M00853221
Our Addiction Is Killing us
Introduction
Capitalism has brought about such immeasurable advancements in humanity that it would be foolish not to recognize the technological leaps thanks to it. But something that should immediately be brought up is our addiction to fossil fuels and how capitalism is leading us to further and further dependence on it. Even when in the face of the peril of multiple species capitalism isn’t able to curb its over-indulgent reliance on fossil fuels.
An Imminent Nightmare
The predominant way people treat climate change is as if it weren’t a very real thing that is going to affect every single country and its industries. It’s as if it were some abstract thought experiment and not a real, actual threat to our daily lives but its effects are already being felt. In the U.S. climate change is already affecting agriculture with $440 million worth of cattle drowning due to heavy rainfall in Nebraska and farmers only planting 67% of corn crops in 2019 compared to 96% planted the year before (Cho 2019). On top of this in 2018 8 million people died due to fossil fuel air pollution (Harvard 2021). But the siren song of fossil fuels is too much for us to abstain from continuing to consume fossil fuels as the main source of energy. It’s like some sort of mystical spell has warped the minds of these companies that make profits off of them to not see the impending doom that we are headed for. But one doesn’t need to look to supernatural explanations to understand why corporations are so blind to these effects. ExxonMobil, an American oil and gas company, that also knew about climate change and the greenhouse effect as early as the 1970s (Black 1978) announced their third-quarter earnings of this year to be almost $20 billion (Exxonmobil 2022). It’s clear from this that even though they have made groundbreaking scientific discoveries equivalent to finding a tumor early before it becomes a significant problem the profit motive under capitalism is enough to filter these pesky ideas of preserving the environment. It’s all about the benjamins baby and if you can’t see that by now you must be buying into the climate change disinformation that our old friends at ExxonMobil spends $37 million on per year since 1998 (Negin 2020). When looking at this one may be compelled to be reminded of one of the theories by Karl Marx, the theory of base and superstructure. This is a relationship between what Marx saw as the basis of society being the economic system and the ideology it creates. Since capitalism and the society it creates for itself is reliant on fossil fuels we could see that what ExxonMobil is doing is what is clearly in the best interest of the company.
The world’s poorest nations are going to see the effects of climate change the most due to the consumption and pollution of the richest nations (Singh 2019). It’s almost funny how this distinction between the world’s richest and the worlds poorest seems to constantly be around every corner of this issue.
What we need to have a more critical eye on is how this behaviour is even encouraged in the first place. Why should we continue to suffer with a system while among other things allows and even rewards this kind of behavior and negligence? What is now needed in this time of gloom and despair for the future is action at the industrial level. Only this way is it even feasible that changes would begin to happen.
Bibliography
Cho. R (2019) “How Climate Change Impacts the Economy”
Harvard (2021) ”Fossil fuel air pollution responsible for 1 in 5 deaths worldwide”
F Black. J (1978) “The Greenhouse Effect”
ExxonMobil (2022) “3Q 2022 Earnings Release”
Negin. E (2020) “ExxonMobil Claims Shift on Climate But Continues to Fund Climate Science Deniers”
Singh. H (2018) “Solving the climate crisis means tackling global inequality”