Bill McKibben: Capitalism and the Climate Justice Movement

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/29161-bill-mckibben-capitalism-and-the-climate-justice-movement

McKibben’s has long been one of the most visible contributors to that debate. In his 2010 book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, McKibben asks what it will take to adapt, politically and socially, to a world drastically altered by climate change. His proposals are people-centered and focus on breaking the power of the fossil fuel companies.

But he’s also partial to decentralization, which should raise red flags: we can’t hope to subdue the most centralized, highly organized institutions of capital with diffused power. Additionally, McKibben doesn’t advance a critique of capitalism, whose very logic has demanded exponential increases in the use of fossil fuels.

It’s true that the fossil fuel industry has an unsurpassed capacity to destroy the planet. But it’s also true that fossil fuels are a social force, a class project: “no piece of coal or drop of oil has yet turned itself into fuel,” Andreas Malm notes. That is, the large-scale consumption of fossil fuels, and in turn, the power of the fossil fuel industry, is a product of capitalist production — not the other way around.