Climate Upheaval, Mild or Severe, Who Really Cares?
Image by Matt Palmer.
The onset of some level of climate upheaval or widespread destruction of biomes and human lives, mild or severe, has essentially been forecast by the world’s leading climate scientist James Hansen, Earth Institute, Columbia University who pronounced the 2C upper temperature limit that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says cannot be exceeded “dead on arrival.” But frankly, “who cares” is an overriding issue that impedes doing anything constructive.
Only recently several publications took notice of Hansen’s most recent communique: The Guardian, February 4, 2025: Climate Change Target of 2C is ‘Dead’ Says Renowned Climate Scientist.
If the 2C target is dead on arrival, then the worldwide climate system is headed for a wild trip that’ll make the past two years look like a cakewalk. If history is a guide, paying heed to James Hansen’s warnings is advisable. For example, if the US Senate, decades ago, would have listened and acted upon Hansen’s 1988 warning, articles like this that spell out scientific facts about an uncompromising challenging climate system would be stupid and unnecessary. Back then, Hansen told the US Senate: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
Wow, talk about a zinger: “changing our climate” should have shaken and rattled the rafters of the Capitol building with demands by senators for immediate research into what could be done about such shocking news. But nothing happened, until now, with a climate system threatening everything capitalism stands for, like homeownership, as major home insurers either back off coverage/drop coverage in states like Florida and California, or they crank up rates so fast, so high to nosebleed levels that many current and prospective homeowners are priced out of the market. Homeowner’s Insurance Costs Soar, Barron’s d/d January 22, 2025.
Significantly, it’s no small deal when RE is clobbered by a ravaging climate system in the states of Florida and California, as Florida’s $1.58 trillion GDP is comparable to Spain and California’s $4 trillion GDP comparable to India. Combined, GDP of the two states ranks alongside the US, China, Germany, and Japan as one of the five largest in the world.
Climate change is rapidly becoming too costly for insurers and for homeowners. Assuming Dr. Hansen is right once again, homeownership will become a relic of the American Dream. If and when “2°C is dead,” meaning surpassing pre-industrial temperatures, the repercussions will be so ugly, so dreadfully corpselike, and impossible to describe with a clear conscience. And, besides, who really cares anyway?
For two years running, the most influential sources of US political power have been dropping out of the green movement by the bucketload. They just don’t care and neither does the general public. According to a Gallup poll, 54% of Americans do not think global warming poses a serious threat during their lifetimes. Just wondering: Does the 54% mostly come from the over 50s crowd?
The world’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, similarly addressed the issue of complacency and lack of interest based upon the title of a recent report: James Hansen, Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed? Earth Institute, Columbia University, Feb. 3, 2025.
Greenhushing has become the newest approach to climate change by corporations. Recent financial headlines tell the tale: JPMorgan, State Street Quit Climate Group, BlackRock Steps Back (Reuters, Feb. 15, 2024) Major Asset Managers Drop Climate Activism (Competitive Enterprise Institute, February 2024) And this is before Trump turned lose his attack dogs on the EPA and dropped out of Paris ’15, an agreement by the nations of the world to take measures to suppress CO2 emissions (which act as a blanket holding heat) to try to hold down rising global temperatures. So far, it’s been a massive failure and is now destined for the dustbin.
What about 2°C by 2050
Never before in Earth’s history has the planet been confronted by such a powerful force as the human footprint, e.g., human-generated climate change is changing the face of the planet in one human lifetime. That’s difficult to comprehend in the context of a planet celebrating 4.543 billion years. The human era 2.5m/yrs is merely a speck of time. Humans are 0.0006% of earth-time.
Several respected scientific studies claim “business-as-usual’ will take global temps up to 2°C above pre-industrial by 2050, possibly 2040-45, resulting in one-foot of sea level rise. Every 1 foot of sea level swallows up 100 feet of shoreline for most coastlines. The consequences will drive the cost of home insurance to the moon. Furthermore, the climate change issue is not only increasing sea levels; it’s massive wildfires, monster hurricanes, expansive floods, and barn-burning droughts. All of these events are happening at extreme levels of human history.
As a result, homeownership will no longer be a crowning feature of capitalism and will lose its safety valve effect of stabilizing society. Begging the question: Is the big fossil fuel CO2 emissions profit center worth the loss of valuation of large portions of real estate, the world’s biggest asset class, with a projected value of $613.60 trillion in 2023?
According to an article in USA Today, Feb. 3, 2025: Climate Risk Will Take Trillion-Dollar Bite Out of America’s Real Estate, Report Finds. According to the referenced report, Property Prices in Peril, “Climate abandonment’ areas are where climate risks and insurance premiums are high enough that population is declining; risky growth areas are where perils are high and premiums are rising.” This is the direct result of anthropogenic (originating in human activity) climate change.
It’s threatening America’s number one asset class and the existence of capitalism as a viable socio-economic system, which is already questionable. Can the system survive the climate change that Dr. James Hansen warned the US Senate about 37 years ago that’s now morphing into a lengthy extension that’s much more ominous than his 1988 warning? Moreover, today’s administration is poking the bear by abandoning green policies just as the worst of climate change approaches full stride, which will likely define the 2030s (distant cousin to the 1930s).
Prospects for Heat Waves: “Mortality from extreme heat could surpass that of all infectious diseases combined, and rival that of cancer and heart disease.” (Source: Why Heat Waves of the Future May Be Even Deadlier Than Feared, The New York Times, October 25, 2024)
And Still Growth Is All They Talk About
February 14, 2025
Image by Matt Palmer.
Every year of the past 10 has been the hottest on record, with 2024 topping the heat chart. It’s not only air temperatures that are climbing; in 2024, the oceans of the world also reached a new daily high. 2024 was the first year on record where global average temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. “From January to September, the global mean surface air temperature was 1.54°C above the pre-industrial average.”
The reason the planet continues to heat up is because not enough is being done to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Arising principally from burning fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas), it is GHG emissions that are clogging the lower atmosphere, resulting in global warming.
Limiting global warming to 1.5˚C was the target agreed upon by 196 countries at the Paris Climate Accords in 2016. The Paris Agreement “sets long-term goals to…. hold global temperature increase to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” President Trump has taken the US out of the legally binding landmark agreement. This reckless and irresponsible step sets a dangerous example for other nations that wish to flaunt environmental commitments, and should be strongly condemned by governments throughout the world.
If the current warming trajectory continues, by the early 2030’s 1.5˚C is likely to become the norm, with higher temperatures a real risk.
Increases in average ground temperatures of 1.5 or 2 degrees centigrade doesn’t sound like much, but every additional fraction of a degree can bring more frequent and intense extreme weather, such as heatwaves and heavy rainfall. “Every tenth of a degree matters and climate impacts get progressively worse the more warming we have,” explains Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth.
Once established a 1.5˚C world would be hard to reverse, and the risks are manifold: an increase in extreme weather events – more frequent and intense heatwaves, droughts, heavy rainfall and storms; rising sea levels, which in turn increases the risk of costal flooding and erosion; coral reef loss – its estimated that 70-90% of coral reefs could disappear due to ocean warming and acidification; arctic ice loss, affecting ecosystems and global climate patterns; biodiversity loss – up to 14% of land species could face high risk of extinction.
If warming of 1.5˚C is normalised and becomes 2˚C (or higher), the impacts would be much worse — doubling the extinction risks, intensifying extreme weather, and making some regions uninhabitable, leading to mass displacement of people.
In addition to the environmental impacts, rising temperatures affect communities and economies. A heating planet means food and water shortages and increased risk of heat related illnesses and deaths. Businesses are impacted in affected areas and climate disasters cost trillions of dollars in infrastructure damage and reduced productivity.
Its all interconnected
Climate change is one aspect of the man-made environmental catastrophe, which is the biggest crisis humanity has ever been confronted with. It is unprecedented in seriousness and impact, short, medium, and long-term. The speed of change is surprising everyone, including climate scientists. “Both 2023 and 2024 temperatures surprised most climate scientists— we didn’t think we’d be seeing a year above 1.5˚C this early,” says Dr Hausfather.
In all developed and emerging countries, the environmental emergency should be the central issue around which all other matters— economy, development, geo-politics, etc.— are decided. How does this policy, this proposal, impact the planet? Does it have a negative or positive effect on the climate, on local ecosystems, on pollution, etc., or is it neutral? If the proposal increases greenhouse gas emissions, further weakens an endangered species or ecosystem, adds to air/water/soil pollution, or expands desertification. Then the proposal should immediately be dropped; this is what would happen in we were living in a world where responsible governance was standard practice. Sadly we are not.
The current crop of political ‘leaders’ are weak, unprincipled, and on the whole, completely inadequate to the colossal challenge that the man-made environmental catastrophe presents. Compromised by their indebtedness to big business, personal ambition, blind adherence to ideology, and complete lack of vision, not only do they consistently fail to address the issues of the day, but their actions routinely intensify the problems.
Far from environmental concerns sitting at the forefront of policy-making, irrespective of country or ideology, it is securing economic growth that exercises the minds of politicians, and the drive for profit that determines the actions of corporations. Growth that is strongly dependent on consumerism, and it is unconstrained consumerism within and by rich nations, that is in large part responsible for the environmental catastrophe.
Along with competition and social injustice, consumerism is one of the cornerstones of market fundamentalism. Excess is celebrated, selfishness and greed promoted. Not only has this crude materialistic way of life vandalised the natural world, it has encouraged narrow unhealthy behaviour and a set of social norms that have created unhealthy societies populated by frightened, confused people.
The health of the planet and the well-being of humanity, as well as the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms are all interconnected. It is one integrated eco-system, one life; infection in one area affects all other parts. There is no such thing as separation, on all levels life is one. Try telling that to the Clown In Chief ensconced in the White House.
Whilst governments and (most) corporations/businesses are not interested in putting the environment at the centre of everything, we as individuals can. This means protesting environmental abuse and taking personal responsibility for the way we live. Every decision – shopping, travel, heating, etc., should take into account the environmental impact; if everyone decided to only patronise environmentally responsible businesses, companies large and small would quickly change their strategies. The same applies to politicians, local and national, who are trying to persuade the electorate to vote for them.
Given the scale of the crisis such steps may appear tiny, but when adopted by enough people they can have an impact, and doing something rather than nothing alleviates to some degree the feeling of despair. Hope, which is so badly needed at this time, is not based on wishful thinking, but comes about through sustained action.
Two Books on Climate Change and Beyond
Wauna Mill, Westport, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Malcolm Harris, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis (Little, Brown and Company, 2025)
Anthony Galluzzo, Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today (Zer0 Books, 2023)
One of the more predictable outcomes of Trump’s return to the White House is the common liberal assertion that leftist politics, particularly following the George Floyd protests, had gone too far. Even before the 2024 election, some writers were pointing to radical demands such as police abolition to explain why the effort to achieve significant national reforms failed. Trump’s victory, along with the dismantling of DEI programs across the government and private sector, seemed only to confirm the view that the rightwing backlash was the inevitable reaction to a movement that had outpaced its popular support.
It is therefore impressive that Malcolm Harris’s What’s Left forcefully and unapologetically argues that when it comes to climate change left politics in fact needs to go much further. A survey of three responses to the climate crisis, the book evaluates liberal, socialist, and communist strategies, arguing that any likely solution will incorporate portions of all three in a Venn diagram or “metastrategy of coherence” (Harris cuts to the chase by rejecting conservative and tech-utopian solutions prima facie, asserting that they are, respectively, discredited and delusional).
In the book’s first section, Harris examines the liberal strategy of marketcraft: the state’s manipulation of production toward green energy and away from fossil fuels and other flagrantly destructive resources. Harris is generous in his evaluation, focusing among other things on the ways in which the Biden Administration bypassed the traditional “regulation/deregulation” toolkit to instead affirmatively cultivate more climate-friendly policy outcomes through subsidies and incentivizing venture capital toward decarbonization. Harris uses metaphor nicely and describes marketcraft alternately as a steak thrown to redirect the hound of private investment and as the parent/state restricting the teenager/market’s freedom in the bedroom of the “state’s house.”
Assuming that it is even feasible to “trick” capitalists into “financing their own euthanasia,” there are of course, Harris notes, deep contradictions in attempting to direct private enterprise toward the public good, not least of which is that companies are motivated first and foremost by the pursuit of profit derived from the exploitation of labor and view the natural world as a cheap resource and dumping ground. Capitalists are therefore disinclined, no matter the subsidies, to invest in long-term projects – including the types of financially risky infrastructural projects required for transitioning to a “green economy” –and have no general interest, to put it mildly, in the common good.
Nowhere are marketcraft’s contradictions clearer than in the promotion of electric vehicles. While it might appear sensible at first glance to promote electric vehicles in order to jettison gas fueled cars, emissions, Harris emphasizes, primarily result from “indirect consumption of fossil fuels – through agricultural products, plastics, and basically everything we consume.…” This is not to mention the lithium, plastics, and endless rubber that are required for EVs and the unending wealth extracted from drivers to maintain subsidiary industries such as insurance companies, law firms, and the aesthetically and environmentally abominable parking lot industry.
The shift to EVs does not merely represent a missed opportunity for developing more rational forms of travel and city design – say, ones that contain large and attractive open spaces where humans could comfortably move without fear of being honked at or killed. Our move to EVs also indicates the extent to which our political decision making, lives, and imaginations are held hostage to the needs of capital, leaving us in a world in which “saving the environment” becomes a meaningless (and erroneous) abstraction amid an ever-lengthening rush hour (sic) where cars sit backed up for miles, their drivers, stressed and aching, fearing collision with a Cybertruck or simply being rear-ended by a phone-addled commuter. Who would want to save the environment, instead of drive over a cliff, in such a world?
Necessary but not sufficient, marketcraft, Harris argues, needs to be supplemented by other, more radical, strategies. Public power, in contrast to marketcraft, bypasses the short-term and narrow interests of private investors and enables the state to engage in comprehensive planning for the benefit of, if not all, at least the majority. Public power’s deployment of nationalization, for example, could enable the federal government to not only expand the electrical grid but also redirect it for rational use outside the myopic and astronomically wasteful incentives of private profit. Calling on the work of Matt Bruenig and other analysts, Harris notes that there already exists public power infrastructure that could simply be expanded and repurposed toward clean energy production and decarbonization: a green and nationally extended Tennessee Valley Authority. Similarly, labor unions – “the subject and object of the public power strategy” – already provide the organizational structure and class-orientation required to politically challenge the fossil fuel industry and other entrenched polluters. Acknowledging that some unions are politically conservative, Harris stresses that radical political consciousness cannot be assumed but instead must be “built.” That is, the heart of the battle over climate change is ultimately neither organization nor strategy but values that must be fought for.
Nevertheless, as with marketcraft, public power contains its own contradictions, first and foremost concerning just what “the public” entails. The TVA, for example, destroyed Native American burial sites and refused for decades to return the remains. As Harris notes, “Native social metabolic orders are distinct sets of values” that can conflict with not only capitalism but also public power itself. Emboldening state power in the name of a preconceived “public” can exclude if not destroy the particular in the name of the general and forfeit opportunities to incorporate indigenous capabilities into a reconfigured and more environmentally sustainable world. Public power, Harris continues, can also overlook existing social divisions and their implications on constituency-building. Why would men, say, support eliminating a status quo that furnishes them a variety of household and workplace privileges? Alternatively, how do you get unions to overcome Joshua Clover’s “affirmation trap,” in which labor, fearing for its survival, embraces its own exploitation? Harris ultimately circumnavigates such questions by relocating the central site of struggle from the workplace to his third and final strategy: the commune.
The commune, for Harris, is distinct from the first two strategies since it does not attempt to compete against capitalism from within but is external to it. Unlike public power, it does not prioritize the working class’s control over work but seeks to abolish a system in which “work itself (is) the center of life… a strategy in which the planet’s exploited people abolish capital’s system of Value and impose a new world social metabolism based on the interconnected free association and well-being of all – and not just humans.”
The orienting principle of the commune, Harris writes, is not capitalism’s “Oil-Value-Life chain” but the revolutionary dictum: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Adhering to the principle of need to ensure that all are housed, clothed, and well-fed would allow us to eschew the mumbo jumbo of a merit-based society, while focusing on ability – versus, say, equality – would enable us to stop imagining that an 80-year-old woman and a 25-year-old man are equally capable of manual labor and thereby equally deserving of the remuneration that accompanies it. Harris’s second orienting principle for the commune is another Marxist dictum: The ruthless criticism of everything existing, an epistemological orientation recognizing that answers to our problems are frequently as suspect as our problems themselves, if only because the answers emerged from the same conditions and ideological presuppositions that helped produce the problems in the first place. A revolution in permanence, guided by the principle of collective well-being, is a prerequisite for escaping the trap.
What’s Left is at its most subversive, however, when addressing the question of the police and violence. Harris identifies the police as the primary impediment to revolutionary change, rejecting the notions that the police are merely fellow workers and what has been called the pathology of non-violence. Harris specifically invokes so-called Rose Theory in observing that all living creatures are designed to protect themselves (a la the rose’s thorns) and that it is only natural and proper for humans too to defend themselves from, in this case, life-threatening pollution and heat. Historically speaking, the efficacy of political violence is relatively uncontroversial, as even adherents to non-violent civil disobedience, famously Gandhi and MLK, have leveraged the threat of external violence to advance their goals. That is, violent and non-violent resistance are not mutually exclusive but symbiotic. Prima facie rejecting out of hand the former represents not only bad history but is also morally irresponsible, as it is our duty, no less than the rose’s, to defend ourselves.
Notably, Harris insists that these three strategies must all be included in the plan in order to combat climate change (practically speaking, he assumes that you won’t convince liberal marketcrafters to become communists and vice versa), but it is not entirely clear what is to stop the strategies from combating each other. Marketcraft preserves capitalism, which of course never stops accumulating and would like nothing better than to privatize the nationalized sectors promised by public power. At a minimum, the tripart strategy can only be made for the short-term befitting an “emergency siren” (or “brake”). Still, one wonders about the long-term dangers of such an unholy alliance, and Harris isn’t always convincing here. Harris counsels, for instance, that we exploit divisions within capitalists, noting that even John Brown received support from anti-slavery capitalists (John Brown, though, was not a communist). However, in his criticism of marketcraft Harris notes that British commerce’s successful abolition of West Indian slavery was followed by its quick embrace of U.S., Cuban, and Brazilian slavery. That is, exploiting capitalist divisions, fighting merely over which commodities to use, can squander our own energies while sidestepping the problem.
While Harris refers to the superior environmental practices of many indigenous societies, he is wary of romanticizing the pre-Columbian past and is quick to invoke José Carlos Mariátegui’s assertion that “the past is a foundation not a program.” Yet, in concluding that we cannot go backwards, which we of course cannot, it can be tempting to overlook the ways in which the destruction of the environment is an outcome of not merely capitalism but modernity itself. Putting aside the debate over whether the USSR was authentically socialist, Chernobyl was one of the biggest environmental catastrophes in world history, not mentioning the pollution produced by other non-capitalist states. We might not be able to exit the 21st century, but we should surely cultivate critical detachment from the hegemonic ideologies of the modern world.
In this regard, Anthony Galluzzo’s Against the Vortex provides a critical supplement to the discussion. Criticizing the “rational-empiricist yet implicitly religious logic of modernity,” Galluzzo argues that the source of the ongoing destruction of our physical environment is not capitalism per se but the “developmentalist imperative that defines the modernization process,” representing a revolt against finitude, limits, and death itself. This process spans the ideological spectrum, informing Musk and other tech oligarchs’ transhumanism as well as the so-called “fully automated luxury communism” and accelerationism of significant portions of the left. Developing his discussion through a critical viewing of John Boorman’s cult classic Zardoz, Galluzzo argues that, “flourishing starts with an embrace of our mortality and natality, our embodiment and animality, of our fragility and the interdependence that follows from this.”
Harris apparently rejects none of this, but the incorporation of marketcraft and public power into an otherwise revolutionary response to our climate catastrophe reproduces forms of domination that helped get us into this mess in the first place. Communism, too, which expresses a necessary and appropriate self-confidence in humans’ capacity to shape and improve our world, can slide into hubris. Nowhere perhaps is this more evident than in Harris’s discussion of family abolition. It is not difficult to imagine how such a policy would develop in our current political reality, that is, in the hands of opportunistic reformers who in grafting utopian solutions onto an existing dystopia wreak havoc and discredit revolutionary politics for years. Even in a revolutionary scenario, it is debatable, to put it modestly, whether not just men but most people would welcome the abolition of our most intimate form of social organization.
Addressing the heart of the matter, Galluzzo asks: “How to exit the dead end of industrial modernism and its legitimating fictions – utilitarianism, Prometheanism, productivism and its ecocidal dreams of endless growth or secular immortality – in the face of interrelated material, ecological, and spiritual crises but without sliding into the reactionary antimodernism that, for example, led certain disillusioned Western intellectuals to embrace the Iranian revolution at the end of the Seventies?” Harris provides many answers, some of them exceptionally valuable: without revolution we are doomed. Yet without humility we are lost.
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