Despite the rather common neoliberal hallucination of eternal growth, the Club of Rome’s seminal study “Limits to Growth” (1972), showed that the catechism-like faith into endless growth, fabricated by the propagandistic apostles of neoliberalism, remains what it always was: a mere illusion. A just published book by Austrian political scientists Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen – “Kapitalismus am Limit” or Limits of Capitalism – explains the distressing, if not depressing, link between global warming and capitalism’s consumerist way of life.

Their proposal is as radical as it is unknown. Meanwhile, well-known expressions such as “climate crisis” and “climate change” continue to be key buzzwords that virtually everyone knows by now. But what do mainstream media mean by the term “climate crisis”? For one, there is an inextricable link between capitalism and global warming. As climate science progressed, these connections can be explained precisely, comprehensively, and with competence.

Initially, the author pair of – Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen – became known through their 2017 bestseller “The Imperial Mode of Living”. What we see in their recent book, “Limits of Capitalism”, is that symptoms – and not the causes of global warming – are discussed by the mainstream press. Potentially at least, these symptoms can be controlled by system-supportive politicians, so the fallacious aspiration in climate adaptations goes. 

Much of this links rather neatly to a wide range of modern weasel words like, for example, ecological crisis management, adaptability, carbon footprint, sustainability, carbon capture, corporate social responsibility, business ethics, green capitalism, carbon capture, ecological modernization, decarbonization, clean coal, and on, and on, and on.

Worse, the trickery extends to the selling of capitalism as eco-capitalism or green capitalism. Yet beyond such ideologies, the means and methods of green capitalism are completely insufficient to deal with the real causes of the current climate crisis. Consequently, it is pure cosmetic-like symptom control. Green capitalism is about the controlling of the signs, markers, and symptoms of an environmental-destructive capitalism. 

Since it is made to appear that it is no longer possible to slow down or even overcome the growth and profit logic of capitalism, virtually all recipes, ideas, and measures set against the current climate crisis will be in vain. As a consequence, we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.

The global ideology of neoliberalism’s faith in endless growth will assure that our foot remains firmly pressed down as we plunge towards the abyss. However, this is nothing new. The problem has been most vividly expressed by a New Yorker cartoon that reads, 

Yes, the planet got destroyed.
But for a beautiful moment in time we
created a lot of value for shareholders.

Ever since Adam Smith, and perhaps even more so since the writings of one of the world’s most astute writers on capitalism – Karl Marx – we know that capitalist development is genuinely designed for limitless expansion. What is problematic for the missionaries of neoliberalism is that there is only “one earth” available for their capitalism, and this “one earth” is definitely limited. Historically, the global expansion of capitalism has always thrived on the idée fixe that capitalism has been able to externalize the social, human, and environmental costs of its development. 

For decades, one of the classical locales for the cost of externalization has been the so-called Third World – now called the Global South. Yet, the geographical spaces for capitalism to conquer for resource extraction and exploitation continue to shrink. And both – extraction and exploitation – are disputed ever more rigorously between competing players from the so-called Global North and from China. This continues to lead to significant eco-imperial tensions.

The cost advantages of specific locations and relocations – that arise because of global asymmetries in wages, education, health, social, and environmental standards, as well as from financial credit conditions – are rapidly moving towards being inconsequential. Worse, much of the quests to find new places for resource extraction is turbo-charged through a global race for mineral deposits, rare earths, and the mining of metals needed to produce batteries for electric cars and computers. 

This is spiced up through the high demand for rare minerals used in the production of computers and mobile phones as well as the stratospheric energy consumption of the Internet. In short, there is an unrecognized high cost of cheap emails. Rising energy use demands the production of green electricity and for the complex production of hydrogen as an energy substitute for climate-damaging oil and coal.

Meanwhile, energy has become more expensive and is more risky to extract than during the times of 19th and 20th century imperial expansions – now framed as globalization. As always under capitalism, free market competition and eternal growth are the two key accompanying ideologies.

Yet, there is also an inextricable link between destructive resource extraction and social relations defined by the managerial domination of labor under capitalist production. Since the ideology of eternal growth – as beamed to us by the daily news – remains the sacred cow of capitalism, the demand for raw materials is growing on a global scale. This is done in blatant disregard for any serious attempt to save energy – apart from switching to LEDs, and other petty and trivial, but consumer appeasing activities. Simultaneously, the ecological consequences of the enormous destruction of resources are carried on – with “our foot on the accelerator”, as the secretary of the UN says. 

Camouflaged by handy ideologies, such as CSR, capitalism’s hidden profit-scripts runs relentlessly culminating in a never-ending struggle for what is all too often sold as a New World Order which, in reality, boils down to a gigantic battle for raw materials. As the accompanying ideology of capitalism works its way, we can, “more easily imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism“.

In the meantime, the environmental costs of all this are mostly pushed to the countries in the South. As an inevitable consequence, profits migrate northward while environmental destruction remains in the South. Worse, global mass poverty is created by a system that prevents the poor to migrate to the north.

In 2015, the success of these accompanying ideologies was seen during the official opening of the new and hyper-stylish building of the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt, Germany. People were seen protesting in the city’s center against the excesses of financial capitalism – a little blemish for the ECB and a police issue for others.

At the same time and as generously supported by the ECB and adjacent financial institutions of capitalism, global energy transition is intensifying competition among corporations in a quest for raw materials. Currently, this impacts on, for example, the global e-car production. The production of heavy batteries requires aluminum, nickel, copper, lithium, and many kilograms of the relatively rare cobalt. 

All this is fired up by a transition towards producing more electric cars and ever larger electric SUVs – commonly known as urban assault vehicles. This intensifies the eco-imperial competition between North American and European corporations, on the one hand, and Chinese, on the other. In this, China is framed as the enemy – particularly by Trump-style right wing populists.

This assists the rise of right-wing populists during recent years. Yet, the far right represents a clear and present danger for not only the liberal-democratic governments as they slip into populist-authoritarian regimes but also for environmentalism.

Much of this can indeed indicate that capitalism is at its limits. However, that does not mean that environmental destruction will not continue unabated, and that competition will not have a severe impact on human society. Rather than joining the ideology-producing treadmill of sustainable development, it is high time to demand political responsibility, rules with better steering effect, and appropriate controls. Even though, corporate greenwashing is absolutely the last thing we need right now. Yet, this too, continues.

Worse, we also live in a world where less than 50% of the world population lives in an open-democratic society and more than 50% live in illiberal, “flawed” (e.g. USA) democracies, failed states, autocracies, and outright dictatorships. On a global scale, it appears as if it is currently rather challenging to bring a reliable momentum towards socio–ecological transformation. Even more problematic is that there is no effective global governance body to prepare the transition towards a human-based and environmentally sustainable future. Instead, what we have are “blah-blah-blah COP” meeting, the self-aggrandizement of the WEF (where private jet emissions soar), and many other get-togethers of the global elite.

As a consequence, some have suggested that it might be beneficial to focus on regional solutions. Yet, the incapacity of global capitalism to solve global warming also means that this remains a truly global problem. Beyond all that, financial market mechanisms would need to be reversed into the direction of sustainable economic management, if this is even possible. In the EU, rules for banks have been established with the European taxonomy for sustainable investments. 

As so often in financial capitalism and its support institutions, there is next to no independent, public, and democratically legitimized institution that operates specifically outside of profitability, i.e. who specializes in venture reforms towards truly social, and ecological transformations. 

Meanwhile, the OECD Better Life Index – a synthesis of studies on the conditions under which people express themselves as “satisfied” – focuses on a “good life”, in which social capital (wellbeing) also counts. Fittingly, these conditions coincide with many of the goals in the UN Sustainability Strategies (SDGs). They provide highly useful topics for academics to produce lovely scholarly articles published in career-assisting A-star journals. In cahoots with these crypto-academics often employed in business schools, the apostles of neoliberalism and managerialism can use rafts of initiatives to create the impressions that “we do something” and “we are on top of it”. All is fine in the Lala-land of capitalism.

Best of all, now we even have lovely “compasses” measuring values, objectives, well-being factors, and so on. Even better, they range from health and a secure income, to clean air and water, to educational levels, employment relationships, security – not to forget the eternally helpful ideology of a work-life balance. 

All of this helps in pretending that the unsuspecting public never understands the short-sightedness and insufficiency of adapting the environmental actions propagated by corporate management and capitalism. Much of this smokescreens the fact that financial capital has no environmental values of its own. It is merely a managerial technique that can only exists through states with business supportive legislation.

Despite the reality masking the ideology of the free market, people are made to believe that we should commit ourselves to “liberalism 2.0” capable of self-correction. This, so the fairytale goes, can react more flexibly and adaptively than many of its autocratic opponents. The myth of self-correcting capitalism has been spun long before Adam Smith was born. By focusing on flexibility and adaptation to climate change, and by positioning all this against “autocratic opponents” (closed), democracy (open) becomes the ultimate vehicle. All this is propagated without the need to mention democracy as corporations remain closed to democracy. 

The propagandistic fairytale of capitalism continues with the theme that in open societies, the information and knowledge that we need to be able to create sustainable capitalism in the 21st century are available. Please do not mention that the tobacco industry as well as fossil fuel industry – and plenty of others – have been hiding their destructive ways from the public for decades. 

In other words, while Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago, as the Scientific American noted a decade ago, Exxon did not tell the public. Instead, Exxon Mobil made almost $60 billion in profit in 2022. At the same time, BP reported the largest profits in the company’s history. As we are made to believe that we are living in an open and democratic society, corporations have no democracy, are not open to scrutiny, and hide their environmentally destructive ways using highly-paid and so-called PR – corporate propaganda.

The unmentioned truth remains that a systemic and global crisis such as global warming can only be solved by systemic change (read: the end of capitalism as we know it). Currently, the so–called EXIT strategy with the climate currency as an ecological basic income is circulating in political-ecological circles. Perhaps the future of green non-capitalism lies in what anthropologist Hans A. Baer calls Climate Change and Capitalism in Australia: An Eco-Socialist Vision for the Future.

In the end, there are earthly and environmental limits to green capitalism. In that, capitalism can be understood as being the cause, and not the solution, to global warming, the 6th mass extinction, and the global environmental abyss. To divert humanity away from this and move towards a post-capitalist and environmentally sustainable future, perhaps there are four basic options that get us from here to there: 

1. smashing capitalism, i.e. a revolution; 
2. taming capitalism, i.e. establishing cooperatives;
3. escaping capitalism by moving, into a hippie commune or joining the naked beggars; and by
4. eroding capitalism.

This can be done for example, by building more democratic, egalitarian, participatory economic relations in the spaces and cracks within capitalism’s complex and its fragile system – wherever this is possible. This is a struggle to expand and defend those spaces. The idea of eroding capitalism imagines that these alternatives have the potential, in the long run, of expanding to the point where capitalism is displaced from its dominant role. According to Brand and Wissen’s German-language book, “Kapitalismus am Limit” (limits of capitalism), this might just save the planet earth from the ravages of destructive capitalism.

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