The Role of the American Nation-State in Fighting Climate Change

***Op-Ed cross-posted from The Middlebury Campus, with permission from the author.***

            It has indeed occurred to me that the position I’ll soon take towards this question will be attacked. Critics and sympathizers alike will accuse me of  writing what is both a topical critique, and an assessment lacking requisite emphasis on potentially potent solutions. I do not deny either. My attempting to outline a whole host of complex issues in the space of a limited word-count op-ed, should not neglect my offer to engage anyone interested in pursuant rhetorical debate. Nonetheless this written polemic, having been expressly penned for the Campus’s “Green Issue,” seems to be a necessary disruption for Middlebury’s environmental discourse.

            The first point, one that I believe cannot be avoided by any critically-thinking environmentalist, is that capitalism itself is unsustainable. This assertion pertains to both the operation of Middlebury College (a corporation “working towards sustainability”) by means of an exploitative endowment portfolio, as well as the entire workings of the system itself. Capitalism is an economic system based on perpetual growth and expansion, with new markets to be created and goods to be sold. Last time I checked, we were living on a planet with an overwhelming list of biophysical limits.

            The pursuit of GDP and growth as a universal tool of political economy are being proven wrong by an overwhelming list of accelerating ecological catastrophes of which climate change is only one of many (biodiversity, clearcutting, desertification, global fisheries etc.) If greenhouse gas abatement is solved at the expense of carbon markets and emissions trading, it will only fuel the concentration in power behind complex, globally-traded financial instruments. Remember that the global financial crisis of 2007-(?) was the not the first- nor will it be the last- crisis of capital to rock our increasingly globalizing world. And while I have no doubt in humanity’s ability to solve problems with profound ingenuity, standard techno-fixes rarely come without unintentionally creating problems elsewhere. As noted academic David Harvey likes to put it “Capitalism never solves it’s own problems, it simply moves them around Geographically.” 

Yet the ideological arch of contemporary American politics refuses to acknowledge such contradictions. Sustainability is a politicized buzz-word irresponsibly thrown about on both “the left” and “the right.” Furthermore, Democrats and Republicans are both captive prisoners of a corporatist state, failing not only in enacting progressive policy changes, but even in the more basic act of protecting our cherished civil liberties. We are living in a country where corporations have the same rights as an individual. A country where imperialist wars are fought to protect “our American way of life”- not our civil rights- but a front, to be sure, for economic exploitation and market capitalization.
            By its very global nature, climate change negotiations are subject to the cooperation and whim of international civil society, negotiations which the U.S has overtly and publicly sought to undermine. Safe with the knowledge that a changing climate will disproportionately affect the global south, our government can sit back and watch as all the cherished tenets of universalism collapse into greedy bickering. With food security becoming the dominant immediate concern of people the world over, the fact that U.S cereal grain production is set to increase in a warming world should give even the most hardened optimist a moment of pause.

The biggest problem here on campus, is that most people play into this short-circuit, where their activism empowers the very people who stand in the way of making real systemic changes. Incrementalism and Democratic activism only result in “feel-good” moral politics where nothing is actually accomplished save for the individual’s moral absolvency. Lifestyle politics abound on this campus, but serve as nothing more than a dangerous facade for change. Dangerous, because by believing in the legitimate agency of their actions as individuals, they actually play into the hands of those very forces they claim to oppose. Dangerous more so, because Middlebury students are exactly the engaged and empathic people the world needs most in this fight.

Our economic system, moving at the direction of transnational organizations and multinational corporations, will need a strong dose of direct democracy in this coming decade. Nobody in this world wants to see their environment degraded, but without the agency or power to stop these forces, their worlds literally crumple around them. We will need to confront these growing problems by recognizing the only realistic option for survival. Already citizens of the world are calling for system change, not climate change. 

Matt Birnbaum