Capitalism's Arctic plan - get the oil, destroy the lives of millions

Citizens of every country will pay a massive, painful price for the melting of Arctic sea ice, even though capitalist corporations and governments view it as a potential profit bonanza.

A study in the journal Nature models the economic impact of the release of 50-gigatonnes of methane from melting permafrost and shows it would result in flooding, sea-level rise, agriculture damage and health impacts amounting to a cost of $60 trillion – roughly the size of the entire global economy last year.

And a parallel study confirms that this release of methane is already happening at an alarming rate. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet started a little later this year but is spreading fast and will probably match last year's record melt by September.

The result of this annual trend is that permafrost in the Arctic, in Siberia and Alaska is melting, releasing methane and speeding up global warming.

The methane could continue to be released gradually, albeit on a rising trend, or there could be a sudden pulse as tipping points are reached. This would push temperatures up so fast we could reach 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2035.

Once you say that of course you are really saying "anytime" because emissions of all greenhouse gases continue to rise and no effort is being made to halt or slow them. A feedback effect could kick in at any moment.

A slowing of the rise in temperatures over the last few years provided a breathing space. 

But instead of using this to take urgent action to halt the growth in emissions, it was simply exploited by climate change deniers to say there is no global warming.

Now we know that much of the heat was being absorbed into the deep oceans and as they lose their capacity to soak up more, warming will take off again. Indeed, the overall upward trend has never halted, with all the hottest summers on record taking place during this disputed period.

Corporations and governments may be greedily eyeing the Arctic, but alongside the process already in train, this scenario would result in the worst possible conditions for agriculture. The worst effects would be in Africa, Asia and South America, but no country is immune as farmers from Europe and America can testify.

But the opposite of action to halt emissions is happening; Lloyds of London estimates more than $100bn will be invested in extraction and shipping in the Arctic in the next five years.

Writing these blogs, one begins to feel a bit like the Trojan prophetess Cassandra who was locked up as a madwoman by the fellow citizens for warning them the war with the Greeks could only end in disaster.

But so be it – the truth can always bear repeating, which is that without system change we cannot begin to start to slow and then reverse climate change. If the corporations are permitted to start operating in the Arctic, the consequences are unthinkable.

Solutions are tantalisingly within reach – from permaculture, perennial grains, recycling of waste products to support organic farming, to abandoning fossil fuels in favour of locally-planned renewable energy strategies, and, in the case of the Arctic, leaving the fossil fuels and minerals in the ground!

But capitalism cannot permit this approach. As Bolivian climate strategist Pablo Solon puts it: "In this race to the top, capital needs to colonize territories and natural resources, decrease the cost of human labour, develop new technologies and promote new financial, investment and trade rules that allow capital to have more and more profit."

As a result, capitalism has already, in Solon’s words, "reached and surpassed the limits of the Earth system". To redress the damage, and to have a future for humanity, we must move to a model where humans work in harmony with nature and that means that the absolute supremacy of growth and profit must be overthrown.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Missing the point about 'growth'

The consequences of the sudden eruption of global crisis in 2007-8 took many by surprise. Amongst those struggling to incorporate these dramatic changes into their overly fatalistic views are the growing number of people concerned about the depletion of resources and changes in climate.

David Holmgren is the leading advocate of permaculture, a design philosophy which has evolved since its inception in the 1970s as “an integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man”, in other words “permanent or sustainable agriculture”.

Its current all-encompassing vision is one of “permanent or sustainable culture” covering all of human activity, which is divided into seven domains guided by a set of ethics and design principles. Permaculture is defined as an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies.

Holmgren’s views are seminal for many, including those active in the Transition Initiative, who have come to realise that we humans cannot continue to live on the planet, producing in a way which depletes resources and destroys the ecosystems we depend on.

In his latest essay, Money vs Fossil Energy: the battle for control of the world, he tries, as he says, to “provide a framework for understanding the ideological roots of the current global crisis”.

Holmgren finds common cause with many who attribute the current problems to a society that pursues the myth of the possibility of continued economic growth but adopts an approach that is as confusing as it is misleading. His one-sided obsession with growth fails to realise that capitalist society has always been like a roller-coaster. It alternates between periods of growth which reach the limits of credit-fuelled overproduction, alternating with ever-worsening periods of contraction and destruction.

For much of his explanation, Holmgren relies on what he presents as two counter posing camps – the money people, those who believe that wealth is the result of human ingenuity or “human brilliance”, versus those who believe that wealth comes from nature, the oil people.

However hard you look, you won’t find a definition of “wealth” itself in Holmgren’s essay. And it’s this omission that’s at the heart of his pessimistic, fatalist, survivalist conclusion. The best we can hope to achieve, he argues, are “resilient and relocalised economies that will grow at the margins abandoned by the dinosaurs of the declining global industrial culture.”

Holmgren’s one-or-the-other explanation excludes the reality that what we produce – including the reproduction of ourselves – is actually the result of humans applying their ingenuity to the nature that they are part of.

Marx’s investigations led him to the inner dynamic of social evolution to unravel the contradictory opposites of use-value and exchange-value. Use-values are the outer, physical form of commodities, the things we can and do actually use. Exchange value constitutes the amount of socially-necessary human labour expended in the production of the use-value.

Capitalist production is driven by the pursuit of the profits extracted from the production of intangible exchange-value, destroying the ecosystem in a way which arises almost accidentally out of the alienation of present social relationships. A truly global society that supersedes capitalism will consciously organise its social relations to identify and produce what is needed – use-values – in a way which is consistent with maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.

Evidence is mounting that the phony recovery brought about by torrents of credit imagined into existence to prevent financial and economic Armageddon has run out of steam and the feared “double-dip recession” is well under way. Holmgren leaves capitalist society to continue on its path of destruction Surely our task is to replace it.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor