The period of world history since the 1980s has been the most extractive in human history.
In an environmental impact study that made headlines last month, the Trump Administration argued that anthropogenic climate change is likely to lead to a 4°C increase in average temperatures by 2100. According to the memo, modest reforms, like the fuel-efficiency standards the study was aiming to overturn, will make no appreciable difference in global climate change.
That outrage greeted the release of this memo was unsurprising. Throughout his candidacy and his presidency, Trump has preferred to think of climate change as a “Chinese hoax,” and his administration, like all recent Republican regimes, has committed itself to an accelerated anti-environmentalism, overturning with ecstatic vigor its predecessor’s modest restraints and regulations. Still, in its own perverse way, the Trump study is one of the most forthright presentations on climate change to come from a Global North government in recent memory.
Trump withdrew from the 2015 Paris Agreement more than a year ago, for which he has been condemned in the US and abroad. But the unfortunate truth is that the non-binding treaty’s stated targets—to keep global temperatures to a less-than-1.5°C increase above pre-industrial levels over the next eighty years—were technically already impossible three years before it was signed. In the simplest terms, even with a reduction in the rate of carbon emissions, emissions as a whole are on track to increase by about 3 percent per year. To hold to the actual goals of the climate treaty, the actual output (not simply its rate) of carbon emissions would have to decrease in the range of 2 to 3 percent per year. Thus, in most likely scenarios, a 1.5 to 2°C increase threshold will be passed by 2050, and perhaps as early as the mid-2030s. What’s more is that the very idea embodied in the Paris Agreement—a transition to sustainability within existing political, economic, and social systems—is simply not plausible. To use the language of the administration’s study, such efforts are not currently “economically practicable.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released just a week after the administration study emphatically underlines this point: at every turn, mitigation and adaptation efforts are “limited by economic, financial, human capacity and institutional constraints.”
In a much-discussed recent paper in PNAS broadly known as the “Hothouse Earth” paper, a team of noted climate scientists led by Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, and Katherine Richardson argue that unless drastic transformations were to occur, even increases of 1.5 or 2°C could lock in the “Hothouse” scenario, the result of a “cascade of feedbacks” in ecological systems. The idea of cascading effects or a series of triggered events is not new in the climate science literature, but Steffen et al were far more sanguine than is typical about how much human social and economic systems—rather than simply technological systems—play a central role in this process:
The present dominant socioeconomic system . . . is based on high-carbon economic growth and exploitative resource use. Attempts to modify this system have met with some success locally but little success globally in reducing greenhouse gas emissions or building more effective stewardship of the biosphere. Incremental linear changes to the present socioeconomic system are not enough to stabilize the Earth System.
In other words, small-bore reforms—a little cap-and-trade here, some fuel efficiency there—are not credible. For all their symbolic weight and political utility for figures like Emmanuel Macron or Angela Merkel, the Paris Climate Accords have offered little more than a fig leaf. Even the modest reductions in emissions—what Steffen et al describe as “some success locally”—deserve an asterisk. Many would argue that measuring carbon output by national boundary in a globalized world is highly misleading. Some of those local success stories are precisely that: partial transitions to clean energy or higher efficiency. But a far clearer picture can be found in the world of industrial production. Just as so much global manufacturing has shifted to places like China, so have much of the related emissions. Today, as ever, a vast number of ideologues and politicians of fundamental-system preservation like to present themselves as the adults in the room, the experts who can be trusted with the ever more complex problems of the 21st century. But nothing could be further from the truth. When it comes to centrist technocracy and the climate, it’s not that the emperor is wearing no clothes. The whole suit is on fire.
At the center of the Anthropocene lies what the PNAS scientists refer to as the “present dominant socioeconomic system.” Capitalism as we know it has not simply steered the global human ecological niche off course; it has driven us completely into a ditch. “High-carbon economic growth” and “exploitative resource use” are constitutive of this system, not incidental to it. And this resource exploitation is not limited to fossil fuels and rare-earth metals. Everything from the augmented mental health regimes of white-collar workers in the Global North to increasingly destabilized and dispossessed farmers and fishermen in the Global South are part of its extractive circuit. Its causal tendrils snake back through the history of colonization, of coal and oil, of geopolitics, and, of course, profit.
