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People who are paying attention know that wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and floods are becoming more frequent, more extreme, more dangerous. We know it’s harder to grow food. We know that greenhouse gas emissions are rising every year, unless there’s an economic recession. We know that within a capitalist economy, an increase in industrial-scale green energy production causes an increase in fossil fuel production, by lowering the price of energy and forcing owners of the extensive fixed capital involved in fossil fuel production to produce more, in order to make up for a lower profit margin.
We know that every attempt to claim that economic growth is being decoupled from carbon emissions is just carbon accounting, shuffling the numbers to hide the true costs of capitalism. The highly paid researchers and journalists telling us that we can make capitalism green are pointing to multiple examples of emissions decoupling. But if we scratch under the surface we find Scandinavian countries that are actually producing huge quantities of oil and gas, but that doesn’t count because they’re selling it to be burned in other countries. We find the UK, which is also increasing gas production and weapons manufacture, has an economy based largely on banking and financial services for fossil fuel companies and other destructive industries. Curiously, none of that counts. We’re told that forests count as a carbon sink. And yet, if we look at a “green” country like Chile, much of these forests are on land stolen from Indigenous communities. And from Chile to the US and Canada, they’re not actually forests: they’re monocrop tree plantations. They destroy the soil, they don’t provide a good habitat for other species, they’re reliant on petrochemicals and fuels used in clearcutting and processing, and they don’t absorb nearly as much carbon as healthy, real, forest ecosystems.
Capitalist agriculture is a major cause of soil depletion, which releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Many of these emissions aren’t counted. Capitalist forestry and development practices cause bigger wildfires. Those emissions aren’t counted either. Militaries and wars are a major source of emissions. They also get excluded from most official counts.
Keep digging, and we see that electric vehicles as well as industrial-scale wind, solar, and hydro projects cause immense damage to the land through deforestation and mining, and in some cases they also devastate human communities. It also becomes clear how much money green energy, electric vehicle, and carbon capture companies are making, even though they are obstructing the goal of a negative-emissions economy.
