their influence to mitigate climate change but have instead intentionally obfuscated the issue and deterred others from acting. To explain and understand their behavior, we can look at economic incentives, group dynamics, and ideological schemas. A social scientific explanation does not preclude moral appraisal, but it is necessary for understanding responsibility in a complex world where actions and their consequences are mediated by social, technological, and political factors and by earth systems. In addition to the moral appraisal of powerful individuals, there are other relevant ethical questions. How should the rest of us associate with the elite? What moral risks are involved for those climate activists who try to further the mitigation of climate change by working with the global elite? I return to these questions in chapter 3.
When discussing human beings and social structures, the behavior of parts (e.g., individual human beings or groups) can never be completely explained by the whole; if it could, it would make no sense to talk about responsibility. The complex and long debate over the relationship of structure and agency in social sciences demonstrates that it is no simple matter, and that there may be no permanent answer, except in the most abstract sense, since social structures affect the possibilities and the forms of agency, and social structures change, sometimes very rapidly, sometimes very slowly. Mitigating climate change would in fact require rapid changes in social structures and thus changes in the possibilities for agency.
In addition to a holistic and/or relational view of the world, structural models also tend to ascribe certain logics and tendencies to the whole structure that constrain and condition the possibilities for action within that structure. This point is crucial, since the social structural view of climate change means that in some sense the logic of current social structures is such that they tend to produce climate change. How these logics function and where they come from differs from model to model, but in general there is nothing very mysterious about the idea. Customs, power and property relations, infrastructures, the shape of technology, laws, and other enduring features of the social world make some practices easier to repeat and become customary than others.
In global capitalism, societies are structured in ways that, through actions of individuals, collectives, and institutions, produce global warming. This does not mean that structures are the real agents that work through individuals and collectives. Indeed, structures are themselves products, and it is how they are produced over which social theorists disagree. By focusing on global capitalism, I make social theoretical commitments. I believe that some relevant structures are global in scale, and that the “mode of production” called capitalism structures our lives and possibilities for agency. The theory of capitalism I am proposing is essentially Marxist, but one does not need to be a card-carrying Marxist to share some of these basic beliefs about social structures in today’s world.
Some basic aspects of global capitalism that are most relevant to climate change are:
– There is a structural imperative for firms to seek profits, which results in capital accumulation and economic growth
– Market competition functions as one of the mechanisms that constrains the possibilities of what firms can do
– Having economic wealth carries influence in the social, cultural, and political spheres; having capital in certain key sectors of the economy, such as energy, means even more influence
– Aspects of social life and even natural processes that were previously non- economic become tendentially economized and commodified15
As Anwar Shaikh writes: “Capital is a particular social form of wealth driven by the profit motive. With this incentive comes a corresponding drive for expansion, for the conversion of capital into more capital, of profit into more profit” (2016, 259). Firms have to make more money than they invest. We can disagree about which factors and mechanisms are in play and in what ways, but it is hardly far- fetched to say that most firms try to be profitable, preferably more profitable than their competitors, since this allows them to invest more and thus acquire greater market share, which makes them even more profitable. If firms make less money than they invest, they cannot use their profits for new technologies and workforce training, giving their competitors an edge. Thus, even if CEOs wanted to minimize their carbon footprint, they would have to balance this aspiration with the need to make a profit. Forestry companies would have to make significant investments to change their modes of operation, and fossil fuel companies would have to discard their current business models completely. One does not have to be an avowed Marxist to agree with these points. It should be noted that the profit motive as a structural feature of the system is not the same as individual greed. It may be that the system rewards greed for some individuals or that it produces greed as a disposition. However, it may sometimes be the case that individuals sacrifice their personal well-being and resources in order to make a firm profitable without expecting returns to themselves.
Other more contentious parts of Marx’s analysis, such as the theory of exploitation premised on the labor theory of value or the law of tendency of the rate of profit to fall, are also important in the context of climate change, as they concern among other things technological change and structural injustice, but if we can agree that firms have to make a profit and that this trumps other values in case of conflict, and that if we can also agree that in global capitalism there exist
15 These features of capitalism have been examined in depth in Karl Marx’s critique of political economy and more recently by the economist Anwar Shaikh (2016). However, it is possible to take them to be structural features of capitalism even if one does not commit to their Marxist explanations. For accounts of how global capitalism and climate change are connected, see for example Peet, Robbins, and Watts (2011), Wright and Nyberg (2015), and Malm (2016).
tendencies of commodification and that wealth carries social power, we already have the rough outlines of a theory on how capitalist social structures and climate change are related. Even so, my main argument does not even require one to think that capitalism is an essential structure in our world. It is enough to think that there are certain social structures and that power is a feature of how societies are structured.16
In our world, economic growth has so far tended to correlate with emissions (IPCC 2014). There are some indications that this may be changing, but at the time of this writing, it is still too early to tell. For example, according to some estimates, 2014 saw economic growth in Europe while emissions there decreased and worldwide emissions stalled.17 This may be a hopeful indication that emissions and economic growth have finally been disconnected, but one year is not a trend.18
In the social structural view, climate change is not a random accident but a result of the “normal” functioning of social structures. Insofar as capitalism is supposed to provide economic growth and economic growth has been premised on the cheap energy provided by fossil fuels, climate change is not just an unhappy unintended consequence but the result of capitalism doing precisely what it is supposed to do, even in ideal theory (although ideal theories usually do not take into account the ecological conditions of the economic system, which is part of the problem). People not only cause emissions directly when doing ordinary things such as driving to work; in their roles as workers, managers, investors, and consumers, they participate in, uphold, produce, and reproduce social structures that cause emissions and other drivers of climate change via countless mediations.
These structures, however, are related to climate change. This is significant for two reasons. First, the social structural view allows us to see how there can be
16 The connection between wealth and social power seems almost trivial, and there is a vast literature on the commodification tendency, not just by Marxists. The Great Transformation (1944) by Karl Polanyi, for example, has had a great influence.
17 See Olivier et al. (2015).
18 The connection between economic growth and emissions is obviously an enormous question, because on it depend how much global social structures will have to change and how quickly. If greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth are in the end inextricably tied together, we must do away with the economic system based on growth and profit. This may not mean that there could not be economic growth at times or that no one should ever make a profit, only that constant growth and profit-seeking should not be the basis on which our societies are structured. On the other hand, it may be important to imagine possible worlds and ways of life where there is no profit, the market, or anything resembling economic growth at all. Even if it were possible to maintain economic growth while decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, this would lead to other problems as long as economic growth requires energy. For example, the construction of solar panels uses rare and non- renewable minerals, and the deployment of electric cars would mean a huge increase in battery waste.
different ways retrospective responsibility can be assigned, which in turn has effects on how we should see prospective responsibility. Having done wrong will mean that one has a duty not just to prevent future harms and help those one can help, but also to alleviate the wrong done. The second reason is that social structures make possible and constrain different avenues for social action in different times and places and for different people. Therefore, “pure” prospective responsibility will also look different from the structural view than from the collective action problem view.
Capitalism is not the only social structure that is involved in climate change. In feminist theory, the term intersectionality is often used to conceptualize the positioning of individuals in social worlds structured by class, gender, race, sexuality, and other differences in power and identity. For the individual’s responsibility for climate change, all these structures are relevant insofar as they have to do with social power and because the ways cultural factors such as ideas about masculinity constrain what individuals think they can and should do. How these different social and cultural factors influence the capacities of individuals to think and act is a topic of ongoing empirical and interdisciplinary investigation and debate.