The mainstream climate framework is only making things worse
research and references proving the points that everyone wants to ignore
These last couple years have seen a huge boost in funding for industrial-scale green energy, the Paris Agreement, the IPCC, a growing chorus of highly paid “green growth” academics… but carbon emissions are still increasing. The sad truth is, the whole official framework around climate change isn’t actually designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
People who still believe in the Paris Agreement are basically the equivalent of flat earthers. They’re ignoring all the data. Predictably, the UN and all the NGOs—with all their funding from companies like Microsoft, Google, and BP—have failed. There is basically no chance to keep global warming below 1.5C. In fact, the world temperatures over the 12 months before this past July were already 1.64C above average.
How much heating will there be? It’s really hard to say, because the planet is made up of incredibly complex and interlocking systems. It’s not just a house where you turn the dial on the thermostat. Many climate models suggest that there is actually no possibility of a 2C or 3C increase in planetary surface temperatures: that actually, going over 1.5C triggers a series of tipping points that have a domino effect, bringing the world up to a new stable state that is 4C or 5C hotter than the pre-industrial averages (up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit).
And transitioning to that kind of world in such a short time frame is… gnarly. To put it simply, most of us die. Many or most current species go extinct. All ecosystems on the planet either migrate quickly or disappear forever.
How did the Biden administration’s boost to green investment play out? It was effective at incentivizing the purchase of EVs and hybrid vehicles, though the sale of electrics and hybrids were already trending upwards. On the contrary, it was ineffective at encouraging a shift to renewable energy generation (which actually fell slightly in 2023). Nearly the entirety of the embarrassingly modest 3% reduction in emissions that the US can claim in 2023 is due to a switch from coal to natural gas.
What’s worse, this 3% reduction is an illusion of carbon accounting standards. In 2023 the US saw a tremendous increase in gas and oil production that completely wipes out the supposed 3% reduction, though fossil fuel production doesn’t count under US greenhouse gas inventories according to the IPCC system. Why? Because the US sells most of those fossil fuels to poorer countries (“developing economies”) and they get blamed for the emissions. This model of creative carbon accounting is the reason why major oil and gas producers like Norway, or gas producers, arms manufacturers, and international financiers of fossil fuel like the UK, can claim to be reducing emissions.
This explains why global emissions (the only important measure, for people who live on a planet) are rising as investment in green energy also rises globally. A country’s economic strategy can be largely based on oil and gas production, but it dodges accountability for those emissions by selling the product to countries that cannot currently afford renewable options. To put it more plainly, the most promising models of growth in green energy production are paid for by gas and oil.
Everyone from college economics professors to Marxists will acknowledge these basic patterns in how capitalism functions. But all of the sudden, that awareness disappears when the topic under consideration is green energy. It’s not hard to guess why capitalists have kept silent. Investors in green energy have been making bank.
But, let’s humor our amazingly brilliant fellow humans who believe economic growth is magically going to become good for life, rather than what it’s always been: a measurement for profiting off death. Let’s go a little slow, to enable conversation with completely reasonable, highly paid writers and scholars who look at the history of our planet are think, yeah, we can trust the State to solve our problems. Yeah, let’s invite these institutions that colonized the whole world to the table. Maybe they’ll draft a good plan for us about how to save the Earth. And you know what? While we’re at it, let’s ask the banks and investment firms that got their start in the transatlantic slave trade to author our climate plan...
Hold on, hold on, there’s too much noise coming in from the street. Hey cops, yeah, you guys with the guns and the white supremacist tattoos. Can you take care of all that rabble making noise out in the streets? We’re trying to have a serious conversation in here...
Guess what? All the models the UN scientists have been using to predict how much excess carbon the planet’s life systems can absorb? Well, they were way too optimistic. “This decrease [in the ability of the world’s forests to absorb more carbon] is decades ahead of what even the most pessimistic climate models predicted,” said Wannes Hubau, a forest ecosystems expert at Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa.
What follows is a long list of annotated links to sources that can help us learn more about the ecological crisis and the false solutions that are based in climate reductionism, climate accounting, and the lie of green growth. This newsletter is also meant as a research and source supplement, to back up my arguments in a forthcoming article at In These Times.
To help everyone find that article, I’ll post the link as a comment after August 16. Go to the website version of this article on Substack and heart my post with the link so it stays on top of any other comments that appear.
And while you’re at it, share my newsletter with someone you like!
I give a couple examples of effective movements in the In These Times article. There are two chapters full of more examples in The Solutions Are Already Here. And in that book, as well as Worshiping Power, I present historical research, abundant examples, and a theoretical framework to explain why the State as a form of social organization is always ecocidal.
Here’s a model for international solidarity projects that make a real difference at both ends of the connection, breaking the authoritarian charity model used by NGOs and churches, in which colonizing institutions retain all power to determine how resources are used. In the model described below, everyone is empowered to define their capacity and needs, and just a dozen people can organize something that makes a substantial difference in the lives of communities in the Global North and the Global South.
We need to change paradigm around land and property https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sever-land-and-freedom
In case we need a reminder about the dangers of relying on government regulation when our survival is on the line: it’s too late to limit warming to 1.5C because of governments’ broken promises:
But don’t worry, soldiers! Stay the course! All you have to do is use this hand trick that you can find in so many reports written by the experts. Talk about your projections for decreasing carbon emissions as a reality, rather than a hypothesis that turned out to be wrong. And if anyone notices that actually you’re speaking counterfactually, just insist that the predictions will bear out next year, like this expert does:
https://www.msci.com/www/blog-posts/ira-boosts-us-utilities-plans/04650240458
Go back and read how optimistic projections were in 2020, and how rarely their projections are actually met
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/renewables-record-capacity-solar-wind-nuclear/
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/08/electricity-capacity-power-renewable-energy/
Check out this press release. As is typical, UN representatives who are supposed to be focused on protecting the environment and slowing this catastrophe that is killing millions of people are actually paying much more attention to investments and business than to life and survival. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/wake-call-humanity-qa-climate-expert-ipcc-report
In the first year of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), with which Biden pledged to reduce US carbon emissions by 40% over 8 years, accounted emissions went down by under 3%, 134 million metric tons to be precise.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/
The same year, the US broke all records in crude oil production https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61545
Gas production in the US also increased by 4% in 2023, with the US maintaining its spot at the top of the rankings.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61646
85% of the very modest 3% emissions reductions in US came from a decrease in the use of coal in US electricity production. Increases in natural gas accounts for nearly all of it.
The increase in natural gas production in 2023 was 135 terrawatt hours. The same year saw a 156 tw/hr decrease in coal. Renewables actually decreased a small amount in 2023, as government incentives have been more effective at getting people to buy electric or hybrid cars than to get power companies to switch to a completely different infrastructure.
https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/carbon/
Electricity generation by source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/220174/total-us-electricity-net-generation-by-fuel/
Coal is now far more expensive than natural gas.
And coal-fired plant can be repurposed for natural gas, so that is seen as the safest investment
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44636
The IRA encouraged a couple hundred billion dollars in investments, but most of the new projects are mostly in battery/storage and electric vehicle manufacture. In other words, projects that benefit major companies but also tend to be destructive of the environment.
https://e2.org/releases/march-2024-clean-economy-works/
One attractive site educating the public about the benefits of renewables is funded by EnergyX, a lithium mining company that has major investors like General Motors, one of the companies most responsible for global warming. They’ve collected over $100 million in investment to support their lofty goals. That’s great, right? Something we can all support… democratic action the masses can get involved in. Well, maybe not. The minimum investment is $1K.
Green energy might not be effective at stopping the climate crisis, but it sure is great for making money. Tesla’s cumulative return for investors between 2019 and 2023 was 1,073%. Investments in solar panel manufacturer First Solar gave a five year cumulative return of 272%.
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-a-decade-of-clean-energy-investment/ and https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-the-growth-of-clean-energy-stocks/
Meanwhile, carbon capture technology that has won much fanfare as a potential tech fix to the crisis has proven immensely profitable… for gas and oil drilling operations.
Oil companies like BP, manufacturers like Siemens and GE, tech companies like Google, all of them are investing billions of dollars in renewable energy production, but that’s not something to celebrate. It allows them to clean up their image, given that they are all major polluters with blood on their hands. It also doesn’t make any sense to trust them. For example, in 2023, with profit margins for wind energy crashing below 5% or even dipping into negative numbers, BP drastically scaled back its investments in green energy, increasing its oil and gas profiles again, whereas companies like Siemens and GE decreased their production of wind turbines and other infrastructure.
The transportation sector in the US is responsible for a sizable chunk of global emissions, but we can’t count on government regulation to reduce those emissions. Early in 2024, the EPA set even tougher emissions standards for vehicles manufactured in the future, starting 2027, but the Supreme Court has gutted the ability of the EPA to enforce them.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/new-epa-vehicle-standards-cut-us-emissions-ramp/story?id=108278728
And let’s not forget that electric vehicles still use energy. Depending on how much a country’s energy grid relies on coal and gas, EVs actually aren’t that much more efficient than gas-powered vehicles.
We’re also being sold this idea of carbon markets—when industries that supposedly absorb atmospheric carbon sell credits so that companies with high emissions can buy the right to pollute more without facing additional taxation or running afoul of regulations—as a market-based solution to incentivize good corporate citizenship and other concepts that are, frankly, ridiculous. The only thing they incentivize is green washing.
Corporate “forestry” (basically the highly extractive, highly destructive logging industry) is not a carbon sink, it’s a ticking time bomb based on land theft that destroys real habitats and depletes the water and soil. Contrast the portrayal of carbon markets with the following descriptions of some of the repression necessary to protect commercial forestry in Chile.
On the repression of Mapuche https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-severino-ongoing-repression-in-wallmapu
Are progressive governments a solution? They haven’t been in Chile. And the socialist, Indigenous-led state in Bolivia also built megaprojects on stolen Indigenous land, prioritizing the needs of capitalism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-severino-evo-s-highway
These articles discuss the human and ecological violence of coltan mining (necessary to the green energy transition and tech development in general) in DRC and Venezuela. Both fall into the pattern of recommending leaning into failed strategies even more, like more state-ownership and regulation. The second article even recommends copper mining in Chile as a success story, despite the immense ecological damage and violence to workers and Indigenous societies caused by these mines.
https://issafrica.org/iss-today/child-miners-the-dark-side-of-the-drcs-coltan-wealth
https://research.library.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1159&context=environ_2015
Green business is failing left and right. Industrial scale meat production trying to be eco has failed at carbon neutrality:
Currently the global economy suffers $143 billion in economic costs from climate-exacerbated extreme weather events.
This number may exceed $3 trillion by 2050.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/10/climate-loss-and-damage-cost-16-million-per-hour/
It feels disgusting to even share these numbers, which are generated by thoroughly disgusting people who are analyzing this crisis in a sociopathic way. They don’t care about life or other species or other societies or any of the habitats on the planet. Most of the “costs” of climate change, according to them, come in the loss of human life. And they actually have systems for putting a monetary value on human life (guess what? it varies based on what country the person is from, their age, their ability status, and their level of formal education). The value they put on life is much cheaper than the price tag on the cars they drive (or that they get driven around in).
Nonetheless, looking at these numbers is important, because with more extreme weather, capitalism takes huge losses. Insurance companies won’t even offer coverage for new construction in growing swathes of the world that are especially vulnerable to tropical storms and sea level rise.
With all of these losses, many capitalists are putting more money and thought into building their luxury doomsday bunkers than building plans for future, long-term, sustainable investment. The good thing is this demonstrates something that everyone should know: they have never been on our side.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/short-term-profit-long-term-losses
Even before the pandemic and an obvious acceleration of the ecological crisis, this is how capitalist writers were acknowledging the possibility of diminishing returns.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/capitalism-used-to-promise-a-better-future-can-it-still-do-that/
Hydroelectric dams, the largest source of renewable energy around the world, are losing capacity because global droughts have been lowering reservoirs. What’s more, as these reservoirs lose water they release huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere.
Global methane emissions are rising at their highest rate in decades. Methane has a warming effect 80 times more potent then carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere: the only good news is it tends to stay for a couple decades instead of centuries. Nonetheless, it’s responsible for 30% of current warming.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/30/methane-emissions-study
The world’s forests will start emitting carbon soon:
The 2023 Canada wildfires exceeded their carbon budget for the year. Something similar happened in Australia the year before.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/27/canada-2023-wildfires-carbon-emissions
Nonetheless, Australian society, which leans heavily white supremacist and has one of the strictest, most racist border regimes in the world, continues to repress Indigenous people who never ceded their lands, and who are fighting to protect the forests.
Arrest warrant for Aboriginal activist
Great Salt Lake is releasing a huge amount of methane and carbon as it desiccates, sucked dry by all golf courses, suburban developments, and other harmful uses of the settler middle class throughout the West Coast and Southwest.
https://www.newsweek.com/great-salt-lake-utah-emitting-co2-climate-change-1930214
The oceans are also reaching their saturation point, which means they’ll soon start releasing extra carbon into the atmosphere as they warm, instead of taking carbon out of the atmosphere.
Several major tipping points that will lead to a much hotter world are already being triggered.
Ocean currents necessary for cooling the planet and absorbing greenhouse gases are slowing:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-65120327
We saw articles above suggesting we face 3C of warming, but it’s important to remember that because of global tipping points, 3C—which is already disastrous—might not even be an option. Many climate models suggest that once we pass 1.5C or 2C of warming (and most climate scientists now believe we will, the tipping points will trigger several degrees of additional warming that would basically be impossible to stop.) We might already be on course for 5C of warming that will occur in a matter of decades.
Sometimes, eco-reformists trot out statistics to suggest there might be some hope in pushing for corporate accountability, going after the really big targets. For example, we can read how 57 companies are linked to 80% of all global emissions since 2016. What they don’t get into is what it would mean to put those companies out of business. Frankly, getting rid of them would also destroy the global economy or just require other companies to take over most of the production they’re involved in, because without these companies there is no more cement and no more energy, so no more construction, no more transportation of goods, no more factories. The Guardian is trying to build support for a billionaire’s tax or more aggressive government action with articles like this, but they don’t realize what they’re actually saying.
Don’t get me wrong, we absolutely need to destroy global capitalism. It’s just frustrating how these progressive hypocrites will never be honest about what’s actually needed to save us.
Close to 80% of the global energy mix comes from fossil fuels. Read this highly optimistic article from a government energy agency. Contrast the optimism of the title, which assumes that the energy transition is already in the bag, with the actual facts cited in the article (of real change and not projections) and that we can contrast that with the fact that very few climate scientists still believe we have not already crossed the 1.5C warming threshold. And yet governments are acting like we’ll be fine if in 2030 fossil fuels still produce the majority of our energy, but it’s just a smaller majority.
The WEF estimates it would take $10 trillion in investments for India alone to transition to a carbon neutral economy. Health Policy Watch, in analyzing the failures of all climate goals so far, acknowledges that “systemic transformation [is the] only option to avert climate collapse”, but then they immediately go back to beating the drums that they have just shown are not working: private investment, and government intervention.
World Bank report on 4C of warming. They don’t honestly name how many people would die, but the consequences they name, all brought together, make it clear
https://www.greenfacts.org/en/impacts-global-warming/l-2/index.htm
Those estimating deaths in the hundreds of thousands or low millions are looking at extreme weather events and air pollution. They are not taking into account hunger, the spread of diseases with a larger tropical disease zone and more people stressed and malnourished, wars fueled by resource scarcity, lack of clean water, people dying as they try to migrate…
https://www.weforum.org/press/2024/01/wef24-climate-crisis-health/
Effects on food production of 4C rise:
https://woods.stanford.edu/news/seven-years-agricultural-productivity-growth-lost-due-climate-change
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01492-5
Food insecurity is even appearing in wealthy countries like the UK
It’s very hard to find mainstream institutions looking at the consequences of a temperature rise greater than 3.2C or 4C.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/impact-climate-change-global-gdp/
Even 3.2C would be catastrophic for life and for capitalism. The WEF predicts an 18% contraction in the global economy with a 3.2C rise. That prediction is probably optimistic, but even so it could easily trigger the complete collapse of global capitalism, considering it’s 4 times greater than the 4.3% GDP contraction just in the US in Great Recession.
https://www.britannica.com/money/great-recession
All of the countries lauded by the WEF as “leading the energy transition” are European countries or Euro settler states like New Zealand.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/energy-transition-race-which-countries-leading/
Hannah Ritchie article shows that countries that supposedly have decoupled economic growth from emissions are not counting the emissions of their fossil fuel exports, and the reduction is shown per capita, which also helps hide a growth in total emissions, given the economic benefits of growing populations.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-emissions-in-2023-fell-to-lowest-level-since-1879/
Countries that are claiming to reduce emissions either at a sufficient level (Norway, UK), or at an insufficient level (US) are engaged in a massive expansion of oil and gas drilling, selling most of this to developing countries that are dependent on it. Carbon accounting hides half the pieces to the puzzle. A country’s economic strategy can be largely based on oil and gas production, but it dodges accountability for those emissions by selling the product to countries that cannot currently afford renewable options. To put it more plainly, the most promising models of growth in green energy production are paid for by gas and oil.
I argued that capitalism and green growth would be incapable of reducing emissions or stopping ecocide, in a trilogy of essays I published 15 years ago:
“Before the Big Change” Infoshop News June 2009, followed by “More Wood for the Fire: Capitalist Solutions to Global Warming” Counterpunch Feb 1 2010, followed by the final installment, “An Anarchist Solution to Global Warming,” published on Anarchistnews September 2010.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100620031557/http://counterpunch.org/gelderloos02012010.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20101120064122/http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/12190
But media, even progressive media, still celebrate any increase in green energy, actively erasing the fact that it isn’t leading to a decrease in greenhouse gases. And they actively silence other perspectives—perspectives that are actually proving much more accurate and more historically grounded. They have also frequently built up support for police repression of those taking direct action to confront the crisis.
Analysis of top ten emitters.
https://www.wri.org/insights/interactive-chart-shows-changes-worlds-top-10-emitters
Another analysis that shows historic all time carbon emissions. This is important to show the unfairness of a “green energy transition” within a capitalist system, given how the richest economies are responsible for the vast majority of CO2 increase in the atmosphere, but are blaming poorer countries like India that are currently emitting at a higher rate.
https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/who-releases-most-greenhouse-gases
Great graphics to show the rise in emissions over time and how a few countries are responsible for the vast majority of it:
https://www.wri.org/insights/history-carbon-dioxide-emissions
Capitalist technocrats showing how clueless they are, and willfully ignorant of dynamics of exploitation throughout history:
IPCC guideline for National greenhouse gas inventories https://www.ipcc.ch/report/2019-refinement-to-the-2006-ipcc-guidelines-for-national-greenhouse-gas-inventories/
Country by country analysis is vital to IPCC claiming that GDP can be decoupled from growing emissions: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_Chapter02.pdf
Peter, thank you for these brilliant and well researched thoughts. I'll be up all night checking and double checking all the sources you've included here! I can't see anything I disagree with and I'm very much looking forward to your forthcoming article.
It all boils down to our programming being so successful, we can't let go of the notion of needing the state to govern us. The rise of "green energy" within capitalist framework brought that fact to the surface like never before. I can't even wrap my head around people believing that any promise the state has ever made regarding "green targets" was truthful and that there has actually been a genuine intention to reduce our emissions and become sustainable. It just goes to show how little breadcrumbs people need to swallow the entire bait and start enabling and perpetuating the system.
There has never been and there can never possibly be a solution within a violent, extractivist framework of colonialism and capitalism that is by default anti-life (human and planetary). The state pursuing various targets, pledges and treaties will never save us, for it requires us to surrender our power to the state with a belief that we need to be governed and a blind trust that we can be governed justly and humanely. Only we can save us, as a collective that has dismantled and rewritten the framework.
And yet, even with the planet burning at a critical point, those of us who think this way are still a minority - a minority bigger than ever before, but a minority still, with the majority desperately clinging onto their rulers and their promises. We truly didn't move far from the times when we unconditionally surrendered to and believed in the divine rights of kings, we just reframed our language to soothe ourselves with the breadcrumbs of the alleged progress.
I think it's worth mentioning that military-based creation of carbon is not even counted in the emissions goals, and that the US military, in particular, is the largest consumer of hydrocarbons in the world. https://substack.com/@animalpolitics/p-147424712.
I could add more, but I think you highlight the problems of reliance on state or oligarchy-controlled systems to address pollution admirably. Everything they've done is a fraud. I'm not sure what the solution is, though. I'm a believer in conservation at every level, but what do you think it's going to take to stop the mass extinction going on right now? Or is it already too late?