This last is more or less the model that Naomi Klein memorably sketched out in The Shock Doctrine, in which she documents just how monolithically the forces of capital respond to crises of any kind—by demanding more space, power, and autonomy for capital. The book is not primarily about the response of financial interests to climate disasters—it focuses more on political collapse and crises of the technocrats’ own making. But it does give a very clear account of what kind of strategy to expect from the world’s money elite in a time of rolling ecological crisis. More recently, Klein has offered the island of Puerto Rico, still reeling from Hurricane Maria, as a case study, even beyond its unfortunate spot in the path of climate-change-fueled hurricanes. Here is an island endowed with abundant green energy nevertheless importing all its oil, and an agricultural paradise nevertheless importing all its food, importing both from a quasi-colonial mainland power that sees it merely as a market. That mainland power has effectively turned over the government of the island, down to its power company, to a select board of bondholders whose interest is in the repayment of debt.
It is hard to imagine a better illustration of the empire of capital in a time of climate change. And it is not merely rhetorical. In 2017, just after the storm, Solomon Hsiang and Trevor Houser calculated that, all on its own, Maria could cut Puerto Rican incomes by 21 percent over the next fifteen years, and that the economy of the island could take twenty-six years to return even to the level it enjoyed just before the storm—a level, Klein reminds us, already strained. This did not prompt a dramatic expansion of social spending or the extension of a Marshall Plan across the Caribbean; instead, Donald Trump tossed a few rolls of paper towels to the citizens of San Juan, then left them to plead with the outsiders who now controlled the public coffers for mercy, which did not come. The echo of financial crisis is unmistakable, as Hsiang and Houser note, suggesting such crises may offer the best conceptual model for the punishments of climate change. “For Puerto Rico,” they write, “Maria could be as economically costly as the 1997 Asian financial crisis was to Indonesia and Thailand and more than twice as damaging as the 1994 Peso Crisis was to Mexico.”
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How well will the shock doctrine be sustained through a new climatic regime, one that assaults the economies of the world with extreme weather and natural disaster at an entirely unprecedented rate and—just in the diminishing downtime between hurricanes and floods and heat waves and droughts—also threatens to devastate agricultural yields and cripple worker productivity? It is an open question, as are all those having to do with human response to global warming in the present and future. But here, too, even relatively fractional adjustments to the West’s basic orientation toward business and financial capitalism are likely to arrive like earthquakes, so much has that orientation produced the culture’s collective sense of what is thinkable and what is not.
One possibility is that the scramble for shrinking profits by the powerful will only intensify, a further self-entrenchment of the rule of capital; this is the outcome you might extrapolate from a consideration of the last several decades. But over those decades, capitalists could still count as a public-relations ally the promise of rising-tide growth. In fact, despite our many and divergent varieties of markets, that promise has served as something like the basic ideological infrastructure of the world since at least 1989—and it is no coincidence that carbon emissions have exploded since the end of the Cold War.
Climate change will accelerate two trends already undermining that promise of growth: first, by producing a global economic stagnation that will play, in some areas, like a breathtaking and permanent recession; and second, by punishing the poor much more dramatically than the rich, both globally and within particular polities, showcasing an increasingly stark income inequality, unconscionable already to more and more. In an economic future doubly mangled by those forces, the near-monopoly on social power presently enjoyed by the world’s very wealthy will likely have much more to answer for, to say the least.
And how might it answer? Beyond new Social Darwinist appeals to unequal outcomes as “fair” ones, an already familiar one-percenter worldview, the force of capital may find itself with very little to say. The market has justified inequality for generations by pointing to opportunity and invoking the mantra of new prosperity, which it promised would benefit all. This was probably always less credible as a truth claim than it was as propaganda, and, as the Great Recession and the deeply unequal recovery that followed showed unmistakably, income gains in the world’s advanced capitalistic countries have gone, for several decades now, almost entirely to the very wealthiest. That this itself represents a crisis of the entire system is clear not just from the raging populism, on both left and right, sweeping Europe and the United States in the aftermath of the crash, but by skepticism and lacerating self-doubt beaming out from the highest free-market citadels. In 2016, the IMF published an article titled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”—the IMF. And Paul Romer, later the chief economist of the World Bank, proposed that macroeconomics, the “science” of capitalism, was something like a fantasy field, equivalent to string theory, that no longer had any legitimate claim to describing the workings of the real economy accurately. In 2018, Romer won the Nobel Prize. He shared it with William Nordhaus, who pioneered the study of the economic impact of climate change. An economist, Nordhaus favors a carbon tax, but a low one—his “optimal” carbon price still allows for 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming.
At present, the economic impacts of climate change are relatively light: in the United States, in 2017, the estimated cost was $306 billion. The heavier impacts await us. And if, in the past, the promise of growth has been the justification for inequality, injustice, and exploitation, it will have many more wounds to salve in the near climate future: disaster, drought, famine, war, global refugeeism and the political disarray it unleashes. And, as a salve, climate change promises almost no global growth; in much of the world hit hardest, in fact, negative growth.
To the extent that we tend to believe today in human resiliency against such disasters, it is a legacy of several hundred years of industrial affluence produced by our exploitation of fossil fuels. Medieval kings did not believe they could grow their way out of plague, or famine, and those who lived in the shadow of Krakatoa or Vesuvius did not blithely assume they could endure volcanic eruption. But the downward revision of expectations for the future may be still more important than diminished prosperity in the present. And if what you mean by “capitalism” is not just the operation of market forces but the religion of free trade as a just and even perfect social system, you have to expect, at the very least, that a major reformation is coming. The predictions of economic hardship, remember, are enormous—$551 trillion in damages at just 3.7 degrees of warming, 23 percent of potential global income lost, under business-as-usual conditions, by 2100. That is an impact much more severe than the Great Depression; it would be ten times as deep as the more recent Great Recession, which still so rattles us. And it would not be temporary. It is hard to imagine any system surviving that kind of decline intact, no matter how “big.”
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If capitalism does endure, who will pay?
Already, in the United States, courts are awash in a wave of lawsuits aimed at extracting climate damages—a bold gambit, given that most of the impacts they enumerate have yet to arrive. The most high-profile are the torts brought against oil companies by crusading attorneys general—public health claims, more or less, put forward by the public or at least in its name, against companies known to have engaged in disinformation and political-influence campaigns. This is the first vector of climate liability: against the corporations that have profited.