The Facts that Back an Ecological Revolution
the research shows a decentralized revolution is realistic, green capitalism is not
Today’s newsletter is a companion piece to my new article with In These Times, “Betrayed by Green Capitalism, Here’s How We Can Build a Livable Future.” It’s here for anyone who wants to dig into the data, check my sources, learn more, or understand how fraudulent the official climate framework really is (that’s the framework centered around the Paris Agreement and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with its yearly COP summits and a focus on reducing carbon emissions without slowing economic growth, i.e. “green growth” or “green capitalism”).
Most of the In These Times article describes what an effective, realistic response to the ecological crisis would look like and how it would require, for example, abolishing capitalism. Since that’s a possibility mainstream media completely censor and research institutions never get the funding to investigate, I’m also using this newsletter to explain the empirical research and documented history that demonstrate how the hypothetical or counterfactual situations I’m describing are actually practical and functional, rather than wishful or utopian.
You can read this newsletter in parallel with the In These Times piece, since it follows the order of the claims and arguments I make there pretty closely.
A FACTUAL LOOK AT THE PROBLEM
Here’s a summary of what’s wrong with the mainstream climate framework, as well as the mainstream environmental movement that encourages us to support this framework, and the climate scientists who are working within these institutions (as opposed to the scientists who actually admit what their research is saying). Below the summary you’ll find explanations and links to articles and studies that show the factual basis for everything I’m saying here.
Climate models have been too optimistic: warming has been occurring faster than predicted, and in 2024 we passed a dangerous threshold that the IPCC assumed would not occur until between 2030 and 2050, which would have given “us” more time to act
“Us” is in scare quotes because according to the IPCC, we are not supposed to do anything besides sit around, work, shop, and vote, and trust that the governments, corporations, NGOs, and scientific institutions that caused these problems are going to solve them
The emissions reduction targets set by the IPCC were too low because they prioritized the economy, the profit interests of corporations and the power/growth interests of states more than our interests of survival
Thanks to carbon credits and carbon trading, which fossil fuels companies wrote into the Paris Agreement, the official climate framework we are all supposed to trust has ensured it will be the slowest possible way to reduce carbon emissions
Investment in green energy and production of green energy have increased dramatically, making lots of money for rich people, but carbon emissions and fossil fuel production continue to rise
Carbon emissions are still growing because energy use and GDP growth cannot be completely severed
Additionally, in any growth-based economy, whether it calls itself socialist or capitalist, increased green energy production will cause, not prevent, increased fossil fuel production
Even worse, green energy production at an industrial scale—the massive scale required by our capitalist global economy—causes a great deal of ecological devastation and is fueling a huge wave of mining and land theft, together with an increase in police and paramilitary violence against rural and Indigenous populations around the world
The mainstream media, climate scientists within the IPCC framework, and the mainstream environmental movement are all censoring or ignoring these facts because in one way or another they are on the payroll and their short-term economic interests benefit from lying about the situation and supporting institutions that are actually the cause of the ecological crisis
Opening: the mainstream environmental movement is failing, and green capitalism puts us all in danger
Here’s a book from Survival International about the colonial, racist history of conservationism. This book centers Indigenous people fighting to protect their ecosystems and their own ways of life: Decolonize Conservation.
While old-school conservationism remains a major problem, it is being eclipsed by the climate crisis. And even though all aspects of ecology overlap in a complex web, and setting aside conservation areas is one part of the official strategy for dealing with the climate crisis, there has also been a huge change in focus when it comes to environmentalism. States are incapable of understanding complexity, so they have to flatten the territories and populations they rule. Likewise, scientific institutions that prioritize a quantitative approach, reducing complex problems to a set of numbers that can be tracked, also engage in a simplification of the problem. The result is climate reductionism, by which I mean the simplification of a complex, entangled problem involving every aspect of ecology and human societies, in order to enable a professional, scientific, technocratic focus on a tiny slice of that problem. Climate reductionism leads directly into carbon accounting, the attempt to measure and assign responsibility for all carbon emissions. This accounting feeds back into the power interests of governments and corporations. Instead of admitting a serious problem, admitting that the problem is their fault, and doing everything they can to fix it, they delay, they gamble, and they try to estimate how much more emissions they can get away with. This accounting system is at the root of one of the most obvious problems in the whole system, carbon credits.
I can give two quick definitions of carbon credits. The first one is for people allergic to economics.
Carbon Credits for Beginners: Say companies will face a fine if they produce more than 100 tons in carbon dioxide emissions. Company A does a great job and they bring their carbon dioxide emissions down to 80 tons. They make a lot of money building up their brand, letting everyone know how good they are for the environment (and by good they really mean bad, just not quite as bad as many other companies).
One of those companies is Company B. They produce 120 tons of carbon dioxide, meaning they would face some sort of punishment from the governments that are supposed to save us all from global warming. Carbon credits allows them to escape the punishment, they just have to spend a little money paying for 20 tons of credits from Company A. So the total emissions still average out to 100 tons per company, and Company A hasn’t actually done a better job of decreasing greenhouse gases, since they’re also making money off of another company’s pollution. This becomes an even bigger problem if the government limit on greenhouse gases is too high (and in the real world, it definitely is) or if the system for counting greenhouse gas emissions leaves out a lot of things or is easy to cheat (again, in the real world, both of those things are absolutely true).
Carbon Credits 201:
Carbon credits use the quotas or targets for greenhouse gas reductions to create a market: companies or countries that meet their target with a little room to spare can sell the right to emit pollution to countries or companies that don’t meet their target. This guarantees that reductions will occur as slowly as possible, because any entity that does better than the official timeline for emissions reductions simply enables other entities to go slower. What’s worse, radicals have long known that the official timeline was far too optimistic to avoid catastrophic warming (and 2024 proved us right), and carbon reductions claimed by the carbon accounting system are often fictitious. Check out some of the research in that Food & Water Watch link above.
The whole idea of carbon credits are based on “inventories” or accounts of how much carbon emissions a specific country or corporation is responsible for. And these accounting practices are rife with fraud and false assumptions, as revealed in a report from Food & Water Watch.
In the first section of my In These Times article from August, you can also read about how the countries that “green growth” advocates hold up as examples of economic growth without carbon emissions—like Sweden, Norway, Chile, and the UK—are actually contributing to global warming but hiding their true effects through carbon accounting practices.
Another problem with carbon accounting is that it arbitrarily leaves out many sources of greenhouse gas emissions, like catastrophic wildfires. Wildfires are counted as “natural” emissions, even though the record-breaking wildfires that are becoming more and more frequent are much more devastating and immense than natural fires or traditional burns by traditional pastoral and agricultural societies. These new fires are caused by the combination of global warming, desertification, commercial forestry practices (which replace healthy forest with monocrop tree plantations that go up like gasoline in a fire), and often sparked by power lines or other energy infrastructure.
This is not a small problem. Australian wildfires in the summer of 2019-2020 released 1.6 times more carbon than the country’s accounted emissions for that entire year. Canada’s wildfires in 2023, which burned both commercial lumber plantations (fake forests) or traditionally humid forests being dried out by climate change, released more carbon into the atmosphere than the yearly emissions of Russia or Japan. In fact, if wildfires around the globe were counted as a country, they would be the second worst polluter on the planet, behind only China. (This is using current annual emissions. For an anti-colonial analysis it’s important to note that if we are counting all the greenhouse gas emissions that are fucking up our atmosphere, the US is responsible for the greatest share.)
One fact that mainstream media almost never mention: fossil fuel companies like Shell Oil exercised great influence in the drafting of the Paris Agreement, making sure the international climate framework would benefit them rather than hurting them. One way was by legitimizing carbon trading.
Tesla shouldn’t be considered a car manufacturer: they’re a climate movement profiteer. Most of their profits come from carbon trading. Car companies would run afoul of government regulations and fines for producing high emissions vehicles, but thanks to carbon credits, they can just pay money to companies like Tesla to continue churning out gas guzzlers. In other words, according to Elon Musk’s business model: no gas guzzlers, no Tesla.
Here are just a few examples of hydroelectric dams, wind farms, and other green energy sites leading to land theft, killings or other forms of violence against Indigenous groups, and damage to the environment.
In China: https://sundayguardianlive.com/news/china-forcibly-confiscating-lands-to-construct-hydropower-dam
In the US: “ ‘A Dead Sea of Solar Panels:’ solar enclosure, extractivism and the progressive degradation of the California Desert” by Dunlap, Sovacool, and Novaković.
For a more detailed and a more specific look at some of the collateral devastation reaped by industrial-scale renewable energy projects under capitalism, see Renewing Destruction and This System Is Killing Us, both by Alexander Dunlap.
Here’s a list of the high-six-figure salaries of the executives at the major environmental NGOs. Obviously the people lower down the pecking order make less, often a little over or a little under $100K a year, which is much more than what a public school teacher makes, and it’s even more than what the average registered nurse makes.
And a big part of that money for environmental NGOs comes from industry – including the fossil fuel industry.
In a future newsletter, I’ll be publishing an interview with someone who worked within the mainstream climate movement preparing protests against a COP summit, and who saw how much money they wasted, how they deliberately excluded local organizers and collaborated with police, how they reproduced colonial and racist dynamics within the movement, how they were mainly focused on getting in the media spotlight, and how they were basically incapable of actually organizing anything themselves.
Here’s a good book providing a critique of the non-profit industrial complex: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.
And here’s a powerful example of the ways that charities and non-profits can be absolutely heartless and self-serving, using their power over the populations they are supposedly helping: Bill Gates using his charitable foundation to protect monopoly medicine in Africa, even though it meant COVID vaccines were far less available, and how the AGRA program, funded by Gates and a number of other philanthropists, fought “to expand high-input, chemical-dependent monoculture farming in Africa [but] has failed to provide food security, despite billions in funding from private donors and government subsidies. Critics say the “green revolution” approach is exacerbating hunger, worsening inequality and entrenching the power of outside corporate agribusiness interests in the hungriest regions of the world.”
Increasing investment in green energy is the central proposal of the mainstream environmental movement and the international climate framework under the IPCC. However, this proposal is a total non sequitur. Increasing green energy production will do nothing to decrease fossil fuel production. In fact, as I show in an earlier article with In These Times, more green energy actually causes an increase in fossil fuel production.
For all their fancy degrees, I have never heard any scientist working for the IPCC framework or the many NGOs receiving corporate funding admit this. And I have never come across a single article from any mainstream publication in our supposedly free press that acknowledges these facts.
Some well paid academic hacks engage superficially with the critiques of degrowth, which is an academic current that gently tries to express how a growth-based economy cannot exist on a finite planet, while side-stepping the uncomfortable necessity of anticapitalist revolution. These “green growth” propagandists manufacture the statistics that their corporate backers want to hear, but as I’ve pointed out above, with evidence, their carbon accounting practices are fraudulent. Meanwhile, other academics have thoroughly demonstrated that GDP growth “ultimately cannot plausibly be decoupled from growth in materials and energy use, demonstrating categorically that GDP growth cannot be sustained indefinitely.”
What we’re faced with is a system of censorship far more effective than the erasure practiced by the Soviet Union under Stalinism. Capitalist media and their government minders and regulators encourage rigorous debate on any strategy or approach that might be useful for improving the function of capitalism and the State. Anything else simply does not exist. (You can read more about this mechanism, complete with empirical evidence, in Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.)
I can explain it in one minute.
You’re an energy company. You’ve invested $10 billion in an oil refinery, gas wells, gas pipelines, and a power station that burns natural gas. You make $1 billion in profits every year. Then, the government and other investment firms begin pouring billions into investments for green energy and tax breaks for the use of carbon capture. Wind, solar, and hydro all increase and soon they’re producing energy at lower costs than you are. Your profits drop to a measly half billion per year.
What do you do? Give up and close your business? No. And you can’t just pivot to green energy without losing that $10 billion investment. That’s fixed capital. Money spent. You can’t change an oil refinery or a gas well into something else. You’d have a hard time making a thousand bucks off the scrap metal.
The way to continue making a profit, which is your legal responsibility to stakeholders under capitalism, is to double your production of oil and gas. Profit margins decrease so production volume has to increase. Once again you’re making $1 billion in profits. You can amplify your gains by using carbon capture to raise production at your gas wells, and also improve your brand image and diversify your investment portfolio by putting some of the profits into wind or solar projects.
Here’s another explanation of this problem, along with plenty of graphs for any visual learners out there: “Ahead of Another Summer of Climate Disasters, Let’s Talk about Real Solutions” on CrimethInc.
This isn’t just a theoretical explanation of capitalism and green energy I’m giving here. It’s the only analysis that matches the data. All the projections for emissions reductions being put out by the IPCC, by various governments, by proponents of green growth are wishful thinking, and every time we get data for the years they make predictions for, they are proven wrong.
Every week, respected journalistic operations like the New York Times spread information about climate change that is misleading or downright false. Take this example from January 21:
“Collectively, [Trump’s] executive orders put the United States on a path to increasing production of coal, oil and gas” The US already was on that path: in 2023 and 2024, under Biden, oil and gas were not only increasing, they were breaking records. Of the three, only coal was declining, largely because production was more expensive and profits were lower. The very first paragraph of the same article claims that 2024 “brought the planet to a dangerous temperature threshold,” when in fact temperatures in 2024 showed that we had already broken that threshold, one that wasn’t supposed to arrive—according to the IPCC framework—until 2050.
Television news companies are even worse: mischaracterization, falsehood, and—most of all—silence, mark their coverage of the ecological crisis every single day.
(Green) capitalism doesn’t rule through reason, but through repression
It’s no exaggeration: those of us who spread a realistic analysis of the ecological crisis and respond in reasonable ways to what is factually a question of self-defense and survival are treated as terrorists and going back to the ‘90s corporate interests intentionally invented the concept of ecoterrorism and convinced the US and British governments to repress us as terrorists, leading to dozens of framings, police raids, long-term imprisonment, torture, sexual assault, social demonization on a massive scale, and several deaths. Numerous times in the early ‘00s, even as the US government used the September 11th attacks to justify a massive counterterrorism apparatus targeting Muslims, the FBI and Congress identified anarchists and the overlapping radical ecological movement as the “number one domestic terrorism threat”. (Incidentally, going back to the ‘90s and probably earlier, white supremacist and far-right groups and individuals have been responsible for more terrorism-related deaths in the US, these groups frequently overlap in membership with the police and military, and both the media and the government have systematically downplayed the danger they present.)
Read: “How a Movement that Never Killed Anyone Became the FBI’s No. 1 Domestic Terrorism Threat” from The Intercept.
In the US and the UK, this has been referred to as “the Green Scare.” The “Spy Cops” cases in the UK also involve repression against radical ecologist anarchists, with police there also carrying out sexual assault and child abuse.
On other continents, police, military, private security, and paramilitaries carry out the murder, rape, and torture of land and water defenders with impunity, often receiving direct financing from global corporations and training from US and European militaries. The international flow of funding, weapons, and training shows that this brutality isn’t the fault of the “poor countries” where it often happens. It is a universal feature of capitalism and the State. We can find more evidence for this claim in the fact that there is police and paramilitaries also carry out torture and murders in the supposedly wealthy countries, especially against the most oppressed groups like Indigenous communities in resistance.
(Note that Global Witness, the NGO that releases the annual report linked above, only reports the deaths of people who are part of movements that are not fighting back against genocidal and ecocidal forces. This erasure is a typical feature of the hypocrisy and double standards of the liberal version of colonial white supremacy. Just as global capitalism denies people on bottom the right to survival, progressives deny those same people the right to self-defense, only protesting their deaths if they can be held up as innocent, passive victims.)
As we’ve seen above, many of the corporations that fund military repression to silence realistic movements also fund and amplify the mainstream environmentalist movement. And this movement not only validates a response to the ecological crisis that is making things worse, it also reproduces racist and colonial dynamics.
Be sure to read Rebecca K. Smith’s article on ecoterrorism. https://cldc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Ecoterrorism-article.pdf
In her article, she provides an illuminating quote from Ron Arnold, the person who coined the term ecoterrorism. “We want to destroy environmentalists by taking their money and their members. . . . No one was aware that environmentalism was a problem until we came along. Facts don’t matter, in politics, perception is reality.” Aside from being connected to the millionaire cult Unification Church, Arnold was an executive with the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, which received well over a million dollars in donations from ExxonMobil and the far-right Mercer Family Foundation established by a hedge fund billionaire with connections to leading politicians in the US and UK.
Here’s an interview with activist lawyer Lauren Regan on “Informants and Information” during the Green Scare, and a more recent podcast interview on A Wild and Beautiful World, “They’re Doing This Because We’re Winning.”
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Amazon regularly contracts out for surveillance against labor union organizers as well as environmental groups keeping a critical eye on their practices. In another article, The Guardian reports on how spying against environmental movements is standard practice for energy companies.
To avoid the rose-tinted glasses of mainstream media, we have to acknowledge that corporate repression against our movements does not only involve intelligence gathering. Many corporations also hire mercenaries to brutalize or kill those who stand up. The energy companies trying to build a pipeline through Standing Rock hired TigerSwan mercenaries, professional killers who had just come back from fighting neo-colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After their experiences at Standing Rock, TigerSwan made more money off the venture by sharing their counterinsurgency manual with other oil companies.
Want to read the research showing how all the elements of an ecological revolution – a realistic response to the ecological crisis produced by the State and colonial capitalism?
Because of the length of this piece, I’m going to be releasing Part II later this week. Unless work piles up, which it often does, in which case it will be earlier next week.
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Thanks for all your extensive research as always