Capitalism is to blame for climate change. For many activists there is no doubt about it. For example for some of the young people who had come to Glasgow during the past two weeks to fight for a radical climate change on the sidelines of the UN climate conference at the alternative “People’s Climate Summit”. They demonstrated under red, Scottish, Palestinian and other flags and under slogans such as “System Change, not Climate Change” or “Planet over Profit”. Climate change, so the message, can only be stopped if “the system” is abolished beforehand. The Canadian journalist Naomi Klein had already made an entire book out of this claim in 2014: “The decision. Capitalism vs. climate”.
The debate on such theses would come to an end quickly if one imagined for a moment that the wishes of the demonstrators would be granted and capitalism abolished. The rich would have had their factories and villas taken away, markets would no longer exist, and a revolutionary committee made up of groups such as “Extinction Rebellion”, the “International Socialist Alternative” or “Fridays for Future” would decide who still has how much CO₂ may emit.
Would that really protect the climate? The lessons of history are pretty straightforward. Even if everyone involved should be goodwill – which would be a bold assumption – the abolition of markets inevitably leads to some kind of planned economy. And anyone who has lived through the GDR knows how disastrous a planned economy is for the environment. Even reporting on environmental problems was considered subversive under socialism.
It was clear early on that nature was a scarce resource
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that, from a historical perspective, climate change and capitalism have something to do with one another. The accumulation of CO₂ in the earth’s atmosphere began at the end of the 18th century with the invention of the steam engine and the industrial revolution in England, when people first burned coal in factories to replace the muscle power of workers and horses. This capitalism seemed to overcome the limits of nature, it brought wealth and prosperity, even if this prosperity was and is unevenly distributed. He also made it possible for the earth’s population to grow dramatically. There were one billion people on earth around 1800, three billion in 1970, when the first Limits to Growth report appeared, and today the number is nearly eight billion. The capitalist age also brought inventions and innovations that dramatically improved the living conditions of mankind.
Today we know that this progress came at a high price: the change in the world climate. But what follows from this? In this context, it is instructive to realize that people were already thinking about the limits of growth in the age of the industrial revolution. Of course, nobody knew anything about climate change back then. But people were very much aware that nature is a scarce resource. The “banquet table of nature” simply gave too little to satisfy people’s striving for growth, as the English pastor Thomas Robert Malthus put it, one of the classics of economics. In an essay in 1798 he set up a “population law” according to which people multiply faster than the yield of the soil increases, which is why the poor tend to vegetate on the verge of subsistence.
To this day, Malthus does not have a particularly good reputation among leftists, mainly because Karl Marx ridiculed his essay as “student-like, superficial and parsonly decreed plagiarism”. His pessimistic worldview fits the present and climate change. What agriculturally usable soil was in 1798 is today the earth’s atmosphere and its limited ability to absorb CO₂. With their radical demands, today’s climate activists have more to do with Malthus than with Marx, who dreamed of an empire of freedom without material restrictions.
There is no climate protection without innovations
Malthus was wrong about its central point. There is no such thing as a population law. There are eight times as many people on earth today as there was in its day, yet most of them do not suffer from poverty. Why Malthus was wrong has a lot to do with Adam Smith. The most important of the classics of economics showed in his main work, the “Prosperity of Nations”, that when people pursue their own interests, they automatically also serve the interests of their fellow men. His theory was the ethical rationale for free markets, and it can explain the waves of innovations that made today’s standard of living possible in the first place.
Today it’s about reconnecting Malthus and Smith. One has to acknowledge the radical scarcity of nature with all its consequences. At the same time, however, people’s self-interest is necessary in order to mobilize innovations to protect the climate. Climate protection would be doomed to failure if the very system that produced the great innovations in the past were to be abolished.