The United States of America, which houses a mere 6% of the world’s population, consumes 33% of the world’s non-renewable raw materials. This level of consumption, which most models of economic development tout as the standard to which developing nations like India must aspire to reach if they hope to escape poverty, would require an astonishing sevenfold increase in raw material extraction (Daly, 1996, p. 69). Setting aside for a moment the fact that exponential growth in America’s Gross National Product [GNP] from the early 1970s has failed to register any change whatsoever in the nation’s Index for Sustainable Economic Welfare [ISEW] [a tool developed by World Bank economist Herman Daly which integrates debt, income distribution, resource depletion etc. into traditional GNP measurement] (Daly & Cobb, 1994), from a purely environmental standpoint, the effects of such an increase in resource extraction will toll inconceivable amounts of damage to the environment and consequently our living standards.
At the current rate of extraction and pollution, we will inevitably reach 1.5° above pre-industrial levels. Unfortunately, given the current global socio-political climate and its implications for our socio-economic trajectory, it is far more likely that we will breach the 2° threshold. Natural disasters will become much more intense and frequent. At 1.5° of warming, 13.8% of the world will face the brunt of one extreme heatwave every five years. At 2°, this figure jumps to 36.9% (Dosio et al., 2018, p. 6). At 2° of warming, sea-levels will rise by 50 centimetres. Coastal sea-levels will rise even more (Schleussner et al., 2016, p. 1). As of now, areas occupied by approximately 130 million people will be entirely submerged (CarbonBrief, 2015). Incidences of devastating floods, so many of which have already been ravaging many of our states like Kerala, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Uttarakhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Karnataka, and others have been especially devastating for peasants, subsistence farmers, fisherfolks, and the urban poor, and will become far more frequent and intense.
Crop-yields (especially in the global-south) are expected to fall significantly (Schleussner et al., 2016, pp. 1-2), which will raise food prices and dismantle globalised food supply chains, pushing a conservative estimate of 100-400 million more people into hunger (Mukherjee & Mustafa, 2019, p.5). (Gutierrez, 2017, pp. 195-196) estimates that 2° of warming will cause water shortages of varying degrees affecting anywhere between 1-4 billion people worldwide.
Millions of people will die as a direct result of this climate catastrophe, and the lives of countless others will be irreversibly changed. The number of climate refugees will increase exponentially, undoubtedly sharpening border tensions and communal conflicts. Even if all our energy sources become completely renewable, matter makes matter – it is not possible to transform the economy into one that is sustainable in the long term unless we move beyond an economic system that is rooted in the necessity of infinite growth on a finite planet. This is to say that climate change necessitates not merely a transition from ‘dirty’ to ‘green’ energy and individualistic solutions (like electric cars for example). More cars require more energy and more non-renewable resource extraction (metals, minerals, etc.), which requires more energy, which requires more extraction of non-renewable materials and on and on and on ad infinitum.
Therefore, while the current administration’s meagre financing of sustainable energy sources are a necessary step, it is nowhere near approaching the required pace to combat climate change, nor is it a recognition of the necessity of changing our production and consumption patterns to meet the need of the hour. The constant competition that characterises capitalism, the unstable profit rates combined with the systemic need to stabilise and increase them in order to dismantle competitors, is what makes it such an inherently destructive, war mongering economic system. Until it is replaced with a system that directs profits towards new investment based on social consensus and social needs, as opposed to private concerns and the needs of the ultra-rich, we will not be able to prevent the impending apocalypse.
