Because Capital Doesn't Care

The June 14 NY Times is awash in information about climate chaos but they make the assumption that those with power actually care how many people die. Columnist Paul Krugman took a break from telling us inflation is no biggie, to start worrying about the lack of response to climate chaos. He cites the drying up of Salt Lake and wonders why no one is doing anything about it. Listen Paul: Capital doesn't care. While individual and mostly local capitalists are nervous about the impacts of poisonous dust clouds, decimated bird populations, diminished snowpack etc.., they also realize that putting more water in the lake hurts development and economic growth, that is, affects the essential circuits of Capital. A wicked problem indeed. A little late to feign surprise Paul. Krugman points to the Aral Sea as an example of what is to be avoided but why stop there? There are millions of examples of purposefully destroyed ecosystems and they all have the same root cause. Paul thinks it is up to "policy makers to act." Where is rationality, he wonders? Then there is the report from Southeast Asia on the "fresh urgency" of climate change "worries", that is, farmers dying of heat stroke or committing suicide over personal economic ruin. They all need to understand, Capital doesn't care if they all die. Readers of the Times will care, will fret, will "worry", but will do nothing to stop emissions. Like the Salt Lake "policy makers", they all know the reality. “This is everyday climate change at work: a slow-onset shift in environmental conditions that is destroying lives and livelihoods before our eyes,” write the activists about conditions in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal. In his novel Ministry of the Future, author Kim Stanley Robinson imagines a day when wet-bulb temperatures kill tens of millions and THEN "policy makers" snap to attention. A day, an Event, a rupture. Anything but The Long Now we currently endure. Then the Times has pictures of roads in Yellowstone Park washed out by flooding and a piece wondering if "carbon capture can be part of the climate solution". Some gal from the "office of fossil energy and carbon management" says yes. Office of Carbon Management? Really? Do they know that Capital doesn't care? They will do something, "Yes, but not now, not yet" to quote Stuart Hall. We live in what he called "The Great Moving Nowhere Show" because it is all frantic enrgy but never actual movement. Not the Long Arc of History bending toward Justice or anything else. Just "The Long Slow Cancellation of the Future" as Mark Fisher (RIP) put it.