The Capitalist Engine of Combustion in Los Angeles: an ecosocialist response

Investigators are busy searching for causes of the fires ravaging Los Angeles — downed powerlines, carelessly tossed cigarettes, errant sparks from machines, campfires, arsonists, etc. They need look no further than the weather report. 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded in Los Angeles, and the hottest year on record globally. 2023 was the second hottest. The last ten years have been the hottest years humans have ever experienced. In 2024 the average temperature of planet Earth hit 1.62°C above pre-industrial levels — exceeding the 1.5°C limit the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been desperately badgering nations to hold to for fear that relentlessly rising emissions will at some point trigger runaway global warming that no human power can stop.

With planetary warming, we’ve entered a dangerous new era of extreme weather. The warming is supercharging megastorms, hurricanes, floods, ferocious fires, and other weather disasters around the world. Deadly heat waves are now taking tens of thousands of lives yearly.^[1] Fires have dramatically increased in number and intensity in the U.S. west in recent years. Rising temperatures and Increasing aridity across the western half of North America have doubled the amount of forestland that has burned since 1984.^[2] In the last ten years fires have incinerated vast areas of wilderness: boreal forests in Canada, redwood groves in Oregon and California; even Olympic National Park, one of the wettest places in the United States, caught fire in 2015.^[3] When I camped in that rainforest as a kid, the problem was keeping dry; fires were unheard of. Today, fires are consuming not just forests but torching towns and swaths of cities: Northern California’s Santa Rosa in 2017 and Paradise in 2018, Lahaina Maui, Hawaii in 2023, and parts of metropolitan Los Angeles in 2024-25.

Wildfires in Los Angeles are unusual this time of year. January and February are supposed to be the wettest spell in LA’s brief rainy season. But January was bone-dry until a storm finally arrived near the end of the month dousing the fires and offering some respite from the heat, at least for now. LA is enduring a long drought, the second driest period in the city’s recorded history. The whole country is in sustained drought.^[4] Temperatures have also been higher than normal, and nighttime temperatures are rising faster than daytime temperatures, enabling fires to burn continuously. On top of this, the Santa Ana winds are stronger, gusting to more than 100 miles per hour, hurricane strength.

I lived in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s as a student at UCLA. Hillside and canyon wildfires were common in those years. The coastal sage scrub, chapparal and live oak vegetation of the Malibu coastal palisades depended on fire to recycle nutrients and ensure seed generation.^[5] But in the early twentieth century, local governments imposed fire suppression bans that, paradoxically, precipitated even bigger fires because dead undergrowth accumulated to explode in the next fire cycle. Developers built along the coast and in the hills and canyons adding more timber to the conflagrations. Mike Davis vividly recounts how the bans and growing development fueled larger fires from the 1930s.^[6] In the 1970s we had the same relentless suburban expansion, underfunded fire departments, statewide divisions over water use, and the same igniters as today. We had hot gusty Santa Ana winds every year but they tended to die down by November when the rains normally arrived, replenishing the dried-out landscape and lowering temperatures. In those years, fires were intense, burned down lots of houses, but “fire seasons” were limited, and they didn’t threaten to burn down whole towns and cities.

It’s a different world today. Wildfires are more frequent, burning hotter, moving faster, and lasting longer.^[7] California fire season now has 365 days. When wildfires reach urban housing and buildings, they burn a lot hotter, powered by exploding propane tanks, vehicle fuel tanks, EV batteries and the tinder of old, dry wooden houses. The smoke is also far more toxic with all the plastics, rubber, paint, chemicals, and metals in buildings and vehicles. Intense heat, dryness, and wind turn fires into megafires. The best fire departments with the best equipment can’t stop fires driven by hurricane-force winds.

As the first fire in Pacific Palisades raged, wind-driven showers of embers ignited entire neighborhoods. Other fires broke out all over the northern half of LA and into the San Fernando Valley — Altadena, Eaton, Sylmar, Hollywood Hills, West Hills, and new locations during the last week of January 2025. Parched terrain with concentrated houses surrounded by forested hillsides “create indefensible landscape.”^[8] LA’s 9000 firefighters couldn’t stay ahead of the fires. “We were prepared for one or two major brush fires, not four.” Stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, fire crews struggled to reach each new fire in distant corners of the city. The blazes burn so hot they become firestorms. Firefighters reported that “the barrage of ash and soot was so overwhelming they struggled to move through the fire zone.” “’There would be times you couldn’t see 10 feet in front of the rig . . . you had 80-mph winds [and] so much demand on water systems that they ran out of water.”^[9]

The winds were frequently too dangerous to send up the fire department’s helicopter and tanker planes. Helicopter firefighter Ken Williams, with 42 years experience and 11,000 hours flying Fire Department helicopters, said, “This is by far the worst event I’ve been in. Mother Nature was in control that night.”^[10]

Critics have second-guessed firefighting team pre-deployments. But Los Angeles County covers 4,084 square miles. Pre-deployment is enormously expensive, and chiefs have to balance many considerations in predicting which areas might be most vulnerable. Even so, a former LA assistant fire chief observed that “once a wind-driven fire is well established, you’re not going to put it out.”^[11] The head of the U.S. Fire Administration said, “No fire department in the world could have gotten in front of this.”^[12]

Los Padres wildfire firefighter-turned-author and anthropologist Jordan Thomas says more firefighters and more fire trucks are not the answer: “Climate change is making wildfires bigger, faster, and harder to stop.”^[13] The answer is to suppress the fossil fuel combustion that’s heating the planet and endangering the lives of firefighters.

Timothy Ingalsbee, of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology and a former wildland firefighter, told the Guardian, “Our approach to fire is siege-like suppression. We’re spending more and more money having less and less effectiveness in the goals of protecting homes from burning down. . . Once [these fires] grow . . . they cannot be stopped, even with more personnel, air tankers and engines…. No amount of money — you could quadruple that budget, and you would not be able to stop those fires and prevent the spread during these extreme conditions. The problem is, we surpassed our human limits to prevent or put out all wildfires, particularly during these extreme wind-driven weather events that have a link to climate change.”^[14]

If global warming is driving wildfires, what’s driving global warming?

The short answer is: ever more people burning ever more fossil fuels. Last year, countries burned record amounts of coal, oil, and gas, and generated record amounts of greenhouse gases.^[15] U.S. efforts to cut emissions largely stalled.^[16] “We sound like a broken record, but only because the records keep breaking,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which monitors global temperatures. “They will continue to break until we get emissions under control.”^[17] But that’s not happening.

• Instead of suppressing fossil fuel production, producers are frantically pumping oil and gas from one end of Earth to the other. They’re opening new fields even as the world is glutted with oil and prices have fallen to their lowest level in decades.^[18] Even as the USA is the world’s largest producer, MAGAman is urging Americans to gorge themselves on fossil fuels. Claiming we face an “energy emergency,” he is cashiering renewables and wants to “drill baby drill” to flood the already flooded market with so much oil and gas that prices will plummet. Since every economic sector depends on fossil fuels to some extent, this will bring down producer costs and thus inflation, too.^[19] Call it the Donald Trump Magical-Thinking Inflation Reduction Act.


• Instead of minimizing fossil fuel consumption, consumers seem bent on maximizing consumption. Cheap fuel in the USA has only encouraged people to drive more, consume more gasoline, and spend their fuel savings on obese and over-accessorized 6,000-to-8,000-pound gas-hogging SUVs and luxury trucks that get worse mileage than cars and trucks did in the 1950s.^[20] US auto companies barely produce cars anymore; they mostly build trucks and SUVs – “big car, big profit; small car, small profit.”
  
  We’re building ever-more and ever-bigger homes. We’re burning more fossil-fuel generating electricity to power the iPhones, electric cars, and Internet of Things. Scorching summer temperatures drive up electricity consumption to power air-conditioning. We’re burning more fuel flying all over the world; air travel is now the fastest growing source of global carbon dioxide emissions, and is expected to more than double by 2050 while the PR mirage of greener airlines is vanishing over the horizon.^[21] As climate advocacy group Transport and Environment says, “It’s time to come back down to earth and put an end to this addiction to growth.”^[22]
  
  And it’s hardly just the rich who are driving up emissions. For every Bentley or Ferrari, millions of ordinary working people drive gas-hog SUVs and ginormous pickup trucks like the GM Silverado (the country’s best-selling vehicle). For every private jet, millions of regular working people fly across the country on Boeing and Airbus jetliners. Private jet emissions accounted for less than 2% of commercial aviation’s emissions in 2023.^[23] For every private yacht, millions of working-class and middle-class families float around in gargantuan party cruise boats, bashing coral reefs and dumping shit, chemicals, and refuse into the oceans while venting vast clouds of toxic exhaust from filthy bunker fuels. When Royal Caribbean invites customers to enjoy “the ultimate family vacation” on their behemoth boats, they don’t mention that these are by far the worst polluting form of transportation and recreation on the planet.^[24]


• We’re not just devouring fossil fuels, we’re devouring every resource on earth, seemingly as fast as we can, with nary a thought for the needs of future generations, let alone other life forms. We steal pastures and forests for endless urban sprawl. We steal the fish from the mouths of seals and whales. We’re mining the arctic for minerals and oil, strip-mining ocean bottoms for fish and more minerals, leveling tropical forests from Indonesia and Congo to the Amazon to make furniture and cheap flooring, and growing biofuels for vehicles, ships, and planes. From Los Angeles to Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, construction companies are in a nonstop frenzy building ever larger and more luxurious homes, mansions, gilded palaces, and resorts finished with rare woods, exotic minerals, sumptuous furnishings, and “climate control” systems. They’re building new and bigger airports and vanity skyscrapers. Around the world, companies and nations are racing to plunder the last readily available resources on planet Earth and turn them all into “product.”^[25]


• Instead of inventing ways to minimize wasteful consumption and conserve resources, our smartest companies work day and night to invent superfluous “thneeds” (hat tip to Dr. Seuss)^[26] that only consume and waste more resources — endless iThings, 3-D printers, High-Speed internet,^[27] smart watches, “sustainable” drink tumblers,^[28] lab-grown meat,^[29] pizza drones, hover boards, self-driving cars, robotaxis, flying cars, Musk’s ironsides Trump Truck,^[30] space tourism, cruise ships the size of five Titanics,^[31] folding phones, Virtual Reality headsets,^[32] the Internet of Things,^[33] $1,000 sneakers,^[34] AI to steal your job, GoPros to film your life, Smart Ray-Bans to secretly film others,^[35] electric trash cans to power-compost your banana skins, biometric shirts to track your heartbeat, implantable devices to measure your brain waves (subscription required),^[36] toilet seats to wash your butt,^[37] TikTok and hundreds of other pointless apps to waste your time. The list is endless — but they all share one thing: They contribute mightily to increasing greenhouse gas emissions and depleting resources.
  
  Capitalists always tell us, “We’re just meeting demand, supplying what you ask for.” But no one ever asked for any of this junk. And almost no one ever asks the obvious question: “Do we really need any of this — particularly when producing it squanders resources we don’t have to waste and is needlessly cooking the climate?”^[38]
  
  The real driver here is not us, but the capitalists’ ceaseless quest for “the Next Big Thing.”^[39] Decades ago, Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentice Victor Papanek got it right: “Most things are not designed for the needs of people, but for the needs of manufacturers to sell to people.”^[40] Companies can’t help themselves. Growth is not just an “addiction.” If they don’t seize the moment and throw something new onto the market, a competitor will do so. If they don’t grow, their stockholders will sell out and take their money elsewhere. Those are the eco-suicidal pressures they face.
  
  Ergo, even as its inventors warn “AI could destroy civilization,”^[41] and even as CEOs are still scratching their heads to figure out what AI is useful for (besides taking your job and stealing your IP^[42]), Wall Street is driving an investment frenzy like no other, as companies scramble to integrate AI for fear of being left behind.
  
  Meanwhile, since AI demands stupendous quantities of electricity to process its Large Language Model data, tech titans at Microsoft, Google, Facebook and others are scrambling to buy or build bespoke nuclear power plants for each company. But since those aren’t up and running yet, they’re powering their data centers with mostly fossil fuels (60 percent of U.S. electricity was supplied by fossil fuels in 2023).^[43] That’s why in May 2024 Microsoft reported that its “total planet-warming impact is about 30 percent higher today than it was in 2020.” Brad Smith, the company’s president, told Bloomberg that “In 2020 we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence. So in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020, if you think of our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs.”^[44] That’s why Microsoft signed a contract to reboot the shuttered Three Mile Island reactor for its own use.^[45]
  
  And AI is just getting started. Before long it could demand as much electricity as entire sizeable countries.^[46] Data centers themselves are also consumers of steel, cement, plastics, microchips, and other carbon-intensive materials. Nuclear power plants may produce less CO2 than natural gas, but they’re far from carbon-free,^[47] They’re not accident-free either, nor has anyone yet solved the problem of where to safely store nuclear waste for 10,000 years. Safety concerns are why nuclear power plants take decades to get permits and to build. Since Trump is now cutting off subsidies and denying permits for new solar and wind power plants, that soaring AI demand for power is going to come from even more fossil fuels than it does today.
  
  Or not? Out of nowhere, in late January DeepSeek, a new Chinese AI company, shocked the West with a claim that its new R1 platform not only outperforms OpenAI, Google and Meta without using Nvidia’s top chips, but trained itself for a fraction of the cost, a mere $5.5 million vs. the $500 million to $1 billion that Western tech companies spend to build their IA machines, and consumes a fraction of the electricity. Plus it’s open-source, freely available to anyone, thus undercutting the U.S. tech giants profit model. The announcement precipitated a stock market selloff that wiped a trillion dollars valuation off the balance sheets of tech and energy giants. An earthshaking breakthrough, or hype? Critics say the company is actually using Nvidia’s top-of-the-line chips, sourced from the West despite Biden’s ban on sales to China.^[48] And claims for its low energy costs are hard to verify because Chinese tech companies enjoy lavish state subsidies and cheap energy. If DeepSeek’s claims turn out to be true, then it could greatly reduce AI cost and electricity consumption. “On the flip side,” as one expert said, “more efficient models could unlock even more growth in the sector, which would mitigate energy savings and exacerbate stress on the grid.”^[49] We’ll see. The larger question, to my mind, is why do we need AI? Why do we need “chips with everything”?^[50]
  
  Then there’s cryptocurrency, another Trump darling. This so-called “industry” is one more huge — and entirely unneeded — source of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not just unnecessary like AI, it’s deeply criminal. The whole point of the crypto dark-web “industry” with its encrypted untraceable transactions is money laundering and tax evasion. That’s what this “economy beyond the reach of government” was designed for.^[51] But these same tools also dramatically empower crime, providing sites where anonymous persons can conveniently post murder-for-hire, hacking-for-hire offerings, buy and sell illicit drugs and weapons, and make ransomware blackmail transactions — all untraceable. Cryptocurrency immediately became “foundational to modern cybercrime.”^[52] Of course that suits the convicted tax-cheat Trump Organization perfectly. If Don the Con had not been re-elected, he would be locked up with crypto mogul money laundering tax evaders Bankman-Fried and Changpeng Zhao.^[53] Birds of a feather. Instead, he’ll probably pardon them, like he pardoned the Libertarian crypto drug kingpin Ross Ulbricht (who had been serving a life sentence)^[54] and the cop killers he pardoned on January 20^th.^[55] This is the “law and order” GOP we’re talking about.
  
  Crypto’s environmental crime is its planet-cooking CO2 emissions. According to a recent Cambridge University study, in 2021 Bitcoin “mining” consumed more electricity than the entire nation of Argentina, more than the consumption of Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft combined. “And it is only getting worse because miners must continually increase their computing power to compete with other miners.”^[56]


• Instead of making products that we actually need to be durable, long lasting, and recyclable to conserve resources and reduce emissions, top companies like Apple assign their best and brightest engineers, designers, and marketers to devise ways to make products wear out, become obsolete and disposable faster, and be replaced with “new and better” products with even shorter lifespans. We consume more, faster, more often, and without purpose. From fashions to furniture, cars to consumer electronics, most of our economy is geared to the production of waste: repetitive consumption by means of ever-faster cycles of designed and perceived obsolescence, with all of it ending up, eventually, in ever-bigger trash mountains (full of ‘”forever chemicals”). As an American retail analyst famously wrote in 1955:
  
  “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption… We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing pace.”^[57]
  
  Back in Adam Smith’s day when both factories and the human population were small, such a crazy economic logic would not have mattered. But today, when everything is produced in the millions and billions, then trashed and reproduced all over again the next day, it matters. A lot. Giles Slade, thinking about the monuments the Egyptians left, asks, after we collapse “Will America’s pyramids be pyramids of waste?”^[58] In short, as “natural capitalism” guru Paul Hawken, the leading theorist of green capitalism, summed it up: “There it’s no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.”^[59]

Why can’t we slam on the brakes before we barrel off the cliff to collapse?

In my work I’ve argued that the problem is rooted in the nature of capitalism, in the requirements of capitalist reproduction. We live on a finite planet, but we live in an economic system based on infinite growth. Growth is an iron law of capitalist development. Capitalism cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the productive forces, without constantly expanding markets, without ever-growing consumption of resources, and without the periodic crises of overproduction. Indeed, it was precisely this market-propelled motor of economic development that, for Karl Marx, so sharply distinguished the capitalist mode production from all previous historical modes of production like slavery or feudalism which contained no such built-in “motor” of development and so suffered repeatedly from stagnation, crisis of underproduction, famine, and collapse.^[60] There can be no such thing as a “degrowth” capitalism.^[61]

Large corporations are destroying life on Earth, but they can’t help themselves, they can’t change (or change very much) because they’re not responsible to society. They’re responsible to their owners and shareholders, whose concern is to maximize profits. They can’t be “greened” beyond narrow limits because the market incentivizes and pressures them to “grow or die.” They can’t cut back, let alone commit economic suicide, merely to save the humans. So, as long as we live under this system we have little choice but to go along with this destruction, keep pouring on the gas instead of slamming on the brakes.

The only alternative — impossible as this may seem at present — is to overthrow this system and its oligarchic rulers and replace them with a global ecosocialist democracy managing a rationally planned economy whose imperative is not profit-maximization but the common good: maintaining a habitable life on planet Earth, a fair society for all, and one that also leaves room and resources for other species to live their lives to the fullest — an ecosocialist civilization.^[62]

What would we have to do to save the planet?

“Deindustrialization.” That’s a word you never hear in the debate around global warming. Not surprising. It’s a word that’s loaded with negative implications: economic collapse, mass layoffs, falling living standards. Who wants to think about those, let alone think about this as a strategy of suppressing CO2 emissions? Imagine suggesting to the next oil driller, auto worker or airline flight attendant you run into that the only way to stop global warming is stop producing oil, park the cars, and ground the airplanes. Even the word “degrowth” is beyond the pale of thinkable thought in mainstream discourse.^[63] But what’s the alternative? As The Guardian’s environmental columnist George Monbiot wrote in 2007 with respect to the aviation industry:

“There is no technofix. The growth of aviation and the need to address climate change cannot be reconciled … [A] 90 percent cut in emissions requires not only that growth stops, but that most of the planes which are flying today are grounded. I recognize that this will not be a popular message. But it is hard to see how a different conclusion can be extracted from the available evidence.”^[64]

There is no “green capitalist market” fix either. Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, the theorists of “green capitalism” Paul Hawken, Lester Brown, Francis Cairncross, and others told us that green technology, green taxes, eco-conscious shopping, and the like could “align” profit-seeking with environmental goals, even “invert many fundamentals” of business practice such that “restoring the environment and making money became one and the same process.”^[65] That strategy has obviously failed.

No doubt we’re better off for some of those green initiatives. But for all the organic groceries, energy-efficient lightbulbs, appliances and buildings, solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, electric cars, and carbon taxes, the global ecosystems are collapsing faster than ever. In 1993, the year Paul Hawken published his green capitalist manifesto The Ecology of Commerce, global atmospheric CO2 concentrations were at 357 parts per million. By last year they were at 424 parts per million, and global land and ocean temperatures have been rising in sync with them. In 1993 the US generated 5,182 million metric tons of CO2. In 2023, after 30 years of green capitalism, we generated 4,807 million metric tons. Given our abject failure to wrench down emissions, on current trends the U.S. will miss its IPCC Paris Agreement emissions reduction target by a wide margin.^[66] Yet while market-driven global warming is cooking the climate, capitalism is destroying the entire planet, virtually all of its ecologies, and ourselves in the process.

Consider species extinction, what scientists call the Sixth Mass Extinction.^[67] This extinction is no natural disaster like the Devonian, Jurassic and other great extinctions of past geologic epochs. This is not the Sixth Mass Extinction, but what Justin McBrien calls the First Mass Extermination – driven by capitalism not natural selection.^[68] Since 1950, the world’s wildlife populations have plummeted, declining by 73 percent, and hundreds of thousands of species have vanished.^[69] We’re wiping out species so fast that in Bill McKibben’s words, “We’re running Genesis backwards, de-creating.”^[70] The “Insect Apocalypse”^[71] is our future, too . . . “unless . . .,” as the Lorax pleaded.

Then there’s deforestation. Since the 1950s the world has lost more than half its rainforests. Today, two-thirds of global forest cover loss occurs in tropical regions.^[72] Tropical forests used to absorb around a quarter of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, but no longer. Tropical forests have been mowed down for their hardwoods and burnt down to convert them to farms and pastures such that, today, tropical forests emit more carbon than they absorb.^[73] Deforestation has slowed since its peak in the 1980s, but that’s only because there is less forest to cut down.^[74] On current trends, the world’s rainforests will vanish before the end of this century. Capitalist “progress.”

Then there’s toxic pollution. After global warming, toxic chemical pollution brought to you by Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and so many other companies is the next greatest environmental threat we face. Scientists since Rachel Carson have warned that human survival and the survival of many other species are increasingly at risk because of the growing assault on our bodies and the environment from the tens of thousands of toxic chemicals pumped, dumped, leached, and sprayed all over the planet. In April 2020 the President’s Cancer Panel issued a landmark report in which it said that “the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated” and strongly urged President Obama “to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase healthcare costs, cripple our nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.” Except for lead, PCBs, DDT, and a few others which have been banned or partially banned, toxic chemical pollution of all kinds has dramatically worsened in recent decades all over the world, especially because of the flood of new synthetic chemicals, pesticides, plastics, fabrics, pharmaceuticals, cleaners, cosmetics, etc., that are now in our food, water, and the air we breathe.

Everywhere we turn we’re exposed to more and more toxins. Today, some 80,000 chemicals are in use in the United States. Barely 200 of those have even been tested for toxicity to humans, and only a handful actually banned. Many are known to cause or be associated with birth defects, cancers, chronic illnesses, neurological disorders in children, hyperactivity and attention deficits, developmental and reproductive problems, in both humans and animals — and these are on the rise around the world.^[75]

As if these horrific environmental crimes were not awful enough, scientists are telling us we’re also immersed in a global cloud of microplastics. Microplastics are found everywhere, in our water, in the crops we eat, in the air we breathe, even in our brains. Scientists are just beginning to understand the health implications of this latest assault on our bodies and other creatures.^[76]

“Green capitalism” was misguided and doomed from the start, because maximizing profit and saving the planet are inherently in conflict and cannot be systematically aligned, even if they might coincide for a moment here and there. That’s because under capitalism, CEOs and corporate officers are not responsible to society; they’re responsible to the private owners of the means of production. CEOs can embrace environmentalism so long as this increases profits. Profit maximization is an iron rule of capitalism, a rule that trumps all else, and this sets the limits on environmental reform — not the other way around, as green theorists suppose.

Saving the world requires that the pursuit of profits be systematically subordinated to ecological concerns — and that capitalists cannot do. So we have to destroy our children’s future to save our jobs today. That is the ultimate contradiction of capitalism.^[77]

The intractable contradiction between the capitalist drive for insatiable growth versus the limited resources and sinks of our small blue planet can only end in runaway global heating, global ecological collapse, and the collapse of civilization, perhaps before this century is out. Many young Chinese are so depressed and disillusioned that they regard themselves as “the last generation.”^[78]

I’ve argued for decades that the only way to suppress emissions and halt species destruction, deforestation, toxic pollution, overproduction, and overconstruction is to suppress production: shut down and/or drastically retrench unnecessary, harmful, polluting companies and industries across the economy and around the world, and deal with the consequences.^[79] Like those climate scientists, I sound like a broken record. But how else can we save ourselves? If capitalism can’t restrain and transform itself, how else can we suppress emissions and eco-destruction? If we don’t organize a rationally planned, partial but very substantial, deindustrialization of the overindustrialized nations of the Global North, including China, Mother Nature is going to do it for us in a much less pleasant manner — as she’s previewing for us right now in Los Angeles. Fire or flood, on present trends we’re doomed either way. Already most of the world’s coastal cities are expected to be partly to mostly submerged by mid-century, and numerous studies show that unabated warming will likely result in widespread crop failures by mid-century.^[80]

A different mode of living is possible: vision and strategy

Obviously, it’s not enough just to criticize capitalism. The ecosocialist Left needs to present plausible visions of an alternative ecosocialist political economy and a realistic strategy to get there. What we really need is a plan to win masses of people to an ecosocialist vision as the only alternative to market-propelled ecological collapse. We have to convince masses of people that the only way to save ourselves is to radically “change everything,” to empower working people with real democratic control of the economy and politics, to disempower the great corporations, and to prioritize people and planet over profit. We don’t need a higher standard of living. We need a different mode of living, one that enables us to live within nature instead of within the capitalist system of conquest, exploitation and violent destruction of nature.

To that end we need to develop and publicize effective, non-condescending, non-scolding, pro-labor and anticapitalist ecosocialist messages and realistic ecosocialist utopias. For what it’s worth, I sketched out what I see as the essential lineaments of such a vision in my 2016 Six Theses paper for the Next System Project. Others have produced their own. I recommend Michael Löwy’s Ecosocialism (2015), Hans Baer’s Democratic Ecosocialism as a Real Alternative (2008), Chris Williams’s Ecology and Socialism (2010), Jason Hickel’s, Less is More (2021), and Kōhei Saitō’s Slow Down (2020). My own sketch centers on the following points:

1. If capitalism can’t help but destroy the world, then what choice is there but to socialize most of the world’s industrial economies and plan them directly for the common good? Given that the companies driving planetary ecological collapse — oil and gas companies like Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Shell; the manufacturers of disposable “fast fashion” and “fast furniture” such as Zara, UNIQLO, and IKEA; the companies responsible for most of the world’s scourge of throw-away plastic containers including Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Danone^[81]; the toxic-chemical-industrial complex led by Dow, BASF, 3M, and Dupont; the auto companies; Boeing and the airlines, and many other categories and companies (not to mention the banks who finance all this destruction) — can’t stop themselves from destroying the world, then the only way to halt their innate destructiveness is to take them into public hands.
   
   Nationalize them. Restructure those that can be rendered environmentally benign. This would include industries like farming, which we need and which can indeed be “greened” by transitioning the whole sector to organics; construction, which we also need and can be greened by eliminating the plastics, needless tech etc., drastically scaling back, and reorienting to build housing for those who need it instead of more mansions for those who already have too much; and aviation, which cannot be greened with current or foreseeable technology, so needs to be radically retrenched. Other industries that can’t be made sustainable, like fossil fuels, many chemicals, disposables, nuclear-arms, and so on just need to be phased out, shut down.
   
   To this end, in a 2019 article, “An ecosocialist path to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C,”^[82] I outlined a plan to nationalize the U.S. fossil fuel industrial complex and its major downstream industrial fossil fuel consumers (the Big 3 auto companies, Boeing and the airlines, and the major petrochemical companies) with a federal buyout paid for, with change left over, by rescinding Trump’s 2017 $3 trillion tax giveaway to the rich. I also included a jobs program to re-employ displaced fossil fuel workers at the same wage and benefits. This plan would have dovetailed with U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s January 2019 “decarbonization” House Bill 109 — which was shot down not only because of fully capitalist Republican opposition but because the majority of the fully capitalist Democratic Party also opposed it.

   And I’m not the only one calling for nationalization of fossil fuels to phase them out. Others have, too.^[83] We have to put them out of their misery, but without bankrupting their shareholders (union pension plans own around a quarter of oil company shares) and with providing new jobs for their workers.
   
   Yet there’s no need to nationalize the whole economy. Small businesses, or most anyway, are not destroying life on Earth. But many big corporations are ruthlessly destroying life on Earth. They need “assisted suicide,” and their hardworking, talented workers deserve other better employment — in work they can take pride in.



2. Rational planning requires democracy: I contend that the only way to plan the economy for the common good is if we do it ourselves, democratically, and with a truly informed electorate that is not deluged with misinformation. Solar or coal? Frack the planet or work our way off fossil fuels? Drench the world’s farms in toxic pesticides or return to organic agriculture? Public transportation or private cars as the mainstay? Let’s put such questions up for a vote. Shouldn’t everyone have a say in decisions that affect us all? Isn’t that the essential idea of democracy? The problem with capitalism is that the economy isn’t up for a vote, but it needs to be. This is a large topic. If you’re interested, see my Six Theses, 24-28, and Hans Baer’s book, cited above.


3. We would have to “contract and converge” production around a globally sustainable and hopefully happy average that can provide a dignified living standard for all the world’s peoples.


4. We would have to revolutionize the production of the goods and services to minimize resource consumption and produce cars, appliances, housing, etc. to be durable, rebuildable, recyclable, and as shareable as possible, instead of disposable — so we can take longer vacations and have more free time. Likewise, we need to revolutionize the workplace to give workers power to make their work as interesting and fulfilling as possible and invest skills in the workers and let the machines do the repetitive boring work.^[84]


5. We need to steer investments into things society does need like renewable energy, organic farming, public transportation, public water systems, environmental remediation, public health, and quality schools.


6. We need to devise a rational and systematic approach to handling and eliminating waste and toxins as far as possible based on the Precautionary Principle (that new chemicals are not released until proven safe) as advocated by scientists and organizations like Toxic-Free Future.^[85]


7. If we have to shut down harmful industries, then we have to provide equivalent jobs for all those displaced workers, not only because this is a moral imperative but also because, without guaranteed employment elsewhere those workers can’t support the huge structural changes we need to make to save the humans.


8. Democracy requires rough socioeconomic equality: In the midst of the Great Depression, the renowned “people’s lawyer,” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, said, “We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,” he was more right than he knew. Today we have by far the greatest concentration of wealth in history. Not just the 1 percent. Worldwide, Oxfam found that just 80 individuals own as much wealth as the bottom half — 3.6 billion — of the world’s population. So it’s hardly surprising that today we have the weakest and most corrupt democracies since the Gilded Age.
   
   Does this mean we would all have to dress in blue Mao suits and dine in communal mess halls? Hardly. Lots of studies have shown that people are happier, life is better, there’s less crime and violence, and there are fewer mental health problems in societies that are more equal, where income differences are small and concentrated wealth is limited.^[86] Gandhi was right in saying that “the world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed.” We don’t have five planets to provide the resources for the whole world to live the kind of wasteful consumerist lifestyle that middle- and upper-class U.S. Americans enjoy. But we have more than enough wealth to provide every human being on the planet with safe water and sanitation, quality food, housing, public transportation, great schools and healthcare, and comfortable retirements — all the basic necessities and more. These should all be guaranteed as a matter of right. Indeed, most of these were already declared as such in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

Strategy

As to strategy, I’m a historian and environmental economist, not a political strategist, so I claim no expertise on this topic. But given that social revolution is nowhere on the horizon, it seems that the only way to promote such a vision and win masses of people to it is to build a sizeable political party imbued with those politics and to campaign not so much to win elections, at least in the short run, as to wage a pro-ecosocialist messaging campaign such as that Bernie Sanders waged in his campaign for Medicare for All. This would build a political pole of attraction for pro-working class and ecosocialist politics because, again, what other alternative is there? And if we don’t do this, who will? Call it the “Party of the 99%” or something like that.

Most of the time, the notion of building a new labor-ecososocialist third party would seem quixotic in our two-party system. Nader’s third-party bid in 2000 was widely, if unfairly, blamed for Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush in a race that should never have been close. But today, having sold out the working class with Clinton’s “NAFTA We Havta” and his ”China Shock,” then threatened them with more job losses with the Trans Pacific Partnership trade pact championed by Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race (Trump pulled out of that deal on his first day in office in 2017),^[87] then ignored altogether in the 2024 race as the Democrats dropped down the rabbit hole of identity politics, it’s now more apparent than ever that the American working class has no party to represent them.

Into this void stepped “stable genius” Donald Trump, who parked his golf cart to parade around dressed as a “blue-collar millionaire” tribune of the working class. He easily scooped up the workers’ vote because Harris had nothing to offer the working class, no promises, no solidarity walks on picket lines. By contrast Trump made promises to bring jobs back to this country: “Make your product in America – or pay tariffs.”^[88] Definitely a shrewd electoral strategy. 2024 was another race for the Democrats to lose. After all, the GOP has always been a minority party, at least up to recently. After FDR won four consecutive terms, and Truman served nearly two full terms – on solidly pro working-class platforms, it’s been mostly downhill for the DP ever since even though more Americans identified as Democrats than Republicans up to 2022. Since 2022, the GOP has held a slim advantage. Of the 12 elections between 1972 and 2024, the GOP won 8 even though the GOP is the quintessential ruling class party. The capitalists are few, and the workers are many. So all those races were the DP’s to lose, and they lost them by presenting nothingburger candidates like McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry and Harris, none of whom pitched themselves directly to the working class as Reagan and Trump astutely, if disingenuously, did.

But of course, Trump is more comfortable in his chandeliered palaces and golf carts than shoveling French fries at McDonalds. In any case, it’s impossible for him to deliver to for workers and capitalists simultaneously.^[89] So now that he’s in office, and with a trifecta majority in the House and Senate to boot, and has sidekick Elon Musk to slash budgets, he’s dropping the pretenses. Like Reagan, whose first act was to crush a labor union, Trump is swiftly organizing to blitz the now politically defenseless country with the harsh rightist ultra neo-liberal Project 2025 he swore he knew nothing about.^[90] This plan aims at nothing less than to roll back all gains made by the working class since FDR: to destroy or privatize Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, gut OSHA, NIOSH, NLRB, FDA, EPA regulatory protection, block unions – all to make workers more vulnerable and exploitable. It also aims to gut access to abortion, rein in free speech, unleash cops on peaceful protestors, severely limit voting rights, censor critical thinking in classrooms, and more. He’s already appointing a phalanx of oil, gas, and toxic chemical lobbyists, ex-execs, and anti-EPA politicos to run and weaken the EPA.^[91]

How is any of this good for the working class? What seems clear to the Dem’s disillusioned social base, is that the (uber-capitalist) Democratic Party, run by ruling class lapdogs, plans no fightback. That’s why the Democratic Party is in terminal decline.^[92] And that’s why, in my inexpert view, this presents the Left with an extraordinary, unprecedented opportunity to seize the moment and organize a real labor-environment eco-social-democratic party, to go after Trump’s working-class base who are likewise being sold out, and go after those disillusioned Democrats. Such a party probably could not contest for the presidency in the short run, but could contest state, local, and congressional elections. It could build a grassroots movement around key issues that enjoy strong majority support, even among Republicans: universal government funded health care, a national childcare program, public-only funding of elections, a ban on assault weapons, abolition of the electoral college, legal immigration, and other issues. Whether the currently fragmented, disorganized, and demoralized US left could pull together and construct such a third party is not clear. Let’s hope that happens before we become the last generation.

Richard Smith is an economic historian and cofounder of System Change Not Climate Change. He has written on capitalism and the global environment and related issues for New Left Review, Monthly Review, The Ecologist, the Journal of Ecological Economics, Real-World Economics Review, and other publications. He is the author of China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse (Pluto 2020) and Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (2016).

Endnotes

1. Virginia Iglesias, “LA fires : Why fast-moving wildfires and those started by human activities are more destructive and harder to contain,” The Conversation, January 13, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/09/climate/2024-heat-record-climate-goal.html. https://theconversation.com/la-fires-why-fast-moving-wildfires-and-those-started-by-human-activities-are-more-destructive-and-harder-to-contain-247314. ↑

2. John T. Abatzoglou, Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests,” PNAS, October 10, 2026, https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1607171113. ↑

3. Sarah Kaplan, “The West is so dry even a rainforest is on fire,” Washington Post, July 13,m 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/13/the-west-is-so-dry-even-a-rainforest-is-on-fire/. ↑

4. NASA, Drought expands across the U.S., Earth Observatory, October 29, 2024, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/153526/drought-expands-across-the-us. ↑

5. “The case for letting Malibu burn,” Longreads, December. 4, 2018, https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/. ↑

6. Ibid. ↑

7. David Gelles and Austyn Gaffney, “’We’re in a new era’: how climate changed is suprercharging disasters,” New York Times, January 10, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/climate/california-fires-climate-change-disasters.html. ↑

8. Thomas Fuller et al., “Agencies’ resources were no match for these blazes.” New York Times, January 12, 2025. ↑

9. Fuller, et al., op cit. ↑

10. Thomas Fuller, “Inside copter 17’s terrifying ride above an inferno,” New York Times, January 19, 2025. ↑

11. Fuller et al., op cit. ↑

12. Fuller et al., op cit. ↑

13. Jordan Thomas, When It All Burns (New York, Penguin, 2025). ↑

14. Hilary Beaumont, “We surpassed human limits to stop this’: LA megafires show our approach to fire needs to change,” Guardian, January 22, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/22/los-angeles-wildfires-response. ↑

15. Brad Plumer, “’Fossil fuels are still winning’: global emissions head for a record,” New York Times, November 12, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/climate/fossil-fuel-emissions-2024-record.html. ↑

16. Brad Plumer, “U.S. efforts to cut emissions stalled in 2024 as power demand surged,” New York Times, January 9, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/climate/us-emissions-solar-wind-power.html. ↑

17. David Gelles and Austyn Gaffney, “’We’re in a new era: how climate change is supercharging disasters,” New York Times, January 10, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/climate/california-fires-climate-change-disasters.html. ↑

18. Ryan Dezember and David Uberti, “Natural gas hasn’t been this cheap in decades,” Wall Street Journal, February 25, https://www.wsj.com/finance/commodities-futures/natural-gas-hasnt-been-this-cheap-in-decades-95959da7. In 2023, the price of gasoline was the lowest since 2010: Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/204740/retail-price-of-gasoline-in-the-united-states-since-1990/. ↑

19. Lisa Friedman et al., “President wants to unleash energy, but not if its wind or solar,” New York Times, January 22, 2025. ↑

20. Annie White, Car and Driver, August 16, 2021, https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g20111998/worst-mpg-highway-tested/ ↑

21. “Green aviation solutions have yet to take off,” Seattle Times, July 26, 2024. ↑

22. Joanna Plucinska, “Projected air traffic growth runs counter to climate goals, study says,” Reuters, January 13, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/projected-air-travel-growth-runs-counter-climate-goals-study-says-2025-01-12/; Laura Gibbons and Brandon Bowersox-Johnson, “Sustainable aviation fuels aren’t the answer; flying less is,” Seattle Times, July 23, 2023, https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/sustainable-aviation-fuels-arent-the-answer-flying-less-is/. ↑

23. Stephen Gössling et al., “Private aviation is making a growing contribution to climate change,” Communications, Earth & Environment, November 7, 2024, https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01775-z. ↑

24. Royal Caribbean, “The ultimate family vacation,” https://www.royalcaribbean.com/plan-a-cruise/family-cruises; Faig Abbasov, “Luxury cruise emits 10 times more air pollution (Sox) than all of Europe’s cars – study,” T&E, June 4, 2019, https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/luxury-cruise-giant-emits-10-times-more-air-pollution-sox-all-europes-cars-study; “How cruise ships became a catastrophe for the planet,” Guardian video, March 7, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZlgM_u4Ghg. ↑

25. Michael T. Klare, The Race for What’s Left (New York: Picador, 2012). ↑

26. The Lorax (New York: Random House, 1971) – in my opinion, the best environmental book ever written. ↑

27. Shalini Ramachandran et al., “The truth about faster internet: It’s not worth it,” Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2019. ↑

28. Hiroko Tabuchi, “Are ‘sustainable tumblers’ actual . . . sustainable?” New York Times, February 11, 2024. ↑

29. Joe Fassler, $3 billion later, where’s the (planet-saving), lab-grown) beef?”, New York Times, February 11, 2024. ↑

30. Tim Higgens, “Tesla launch underwhelms,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2023; ↑

31. “The math behind the megaships,” Wall Street Journal, December 2-3, 2023. ↑

32. Brian X. Chen, “Apple’s Vision Pro Headset lacks polish and purpose,” New York Times, February 8, 2024; ↑

33. “Chips with everything,” Economist, September 14-20, 2019. ↑

34. Jamie Waters, “The next status sneakers,” Wall Street Journal, July 13-14, 2024. ↑

35. Brian X. Chen, “How Meta’s face camera heralds a new age of surveillance,” New York Times, December 25, 2023. ↑

36. Daniela Hernandez, “Devices aim to make your brain work better,” Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2023.↑

37. “This new toilet seat cleans your butt lightning fast,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mif8MjDmqs. ↑

38. Well, some do: Helen Lewis, “Never mind the pointless apps–our best minds should be solving real problems,” Guardian, November 11, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/11/laundry-ninjas-free-market-science; and David Sax, “End the innovation obsession,” New York Times, December 9, 2018. But of course, they can’t extend their critiques to the economic system that drives all this waste if they want to keep their jobs. ↑

39. Aaron Tilley and Yang Jie, “Apple sees foldable phone as a key to growth,” New York Times, December 16, 2024; Kevin Roose, “The uncertain future of the Vision Pro,” New York Times, June 12, 2024; Gao Yuan, “Virtual Reality, the next big thing for future-minded tech firms,” China Daily, January 5, 2016, http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2016-01/05/content_22941357.htm. ↑

40. Quoted in Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2006), 52. ↑

41. Brian Foster, “AI carries a 10-20% risk of wiping out humanity within 30 years, experts warn,” Glass Almanac, January 24, 2025, https://glassalmanac.com/ai-carries-a-10-20-risk-of-wiping-out-humanity-within-30-years-experts-warn/. ↑

42. Karen Weise, “Tech bosses preach patience as they spend and spend on A.I.” New York Times, August 3, 2024; Steve Lohr, “IBM tries assuring its customers generative A.I. is a safe bet,” New York Times, September 29, 2023.↑

43. EIA, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php ↑

44. Akshat Rathi and Dina Bass, “Microsoft’s AI push imperils climate goal as carbon emissions jump 30%,” Bloomberg Green, May 15, 2024, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-15/microsoft-s-ai-investment-imperils-climate-goal-as-emissions-jump-30?srnd=undefined&sref=4KuSK5Q1. ↑

45. Geoff Brumfiel, “Artificial Intelligence wants to go nuclear. Will it work? NPR, December 9, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/12/09/nx-s1-5171063/artificial-intelligence-wants-to-go-nuclear-will-it-work. ↑

46. Delger Erdenesanaa, “A.I. could soon need as much electricity as an entire country,” New York Times, August 23, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/climate/ai-could-soon-need-as-much-electricity-as-an-entire-country.html. ↑

47. Manfred Lenzen, “Is nuclear power zero-emission? No, but it isn’t high-emission either,” The Conversation, May 20, 2015, https://theconversation.com/is-nuclear-power-zero-emission-no-but-it-isnt-high-emission-either-41615. ↑

48. Tim Hains, “Scale AI founder Alexander Wang : China’s DeepSeek has many of the most powerful Nvidia chips despite U.S. export controls,” Real Clear, January 27, 2025, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/01/27/scale_ai_founder_alexandr_wang_deepseek_has_about_50000_of_the_most_powerful_nvidia_chips_that_they_cant_talk_about.html. ↑

49. Imad Khan, “DeepSeek turned the AI world on its head, but don’t fall for the hype just yet,” CNET, January 28, 2025, https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/deepseek-turned-the-ai-world-on-its-head-but-dont-fall-for-the-hype-just-yet/. ↑

50. “Chips with everything,” Economist, October 2, 2019, https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2019/10/02/chips-with-everything-could-open-source-technology-solve-the-tech-trade-war. ↑

51. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “The end of crypto’s dream to escape from government,” Wall Street Journal, November 25-26, 2023; Derace Lauderdale, “IRS cracking down on tax evasion in cryptocurrency industry, Federal News Network, July 16, 2024, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/federal-newscast/2024/07/irs-cracking-down-on-tax-evasion-in-cryptocurrency-industry/. ↑

52. “Silk Ties,” Economist, January 25, 2025, 19. ↑

53. Josh Russell, “Trump organization guilty on all counts in criminal tax fraud,” Courthouse News Service, December 6, 2022, https://www.courthousenews.com/trump-organization-guilty-on-all-counts-in-criminal-tax-scheme/. ↑

54. Trump pardons Silk Road founder Ulbricht Ross,” CBS, January 22, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-pardons-silk-road-founder-ross-ulbricht/. ↑

55. Pardons granted by President Donald J. Trump (2017-2021), DOJ, https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-donald-j-trump-2017-2021; Editors, “Trump pardons the Jan. 6 cop beaters,” Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2025. For the record, 140 cops were assaulted, one, Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer was killed in the riot, four later died by stress-induced suicide, and many have received death threats. ↑

56. Renée Cho, State of the Planet, September 20, 2021, https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/09/20/bitcoins-impacts-on-climate-and-the-environment/. ↑

57. Retailing consultant Victor Lebow quoted by Vance Packard in his brilliant and sardonic classic The Waste Makers (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1960), 24. ↑

58. Slade, Made to Break, 7. ↑

59. The Ecology of Commerce (New York: HarperCollins, 1993),3. See my critique of Hawken’s vision of green capitalism in my Green Capitalism, 49-97. ↑

60. Richard Smith, “Beyond growth or beyond capitalism,” in Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (WEA, 2016), 27. ↑

61. My disproof of Herman Daly’s theory of a “steady-state” capitalism in “Beyond growth or beyond capitalism” and my rejoinder to his response to that critique: “If Herman Daly has a better idea, where is it?” in Real-World Economics Review, no. 54, December 17, 2010, https://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue55/Smith55.pdf, applies equally with respect to currently fashionable notion of a degrowth capitalism. ↑

62. For more on this see my “Six theses on saving the planet,” The Next System Project, 2017, https://thenextsystem.org/sites/default/files/2017-08/RichardSmith.pdf. ↑

63. James Freeman, “’Degrowth’ looks as bad as it sounds,” Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/degrowth-looks-as-bad-as-it-sounds-11671142180. ↑

64. George Monbiot, Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet from Burning (Cambridge, UK: Penguin, 2007), 174. ↑

65. Smith, Green Capitalism, 49. ↑

66. NOAA, Climate.gov, Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide; “US not on track to achieve 2030 or 1.5°C-aligned pathway, Climate Analytics, 2025, https://climateanalytics.org/publications/15c-aligned-2030-and-2035-ghg-emissions-targets/usa. ↑

67. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (New York: Henry Holt, 2014). ↑

68. Justin McBrein, “This is not the Sixth Extinction. It’s the First Extermination,” Truthout, September 14, 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/this-is-not-the-sixth-extinction-its-the-first-extermination-event/. ↑

69. “How many species are we losing?” Panda.org, https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/biodiversity/biodiversity/. ↑

70. Cited in Smith, Green Capitalism, 55. ↑

71. Brook Jarvis, “The insect apocalypse is here, New York Times magazine, November 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html. ↑

72. “The history of deforestation: the past and origins,” Climate Transform, https://climatetransform.com/the-history-of-deforestation-the-past-and-origins/. ↑

73. Daily Dunne, “Tropical forests are ‘no long carbon sinks’ because of human activity,” Carbon Brief, September 28, 2017, https://www.carbonbrief.org/tropical-forests-no-longer-carbon-sinks-because-human-activity/. ↑

74. “Decadal losses in global forest over the last three centuries,” Our World in Data, 2020, https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation. ↑

75. Smith, Green Capitalism, 38-40. ↑

76. Douglas Main, “Microplastics are infiltrating brain tissue, studies show: ‘There’s nowhere left untouched,’” Guardian, August 21, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/21/microplastics-brain-pollution-health; CIEL, “Breathing plastic: the health impacts of invisible plastics in the air,” March 27, 2023, https://www.ciel.org/breathing-plastic-the-health-impacts-of-invisible-plastics-in-the-air/. ↑

77. Smith, Green Capitalism, 29, 40. ↑

78. “The ‘last generation’: the young Chinese vowing to not have children,” Guardian, January 20, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/20/the-last-generation-young-chinese-people-vow-not-to-have-children, ↑

79. “Creative destruction: capitalist development and China’s environment,” New Left Review 1/222 (April-May1997), https://newleftreview.org/issues/i222/articles/richard-smith-creative-destruction-capitalist-development-and-china-s-environment; “Capitalism and collapse: contradictions of Jared Diamond’s market meliorist strategy to save the humans,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, December 11, 2005, https://web.pdx.edu/~jeff/courses/sust0809/winter/collapse_critique_smith.pdf; “Green capitalism: the god that failed,” Real World Economics Review, no. 87, March 11, 2011, https://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue56/Smith56.pdf; “Climate crisis, the deindustrialization imperative and the jobs vs. environment dilemma,” Truthout, November 2014, https://truthout.org/articles/climate-crisis-the-deindustrialization-imperative-and-the-jobs-vs-environment-dilemma/; “Six theses on saving the planet,” The Next System Project, 2016, https://thenextsystem.org/sites/default/files/2017-08/RichardSmith.pdf; “An ecosocialist path to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C.” Real World Economics Review, no. 87, March 19, 2019, https://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue87/Smith87.pdf; China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse (London: Pluto Press, 2020) chapter 7 “Grabbing the Emergency Brake,” and others, most available at richardanthonysmith.org. ↑

80. Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle, “Rising seas will erase more cities by 2050, New Reseach Shows,” New York Times, October 29, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/29/climate/coastal-cities-underwater.html; Michelle Tigchelaar, Future warming increases probability of globally synchronized maize production shocks,” PNAS, June 11, 2018, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718031115; C Zhao, et al., Temperature increase reduces global yields of major crops in four independent estimates. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 114, 9326–9331 (2017). ↑

81. Win Cowber et al., “Global responsibility for plastic pollution,” Science Advances, April 20, 2024, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj8275#sec-2. ↑

82. Review of Real-World Economics, March 19, 2019, https://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue87/Smith87.pdf. ↑

83. Mark Paul, et al., “The case for nationalizing the fossil fuel industry,” The Next System Project, June 2020, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/668c154d4d09237bebbb257a/t/6750aedc958a1024d7e8c51c/1733340892466/PUB_OutofTime-Report.pdf; “Cornel West calls for the nationalization of the fossil fuel industry and an immediate halt to oil, gas and coal extraction to combat the climate emergency,” July 24, 2024, https://www.cornelwest2024.com/press_release_072423. ↑

84. Smith, Green Capitalism, 45-46. ↑

85. Ibid., 45-46 ↑

86. E.g., Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (London: Bloomsbury, 2011) ↑

87. “Trump executive order pulls out of TPP trade deal,” BBC, January 24, 2017. ↑

88. Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/video/trump-message-at-davos-make-your-product-in-the-us-or-pay-a-tariff/BBE8CF6D-0F57-4B07-8950-552DB5EC583D?mod=articletype_trending_now_video_pos5. ↑

89. Joshua Green, “Trump’s impossible task: delivering for the working class and billionaires” Bloomberg, November 18, 2024, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-11-18/trump-s-impossible-task-delivering-for-the-working-class-and-billionaires?sref=4KuSK5Q1. ↑

90. Reid J. Epstein, “Trump leaves Democrats dazed and on the defensive,” New York Times, January 24, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/us/politics/trump-democrats-republicans.html; Allan Smith and Vaughn Hillyard, “Trump’s transition team turns to Project 2025 after disavowing it during campaign,” CBS, November 22, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-team-turns-project-2025-disavowing-effort-campaign-rcna180689. ↑

91. Lisa Friedman et al., “Trump stocks E.P.A. with oil, gas, and chemical lobbyists,” New York Times, January 25, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/climate/epa-staff-oil-gas-chemical-industry-lobbyists.html. ↑

92. Julia Conley, “Organizers report longtime ‘loyal’ Dem voters fed up with party’s inaction as Trump 2.0 takes hold,” Common Dreams, January 27, 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/news/democrats-prepared-to-oppose-trump-s-unqualified-cabinet-picks. ↑