Solar panels in the Pavagada Solar Park, Karnataka.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

Modern economic growth and rising demand for goods at relatively lower prices have led to inevitable exploitation of nature, and consequent climate change. There is no denying that unfettered capitalism has contributed to over extraction of natural resources and increasing emission of greenhouse gases. Should uncontrolled capitalism persist till 2050, the aim of restricting average global temperature within 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels may remain a pipe dream. Emitting billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide will see continued climate extremes leading to the loss of lives and livelihoods. No wonder, climate emergencies have become frequent.

Many environmentalists believe that the long-term solution to tackling climate crises is to uproot capitalism because “we cannot solve the problem by what caused it”. But with time short for averting catastrophic climate change, the possibility of putting a new economic system in place may seem improbable.

Transform, progress

In Climate Capitalism, Akshat Rathi explores how to transform the world’s dominant economic system while ensuring that the wheels of progress don’t come to a halt. From renewable power to green cement, electric cars to carbon capture, emission-reducing technologies have tossed new opportunities for private capital and government regulations to work in tandem. The process to harness the forces of capitalism to achieve zero emissions has already begun. Although these are still early days for capitalism to wear a natural look for addressing impending climatic concerns, a faint ray of optimism seems to have been generated.

It has been over two decades that industrial capitalism has been critiqued for neither pricing nor accounting its negative externalities. It liquidates natural capital and calls it profit, undervaluing both natural resources and living systems. Rathi chronicles the political manoeuvrings that made possible China’s lead in building fleets of electric cars, India’s success in promoting solar power, America’s success with reversing climate damages in the oil industry, and the Danish quest for pushing wind turbines. All such initiatives combined, it has been estimated that 2% of global GDP is enough to make the carbon dioxide problem go away. Far from being linear, however, there are disruptive elements that play upon power politics to sully the path to zero emissions. Politics, technology and finance must align in the right direction to bring about change, says Rathi.

To work as a unit

With climate emergencies threatening life, public perception on the global climatic accords and green initiatives remains grossly sceptical. Holding an optimist position, Rathi argues that we cannot insulate ourselves from the transformation coming our way. From bureaucrats to billionaires, doers to enforcers, there are multiple actors on the capitalist platform who would need to bridge differences to reform the economic system and help shape a climate-conducive capitalism.

Passionate capitalists fear that policy reforms may kill the market. But policy shifts in favour of climate-oriented technologies and investments have created new business opportunities. Whether such efforts add up to make an impact at global scale is yet to be fully ascertained. Some trends are noticeable, the U.K. economy grew by 60% between 1990 and 2017 while its carbon emissions declined by 40%. The task lies in replicating and escalating such transformative processes and practices. Although climate financing may have been slow, the Paris Agreement has triggered a process of change.

Climate Capitalism conveys an optimistic narrative which contends that it’s cheaper to save the world than destroy it. What kindles a ray of hope is that capitalists themselves have woken up to both the cost of inaction and the opportunity of action.

Climate Capitalism

Akshat Rathi

John Murray/ Hachette

₹699

The reviewer is an independent writer, researcher and academic.

FILE PHOTO: Police officers use a hose in effort to extinguish wildfires in Ogan Ilir regency, South Sumatra province, Indonesia, September 20, 2023, in this photo taken by Antara Foto.
| Photo Credit: Antara Foto/Nova Wahyudi

As the world gears up for COP28, there is alarming data on the horizon. The year 2023 is on course to possibly becoming the warmest year in recorded history, with temperatures nearing 1.4°C above the pre-industrial era average.

In September 2023, global temperatures reached a record high. The average surface air temperature was 16.38°C, which is 0.93°C higher than the September average between 1991 and 2020. Moreover, it was 0.5°C warmer than the earlier record set in September 2020.

Chart 1 | The chart shows the globally averaged surface air temperature anomalies relative to 1991–2020 for each September from 1940 to 2023.

Charts appear incomplete? Click to remove AMP mode

The month of September 2023 was approximately 1.75°C above the average temperature of September during the 1850-1900 span, which is considered the pre-industrial benchmark.

From January to September 2023, the global surface air temperature was 0.52°C above the 1991-2020 average and 0.05°C higher than the same period in 2016, the warmest year. During this time frame in 2023, the world’s average temperature was 1.40°C higher than the baseline period of 1850-1900.

According to the Copernicus Climate Bulletin, in September 2023, the majority of Europe experienced temperatures significantly higher than the average from 1991 to 2020. A region stretching from France to Finland and extending to north-western Russia reported its hottest September ever. Notably, both Belgium and the U.K. faced unparalleled heatwave conditions at the start of the month.

Chart 2 | The chart shows the average global surface air temperatures for the 30 warmest months between 1940 and 2023, arranged in ascending order. The temperatures for June, July, August, and September of 2023 are highlighted.

The hottest-ever September of 2023 followed the warmest-ever two months on record — July and August 2023 — when the global mean temperature reached monthly records of 16.95°C and 16.82, respectively. The notable increase in these two months, especially compared to the July 2019 record of 16.63°C, is evident in Chart 2. Moreover, September 2023 is the sole September represented in this chart. The warmest September before 2023 recorded an average surface air temperature 15.88°C, which is not high enough to be included in chart 2.

Chart 3 | The chart shows the global daily surface air temperature (°C) from January 1, 1940 to September 30, 2023, plotted as a time series for each year. The line for 2023 is highlighted.

Other years are marked in grey. The thick black line represents the 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels. For more than 80 days in 2023, the global temperature was at least 1.5° higher than pre-industrial levels. The year 2023 holds the record for the highest number of such days.

In a worrying update, the extent of sea ice has stayed at very low levels for this time of the year in the Antarctic region. Sea ice extent refers to the total area of an ocean where there is at least some sea ice present. Satellite records for September reveal that both daily and monthly extents have plummeted to their lowest annual peaks, with the monthly extent dropping 9% below the norm.

Chart 4 | The chart shows the daily Antarctic sea ice extent from 1979 to September 2023. The year 2023 is highlighted; the median for 1991–2020 is shown as a dotted line.

Meanwhile, the monthly average Arctic sea ice extent in September 2023 reached its annual minimum of 4.8 million km2, about 1.1 million km2 (or 18%) below the 1991-2020 average for September. This value is the fifth lowest in the satellite data record.

Source: European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service

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Pope Francis challenged world leaders on October 4 to commit to binding targets to slow climate change before it’s too late, warning that God’s increasingly warming creation is fast reaching a “point of no return.”

In an update to his landmark 2015 encyclical on the environment, Pope heightened the alarm about the “irreversible” harm to people and planet already under way and lamented that once again, the world’s poor and most vulnerable are paying the highest price.

“We are now unable to halt the enormous damage we have caused. We barely have time to prevent even more tragic damage,” Pope warned.

He took square aim at the United States, noting that per-capita emissions in the U.S. are twice as high as China and seven times greater than the average in poor countries. While individual, household efforts are helping, “we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact,” he said.

The document, “Praise God,” was released on the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the pontiff’s nature-loving namesake, and was aimed at spurring negotiators to commit to binding climate targets at the next round of U.N. talks in Dubai.

Using precise scientific data, sharp diplomatic arguments and a sprinkling of theological reasoning, Pope delivered a moral imperative for the world to transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy with measures that that are “efficient, obligatory and readily monitored.”

“What is being asked of us is nothing other than a certain responsibility for the legacy we will leave behind, once we pass from this world,” he said.

As it is, Pope’s 2015 encyclical “Praise Be” was a watershed moment for the Catholic Church, the first time a Pope had used one of his most authoritative teaching documents to recast the climate debate in moral terms.

In that text, which has been cited by Presidents, patriarchs and premiers and spurred an activist movement in the the church, Pope called for a bold cultural revolution to correct a “structurally perverse” economic system where the rich exploit the poor, turning Earth into an “immense pile of filth.”

Even though encyclicals are meant to stand the test of time, Pope said he felt an update to his original was necessary because “our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”

He excoriated people, including those in the church, who doubt mainstream climate science about heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, sarcastically deflating their arguments and showing his impatience with their profit-at-all-cost mentality.

Shaming them for their reliance on “allegedly solid scientific data,” he said the doubters’ arguments about potential job losses from a clean energy transition were bunk. And he cited data showing that increased emissions and the corresponding rise in global temperatures have accelerated since the Industrial Revolution, and particularly in the last 50 years.

“It is no longer possible to doubt the human – ‘anthropic’ – origin of climate change,” he asserted.

While acknowledging that “certain apocalyptic diagnoses” may not be grounded, he said inaction is no longer an option. The devastation is already under way, he said, including with some already “irreversible” harm done to biodiversity and species loss that will only snowball unless urgent action is taken now.

“Small changes can cause greater ones, unforeseen and perhaps already irreversible, due to factors of inertia,” he noted. “This would end up precipitating a cascade of events having a snowball effect. In such cases, it is always too late, since no intervention will be able to halt a process once begun.”

“Praise God,” was issued ahead of the next round of U.N. climate talks which begin November 30 in Dubai. Just as he did with his 2015 encyclical “Praise Be,” which was penned before the start of the Paris climate conference, Pope aimed to cast the issue of global warming in stark moral terms to spur courageous decisions by world leaders.

In the 2015 landmark Paris Agreement, countries of the world agreed to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) or at least two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. It’s already warmed about 1.1 degrees (two degrees Fahrenheit) since the mid-1800s.

Pope said that it was clear that the Paris target will be breached and will soon reach three degrees Celsius, and that already the effects are obvious, with oceans warming, glaciers melting and the world registering record heat waves and extreme weather events.

“Even if we do not reach this point of no return, it is certain that the consequences would be disastrous and precipitous measures would have to be taken, at enormous cost and with grave and intolerable economic and social effects,” he warned.

Since 2015, the world has spewed at least 288 billion metric tonnes (317 billion U.S. tonnes) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air, not including this year’s emissions, according to the scientists at Global Carbon Project. In August 2015, there were 399 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air and in August 2023 it was up to 420 parts per million, a 5% jump.

The record-hot summer of 2023 is one-third of a degree Celsius (six-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) warmer than the summer of 2015, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Antarctica and Greenland have lost more than 2,100 billion metric tonnes (2,300 billion U.S. tonnes) of land ice, since the summer of 2015, according to NASA.

And in the United States alone, there have been 152 climate or weather disasters that caused at least $1 billion in damage since the pope’s first climate message, with costs adjusted for inflation, according to NOAA. Pope concluded his document by noting the emissions rate in the U.S. and shaming it to do better.

“’Praise God’ is the title of this letter. For when human beings claim to take God’s place, they become their own worst enemies,” he wrote.