The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has not only revealed the inherent, exploitative economic failures of an unfettered free market, but also, the environmental failures of capitalism as decreased fossil-fuel activity has cleared the air pollution in Asia, and canals in Italy. Yet there has been a rising online sentiment pinning global environmental deterioration on to inherent human nature –when the global temperatures were normal in a pre-industrial era. ‘Mother nature is waking up, humans are the virus,’ pseudo-woke Twitter users share, amassing hundreds of thousands of likes and engagement.The idea that humans are a virus that can not coexist with nature absolves neoliberalism of its decades of market failures, it absolves the 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions of their blame for global warming. Native Americans have conserved and coexisted nature for thousands of years. The problem is not humanity, it’s neoliberalism, which through deregulation and resistance against a transition towards a 70-85% renewable system, demands the perpetuation of an economy run on fossil fuels. The environment has been the sacrificial lamb of neoliberalism since the 19th century — forgoing environmental health in favor of industrial progress.
Environmental History: Normal CO2 Levels in The Pre-Industrial Era
The nihilist, defeatist blaming of environmental deterioration on “humanity” is an intellectually lazy cop-out. It’s a way to absolve neoliberalism of its responsibility in creating the environmental crisis and absolve ourselves of the responsibility of transforming the global energy industry. Producing fossil fuel emissions isn’t a natural trait of humanity — it’s a trait of capitalism, deregulation, and the fossil fuel industry. There is another way. To simply throw our hands in the air and declare, “oh well, humans are evil destructors,” is the easy and dishonest option. It is ecofascism.
Environmental history shows that humans — who have lived on the planet for 200,000 years — only managed to create a global warming crisis in the last 150 years with the advent of industrial capitalism. How has human activity harmed the environment? The most pressing environmental problems of our time—such as deforestation, water pollution, and global warming—are the results of human activities.
The pre-industrial climate is proof that environmental destruction is not a feature of humanity, but rather, a feature of post-industrial neoliberalism. Human interaction with nature since the post-revolutionary age of fossil fuels from 1800-present, has been primarily destructive. The Industrial Revolution marked the start of the gradual rise in CO2 emissions. Studies have found that climate change signs first appeared as early as the 1830s.
Human influence aside, internal and external forces such as internal heat transfer within the Earth, volcanic eruptions, and variability in the amount of energy emitted by the Sun cause the climate to vary. Scientists, taking this into account, define the pre-industrial baseline relative to 1850-1900. This is why climate accords like the Paris Agreement seek to limit the global average temperature to below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels.
Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, and the IPCC forecasts that we will reach the 1.5°C threshold between 2030 and 2052 because we will not meet the net-zero CO2 emissions goal by 2050 by dropping 45% from the 2010 levels by 2030. To achieve this renewable energy would need to supply 70-85% of electricity use by 2050, but we will only reach a 31% of world electricity market share by 2040 despite 400% growth.
So no, humans are not the problem. Fossil fuels and bad policies are.
Environmental History: Native Americans’ Conservation Practices
Ecofascists forget that post-industrial environmental destruction is not an inherent human trait.
Native Americans have managed to thrive off, and conserve the natural environment for thousands of years because their culture dictates so. Native Americans view themselves as cohabitants with the natural world, not a distinct wilderness to be conquered and paved over as European settlers did. Even a U.N.-backed report found that Native Americans’ lands are degrading less quickly than in other areas.
Native Americans continue contributing to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem health.Their cultural beliefs have been long observed by sociologists like Durkheim who saw how Aborigines’ lifestyles were intimately connected to nature (Durkheim 1915). While they did not actually consider nature to be divine, cultural beliefs such as their totems (sacred animal symbols), stood for the clan which all protected the environment.
While global lumber companies see the Amazon rainforest as a profitable commodity to be harvested, environmentalists see the world’s most biodiverse sanctuary to be left untouched, and indigenous tribes see a home that enables their physical being. Environmentalism and unfettered capitalism are mutually exclusive.
It was then that ecological imperialism was brought to the Americas to reap destruction, then exacerbated with Manifest Destiny as the frontier kept being pushed west. Europeans committed wanton environmental destruction, slaughtered wildlife, burned forests, and tamed the wilderness for the sake of “civilization.” This is because European settlers came from individualist, capitalist culture that valued individual wealth that took the biblical admonition to exert dominion over the earth as one of destruction. The term “wilderness,” was often used by English settlers to describe forests. Thus, with the founding of the first European settlement, Jamestown, 75% of forests have been destroyed since 1600.
It was only with the rise of modern capitalism with the Industrial Revolution and transition away from an agricultural economy, was it that forests were destroyed for lumber, mountains leveled for coal mining, holes punctured to extract oil, rfields smothered in cement, and smokestacks blacken the skies. The new technology was harnessed to transform natural resources into social goods for economic profit. One seeks destruction for profit, the other protection for the future of the planet.
Capitalism stole 1.5 billion acres of natural land from Native Americans since 1784 and turned it into an urban, strip mall, consumerist hellscape — or the modern industrial economy. This is why Indigenous people still fight to protect their sacred land from further colonization at the forces of oil pipelines, logging, and more.
Neoliberalism Is The Problem, Not Human Nature
One hundred corporations are responsible for 71% of all global greenhouse gas emissions yet ecofascist drivel regularly garners 200,000+ likes on Twitter. This is your brain on wokeism. It’s simple, easy, and it absolves neoliberalism and our ability to usher in a renewable age of all responsibility. When we don’t identify capitalism as the problem we ignore solutions.
Neoliberalism fuels global warming, not inherent human nature. Neoliberalism is a liberal political ideology favoring free-market, laissez-faire capitalism, that was popularized in the 1970s. It’s reaped destruction through ecological imperialism all around the globe. It results in natural state-owned resources being commoditized and privatized like in Peru. Neoliberalism is an ideological force which has seized natural resources and led to deforestation in pursuit of development and modern infrastructure.
Neoliberalism has brought us deregulation, and the iron triangle of corporatist fossil fuel lobbying that’s bringing the planet to its death bed.
When we found out about climate change 30 years ago, we didn’t tax fossil fuels to reduce consumption, we didn’t tax or cap carbon emissions, and the government didn’t invest heavily in renewable energy or force companies to do so. In fact, we knew about it since 1958 when chemist Charles David Keeling found that each year evidenced a greater concentration of CO2 than the last, and it corresponded with global increases in the burning of fossil fuels. In the pre-industrial era, the concentration of atmospheric CO2 held steady thousands of years but over the last 50 years it has increased by 20%.
Free market capitalism will never control negative externalities of the fossil fuel industry — that is the government’s job. Instead, this administration has engaged in the opposite approach — taking 142 climate deregulation steps so far. Just today, in midst of a pandemic, the EPA and NHTSA finalized a rule rolling back vehicle greenhouse gas emissions and corporate fuel economy standards. We’ve not only withdrawn from the moderate Paris Climate Accord but also canceled a requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions, partially repealed an Obama-era rule limiting methane emissions on public lands, replaced the Clean Power Plan, and more.
How can you fight a threat without naming it? Neoliberalism. Deregulation. Fossil fuels. Rampant laissez-faire capitalism. Those are the problems, not inherent human nature. Environmental breakdown is also a fundamental feature not a ‘bug’ of capitalism.
A 1.5°C warming of the globe poses the biggest existential threat facing our growing population today, yet baseline forecasts show despite many “plastic straw bans,” climate protest and global policy inaction — we won’t cause an upheaval of the fossil-fuel energy system to prevent this by 2050. Coastal cities will flood, oceans will acidify, crop yields will plummet and we’ll fail to meet the 70% rise in food demand by 2050.
We need to meet a 27% increase in global energy demand by 2040 while providing electricity access in developing nations where 1 billion lack electricity and face barriers to renewable energy attainment. On our current baseline trajectory, renewables will only make up 31% of the energy mix by 2040, as oil and gas will continue to supply over 50% of energy demand.
Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, and the IPCC forecasts that we will reach the 1.5°C threshold between 2030 and 2052 because we will not meet the net-zero CO2 emissions goal by 2050 by dropping 45% from the 2010 levels by 2030.
To achieve this renewable energy would need to supply 70-85% of electricity use by 2050, but we will only reach 31% of world electricity market share by 2040 despite 400% growth. As the world population reaches 9 billion by 2040, we will face a global energy and climate crisis as global energy demand increases 27%, 25% in developing nations, 1 billion continue to lack electricity access, and renewables compose only 31% of the energy mix. This will occur while fossil fuels will continue to reign at over 50% of energy demand as we will witness a 41% increase in gas demand.
Capitalism has rapidly destroyed the global climate in just the last 200 years because it demands the commoditization and destruction of natural resources for economy profit, thereby continuing its reign of imperialist ecological terrorism. Embracing ecofascism and defeatism does nothing but secure future generations’ struggle against a wilderness that won’t be dominated any longer. We need a Green New Deal with at least 70-85% renewable energy.
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