Climate and Carrying Capacity driving towards After Capitalism

The sixth in our series of seven key drivers influencing the move to After Capitalism is climate change and carrying capacity.

Climate change and humanity’s growing ecological footprint are threatening the ecosystem.

Global climate change is accelerating and starting to have noticeable effects. Humanity’s growing ecological footprint, which contributes to climate change, is also influencing the Earth’s carrying capacity. As is commonly observed, people may not survive, but the planet will.

Climate change is connected with capitalism. The growth imperative of capitalism creates pressure to use the energy and resources to fuel it. Patel and Moore (2017) suggest a variation on the Anthropocene called the Capitalocene to highlight the roles of capitalism in the destruction of nature. Post-capitalist Paul Mason says that once the status quo has grasped that climate change is real, capitalism is finished.

The evidence is overwhelming that climate change is starting to have and will have, increasingly negative effects on the environment. The consensus is that the planet is reaching a “point of no return.” One of my favorite sci fi novels, Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather, provided an excellent preview of a future characterized by extreme weather events told through the perspective of storm chasers. More formally and recently, the National Academy of Sciences (2016) published a comprehensive review of the surge of studies suggesting that climate change is influencing the probability and magnitude of extreme weather events. And so on. In short, there is plenty of research on the likely strange weather ahead.

There is some activism on this front. For instance, the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement has staged three major “rebellions” over the past few years to highlight the escalating climate and ecological emergency and demand urgent action from the government. In 2015, a landmark lawsuit, Juliana vs. United States, filed by a group of young plaintiffs, sought to codify the right to a livable planet into the constitution.

But nothing has moved the needle. I reviewed a set of scenarios from the National Academies in 1999, Our Common Journey: A Transition Towards Sustainability  that could have been written today. The opportunity for preemptive action was missed.

Carrying capacity. The Houston Foresight program has long used the work of Wackernagel on calculating humanity’s impact on the environment or its footprint. For many years the Global Footprint Network has calculated the day of the year on which humanity overshoots Earth’s carrying capacity. This Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has exhausted nature’s budget for the year. For the rest of the year, an ecological deficit grows as local resource stocks diminish and carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere.

The evidence for humanity pressuring the planet’s carrying capacity is troubling and not new. The sixth mass extinction is underway and happening much faster than previously expected. Some go further. McBrien coined the term Necrocene — the age of the new necrotic death.

In conclusion. Harari makes the interesting observation that humanity “dominates the planet not because the individual human is far smarter and more nimble-fingered than the individual chimp or wolf, but because Homo sapiens is the only species on earth capable of co-operating flexibly in large numbers.” It is this cooperation that will be necessary to preserve human life on this planet. Many are worried about it being too late. Futurist Richard Slaughter warns that we are no longer a world with multiple global futures from which we can choose to work toward. Rather, the only credible future ahead is one of overshoot and collapse, and our only choice at this point is to deal with it.

My sense is that this connection of capitalism to climate change and carrying capacity is not easily made clear to the general public. Even now there is at best a vague sense of climate change being “real” among the public. A blessing and a curse of humanity is its resilience; not soon after major climate-related disruptive events, be it floods, hurricanes, wildfires, or droughts, it is back to business-as-usual. Let’s hope that the journey to After Capitalism does not require a cataclysm of such magnitude that it cannot be ignored. – Andy Hines