Climate overheating is a story, and human survival depends on how we tell that story. It is a story about the ruling class, about the exploited, working masses, about organization and revolution. It is a story about capitalism, about unspeakable suffering, about politics, media, wealth and power. It is a story that Marxists will understand about a speculative end – a matter of something destined to unfold, yet still beyond our capacity to imagine. It encompasses familiar themes of both a biblical apocalypse and the grand designs of history. I am only one story teller – a struggling, uncertain, inadequate one, perhaps – but the plot lies in front of me (as it does for anyone to scrutinize) with all of its compelling and epic subplots.
Climate overheating is not a fragmented narrative about local floods and wildfires. It exempts no one and meaningfully returns to global themes and international solutions. We make a grave mistake to make climate into a riddle about carbon capture, sea walls and renewable energy, even if technical means of mitigation have to be deployed. We can easily miss the forest for the trees. Climate is a tale about the means of production, profit, and the divided working class. The ending, unlike in classical Marxism, may be one of brutal failure and utter collapse. But the final act will revolve around the working class as we react with outrage or surrender.
Climate overheating is a story about criminals and victims, about failure and salvation, about beguiling mirages, about futile half measures, habitual compromises and the rageful insistence of nature.
We live in the age of excess – excess wealth, addiction, excess stuff straining walls, storage facilities, supply closets, attics, basements and landfills. Excess stuff creates a notable by-product – excess heat from overproduction. Climate overheating initiates a terrible sequence of consequences. With rising sea levels and spreading deserts, the earth shrinks, creating refugees – twice victimized. Stateless people, orphaned by poverty and the violence of the writhing natural world, have been destined to become the centerpiece for reactionary political movements. But what happens when refugees become, not millions, or tens of millions, but billions? Climate overheating, refugees, fascism and war exist as inevitable features in an environmental/political feedback loop. The wealthiest nation builds walls to exclude the victims of climate. When walls fail, concentration camps follow. Excess people will be “treated accordingly” as genocide becomes capitalism’s shadow. Gaza should not be seen as an aberration, but as the template for an overheated world.
Let us add in AI. Our wondrous new passion for profit, fossil fuel generated knowledge available on a whim makes human brains redundant. AI knows that 50 times as many people died in the French Revolution as in the tame American Revolution that we fought on behalf of slave owners and land speculators. With a billion barrels of oil you can conjure up millions of bushels of random facts – you can burn your folder of cake recipes and let the data center measure your sugar and flour. Human thinkers – slow, contradictory, distracted by extraneous tasks involving philosophical and ethical questions that have become dead weight slowing the momentum of profit – once guided even the worst societies. AI, like smoldering climates, creates yet more unnecessary people. Capitalism does not waste space for redundant people. Private prisons and detention centers might be profitable means for the temporary storage of excess people, but for how long? In the US, we have mastered the act of concealment, as a matter of animal agriculture so that industrial levels of agony remain sequestered from common awareness. We have practiced on animals – a trillion tortured, beaten, brutalized chicken and pig carcasses can invisibly be “processed.” Animal agriculture plays two key roles – it spews greenhouse gasses while desensitizing us all. Systemic violence has long provided the foundation for industrial supply chains, but now nature lashes back. Methane from cattle, CO2 from degraded forests turned into grasslands pushes the boundaries of fate. There is no climate story that circumvents animal agriculture.
How could the pundits have missed something so obvious? As the rich become fewer and richer, and the rest lose everything – a swelling torrent of displaced people without a homeland, a bed, a blanket or a meal, the ocean of roiling refugees that capitalism has deemed to be waste products will have to be discarded. You have absorbed the staggering statistics – the top 12 global billionaires own more wealth than the bottom four billion nobodies, the anonymous human filler, the suffering hordes vainly coaxing atrophied corn out of the parched remnants of the global south’s once-upon-a-time coveted fields.
Chiquita once dictated US policy in Latin America, long before El Salvador became a dumping ground for the USA’s most scapegoated and hardest working people. While our backs are turned, as we bow our heads silently in the direction of the cell phone deity, the banana withers and threatens to join dinosaurs, trilobites and saber-toothed tigers.
“Bananas are the world’s most consumed fruit – and the fourth most important food crop globally, after wheat, rice and maize. About 80% of bananas grown globally are for local consumption, and more than 400 million people rely on the fruit for 15% to 27% of their daily calories.”
Climate overheating works in an orderly and incremental manner. First bananas, then you.
“Bananas, especially the cavendish, are sensitive fruits. They require a temperature range between 15C and 35C (59F and 95F) to thrive, and just enough water – but not too much. They are sensitive to storms, which can cause a banana plant to shed leaves, making it much harder for the crop to photosynthesize.
While there are hundreds of banana varieties, the cavendish accounts for the vast majority of exports since it was chosen by the fruit conglomerates for its decent flavor, hardiness and high yield.
It’s this lack of genetic variation that makes bananas particularly vulnerable to the rapidly changing climate.”
So we have a world too hot for the most beloved tropical crop, and a huge population of vulnerable, hungry people who have value to capitalism only as a narrative target for political vituperation. The people burning alive in a post-banana, smoldering hell-scape want to violate our borders, we are told, and in the heat and the chemical pea soup of our remaining days, we are air conditioned, Comfortably Numb and eager to believe. In a world divided between too hot, and just unpleasantly warm, the cooler spots need to be cordoned off with concrete and razor wire.
In the boiling oceans of western civilization we are somehow running out of icebergs, but still richly in possession of sinking ships. In a system founded upon austerity, you can guarantee that the powerful shakers of civic priorities have not budgeted for life boats. Climate overheating is all about not enough. Climate overheating features mansions and tent cities, water for golf courses and dust for corn fields, air travel to tropical resorts and a funeral for the AMOC.
The AMOC, in the straight thinking and linear world of capitalist thought, will be destined to confuse us. We don’t do irony, paradox, or any manner of counter-intuition, do we? The AMOC – an acronym for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the system of ocean streams that delivers equatorial warmth to the North Atlantic, has been slowing down as the ocean absorbs heat from our greenhouse gasses. A stagnant ocean will cause Europe to freeze. Huh? How do warming waters deliver an ice age? You ask.
“The AMOC is driven by the formation of deep water near Greenland: Cold, salty water sinks for the simple reason that cold water is more dense than warm water, and salty water is more dense than fresh. This sinking pulls surface waters toward northern Europe from the east coast of the Americas and further south, powering a massive global conveyor belt of water that extends all the way down to the southern tip of Africa. But as the north warms thanks to climate change, its waters become less dense and therefore less inclined to sink. The current slows. This pulls less salty water up from Africa, making the water in the north even less dense, and even less inclined to sink. The current slows more. Melting ice from Greenland freshens the waters further, exacerbating the problem. Eventually, this feedback loop shuts the current down.
Something similar has happened before: An AMOC shutdown played havoc with the planet 12,000 years ago, when the end of the last ice age dumped huge amounts of fresh water into the northern ocean. This plunged Europe back into ice-age-like conditions, with Greenland, for example, cooling by a stunning 18 degrees F (10 degrees C). “The effects are amongst the most drastic we have seen in the paleorecord,” says (climate scientist, Stefan) Rahmstorf. “We really don’t want this to happen.” “
No matter how much “we really don’t want this to happen,” it will happen, perhaps sooner rather than later if global capitalism fails to summon mass resistance. This revolutionary fervor will need to institute global cooperation and an international mandate to quickly abandon fossil fuel use in favor of slowed consumerism, redistribution of wealth and coordinated production of renewable energy. Economists have imagined the details – Piketty, Chancel, Mohren, Moshrif and Odersky, regarding their own research, conclude:
“A global transformation that reconciles planetary habitability and high standards of wellbeing for all is possible – as long as three conditions are simultaneously met. Fast decarbonisation of energy systems is necessary. But we also need a major shift away from overconsumption towards “sufficiency”. This would involve a sharp reduction in labour hours and the use of raw materials, along with big changes in consumption patterns, food habits, land use and forest cover. Financing and politically sustaining decarbonisation and sufficiency will require a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, between countries and within them. This reduction of global inequality is compatible with deep decarbonisation; indeed, it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.”
Arguments for degrowth have been made by Jason Hickel, Kohei Saito and others, but these neo-Marxist conceptions have not found a vibrant voice outside of academia. The runaway train of suicidal fascism – the ultimate and final strategy of capitalism – is rushing headlong into the geological epic of banana extinction and increasingly static ocean currents. The task for a viable renaissance of progressive mobilization will be both massively difficult and essential – ordinary people have to become “literate about climate.” The basic narrative must be the foundation for political organization, particularly among poor and working people.
Climate overheating is a global issue that cannot be solved by nationalistic politics. Nationalists default to racist, anti-immigrant tropes, leading to war and genocidal solutions as a distraction from the true crimes of the past centuries – the unfettered rule of fossil fuel capitalists, animal agriculture and giant tech corporations (with its insatiable passion for fossil fuels). We now inhabit a five alarm fire being mediated by a global network of arsonists.
Out of our current predicament there are two (and only two) possible outcomes – a world of stagnant oceans, burnt banana plantations, death camps and survival bunkers, or a world of unprecedented international cooperation. This emerging world of second chances will be a mostly vegan world, a world of shared rather than private pleasures, a place full of parks, local agriculture, leisure time and democratic rule animated by citizens assemblies. Technology will be a public good – rationed and evenly distributed. A shrinking, hotter world, with coastal flooding and uninhabitable stretches of formerly cooler territory will require planned, humane movement of populations. Underpopulated countries like Canada, the US and Russia will have to share their good fortune with poor people driven from their homelands by capitalist behaviors of extraction, pollution and emissions. Survival is not about neoliberal nostalgia for an American ideology that never existed outside of fantasy. Survival will involve mass understanding of the emergency engulfing us. Rebecca Egan McCarthy, a climate journalist writing in Grist, suggests that a more protracted unfolding of the looming and catastrophic slowing of the AMOC:
“would still cause enormous upheaval, but would give the world more time to put mitigation efforts in place.”
Climate journalists seldom concern themselves with the nature of “mitigation efforts,” nor do they venture into the obvious implications of entrenched capitalism. Mitigation for climate involves an existential and vast requirement for global, political coordination. It is not a matter regarding the technical brilliance of a few geniuses, the externalized means by which an unforeseeable, inspired immaculate discovery rescues the passive sum of humanity from the physical laws of nature. This rescue will require an enormous network of ordinary people who fully understand the consequences of non-action. Our future will depend on mass comprehension of our shared climate predicament. The solution is not in the hands of scientists only – the bulk of the work (if it is to be done at all) will be accomplished by story tellers and those who avidly listen.
This article also appears in Phil Wilson’s Nobody’s Voice substack.Email
