Capitalism’s Frankenstein Climate
Image by Mika Baumeister.
“Climate change is the monster we made. We are Victor Frankenstein.” (Climate Change: The Monster of our own Making, WashU, October 16, 2017, Michael Wysession, Professor Earth & Planetary Sciences, Washington University)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was inspired by the extreme weather of 1816, also known as the “Year Without a Summer.”
Today’s climate change is a product of capitalism. It’s the unprecedented version and society’s stuck with it. It is here; it’s now; it’s not going away. It’s the birth child of capitalism. Born 200 years ago, it’s now in late adolescence, about to enter early adulthood, unlike anything seen throughout 2.5 million years of human history
This spooky version of climate change overpowers its own creator, hitting capitalism’s pocketbook hard and harder, year by year. Climate change in years past never moved the needle on costly homeowner insurance or abandonment of insurance coverage. But that’s changed; now it’s a money grubber.
The evidence of climate destructiveness never witnessed before is found everywhere. Headlines spell out the truth: (a) The Mounting Cost of Climate for Insurers, S&P Global, Jan. 13, 2025 (b) How the Climate Crisis Became an Insurance Crisis, The New York Times, Oct. 19, 2024 (c) According to NOAA, in 2024, the US had 27 climate disasters each exceeding $1 billion for total costs of $183 billion, the costliest year on record for climate change-related damages. This is the Frankenstein climate in full living color.
The genesis of climate change is easily identified. A study of the period 1750 to 2017 by Colorado-based Climate Accountability Institute (est. 2011) discovered that 70% of greenhouse gases derived from just 103 fossil fuel companies. And since 1965, 20 of those 103 companies now contribute 1/3 of all emissions, e.g., Chevron and ExxonMobil. (Source: Why a Carbon-free World Isn’t Possible with Capitalism, Broadview, April/2024).
It’s scientific fact that too much atmospheric CO2 emitted from burning gasoline in your car’s engine creates too much planetary heat for survival, eventually. An example of what can happen with excessive levels of CO2 is found in the atmosphere of Earth’s sister planet Venus at 96% CO2. This greenhouse effect makes Venus roughly 700°F (390°C) hotter than it would be without the greenhouse effect. Your spaceship will melt before landing on its hot surface.
The causal relationship between CO2 and climate change is indisputable: “Based on the published evidence IPCC attributes temperature increase to the total increase in radiative forcing and asserts that this is primarily caused by the increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 during the last 200 years” (Adolf Stips, et al, On the Causal Structure Between CO2 and Global Temperature, Scientific Reports, Nature, 2016)
The concentration of high-end capitalism’s influence on climate change has been exposed in a study by Stockholm Environment Institute (est. 1989) finding that of 8 billion people, the wealthiest 1% contribute the same share of yearly emissions as the lower 2/3rds. Yet, “we’re so used to capitalism that we don’t necessarily even know it when we see it,’ says Emily Huddart Kennedy, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia,” Ibid. People need to start opening their eyes to who’s responsible, who should pay.
Consequences
If you create it, you own it and must care for it. Capitalism’s Frankenstein, which becomes more and more costly year by year, is not going away. If anything, with oil companies publicly stating intentions to crank up fossil fuels big time, consumers should brace themselves to pay an arm and a leg for property insurance. It’ll assuredly be hitting new all-time highs. This could crush the backbone of capitalism.
Homeowner Insurance Imbroglio
Property insurance is a big question mark: When will American homeowners wake up to reality and rebel against the abject, dishonorable failure of politicians to address the massively destructive climate system that’s starting to crush home values? It’s happening everywhere, to wit:
Move Over, Florida, Retirees are Making New Plans as Climate Change Raises Costs, Barron’s, Feb. 13, 2025: “Beth McCormack recently called off her search to buy a home in Florida. The Chicago attorney decided that prices were too high, especially given the expensive homeowner’s insurance she would need to buy.”
Climate Change to Obliterate $1.5 Trillion in U.S. Home Values, Study Finds, CBS News, Feb. 4, 2025
Real Estate Confronts Climate Change, American Meteorological Society, Jan. 13, 2025
How Climate Change Could Upend the American Dream, ProPublica, Feb. 3, 2025
Zillow Will Begin Showing Climate Risks for US Properties in Early 2025, Reddit, Jan. 2025
More Americans, Risking Ruin, Drop Their Home Insurance, The New York Times, Jan. 16, 2025
California Isn’t the Only Place Where Insurers are Dropping Homeowners, The Washington Post, January 15, 2025.
Map Shows Where House Prices Risk Falling Due to Climate Change, Newsweek, Feb. 10, 2025
Why Renters Suffer After Hurricanes, Floods, and Wildfires, NPR, July 31, 2024
That Giant Sucking Sound? It’s Climate Change Devouring Your Home’s Value, The New York Times, Feb. 3, 2025
Climate Change Should Make You Rethink Homeownership, The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2025
How to stop bleeding headlines about home values clobbered by climate change: Stop fossil fuels. Start renewables. And throw billions of dollars at worldwide coordination to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, much bigger than the WWII Marshall Plan, e.g., New Report States 7-9 Billion Tonnes of CO2 Must be Sustainably Removed Per Year to Hit Climate Targets, University of Oxford, June 5, 2024. It can be done, but removing human-generated CO2 from the atmosphere is a very costly challenging uphill battle. Carbon Capture Has a Long History of Failure, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1, 2022.
According to the International Energy Agency: Direct air capture (DAC) technologies extract CO2 directly from the atmosphere for CO2 storage or utilization. Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year. That’s a ridiculously meager amount: “We’ve maybe at most removed a few seconds of the world’s emissions after spending billions and billions of dollars which would have been better spent elsewhere.” (Direct Air Capture Solution Faces Criticism, Steep Challenges, Mongabay, Dec. 13, 2024).
‘Citzens United’ for the Environment
Since capitalism fathered today’s version of radical climate change, it should treat it as its own. This justifies a universal movement for Environmental Personhood. After all, corporations have been declared ‘people’ in Citizens United the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations are “persons,” aka: the Doctrine of Corporate Personhood entitled to constitutional protections.
Similarly, non-human entities can be “persons” under both Canadian and international law with certain rights and obligations. This is something that indigenous people have followed for centuries.
“In February 2021, the world was introduced to Mutehekau Shipu — also known as the Magpie River — when the people of Ekuanitshit, Quebec and the regional municipality made a joint declaration granting the river legal personhood and rights. The declaration carries broad implications for the fight to protect nature across Canada and around the world.” (I am Mutehekau Shipu: A River’s Journey to Personhood in Eastern Quebec, Canadiangeographic, April 8, 2022)
The river now has its own rights, modelled after the inalienable rights a human person has, including the right to flow and exist. Crucially, it also has the right to legal representation, allowing human lawyers to advocate on its behalf in the courts. Environmental Personhood, like Corporate Personhood, is one way to bring nature into the value system of capitalism, by respecting nature and concern for the health of the planet with legal stranding the same as corporations enjoy. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Who knows where it might lead.
Meanwhile, faster than ever, climate change festers in the background, roughing-up the American Dream of homeownership. It’s gonna get worse, first Trump and now, from Europe’s biggest economy: Germany Set to Scale Down Climate Ambitions, Bloomberg Green Daily, Feb. 17, 2025.
Action on Climate Change May Look Different Than You Expect
Image by Mika Baumeister.
Talk a walk through the Los Angeles’ Arts District, and you’ll learn that there’s nothing contradictory about trying to save the world and living a luxury lifestyle. Start your tour with the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), which proudly displays a banner stating: “the future begins here.”
LACI is “a non- profit organization creating an inclusive green economy” and run “by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs.” They are also supported by a “community” that includes not only the City of Los Angeles but also BMW, Wells Fargo, United Airlines, and JPMorgan Chase.
Across the street, there’s Urth Caffé, a high-end chain offering 100 percent organic and locally sourced goods. Nearby art galleries and boutiques sell handcrafted natural products and upcycled accoutrements.
The Arts District offers the dream of the “sustainability class”—a growing class of do-gooders, with disposable income and high education, for whom green consumption and innovation go hand in hand. But something doesn’t feel right. Can they really save the world one locally sourced ayurvedic turmeric latté or EV charging station at a time?
In fact, luxury and sustainability are fundamentally at odds. The richest 10%— including anyone who earns over $120,000 per year—are responsible for 50% of the world’s carbon emissions. This doesn’t even factor in their investments, which include stocks in some of the world’s most polluting industries. Not only that, but people who have green lifestyles tend to have a higher environmental footprint, since it is income, not attitudes, that is the biggest predictor for carbon emissions.
The sustainability class isn’t just about lifestyle choices. It’s also about innovation: being at the edge of the curve, advancing the newest green tech. A quick scan of the start-ups and companies LACI supports will give you an idea of what “innovation” looks like, with quirky names like Dyrt, Planette, Emissionless, Shoponomik, and Galora—“the airbnb for homegrown foods”. LACI promises sustainability that is edgy, smart, and, most importantly, profitable. The products these companies offer, like EV vehicles, green cryptocurrencies, and household waste reduction apps, are rarely in reach of the world’s poorest 50%, who together emit just 11% of the world’s carbon emissions. But perhaps that was never the intent anyway.
Whether it’s about lifestyle or tech innovation, the solutions on offer in the Arts District are essentially the same. At their heart, they promise one idea: that you can keep living your fancy lifestyle as long as you invest in the right products and services. Put another way, those with money can be sustainable, while it remains out of reach of ordinary people.
In fact, the future on offer by the sustainability class is not sustainable at all. Or, rather, it only promises to sustain the present order of things – which all indicators suggest is hurling towards ecological breakdown, with unthinkable consequences for life as we know it.
Lucky for us, a different kind of environmentalism is not far away. Just across the river from the Arts District is the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights. At first sight, it might not look very sustainable. The area is cluttered with car garages, cheap diners, dollar stores, and messy backyard gardens.
But here, residents, led by the Union de Vecinos (union of neighbors), have been building a very different vision of sustainability, which is ultimately more inclusive. They are less interested in bike lanes, the new metro line, or EV charging stations. They have, for decades, focused their efforts on fighting for social housing, tenant rights, clean water, and against police profiling. What brings these disparate campaigns together, explains organizer Leo Vilchis Sr., is “to make the social life here flourish.” For instance, by screening films, painting murals, throwing block parties, and helping struggling renters, they bring people together and teach the community how to organize.
While this may not look like environmentalism at first, it ends up making big wins that cut across class divides. For example, residents from the neighboring city of Maywood asked for the support of the Union de Vecinos in fighting a private water companies who provided contaminated water to residents. They began to build connections between residents and ran their own candidates, increasing community participation in elections 10 times. Eventually, they won control over city council and made the water companies public.
Or, to take a smaller example: organizers of the Union de Vecinos told us that they aren’t against planting more trees to increase shade, but, when they do, they also install benches so that elderly can use them, also slowing down traffic and increasing connections in the community.
In each situation, the Union de Vecinos starts by building relationships, then organizing for what people need in their daily lives. Vilchis explains that environmentalism follows from community power: “We want to support each other— convivir (conviviality, living together) … create community. When we develop community relations, we will inevitably be involved in politics, sociology, and ecology.”
Mike Davis, one of Los Angeles’ most famous historians, once said that “the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far more than any particular design or technology, is the priority given to public affluence over private wealth.” Protecting neighborhoods from being sold to the highest bidder—like Union de Vecinos does—is environmentalism. Organizing renters to fight nebulous real estate conglomerates is climate action. Organizing a workplace, taking over city council, and putting utilities in public control—these are all ecological.
We don’t need another “AirBnB for homegrown foods.” What we need is more conviviality that brings people together in our communities and breaks down class divides—what you might call solidarity. The future begins, not in places like the Arts District, but across the river, in Boyle Heights.
Listen to Vijay and Aaron discuss their new book The Sustainability Class on CounterPunch Radio.
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