is more common among critics of Marx—ironic as this may seem—than to attribute to him the views of other radical thinkers … that he sought to transcend” (see Foster, 2000)
Broken Economic System
Naomi Oreskes writes that “Capitalism as currently practiced has imperilled… billions of humans…” and that capitalism is “a broken economic system” [emphasis added].
Implying capitalism is broken implies that it has once functioned optimally. From a position of environmentalism, we know this is untrue; “dark Satanic Mills” are synonymous with the Industrial Revolution, while growing capitalist efficiency globally has resulted not in an improving climate but in a growing climate catastrophe, as we have already seen.
The point is that capitalism is not “a broken economic system”. The capitalist economic system is working exactly as only it can – to facilitate competition for profit.
References
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