In the past year, unprecedented wildfires on the West Coast gave California a seemingly perpetual sepia makeover; the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic quickly outpaced the National Hurricane Center’s ability to name them; and Texas’s entire power grid went down during an extreme winter storm, killing dozens, if not more. All of these events are linked to climate change.
The people who have been forced to live in this intensely individualist society, especially people of color and people living in poverty, should not have to bear more of the burden for the climate emergency than the oil and auto company CEOs who purposefully put us in this unforgiving conundrum to line their pockets.
Most Americans now believe in climate change, having seen disasters unfold before their eyes.We are also seemingly entering an age of corporate responsibility, ushered in by a “sustainability” tab on Chevron’s website and a Shell Twitter poll seeking input on which market-based solutions they think might work to get us out of the mess they caused.
In recent months, the auto industry has appeared to shift its focus entirely to creating electric vehicles. The CEO of General Motors, Mary Barra, who was cozy with former President Donald Trump, announced in January that GM will be investing heavily in electric vehicles and will stop producing gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Other auto companies, like Ford, are going all in on EVs, too.
Environmentalists are parched for some meaningful action on the climate crisis from Congress, watching the gridlocked Senate vie for moderate Senator Joe Manchin’s approval as the world burns. Meanwhile, private companies are working to convince consumers that a “new kind” of capitalism will be able to solve the problem.
Don’t buy it.
Stan Cox, an environmental writer and plant geneticist who advocates strongly against narratives about free market solutions for the climate crisis, says people in the United States have a very hard time imagining a society where production and consumption is not continuously increasing.
“Every proposal to do something strong enough to deal with climate change has been rejected on the basis that it would be bad for business” Cox says. “The people in charge of these corporations want to keep doing what they’re doing. And that is totally dependent on continuing to burn fossil fuel.”
Arguments for capitalism as a solution for the climate crisis, coming from groups like The Heritage Foundation, hinge on the observably false notion that CEOs of companies that have contributed to the destruction of the planet, to their great personal financial benefit, will ever be authentically altruistic.
Ashley Dawson, a professor at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and a climate activist and writer who founded the CUNY Climate Action Lab, is critical of arguments in favor of market-led climate change strategy. What’s needed, Dawson says, is much stronger, deeper action.
Dawson has spoken up about electric vehicles in particular, writing in a February article for the CUNY Graduate Center’s The Thought Project that “electric vehicles are the primary element in contemporary green capitalist fantasy: the idea that a convenient technological solution will fix the climate crisis, precluding the need for any significant economic or cultural shifts and thereby protecting the sacrosanct, high-consumption ‘American way of life.’”
Electric vehicles won’t fix the climate crisis, Dawson says, for several reasons. First, even if they are produced at rapid rates and widely purchased, EVs can’t replace every gas-powered vehicle we’re currently driving, and will make up only a fraction of cars on the road in 2040.
Moreover, renewable energy currently makes up only a small portion of energy consumption in the United States, so electric vehicles are not automatically clean just because they don’t use gas. These cars also require a lot of energy to build, due to their large battery, which produces a non-negligible amount of emissions in itself.
This doesn’t mean that electric vehicles, and other similar alternatives to environmentally harmful items, like beef, are completely useless. EVs are definitely superior to the gas-guzzlers of yore and will likely get cleaner as we continue to harvest renewable energy. So if you need to buy a new car, electric is better.
But EVs shouldn’t be touted as the main pathway to a livable future.
We need to think more radically. EVs don’t counter the prevailing U.S. narrative of individualism and commercialism triumphing over the well-being of the planet. Auto industry executives have worked tirelessly for years to convince Americans that we need cars, reshaping society in the process (to make it so that many of us actually do need cars).
“People are ideologically trapped. Car companies have worked for many decades to give us all the feeling that having access to a big automobile is about individual freedom and self-assertion and masculinity and all of that other crap,” Dawson tells The Progressive. “The high price of housing in most American cities means that working class people can’t live in the city center, so the average American is dependent on cars. Even if people wanted to do something different, it’s hard for us to imagine an alternative.”
The alternative, Dawson suggests, is “degrowth,” a term that he admits is a “rhetorical buzzkill,” at least in the United States.
“Degrowth” is an idea that was formed as a critique to the exploitative and destructive “growth” of capitalism. The movement, formed around this idea in France in the early 2000s, advocates for “societies that prioritize social and ecological well-being instead of corporate profits, overproduction, and excess consumption.”
Cox thinks climate scientists have shied away from being explicitly anti-capitalist or anti-growth because it’s not an exciting idea for most people.
“For a long time, climate scientists were just running battles with climate deniers and using any energy they had trying to get the public to accept that we have to do something,” Cox says. “Now they only want to talk about the benefits of clean energy, and not necessarily the sacrifices that may be needed. We’re going to have to give some stuff up,” he says.
But changing our society to use less resources and, yes, generate less profit, doesn’t mean that we’ll all be forced into misery. Cox sees ideas like Universal Basic Services, in which everyone would have basic needs like housing, food, and health care met, as part of a societal restructuring that would also serve to benefit the environment.
U.S. capitalism has produced an extreme wealth gap, a devastating affordable housing crisis, a massive population of people without health insurance, and a $1.6 trillion student debt problem, among other harms. There isn’t much else for working class Americans to lose.
This restructuring must also take into account the structures of oppression at the center of the climate crisis, especially when examining the idea of “personal responsibility.” It’s great if you have the freedom to abandon your car, eat a vegan diet, and shop completely locally, but there are many people who can’t do that yet.
The people who have been forced to live in this intensely individualist society, especially people of color and people living in poverty, should not have to bear more of the burden for the climate emergency than the oil and auto company CEOs who purposefully put us in this unforgiving conundrum to line their pockets.
“If you have lower-impact options that are an option for you, by all means, do it,” Dawson says. “But also mobilize politically for the transformation of these infrastructures and fossil capitalism and racial capitalism that make it so hard for the majority of people to actually have choices available for them.”
Getting out of the climate emergency is antithetical to capitalism. We can only save ourselves if we look out for each other and abandon the confines of toxic individualism.