We Can Move Beyond the Capitalist Model and Save the Climate – Here Are the First Three Steps
We have an urgent responsibility. Our existing economic system is incapable of addressing the social and ecological crises we face in the 21st century. When we look around we see an extraordinary paradox. On the one hand, we have access to remarkable new technologies and a collective capacity to produce more food, more stuff than we need or that the planet can afford. Yet at the same time, millions of people suffer in conditions of severe deprivation.
What explains this paradox? Capitalism. By capitalism we do not mean markets, trade and entrepreneurship, which have been around for thousands of years before the rise of capitalism. By capitalism we mean something very odd and very specific: an economic systemthat boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. Even if we live in a democracy and have a choice in our political system, our choices never seem to change the economic system. Capitalists are the ones who determine what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit. The rest of us – the people who are actually doing the production – do not get a say.
And for capital, the purpose of production is not primarily to meet human needs or to achieve social progress, much less to deliver on any ecological goals. The purpose is to maximise and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. This is the capitalist law of value. And to maximise profits, capital requires perpetual growth – ever increasing aggregate production, regardless of whether it is necessary or harmful.
So we end up with irrational forms of production as a result: we get massive production of things such as SUVs, mansions and fast fashion, because these things are highly profitable to capital, but chronic underproduction of obviously necessary things like affordable housing and public transit, because these are much less profitable to capital, or not profitable at all.
Similarly with energy. Renewables are already much cheaper than fossil fuels. Alas, fossil fuels are up to three times as profitable. Thus capital forces governments to link electricity prices to the price of the most expensive liquified natural gas, not of cheap solar energy. Similarly, building and maintaining motorways is many times more lucrative for private contractors, car manufacturers and oil companies than a modern network of superfast, safe public railways. So capitalists continue to push our governments to subsidise fossil fuels and road building, even while the world burns.
Since Donald Trump’s election, many major investment firms have enthusiastically abandoned their climate commitments, which had, in favour of the common good, restrained their profitability. This should be a clarifying moment for all of us: capitalism cares about our species’ prospects as much as a wolf cares about a lamb’s.
So here we are: trapped in capitalism’s set of priorities, which are inimical to humanity’s. Human ingenuity has bequeathed us splendid technologies and capacities. But, like a cruel divinity, capital not only prevents us from using them for our collective good, but in fact coerces us to deploy them towards our collective doom.
The system also locks us into never-ending cycles of imperialist violence. Capital accumulation in advanced economies relies on massive inputs of cheap labour and nature from the global south. To maintain this arrangement, capital uses every tool at its disposal – debt, sanctions, coups and even outright military invasion to keep southern economies subordinate.
The solution is staring us in the face. We urgently need to overcome the capitalist law of value and democratise our economy, so that we can organise production around urgent social and ecological priorities. After all, we are the producers of the goods, the services, the technologies. It is our labour and our planet’s resources that are at stake. And so we must claim the right to decide what is produced, how, and for what purpose.
How can this be done? There are three necessary conditions for the transformation of our economy from a dead-end dictatorship into a functioning and ecologically sound democratic one.
The first condition is a new financial architecture that penalises destructive private “investments” and enables public finance for public purposes. At the heart of this architecture we need a new public investment bank that, in association with the central banks, converts available liquidity into the types of investment consistent with common, sustainable prosperity.
The second condition is the extensive use of deliberative democracy to decide sectoral, regional and national goals (eg regarding the growth or even winding down of different outputs) towards which the new public finance tools will be aimed.
And the third condition is a Great Corporate Reform Act for the purpose of democratising corporations, favouring and promoting the formation of companies run along the lines of one employee, one share, one vote.
We live in a shadow of the world we could create. A world in which we shall be able to avert an almost certain ecological collapse, rather than waiting around for capitalism to push us beyond the point of no return. A world where the abolition of economic insecurity, precarity, poverty, unemployment and indignity is possible, while we lead meaningful lives within planetary boundaries. This is not a distant dream. It is a tangible prospect.
Jason Hickel is professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a visiting senior fellow at the London Schoool of Economics.
Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25, a former finance minister of Greece and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
Humanity has missed the mark. Humanity has failed.
As COP30 got underway, this was the media’s take on the UN Secretary-General’s announcement that 1.5 degrees of global warming has now been locked in. We should be rolling our eyes at such proclamations. Once again, humanity takes the blame for the impotence of corporate-led summits.
The truth is that humanity includes billions of land-based people who have not yet been pushed into resource-intensive cities and consumer lifestyles. Humanity includes hundreds of thousands of people who – like you, perhaps – have been taking active steps to reduce their ecological footprint, while lobbying for meaningful government policy change. Why should humanity take the blame for the blind, top-down policy frameworks that, above all, treat ecocide and climate breakdown as a ‘carbon market’ – as an opportunity to grow corporate bottom lines?
Ever since Al Gore stood up on his soapbox, we’ve had the finger pointed at our individual behavior. Meanwhile, global corporations were needlessly transporting goods across the world, contributing to massive increases in emissions and mountains of plastic waste.
‘Free trade’ treaties were giving them the right to direct whole societies down the consumerist path; the right to target children with the message: ‘if you want to be loved and respected, you’ve got to have the latest smartphone, the coolest shoes’.
Humanity was never the issue. Corporate rule was.
And there’s no two ways about it – COP is ruled by global corporations. Funding comes from chemical giants like Bayer, tech giants like IBM, and mining corporations like Anglo American. As such, there is no talk of real, commonsense solutions like decentralizing economies, limiting the barrage of consumer messaging, preventing built-in obsolescence, or regulating the most polluting industries. Emissions from redundant trade – at the very heart of the resource-guzzling global economy – has never been so much as mentioned during the negotiations.
The COPs have consistently ensured that billions of dollars get sunk into false but lucrative solutions. Ostensibly to monitor carbon, technologies like A.I. and Internet of Things are being rolled out, with enormous demand for rare earth minerals and severe implications for freedom and surveillance. Carbon markets are commodifying land and water and biodiversity and turning them into financial assets to be traded.
As our colleague, Dr. Camila Moreno, who has attended all the COPs, has summarized:
“This is not a meeting about climate. This is where you can see, most clearly, where the future of capitalism is going.”
Do you speak ‘carbonese’?
Under the vague framing of ‘net-zero’, giant carbon capture plants have been built to supposedly combine air carbon with plastic trash under enormous temperatures and inject it into bedrock. And, perhaps even worse, the much-hyped ‘green transition’ has plastered what should be productive, biodiverse land and coastlines with solar panels, wind turbines, and biomass monocultures.
In the face of all this, humanity is not about to declare failure and give up. Things might be getting bad already – fires, floods, storms – but around the world at the grassroots, people are taking action.
And, come what may, what action makes most sense? Local food. Hands-on ecosystem regeneration. Strengthening community and the local economy.
And raising awareness about the fact that governments don’t have our back.
So, where the UN, the COPs and global corporations have failed, humanity is the solution. Let’s make visible the quiet revolution that’s occurring from the bottom up as communities express their care for others and the living world.
Renewables – saviour or curse?
We must look squarely at the call for a renewable energy. It’s not an easy topic to address. For decades, Local Futures has been part of the call for a small-scale, decentralized renewable energy installations to meet real human needs. Back in the 70s, the environmental movement had clarity about this.
But over the last 3 decades, the global ‘green transition’ has emerged. In rhetoric, it’s about plugging the global economy into a different, greener power source. In reality, it’s about growing the global economy’s already outrageous and wasteful energy demands by throwing more mega-industrial technologies into the mix.
How can environmentalists support the plastering of land with solar panels made from silica mined by consuming entire Indonesian islands? How can they support the conversion of ever more mountains and valleys to vast landscapes of towering pylons built in concrete, plastic, steel and balsa wood from the Amazon – turbines with a life span of less than 20 years destined to pile up in landfills?
How can they support the scouring of the seabed for manganese, and the mining of copper, nickel, rare earths, lithium and cobalt – all of which the International Energy Agency says will require extraction increases of around 400% by 2040 in order to keep up with A.I., digital and renewable infrastructure demands?
We do need some renewables. But the ‘transition’ must be radically reframed. We must not start by asking “how do we transition the current global economy to renewable energy” – that proposition is a death sentence. We must start by asking “what are our real human energy needs, and how do we meet them in the wisest way possible?” In other words, what are the needs of thriving local economies.
A.I. – for climate? Or for corporate profit?
The global economy’s demand for resources and energy is entirely about fueling technologies that have nothing to do with real human needs and everything to do with expanding corporate wealth and power. The A.I. industry is Exhibit A.
A.I.’s cheerful front end – the chatbot that answers a question, the app that writes your email – hides a vast infrastructure of energy-intensive data centers and mineral-intensive manufacturing – all expanding at breakneck speed. In some US states, data centers are already using more than 10% of all electricity, and analysts project that AI will push global data-center power demand up by more than 150% this decade. Google and Microsoft have both reported near 50% increases in their total emissions, due solely to the aggressive buildout of data-center infrastructure to support A.I.
Then there is the water. These facilities need vast quantities of fresh, clean water to stop their servers from overheating. Microsoft has admitted that nearly half of its water use now occurs in regions already facing water scarcity. In Spain, where drought conditions are worsening and desertification covers three-quarters of the country, Amazon’s new AI data centers have approval to draw over 750,000 cubic meters of drinking water a year. South Korea’s planned mega-cluster of semiconductor factories will demand more than half of Seoul’s daily water use, alongside vast amounts of electricity, toxic chemicals, and land for waste disposal. Similar stories are emerging from Chile, the US Southwest, and parts of India.
AI is not a climate tool at all. It is the next frontier in global corporate expansion – a new reason to build pipelines, power stations, transmission corridors, mega-mines, and surveillance infrastructures. Framed as “efficiency” or “net-zero”, it locks us ever deeper into the top-down model where entire regions are sacrificed so that a handful of companies can extract wealth from data, attention and public resources.
All this stands in stark contrast to the quiet, grounded solutions emerging from below. True climate action doesn’t require vast data centers, billions of liters of water, or mineral-intensive hardware. It requires shorter distances, stronger communities, healthy soils, local food webs, and diverse, place-based economies that reduce demand at the source.
A.I.’s expanding empire is a reminder of what happens when we allow the global economy to chase technological fixes instead of human-scale wisdom.
