When we see news or documentaries that mention climate change, typically we’re shown images of the bleached coral reefs, maybe a turtle swimming, and stock video of smokestacks. We’re shown this disparate images which ignore that they might, in fact, be connected in such a way that the destruction of the natural environment is not just a side effect, but an inevitability.
If you dumped poison into a city reservoir, or burned harvest crops sending a city into starvation, very few people would say these weren’t crimes. If your poisoned water went to another city by the way of underground current, even to another country, you would still be held liable for the harm.
We will need to redefine the word “crime” and require a fresh international judicial system to prosecute a new category of “climate criminals”. This new concept must include an act of harm that intricately includes the functions of capitalism. Endless growth in a world with finite resources, that destroys ecosystems and cultures that have every right to exist, is a crime. Dumping carbon into the atmosphere at record levels, causing untold, permanent destruction is a crime. The functions of capitalism are therefore result in an international criminal conspiracy to end human life in exchange for profit.
Allowing climate change to continue is the most serious type of act: a crime against humanity.
Why Nothing Changes
The politics of climate change are nearly absent in this framework. Why is there no international tribunal holding climate polluters accountable? The questions of who is causing climate change and the extent are clearly documented. It is only the ignorant and ideologically committed to inaction that are the holdouts, and another powerful ally: the internal combustion engine of capitalism. The most responsible for climate change (China, USA, Russia, India, Eurozone) are also the most powerful economically and militarily. There is no meaningful mechanism to hold them accountable, because the mechanism that gives them power also creates climate change in a directly proportional way.
We tend to think of crimes as only caused by individuals, mainly because of how crime is portrayed in both the news and media. Someone commits a crime, goes to trial, and if they’re not a cop, they might get convicted. Crimes committed by corporations, such as class action lawsuits, tax fraud, etc get fines which essentially turn into operating expenses for capitalism.
A fine is a type of admission fee for the rich to commit crimes. We also tend to think of corporations as individuals themselves, Apple releases a new iPhone, Amazon wants a new headquarters; the corporation as a type of gestalt entity capable of individual will. A corporation is not an independent actor, but a hierarchy of individuals acting in a collective manner. Instead of producing human good or mutual benefit, they exist only to extract profit from consumer goods, services, and their workers’ labor. In this way they act as individuals, but still have a collective mentality. The main difference between this and a truly socialized group, such as a worker-owned co-op, is the heavy top-down hierarchy and twisted goals of profit at any cost, with the fruits of their success being stolen by a minority elite.
The concept of “bad apples” and non-systemic causes of the climate crisis lead us to believe in a blaring falsehood: that convicting an individual, sending them to jail and so forth, will solve the problem caused by an economic system’s fundamental operating mechanism: endless need for growth. Even someone so central to the climate crisis, such as the CEO of Exxon Mobil, jailing them will not end climate change. It won’t dismantle oil rigs. It won’t pull carbon from the air. Not one foot of coral reef will be saved. Even if all the CEO’s are jailed, they will simply hire more CEO’s, continue their extraction and pollution without so much as an interruption.
Take a look at the failure of the Drug War, which has helped lock up individuals to the tune of 25% of the world’s prisoner population. Countless lives destroyed, billions wasted, and drug usage has not risen or declined in any serious way. It’s also fair to say the carceral state is not about preventing crime or enacting justice, but rather operates as a system of heavily racialized social control, the appearance of justice because the word is on the courthouse wall. This cannot be the system to enact climate justice.
In this present moment of deep ecological crisis, any sort of restorative justice movement is going to have to square the requirement to dismantle the carceral state with the necessity to hold climate criminals accountable in a new, meaningful way. Our limited view of punishment is narrowed to imprisonment for individuals, or fines for corporations. Neither tool will effectively combat an economic system whose lust for endless growth has severe environmental consequences.
A modern leftist take to reign in climate criminals that does not involve the carceral state have been calls for nationalization. This is also counter-intuitive, since the Soviet Union was one of the most incredible examples of industry nationalization, and they were brutally extractionist and environmentally destructive. China has heavily nationalized industry and they are the top contributor to climate change. Venezuela, Norway, and England, three countries with vastly different governments, all have nationalized oil companies and have done next to nothing in preventing carbon from entering the atmosphere at unbelievable levels despite a moral mandate to do so. Nationalization is not some catch-all panacea, considering the cancerous state of America politics.
Prior to any major climate justice action being able to take place, there would need to be a massive, national leftist labor movement that could actively face and defeat the awe-inspiring power of American capitalism, as well as being check to a top-down government hierarchy often too comfortable with power. There’s no getting around this requirement. Organized labor is the main tool used to confront, neutralize, and enact tangible social economic change. It would not even need to particularly be a whole-sale dismantling of the capitalist state and enacting of some Marxist utopia: it would simply need to be a movement that could defeat the worst impulses of capitalism and halt the mechanisms of economic exploitation. That means numbers, resources, and political will at a scale we haven’t seen in almost a century.
Those Responsible
The first step to enacting climate justice would be to establish a multi-level assignment of accountability. Since not all people, organizations, and governments share an equal part in this destruction, it would be unjust to lay equal blame and accountability.
The top level, and easiest to identify as culpable, would be perpetrators: individuals within companies and governments who actively contributed to climate change and willingly misled the public. They must be held individually accountable for their crimes because every person has an individual moral responsibility.
In terms of their companies or national organs, the infrastructure should be dismantled and their resources used to transition to a clean energy system as quickly as possible, then placed in the collective ownership of their citizens. (Note: I do not mean a state that represents the workers, like nationalization or state capitalism, but the ownership of the citizens themselves.) These citizens must be guaranteed their natural rights of their labor to dictate the direction and function of that industrial organization.
The challenge to this would be developing industrial nations who are using fossil fuels to build their economies to the same scale as the US or China. It would be unjust to prosecute them for climate crimes that the West and other industrialized countries have already committed without accountability, and the consequences developing countries will inherit. A desire to improve standard of living is a sympathetic one. The major industrialized nations would be responsible for assisting, financially and technologically, with transitions to green energy and non-capitalist economies.
A second level would be enablers, those who functionally support and spread climate change disinformation. This is a delicate topic that requires nuance, because there is a blurred line between misinformation and free speech. It shouldn’t be against any sort of law to be factually incorrect, as long as you were intentionally not attempting to deceive someone and thereby committing serious harm. Here intent is key, and is difficult to prove without some sort of psychic power. Thankfully, the enablers of climate destruction, such as oil companies, marketing firms, and bad faith astroturf groups keep dutiful records. Here is where the commitment to this new concept of crime is best tested: if you discovered a politician had regularly been misleading the public on climate change, willfully spreading disinformation that lead to countless deaths across the globe, would you consider them to be a criminal worthy of prosecution? Most would say no, because they were exercising free speech and climate change does not directly kill in the same way, let’s say, poisoning a water supply would kill.
But for the sake of argument, how different are those things if not just a matter of degrees of separation? If a person of authority spread climate lies that lead to inaction that cause further drought, hurricanes, deforestation, and wildfires, how culpable would they be personally for that loss of life and property? How would that be functionally any different than saying asbestos goes great on a sandwich? We also tend to think of culpability as something that can only be directly expressed. One of the common exceptions to free speech is the incitement of lawless action. I find the willful destruction of the environment and threatening of millions’ lives across the globe to meet that criteria quite well. These people are not at the same level of guilt as the actual perpetrators, but still bear responsibility for the results. They are collaborators in a destructive propaganda campaign that has cost lives.
The last level is consumers, specifically those of fossil fuels. Now we’re descending into even murkier ethical territory as human being themselves biologically produce carbon dioxide, drive cars, take plane trips, engage in capitalist activity, a thousand daily activities that contribute to climate change in individual ways. This tends to be the realm where most environmentalist sermonizing is directed. You need to do something to make your life more carbon neutral, not the state-owned oil company. You need to get rid of plastic straws and take the bus, even if those options are unrealistic. Recycle, reduce, reuse, but you need to do this first and foremost. (Plastic straws, for example, are commonly used by people with disabilities and the elderly who can’t use metal straws. Transit in America is laughable at best.) It’s unfair to treat everyone with the same yardstick considering the vast economic and social inequality.
The failure of this line of argument is the problem of choice and agency. The citizen who owns their own labor and has the opportunity to express that in a collective and organized way has more power than a voter who wished upon a star that a candidate will not betray them.
This new system of climate justice must be, first and foremost, an international one. This judicial body must have the authority and jurisdiction to hold even Western and other powerful perpetrators accountable. An International Criminal Court for climate criminals, which every carbon contributing nation must be a willing party to, is a reasonable and rational next step. The current nationalist attitudes among the capitalist West and other extractionist nations makes this a near impossibility in this political moment. A vast multi-country paradigm shift must occur.
Judgment
The framework would make individuals accountable for their actions at much more proper scale of involvement. Telling someone that arsenic water is safe to drink is not the same as poisoning someone, but there is still harm being committed. This new world would also turn the infrastructure over to its rightful owners: the workers.
It is moral cowardice to not define climate change as a crime against humanity. It’s not an externality, or a byproduct to be regulated. It is a crime.
The urgency and timeframe of the crisis make depending on the conscience of climate criminals to act a wasteful luxury. We cannot say with a clear conscious, “Okay, you’re a polluter directly contributing to an international crisis. Could you please do that less? It would be very neighborly of you.” If it was this easy, it would already have been done. If all it took was informing the public through rational scientific argumentation, this too would already have solved the problem. If we wish to be a planet of moral cowards, all we have to do is nothing at all. If we’re to survive the upcoming century, we must not only evolve our technology and economics, but our morality as well.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.