their video on capitalism's  climate crisis after this.

Death is upon us. The death of glaciers  and ice sheets plummeting into the sea,  

the death of great swaths of forests, the  death of reefs bleaching white in pain,  

and the death of people killed by  storms, drought, fires, austerity,  

and the state. After making over one hundred  videos and reading countless articles,  

papers, and books about how human history has come  to this moment, it's clear to me what's driving  

this descent into climate chaos: Capitalism.  Today we wade into the muddy waters of capitalism  

in order to understand how our current global  market economy is killing us and the world.

Capitalism's Plunder of the Planet: Since its inception in the urban landscapes  

of England, industrial capitalism has been  a juggernaut of waste, driving plunder and  

reckless production of needless commodities.  Because of this production it has also pumped  

billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the  air. Indeed, were it not for the relentless  

drive for increased productivity and growth  of early English capitalists, the use of  

coal would not have dramatically increased.  Coal allowed capitalists to squeeze more from  

their laborers in less time and ultimately  expand their profit margins. This, in part,  

is why we start to see the rise of greenhouse  gases coincide with the rise of capitalist  

economies. Fossil fuels, with their energy  dense makeup, allowed Capitalism to flourish  

by fueling machines and allowing centralization  in factories, and of course, this was all at the  

expense of the workers and environment. The  core imperative of Capitalism is to grow,  

an imperative which runs in stark opposition to  the realities of what it means to live in balance  

with an entire planet. Indeed, as capitalism seeks  to convert ever more of the natural world into raw  

materials it does so at a rate far greater than  the natural world is able to replenish itself.

The Long Reaches of Capitalism: 

Fast forward to today and the global capitalist  economy has reached its final form. The speed at  

which corporations and capitalist markets extract  raw materials has reached extinction-level rates.  

Deforestation, fishery decline, and even the  disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic all  

have been connected back to industrial capitalist  plunder. Climate change represents the final nail  

in the coffin for capitalism's insatiable desire  for growth. Since 1988, 100 companies have caused  

71% of greenhouse gas emissions, revealing  the simple truth that capitalist behemoths  

are driving climate disaster. And most  of these corporations are multinationals,  

or companies that have grown so large, gobbled  up so much, that they seek out new territories  

to exploit across the globe. I've done a  number of videos on multinationals like Coke,  

Amazon, Walmart, and Exxon, examining how they  use global markets to pay workers starvation wages  

while offloading any waste or emissions they  create into the surrounding environment.  

And fossil fuel companies are the epitome  of multinational exploitation. As it becomes  

increasingly clear that they are wreaking havoc  both on the environment and people, oil and gas  

companies seem to be working tirelessly not  to repair the harm they've inflicted on both  

people and planet, but to protect themselves  and the growth/profit paradigm they enjoy  

by greenwashing capitalism. Since their inception  oil corporations like BP have been at the  

forefront of this self-defense mechanism. Greenwashing Capitalism 

With the help of expensive public relations  campaigns and solidifying support from politicians  

through lobbying, BP has evaded any consequences  for what it has done to us. Its rebrand to “Beyond  

Petroleum” in 2000 and subsequent $200,000,000  marketing campaign claimed they were transitioning  

to renewable energy, while they actually were  pouring more money than ever into expanding  

their oil portfolio. BP also invented the  idea of the individual carbon footprint  

as a way to get consumers to focus on individual  solutions and not corporate activity. And now BP  

is once again claiming it's going to invest in  a green economy by achieving “net zero carbon  

emissions by 2050.” But net zero really just  means that BP will continue to pull fossil  

fuels out of the ground and then just get people  to plant trees for them to cover the carbon cost.  

Net zero isn't zero and BP knows it. In addition  to rebranding and polishing corporate images,  

corporations are grabbing seats at the tables  of international conferences and organizing  

sustainability conferences themselves. The  UN Conference of Parties, which produced  

the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol, is  increasingly inundated with corporate interests  

hoping to mold our global response to the climate  crisis. As a result, the international doctrines  

like the Paris Agreement were significantly  weakened, using non-binding agreements and  

employing market-based solutions that represent  nowhere near the action we need to take in order  

to stave off the worst of climate change. The  truth is, as Dorothy Grace Guerrero puts it in  

a paper on capitalism and the climate, that,  “as the impacts of climate change intensify,  

free-market ideology, big business and financial  actors increasingly shape the strategies and  

priorities in addressing it.” So, we need to  call these conferences and marketing strategies  

what they are: delay and obfuscation tactics  by capitalist institutions that allows them  

to continue burning fossil fuels, producing  useless commodities, and pocketing profits.

Disaster Capitalism in the Climate Crisis: 

As the world watched Texas and the southern  United States freeze in February of this year,  

it was hard not to draw connections. How could  we be so unprepared for such an event? Especially  

with the knowledge that climate change will  induce more erratic weather patterns in the  

future. Texas is a prime example of the dual  reality of Capitalism in the climate crisis.  

It simultaneously creates disasters, hollows  out any form of substantial defense or recovery  

method against disasters, and seeks to profit  off of what remains in the aftermath. In short,  

climate change-related natural disasters  and the human suffering they cause  

are good for capitalism. In 2002, Texas  deregulated its energy sector, purportedly  

hoping that if free-market capitalist competition  ran free, electricity prices would drop. But  

according to a 2014 report, deregulating the  energy market did the opposite. From 2002-2012,  

residents paid $22 billion more in deregulated  areas. And as we saw in Texas during the freeze,  

this extra money was doing nothing to increase  the quality of service or infrastructure. Energy  

companies skimped on infrastructure service in  order to save a quick buck, and the consequences  

inevitably fell on poor communities and  communities of color. For the fortunate few who  

did have power throughout the polar vortex, energy  companies ruthlessly ratcheted up energy prices,  

with bills sometimes reaching into the tens of  thousands for just a couple days of electricity.  

The profit motive of these capitalist institutions  meant a drive to minimize the costs and create  

the most profit, or in other words they sought to  simultaneously provide the least amount of service  

possible while pushing the limit on how much they  can charge. Which, in the case of an increasingly  

disaster-prone world, is quite literally  a deadly combination. On the global stage,  

capitalist operators are also using catastrophes  to engrain free-market ideas into the political  

structures of whole nations. An insidious  agenda known as disaster capitalism. From the  

U.S. backed Chilean coup in 1973 that overthrew  democratically elected Socialist leader Salvador  

Allende in order to prop-up an authoritarian  dictator Augusto Pinochet dead-set on implement  

the capitalist free-market ideologies of Milton  Friedman, to the wave of mass privatization in  

Iraq by U.S. multinationals like Haliburton after  the 2003 invasion, capitalist corporations use the  

shock of disaster and war to enshrine free-market  agendas into law. In the wake of Hurricane Maria,  

the right wing Puerto Rican governor attempted  to close down hundreds of schools, privatize the  

electricity grid, and even sell off some roads  and brudges. Of course, the history of Puerto  

Rico is marked with the colonial attacks of the  U.S. and Europe that have worked to hollow out  

public safety-nets and institutions in the name  of austerity and the free-market. For example,  

under the cover illegitimate debt the US Congress  passed PROMESA in 2016, a law that Naomi Klein  

writes “amounted to a financial coup” that enacted  harsh austerity measures to supposedly solve  

Puerto Rico's debt. It's hard to bounce back from  hurricane winds when your government and colonial  

pressures have carved out all self-sufficiency  methods and made you reliant on fossil fuel and  

food imports. Yet, Puerto Ricans were resilient  in the face of disaster, much like the mutual  

aid groups that provided lifelines for those in  the frozen Southern U.S. The stubborn solidarity  

of these communities reveal that people, not  companies are the answer to climate chaos.

Paths Towards the Future: 

The path towards the future has to be  post-capitalist. We know this when we  

look at the dismal responses to Covid-19, to  natural disasters, and to capitalism's inability  

to curb emissions over the last 40 years. We  know this because that is also what science  

demands. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate  Change calls for societal transformation  

on a scale never-before-seen in order to  stave off the worst of climate change.  

The last time we had this much carbon dioxide  in the atmosphere, global temperatures were 3  

degrees celsius warmer and sea level was 30-40  meters higher. We're already in a climate crisis,  

and I'm scared. Business-as-usual is a recipe for  extinction, as is a slow and steady approach. Both  

uphold a status quo that for hundreds of years has  plundered the planet and destroyed or attempted to  

destroy Indigenous communities and ways of life,  which means that the only path forward is radical  

transformation. Revolution. The paths towards an  environmentally ethical existence must draw upon  

the power of the people. Movements are already  building, especially in the Majority world. La  

Via Campesina and The Landless Workers' Movement  are flexing their collective muscles working to  

dismantle the capitalist growth paradigm and  hoisting up alternatives like championing food  

sovereignty and indigenous land rights. There  is no shortage of exciting, visionary ideas  

on how we can forge a better, more just world.  Principles like democratic eco-socialism moving  

into higher stage communism, degrowth, buen vivir,  socially-owned decentralized electric grids,  

plant-based and hemp-based production, just to  name a few, are showing us that capitalism is not  

only not an answer but also is far from our only  answer. These frameworks are being tested around  

the world, but all of them must consider that  a true transition to a zero carbon world, must  

be a just one. In order to be effective, and to  actually have staying power, our world must change  

not from the top down, but from the bottom up. The  red-green revolution must foreground the majority,  

the oppressed, the marginalized, the laborers  and not the ruling class and the well-being  

of corporations if it is to truly establish an  ethical world. At the end of the day there is  

no one solution to the climate crisis but paths  marked by struggles that push us toward a new  

post-capitalist, post-climate-crisis reality. That  world is possible, and united we can create it.

If you're looking for a broader overview  of capitalism and its many implications  

for climate change, definitely make sure  to check out Second Thought's video over  

on their channel! It's a great  episode for understanding some  

of the basics as to why Capitalism  can't handle the climate crises.

Unfortunately, videos like these, while  very important, do terribly with the  

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