How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change
Jens Beckert How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change trans. Ray Cunningham (Polity, 2025).
Keep Calm and Lose Everything?
Books with titles or subtitles representing the battle to avert dangerous climate change as lost seem lately to have become a thing. Back in 2014 we had Dale Jamieson’s rather long-winded Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means For Our Future. More recently there has been Andreas Malm and Wim Carton’s Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown. Now arrives this from Jens Beckert, easily the scariest of the lot.
That is not because Beckert writes in apocalyptic style – quite the reverse. He presents with calm assurance the straightforward thesis that capitalist modernity is locking us into climate breakdown, while we remain more or less helplessly locked into capitalist modernity. This even tone is admirably rendered by Green House colleague Ray Cunningham, who has achieved here the translator’s ideal of invisibility: the book reads throughout as though its original idiom were English. But behind it one can sense all the authoritative sobriety and scrupulous attention to detail of German sociology. (The author is Director of the Max Planck Institute and Professor of Sociology at Cologne.) That is what is so frightening. One can’t read for many pages without realising that this is an account which could not possibly be dismissed as hysterical or overblown. And its message is uncompromisingly stark.
Beckert elaborates on what he himself calls his “simple thesis” by pointing out that the changes needed to prevent breakdown
“would require radical reforms to our economic, political and social structures. This kind of far-reaching transformation is nowhere in sight” (p.8),
and even if it were, would take much longer to implement than we have available for meeting a challenge which is, as he also notes, time-critical: “postponing it means allowing irreparable damage to occur” (p.69, his emphasis). The book’s strategy is, again simply, to back up this claim with reference to each of those three identified ‘structures’ in turn.
On the economic front, he situates capitalism historically within an emerging dualistic picture of mind’s dominion over matter, with the natural world viewed as essentially a set of resources. Correspondingly the aspiration towards constant material progress, an aspiration supported by liberal-individualist understandings of identity and life-options, has come to dominate our sense of the relation between present and future. In this context it is unsurprising that corporations see their social role and responsibility as fully discharged, in Milton Friedman’s brusque epitome, by attention to increasing their profits – for this incentive keeps them in business and spurs innovation, so maintaining an unbroken flow of the goods which people – or, as they are now known, ‘consumers’ – have come to want and expect. As a natural concomitant to maximising profit, corporations will seek to externalise costs onto the community and, increasingly, the environment, except to the extent that robust regulation constrains them from doing so. But in a globalised capitalist world, large corporations are more than powerful enough to ensure that such regulation stays virtually toothless.
This is most glaringly so in the case of the fossil fuel industry, with its profits averaging $1 trillion annually over the past fifty years (p.37) and its vast assets estimated at between $13 and $17 trillion up to 2050 (p.39), assets which would be decisively stranded if anything remotely like the necessary restrictions on emitting CO2 were to be introduced. The opportunities for disinformation, political leverage, obstruction and sheer intimidation which funds of this order inevitably command mean that, so far from the industry’s being closed down in humanity’s best interests,
“a study focussing on so-called CO2 bombs (i.e. extraction projects that will emit more than one billion tonnes of CO2 over their lifetime) identified 425 such projects worldwide…If all these projects go ahead, the emissions would be double the amount that would allow us to keep the temperature increase to merely 1.5 degrees.” (p.44)
All this is fairly familiar territory, though Beckert surveys it impressively clearly, setting out capitalism’s contribution to our plight without evident indignation, but just perspicuously as the facts. No less familiar is his exposition of why our political structures have proved so feeble in the face of climate and ecological emergency:
“The growth rationale of the capitalist economy and the dependence of the state on the private sector lead almost inevitably to inadequate environmental regulation.” (p.53)
That dependence is both economic and socio-cultural. The typical liberal-democratic state of capitalist modernity draws its resources from taxing both corporate activity and individual citizens, and unless business is flourishing enough (in the short term) to add economic value and provide employment, those resources would cease to support the multiple infrastructural roles – defence, communications, healthcare, law and order…– which the state now derives its legitimacy from fulfilling. Quite apart from the power of corporate lobbying, therefore, democratic politicians have no incentive to oppose the profit-maximising dynamic even when its longer-term destructive tendencies are becoming plainly apparent. For, according to a study by McKinsey, if states were really to get serious about containing these tendencies,
“$9.2 trillion would have to be invested globally in property, plant and equipment each year up until 2050 in order to achieve the 2050 net zero target…These costs would have to be borne by citizens even though the measures would not yield a tangible improvement in the quality of life.” (p.58)
This last point is the crux, since despite pertinacious attempts by advocates of ‘sustainable prosperity’ to persuade people that they are actually better off with less, the broad electorate continues to demand all the goods and services to which it has become accustomed and reckons itself entitled, or else it kicks off. And Beckert provides a range of telling examples, mainly from Germany where successive governments have made at least tentative moves in the right direction, of failure to transform the car and steel industries, or to overcome popular resistance to green energy production or changes to traditional livestock farming – all cases where placating present voters has meant that supposedly responsible democratic politicians repeatedly sell out, in his title trope, on the human future.
Surprisingly, though – or perhaps not? – he still concludes his chapter on ‘the hesitant state’ with what feels like a rather reluctant endorsement of democracy. He concedes, as given the burden of his argument he could hardly avoid doing, that
“in a political order dependent on the mass loyalty of the population in elections, the implementation of effective climate protection remains so difficult that, at the very least, it will not happen soon enough.” (p.69)
He firmly rejects, nevertheless, any putting of democratic processes on hold in favour of “government by ecological elites”:
“Despite all the shortcomings of climate policy in liberal democracies, it remains the case that the nature of the climate crisis as a multi-layered conflict means it can only be dealt with effectively, if at all, in democratic structures.” (p.73, my bold)
But of course, the phrase which I have there highlighted shows this position cracking under breaking strain: for he has just acknowledged in so many words that it will not be dealt with effectively through these structures, and elsewhere as we have noted he emphasises more than once that dealing with it ineffectively is the equivalent of not really dealing with it – constant postponement does really mean irreparable damage. Here we see how even as sophisticated an analyst as Beckert can remain in thrall to the taken-for-granted assumptions which he also demonstrates to be imprisoning us all.
This thraldom becomes most evident with his review of the social or cultural structures impeding necessary transformation. He identifies unerringly the main locus of the blockage:
“proactive climate policy…interferes with established lifestyles and consumer desires. We see the cultural resistances in, for example, discussions on reducing flying…measures that are rejected as trespassing on long-established freedoms.” (p.67)
Here market failure, corporate pressure, political cowardice and consumer aspirations all come together. And driving them all, as he clearly sees, is “the central cultural position of consumption in modern societies” (p.101), where competitive material acquisition has become firmly linked to the consolidation of “social identity”:
“Owning a car and a comfortable house and taking interesting holidays identify a person as belonging to the middle class. At the same time, increasing consumption represents a relative downgrading of those who cannot keep up. This creates a theoretically unlimited momentum towards consumption irrespective of material needs.” (p.102)
But any chance of averting climate and ecological breakdown means stopping and indeed reversing this momentum.
“The order of the day is therefore: fewer cars, fewer cruises and smaller homes. But this will not happen. Since economic growth and consumerism are built into the DNA of the system, a politically presented contraction of the economy is simply not feasible.” (p.111)
And equally unfeasible, as he convincingly shows in a further chapter on ‘Green growth’, are technological fixes at the scale and level of investment required to decouple continuing growth from emissions: supposing otherwise is no more than “a form of magical thinking” (p.143). So his grim, deadpan and seemingly incontrovertible logic leads directly to what one can only call the resigned impotence of his concluding positives. Corporate behaviour and government policy will continue to obey these destructive systemic rationales and to frustrate the necessary transformation, but
“perhaps the parameters of these rationales can be shifted at least a little by the actions of citizens…The consequences…might at least be cushioned a little further. None of this is simple, and none of it is likely, because all of it has to prevail over structures that resist and oppose such changes. But even the faint hope of delaying and further mitigating climate change makes active engagement…a moral duty.” (p.174)
Purely by his own lights, however, this recommends nothing but ineffectual displacement activity – which as such is actually self-serving, because self-comforting, rather than morally heroic. It calls for directing a garden hose onto an inferno and supposing that you have (“at least”) done your bit.
Did so sober and acute a commentator have to end up here? This turns out, as I have already suggested, to be a matter of fundamental assumptions. Beckert seems to take for granted that if people want to jockey for “identity” as social status through “theoretically unlimited” consumption, that is just their free choice. This goes not only with his endorsement of democracy, but with his being a social scientist: he treats that way of pursuing that kind of goal as an empirically-observable social disposition, without reflecting on its conceptual coherence. The form of identity which people are really motivated to establish, however – settled recognition and acceptance of who one is in terms of what one is finally for – is something which inherently cannot be supplied by riches or possessions, because in the nature of being a conscious subject over against an objective world, one can always find oneself questioning where the point of all such externalities lies: “So what if I do have a bigger car and more exciting holidays than the Joneses – what, when it comes down to it, does all that have to do with me?”. There is nothing theoretically unlimited here; in fact, the more one has, the more apparent it should become with each new acquisition that acquisition, in this regard, won’t answer. Nor can such doubts be assuaged simply by choosing to go on plunging headlong into the quest for identity as material goods and status, because one’s genuine identity has to be something which guides all one’s relevant choices, including that one – something creatively realised for oneself through one’s emerging actions and commitments as paradoxically unchosen. But people can only come to self-realisation in this way who are naturally in touch with themselves as fundamentally creative centres of life; and that intuitive touch has been widely lost, through the complex of historical developments producing modern conditions of alienated work, passive leisure and directionless daily existence. It is in these conditions that consumption becomes for the majority a form of addiction – the would-be compensatory pitching of more and more ‘latest-thing’ commodities as meaning-substitutes into the hole in the soul which only deepens with every attempt thus to fill it.[1]
Here is the theoretically unlimited momentum towards consumption which Beckert, to give him credit, has recognised – but not diagnosed, since he gives no sign of acknowledging the addictive dynamic. He does, indeed, come at one point within a whisker of having to do so – he quotes a Tanzanian energy minister whingeing (presumably without comic intent) that Western criticism of a massive East African oil extraction project is “like they are saying, ‘Let the addiction to hydrocarbons be our exclusive right’” (p.83). But this hint is, frustratingly, not taken up. To have done so would have been to have raised very serious issues for his analysis. For if what is really driving climate and ecological disaster through the capitalist quest for profit and the spineless weaselling of elected politicians is a genuinely pathological condition of majority addiction to consumption, then any remedy for that condition could only be therapeutically conceived and configured. And that requirement must call into question the ability of majoritarian democracy to self-administer the remedy – the main things which addiction isn’t, of course, being responsible free choice and self-governance.
Is there an alternative? I have myself suggested elsewhere on this website (see for instance Averting the Climate Catastrophe, can Democracy Cut it?), as well as in other published work, how any hopeful approach to escaping this unprecedented bind must involve the taking of power by an epistocracy of the intelligent and informed, acting on their own life-responsibility as the vanguard of a healing revolution. This suggestion, as I have learnt through painful experience, is recoiled from by conventionally-minded greens, for whom any challenge to their democratic assumptions is just one radical idea too far. But Beckert’s cogent and incisive demonstration of where capture by those assumptions actually leads, ought perhaps to give them pause. After all, a Fire Service whose best response to a critically dangerous inferno was indeed to turn up with a garden hose would itself be in crisis. By the same token, if we accept this balanced, fully-referenced and calmly rational account of what locks us into our desperate plight, it could be time to ask seriously whether democratic process, rather than being the template on which we must mount any confrontation with the emergency, may not itself be part of the emergency which we must now confront.
[1] “Addiction tricks people by sending them after things that can never meet their needs in the long run.” – Jenny Svanberg, The Psychology of Addiction (London: Routledge, 2018), p.2.