Abstract
Since industrialization, global GDP and global average temperature have risen in near lockstep. Hiccups in economic growth (like the 2008 recession or COVID) cause less CO2 emissions. As has increasingly been pointed out, then, the underlying cause of climate change is economic growth, not necessarily fossil fuel combustion, pollution, or biodiversity loss. Given this relationship, perhaps prevailing methods of measuring climate destruction are ineffective. Rather than thermometers and CO2 monitors, a more resonant means of sensing climate devastation would track fiscal activity. While movements have been built around keeping atmospheric CO2 below 350 parts per million and the IPCC set a goal of keeping global warming below 1.5°C, I offer an equally aspirational and quixotic target of limiting global GDP to below $150 trillion per year. Keeping global GDP below $150 trillion could ensure that sufficient ecological resources remain uncommodified to maintain some semblance of environmental habitability.
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According to International Monetary Fund projections, the 2023 global GDP was greater than any prior year ($105 trillion). According to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded. This correlation between wealth accumulation and temperature has been pervasive over the past two-hundred years, so much so that a causal relationship should be affirmed—the more money we make the hotter it gets. Indeed, the graph of annual average temperature since 1800 matches well with global GDP. Minor hiccups in economic growth (like the 2008 recession or COVID) cause less CO2 emissions. As has increasingly been pointed out, then, the underlying cause of climate change is economic growth, not necessarily fossil fuel combustion, pollution, or biodiversity loss (Klein 2014; Moore 2016).
Given this relationship, perhaps prevailing methods of measuring climate destruction and producing environmental knowledge are insufficient or ineffective. In addition to thermometers and CO2 monitors, tracking fiscal activity might be a more resonant means of sensing climate devastation . Rises in stock prices, bank accounts, or inequality can be read as direct indicators of sea level rise, temperature increase, or extreme weather events. Climatologists have spoken with great clarity, but their methods of measuring don’t seem to create knowledge that motivates a transition to non-destructive forms of social organization.
Bill McKibben famously built a movement around 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 as a quantitative threshold beyond which climate crises would become irrevocably unmanageable (350.org). This threshold was passed around the year 2000. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has set a goal of keeping global warming below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. By many measures this mark has already been exceeded, leading advocates to now promote 2°C as our warming cliff. In keeping with this tradition of setting numerical goals, could an equally aspirational and quixotic target be posed of limiting global GDP to below $150 trillion per year?
Keeping global GDP below $150 trillion could ensure that sufficient ecological resources remain uncommodified to maintain some semblance of environmental habitability. The global GDP serves as a proxy indicator for the amount of resources and ecosystem services that have been converted into commodities. As is probably obvious, individual nations with the highest GDPs are the biggest emitters of CO2 (USA $23 trillion; China $18 trillion). Crucial to an economic threshold for climate change, is the recognition that generating wealth comes from depleting ecosystems. Put simply, growing wealth occurs through converting our biologies and geologies into commodities.
In 2022, the global GDP passed $100 trillion. It's been projected that by 2028 global GDP will reach $135 trillion (O’Neil 2023). Extrapolating this projection forward, $150 trillion global GDP could be reached by 2030. While there may not be a rigorous methodology for discerning how much of the environment is capable of being commodified, $150 trillion is proposed here because of the extreme exponentiality it indicates. It took 122 years (1900 to 2022) to go from $1 trillion to $100 trillion in annual global GDP. If it takes under ten years (2023 to 2030) to rise another $50 trillion, this suggests we are approaching a singularity of economic growth, in which global GDP must double every few years. That is, where it took 122 years to make the first $100 trillion, the second $100 trillion could be reached in twenty years. This is the terrifying violence of compound growth rates.
Sadly, most economists seem unaware of (or even excited about) this looming black hole—an economy so ravenous that not even light can escape its consumption. Today, we annually transform $100 trillion worth of the planet into commodities. If in ten years that number is $150 trillion and in twenty years it is $200 trillion, there will very quickly be nothing left to commodify. After the copper and lithium are depleted, it will be thoughts, emotions, and dreams that become profitized (if they aren’t already). As anthropologists know, different communities conceive of wealth differently. Some groups may prize yams, wives, children, trading partners, or livestock. For the colonizing world, wealth just is the capacity to (over)exploit environments and resources. Wealth is measured in how much of the environment you are able to destroy (i.e., convert into exchange value).
Keeping global GDP below $150 trillion will not be easy. Much like the carbon and temperature thresholds, it will require proactively altering dominant means of resource distribution. If we do nothing the $150 trillion marker will be hit and exceeded through pure inertia. Economic growth is not something capitalized societies achieve through aptitude, rather it is something that happens to us. We are the victims of economic growth as much as its cause. Establishing an economic metric for climate devastation more accurately points to the prime driver of environmental change.
The dire metrics and projections produced by climate scientists and shouted by environmentalists for the past three decades have had little effect on our calamitous trajectory. Rather, the reliance on quantified climate comprehension seems to entrench ideologies and behaviors that have propelled environmental exploitation. That is, the thermodynamics and geology that we use to measure our climate crises are the same tools that we use to release hellish quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. Both our science and economy are physically and inextricably thermodynamic—underwritten by heat.
As Audre Lorde knew, the problem with using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house (2018) is that it naturalizes the conditions one wishes to change, whether it be racism or climate crisis. Metrics like temperature came to be defined through nineteenth century studies of the steam engine. As temperature became redefined as “average kinetic energy” it normalized the extractive reconfigurations of the environment perpetrated by the steam engine and divorced temperature from more embodied definitions like “sensible warmth.” We didn’t derive our understanding of thermodynamics (and energy) from studies of “natural” (non-human) environments, but from an apparatus invented to move commodities around the planet—the steam engine.
Straightforwardly, our science developed in tandem with the normalization of capitalism. Thus, the tools of meteorology and climatology take concepts like energy, work, or force for granted as phenomena that exist outside of our peculiar means of social organization. A $150 trillion dollar ceiling on annual global GDP is an effort to see the climate through a different lens, to trouble the naturalization of quantified environmental knowledge. What good is keeping atmospheric CO2 below 350ppm if we are still transforming the planet into commodities through exploitative labor practices? Given the increased visibility of environmental racism, the dangers of climate change clearly go beyond temperature and CO2, beyond the science.
The burgeoning degrowth movement of the past two decades directly addresses the relationship between wealth and eco-calamity. While lacking in consistent and concise messaging, the degrowth movement points out that resources crucial to mammalian survival are finite. This suggests that at some point wealth will stop growing. Degrowth isn’t a choice or ideology. It’s going to happen, one way or another. Infinite growth is not possible. In its bleaker articulations, degrowth may take the form of dystopian hellscapes like in Mad Max movies. To avoid such futures, degrowthers propose “sustainable degrowth,” i.e., a controlled transition from methods of resource distribution that mandate continual economic growth to methods that do not. Degrowth scholarship critiques mainstream efforts at “decoupling” economic growth from environmental incineration.
The rhetoric of “decoupling” economic growth from resource degradation has been shown repeatedly to be impossible (Parrique et al. 2019; Ward et al. 2016). Ecomodernist hopes of an eventual technological salvation fail to appreciate that increases in efficiency only increase consumption under the current economic paradigm (the Jevons Paradox). “Rather than opposing the reckless growth imperative…ecomodernists believe that unfettered capitalism will save the planet” (Dawson 2018, 182). Ecomodernist arguments are consistent with the central myth of capitalism: that unending growth is not only possible but good—two highly dubious beliefs. The dream of decoupling economic growth from CO2 emissions is not only unlikely, it also misses the point. Yes, fossil fuels are primarily responsible for the warming atmosphere, but processes of mass production and extraction needed for economic growth are inseparable from harmful environmental transformation.
While many have noted that climate change is a political problem not a science problem, I would further suggest that it is an epistemic problem. That is, knowledge is produced today that suggests destroying the planet is a reasonable (if not good) idea. Perhaps not explicitly, but tacitly, discovering truth or making breakthroughs in the STEM fields requires money (and is supposed to potentially generate money). If we live in a world where we cannot produce knowledge without it being paid for, how are we going to be able to produce knowledge that stops generating ever more wealth, stops the conversion of ecologies into commodities? Such critiques have been voiced by many in Black Feminist Science Studies, from Sylvia Wynter to Denise Ferreira da Silva. The conclusion of many such authors is that if we don’t produce other kinds of knowledge, we won’t stop assaulting the planet’s ecosystems and inhabitants. “If we do not collaboratively call into question a system of knowledge that delights in accumulation by dispossession and profits from ecocidal and genocidal practices…we are doomed” (McKittrick 2021, 74).
Given that our knowledge production is ineffective and complicit, Hannah Knox has suggested Thinking Like a Climate. She wonders, “Why…is no one listening to the numbers and acting accordingly?” (Knox 2020, 15). One answer is that numbers don’t make noise. We can’t hear numbers. But, as the platitude goes, money talks. We can hear wealth. Wealth is able to alter landscapes in a manner that numbers are not. Thus, Knox concludes, “What our focus on numbers makes clear is that climate change demands the refiguration of the world not only materially but also epistemically” (ibid, 61).
Is the practice of quantifying environments one of translation or of creation? Having discussed methods of environmental representation with meteorologists, paleoclimatologists, and oceanographers in my research (Schwartz 2021), it is clear that the models and projections through which we see the climate are manufactured just like any commodity. Whether it is for-profit conglomerates like AccuWeather or research institutes like NOAA, climate information is mass-produced according to the normalized economic principles of the globalized world. “[C]limate has the uncanny quality of being perceptible only through techniques of modeling, visualizing, the calculation of probabilities, and the creation of scenarios oriented toward a modeled past and a future that does not yet exist” (Knox 2020, 22).
Asymmetrical wealth accumulation, however, is visible to the naked eye. It is in the endless wars over territory and resources, including increased border militarization. It is in the urban skyscrapers and increased homelessness (poverty indicates greater exploitation and concentration of wealth, not lack of economic growth; perpetual economic growth requires widespread impoverishment). Thus, a world of over $150 trillion of global GDP could be scarier than one of over 1.5°C warming. Theoretically, we can adapt to warmer climates, but we can’t adapt to endless ecosystem over-exploitation. The world of a $150 trillion global GDP is one that pursues the Mad Max dystopia, where the world ends before capitalism.
For the millions of people that remain skeptical of the human influence on climate, directly linking climate to economic activity might help make the connection more transparent. As Naomi Klein has pointed out, many climate change deniers fear that environmentalists are crypto-communists. That is, deniers promote inaction on climate change because action could stymie economic growth. Indeed it could! Any ecomodernist that advocates for decoupling economic growth from environmental destruction is lying to themselves and to you. We can’t solve our problems with lies. And the truth is, temperature won’t stop rising until GDPs stop rising.
References
Dawson, Ashley. 2018. "Biocapitalism and De-Extinction." In After Extinction, edited by Richard Grusin, 173-200: University of Minnesota Press.
Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Knox, Hannah. 2020. Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lorde, Audre. 2018. The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. New York: Penguin Books Limited.
McKittrick, Katherine. 2021. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press.
Moore, Jason. 2016. Anthropocene Or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press/Kairos.
O'Neill, Aaron. 2023. Global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at Current Prices from 1985 to 2028. Statista.
Parrique, T., J. Barth, C. Briens F., Kraus-Polk A. Kerschner, A. Kuokkanen, and J. H. Spangenberg. 2019. Decoupling Debunked: Evidence and Arguments Against Green Growth as a Sole Strategy for Sustainability. European Environmental Bureau.
Schwartz, Scott W. 2021. An Archaeology of Temperature: Numerical Materials in the Capitalized Landscape. London: Routledge.
Ward, James D., Paul C. Sutton, Adrian D. Werner, Robert Costanza, Steve H. Mohr, and Craig T. Simmons. 2016. "Is Decoupling GDP Growth from Environmental Impact Possible?" Plos One 11 (10).
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Scott W. Schwartz, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Anthropology at City College of New York. His research focuses on the material culture of environmental knowledge production. He has conducted fieldwork centered on historical ecology in Scotland, Iceland, and Italy. His book, An Archaeology of Temperature: Numerical Materials in the Capitalized Landscape, was released in 2022.
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