You can’t accept climate change as real without acknowledging the need for strong environmental regulations
Matthew Rozsa is a professional journalist for more than 13 years
Cross-posted from d@w’s substack
For the last five years of my eight-and-a-half years as a Salon Magazine staff writer, I focused on covering climate change for the science vertical. I repeatedly covered the basic scientific facts behind global warming — namely, that human beings are causing it far more than natural activity. This is because we keep dumping greenhouse gases (any molecule with more than two atoms in it) into the atmosphere. The excess carbon dioxide (CO2), water vapor (H2O), methane (CH4) and various CFCs (also known as fluorocarbons) are all caused by human business enterprise.
In short, you cannot effectively address climate change without imposing strong environmental regulations on the businesses that emit these greenhouse gases. Because conservatives are dogmatically opposed to environmental regulations — in part because they embrace “free market economics” as a quasi-religion, in part because they hate the left-wing bent of the environmentalist movement — they hate the notion of regulating these businesses. For that reason, they therefore either deny that climate change is happening or downplay its effects on our planet.
To be clear, those effects are devastating. If it continues to occur unabated, climate change will raise sea levels, destabilize ocean current systems, and overheat large sections of the planet past the point of habitability. When we aren’t grappling with freakish extreme weather events like wildfires and superstorms, we will be struggling to find enough food to eat or shelter from dangerously fluctuating temperatures.
Even so-called liberals are reluctant to accept the implications of this. That is why the last Democratic president, Joe Biden, did not declare a climate emergency despite ample evidence that he should do so. As University of Massachusetts Amherst economist Dr. Richard Wolff told me for Salon in 2023, “Of course Biden should [declare a climate emergency] since it is so threatening to the whole world. There would be some real leadership to offset the fast-growing global image of a declining U.S. empire and a declining U.S. economy and politics. The emergency could spark real global efforts to reduce fossil fuel usage, pool resources for all the other projects now being started or stopped according to each nation’s political economy, relocate production and distribution systems to reduce pollution. The emergency could enable collective efforts achievable probably in no other way.” At the same time, Wolff correctly predicted Biden would never “do such a thing,” if for no other reason than “his overdone commitment to wars around the world — all of which worsen both climate-focused problems and inflationary problems — suggests his full participation in the projects of those who do not want what [climate activist Greta] Thunberg and so many millions of others want and seek.”
Yet if mainstream liberals have a hot-and-cold relationship with climate science, mainstream conservatives are downright toxic. This is because, on an intuitive level, they appreciate that the most logical conclusion based on this science is the one arrived at by Japanese philosopher Dr. Kohei Saito in his 2024 book “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.”
He, in turn, was citing the works of Marx.
Marxism is known for socialism, and socialism is often described as the exploitation of the working class. Capitalism has a tendency to increase technologies and promote innovations because of market competition. But Marx thought that once the workers take over power and kick out the capitalists, they can utilize the development of productive forces for the sake of themselves — more wealth, more well-being.
But there is one problem: Sustainability. Because as Marx started to study natural sciences later in the 1850s and 1860s, he came to realize the development of technologies in capitalism actually don’t create a condition for emancipation of the working class. Because not only do those technologies control the workers more efficiently, they destabilize the old system of jobs and make more precarious, low skilled jobs. At the same time those technologies exploit from nature more efficiently and create various problems such as exhaustion of the soil, massive deforestation, and the exhaustion of the fuels, and so on.
Marx came to realize that this kind of technology undermines material conditions for sustainable development of human beings. And the central concept for Mark at that time in the sixties is metabolism. He thinks that this metabolic interaction between humans and nature is quite essential for any kind of society, but the problem of capitalism is it really transforms and organizes this entire metabolism between humans and nature for the sake of profit-making. Technologies are also used for this purpose. So technologies are not for the purpose of creating better life, free time and sustainable production, but rather it exploits workers and nature at the same time for the sake of more growth, more profit, and so on.
My point is basically Marx was quite optimistic when he was young in terms of the development of technologies, but later he came to realize actually technologies have more damaging impact on both humans and nature. So he became more critical of that possibility of solving those problems of poverty and ecological problems using technology. That’s how the issue of degrowth and eco-socialist ideas came to be central for his ideas.
I’m not pretending to know how to persuade the millions of people who reject the reality of climate change for ideological reasons. Indeed, one of my last articles for Salon Magazine was about people who cannot repair close personal relationships because of disagreements about climate change. Of this much, though, I am certain, and I say it after half-a-decade covering climate change, and receiving a distinguished Metcalf Institute fellowship for my efforts:
When conservatives refuse to recognize that climate change is real, it’s because doing so forces them to recognize that capitalism is real, too.
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