Symbiosis or Incineration

Naomi Klein’s chapter “Fruits, Not Roots,” from This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014), exposes how the modern environmental movement has become deeply intertwined with corporate and financial power. The mainstream guardians for the environment have focused on collecting the “fruits,” such as technocratic fixes, market mechanisms, and corporate partnerships, rather than confronting the “roots” of ecological destruction that lie in capitalism’s pursuit of endless growth. Klein’s distinction between fruits and roots exposes the environmental movement’s drift into technocracy as exemplary of how capitalism captures and then infects movements for social improvement.

The entanglement between corporate power and environmental stewardship that Klein highlights mirrors the same tragic inversion that has hollowed out labor solidarity, which I have written about previously (here). Unions and environmental organizations exist ostensibly to protect the public, yet they have become financially and politically entwined with the corporations that drive labor exploitation and environmental destruction. This conflict of interest corrodes their moral integrity and the efficacy of their advocacy.

For instance, labor’s security today depends on the stability of the market. Through 401(k)s and union-managed investment portfolios, both individual workers and organized labor have a financial stake in the same corporations that profit by cutting their wages, laying off staff, and resisting union demands. Workers’ savings are funneled into the stock market, making their retirement dependent on the very forces that can undermine their livelihoods. Further, the constant fluctuations of the market turn these funds into unstable and speculative assets. Union leadership, whose budgets also rely on investment returns, now treats market performance as central to their own stability. This creates a clear disincentive to strike, disrupt production, or challenge corporate power too strongly, since any action that reduces profits can lower stock values and shrink fund balances.

Similarly, the largest environmental organizations have forged partnerships with oil giants and agribusiness. Just as the worker’s livelihood is tied to the profitability of their exploiters, the planet’s survival has been tethered to the prosperity of its destroyers.

Klein shows that this market logic has become pervasive in the environmental movement. Carbon credits, cap-and-trade, and offset schemes commodify carbon emissions so they can be packaged and traded through instruments whose value fluctuates with the same speculative volatility that undermines worker pensions.

The “cap-and-trade” system is often presented as a balanced and pragmatic approach to addressing climate change. Governments set a cap on total emissions and distribute a fixed number of permits that allow companies to pollute up to that limit. In theory, this creates an incentive for efficiency since firms that emit less can sell their unused permits to those that emit more, rewarding cleaner production and penalizing waste.

To make the system easier for corporations to participate in, governments let companies buy “offsets” instead of cutting their own emissions. Offsets come from outside projects that claim to capture or prevent carbon. These projects include tree planting, forest preservation, or cleaner energy production. This was meant to give companies a cheaper alternative to upgrading their factories, changing their energy sources, or reducing production. Rather than investing in costly new infrastructure, they could simply pay someone else to offset their pollution on paper.

This arrangement lowered immediate expenses for major emitters and kept industrial output steady. At the same time, it created new business opportunities for banks, consultants, and traders who could design, certify, and sell these offset projects. The supposed “flexibility” of the system therefore served corporate and financial interests by avoiding direct changes to production while expanding a profitable new market in carbon credits.

On paper, caps and offsets are meant to combine market discipline with environmental responsibility. In practice, however, each component of this structure benefits financial and corporate interests in ways that undermine its stated purpose.

The cap provides a new class of tradable assets: pollution permits. These permits can be exchanged and their value can be speculated on like any other commodity, giving rise to brokers, traders, and financial institutions that profit from every transaction. The offset market extends this even further. Since offsets are created outside the cap, there is no hard limit on how many can exist.

Thus, to the concerned observer, the cap-and-trade system produces a paradox. Each instance of environmental destruction generates new financial activity. As companies emit more carbon and increasingly exceed the emissions cap, they create a need for more offset credits to balance those emissions on paper. As these credits are increasingly produced, they are simultaneously bought, sold, and traded based on expectations regarding how fast the supply of offsets will grow, forming a market that expands at the rate pollution increases. Investors and corporations profit from this growth, since every new offset or trade means more fees and speculative opportunity.

Crucially, investors and corporations earn money from the trading activity itself, not from actual emission reductions. The system’s stability thus depends on the persistence of pollution, since fewer emissions mean less trading and lower profits. It is no surprise, then, that despite decades of global promotion, carbon trading has failed to curb emissions. Since 1990, global carbon emissions have climbed more than 60%.

According to Naomi Klein, this logic reached an extreme in the coolant production factories of India and China. These facilities produce gases used for air conditioning and refrigeration, and they release a greenhouse gas called HFC-23 as a byproduct. This greenhouse gas is thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide, but it can be cheaply destroyed with simple equipment. Under the carbon credit system, companies were paid large sums in the sale of credits they earned by destroying the HFC-23 they produced.

The profit from selling these credits soon surpassed the profit from selling their main product.

In some cases, firms began producing extra coolant only to create more of the harmful gas so they could destroy it and earn more credits. In other cases, firms acted like a mob boss extorting the weak in exchange for protection; some firms simply threatened to produce HFC-23 and they were awarded with offset credits. One company in India earned more than ninety percent of its total revenue in 2012 from selling carbon credits rather than from its own product.

Further, the coolant these factories made was already being phased out under the Montreal Protocol because it severely damaged the ozone layer. Yet under the United Nations emissions trading system, these factories received the largest share of carbon credits, more than any genuine clean energy projects.

In Europe, governments tried to persuade companies to participate by giving away huge numbers of free carbon permits to corporate polluters. When the 2008 global financial crisis hit and production slowed, emissions fell far below the cap on their own. The market was left with more permits than anyone needed, so the price of carbon crashed. By 2013, a ton of carbon was selling for just a few cents instead of the twenty dollars needed to make cutting emissions profitable. Companies found it cheaper to keep burning fossil fuels, and coal use actually went up in both the United Kingdom and Germany.

The United Nations Clean Development Mechanism collapsed in the same way. A U.N. report admitted that weak emissions targets and the global downturn caused a ninety-nine percent drop in carbon credit prices between 2008 and 2013.

The credits were being generated faster than pollution could justify, many representing no reduction at all. They existed only to preserve the illusion of growth, created and traded to feed the expectation that their financial market would keep expanding. True to the logic of capitalism, carbon markets serve as a clear illustration of the boom-and-bust pattern of all markets, which are unstable by nature. They create short bursts of speculation followed by collapse. Relying on such a system to solve the climate crisis is reckless.

Supporters of carbon markets often claim that these failures are not the fault of the market itself but the result of poor design. They argue that with stronger regulations, stricter caps, and better verification of offsets, the system could deliver meaningful reductions in emissions. In their view, the market is the most efficient mechanism available to coordinate large-scale change, because it aligns environmental protection with financial self-interest. The price of carbon, they argue, simply needs to be high enough to make cleaner production profitable and pollution costly. From this perspective, capitalism’s productive capacity can be redirected toward sustainability through proper incentives and innovation.

Yet this argument overlooks how the market actually operates in practice. Markets exist to generate profit through exchange. Any mechanism that relies on trading pollution rights immediately transforms the problem into an opportunity for speculation. The same financial institutions that profit from trading derivatives, housing debt, and other commodities now profit from trading carbon, and their business depends on maintaining activity and volatility in the carbon market rather than reducing emissions. Even when regulations tighten, the drive to find new financial instruments leads to the creation of more complex products that disguise risk and expand the field of speculation. This happens because financial firms make money from trading activity itself, so when one type of trade is restricted, they invent new products to keep money moving and profits flowing. The cap-and-trade system necessarily reproduces the same instability that has defined every major financial crisis.

The assumption that markets can balance moral and ecological responsibility through pricing also collapses upon closer inspection. The destruction of ecosystems, the displacement of people, and the collapse of biodiversity cannot be accurately priced because their value is not comparable to money. When harm is given a price, it becomes something that can be paid for rather than prevented. Wealthy corporations and states can buy the right to continue polluting, while the costs are displaced onto the poor, the landless, and future generations.

Decades of evidence confirm this structural contradiction. As mentioned, since carbon markets were introduced, emissions have continued to rise, while the volume of trading and the profits of brokers, consultants, and financial firms have grown. Every attempt to strengthen the rules has only increased the complexity of the system and the opportunities for manipulation. The idea that the same logic responsible for the crisis can be reformed to solve it misunderstands what markets are.

In light of all this, the posturing of our so-called environmentally conscious politicians makes the situation even more absurd. The 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry once said that climate change is like a “weapon of mass destruction.” If that is true, Klein asks, why do governments keep subsidizing the same corporations that are causing the crisis instead of forcing them to stop?

I believe the problem goes deeper. As I see it, there is a more radical question we must deal with. Why should we continue to treat politicians and corporate executives as the agents of change when they have long proven themselves to be self-serving? It is not their orders or laws that sustain the world but our labor, our cooperation, and our consent. If we want to stop the destruction, we do not need permission from above. Rather, our only saving grace lies in coming together to change how we live and work ourselves. What sustains production is our participation. What makes extraction possible is our acquiescence. The same cooperation that currently reproduces this system could be redirected toward forms of life that don't require the earth's incineration.

The reality today is that this same “cap-and-trade” carbon emissions market system, which has revealed itself as speculative and fraudulent in its incentivizing of rising pollution, remains the model enshrined in law and promoted by politicians. Governments continue to design climate policy around the same market mechanisms that rewarded deceit and collapse.

In the bush of Papua New Guinea, carbon deals are known as “sky money,” and in Madagascar, where the promised wealth has proved as hollow as the product being traded, the Betsimisaraka people speak of outsiders “selling the wind.” The carbon credit and offset market greenwashes capitalism, masquerading the system as ethically conscious and hiding how it is fueled by the exploitation of communities of people who have been beaten down and murdered, demonized and vilified, and stripped of the wealth-building capacity necessary to compete in the global economy. Those with capital require weak and dependent masses to plunder from, and these communities, having been historically cast in the role of the persecuted, are treated as expendable. Their continued exploitation draws little outrage because it fits an old and familiar pattern, which makes it least destabilizing to global markets and therefore most predictable and profitable for investors, corporations, and policymakers who profit from the appearance of environmental progress while maintaining the same extractive order.

Nonprofits and environmental groups too still operate within this framework. They spend time and resources recruiting sharp young minds passionate to take up the good fight in cleaning up and greening our growing world and mobilizing them in the advocacy for “stronger” carbon markets. Rationally concerned with their ability to remain a viable organization, they take up this strategy because their funding streams, partnerships, and influence depend on maintaining cooperation with their financial partners in the industries whose profits rise alongside emissions.

Klein argues that the carbon credit system is a system akin to selling indulgences. The wealthy can purchase their way out of ecological sin, just as medieval elites bought forgiveness for moral transgression. In both instances, no behavioral change is required, nor is any structural shift demanded.

They simulate progress towards moral purity by removing the burden of materially changing.

Just as medieval indulgences covered up the Church’s corruption, enabling them to accumulate wealth and power under the guise of saving souls, carbon offsets pretend to facilitate a green transition but in practice obscure the inescapable reality that capitalism’s morally bankrupt logic cannot be made pure. Capitalism feeds on the destruction of life. The fossil fuel industry has so deeply entrenched itself in the structural functioning of the capitalist machine that continued economic growth hopelessly depends on unearthing the fossilized remains of our long-dead ancestors in the tree of life and burning their remains for energy.

The scale of the climate breakdown demands coordinated international action, yet the capitalist class claims it can solve the crisis and preserve profitability through green technology. Such a proposition follows naturally from capitalist logic, which compels the dominant classes in each advanced economy to pursue competitive accumulation through trade war, resource seizure, and open coercion. As capitalism requires, states continue to function as instruments of national capital. Thus, they treat planetary systems as sites of extraction in renewed forms of colonial expansion that target strategic regions and populations for the mining of rare earth minerals necessary for renewable energy technology.

Where offsets promised to make pollution profitable, green technology now promises to make extraction sustainable. Yet, this promise is hollow; the push for new green infrastructure has intensified extraction processes. The production of batteries, solar panels, and wind components requires continuous access to cobalt, lithium, nickel, rare earth metals, and copper. These materials sit in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bolivia, Indonesia, and across regions already devastated by prior extraction. Capitalist states and their firms contest these regions, competing to to decide who gets access, who sets the terms, and who benefits from the land, the labor, and the resources. This competition unfolds through contracts, loans, and investment deals, and it also unfolds through military cooperation, arms sales, intelligence sharing, and political backing of governments that agree to favorable extraction terms.

This struggle unfolds alongside ongoing fights over oil, gas, and coal reserves that climate change has only made more volatile. Droughts and heat waves destabilize already fragile regions, making the competition for water, arable land, and energy routes even sharper.

So, we can see that these so-called “green technologies” still require extraction, still concentrate harm in poor regions, and still treat ecosystems as resource pools. The difference is that this violence now carries the label 'sustainable development,' making it even harder to oppose.

The language of sustainability conceals capitalist vampirism. “Offsets,” “efficiency,” and “green growth” are terms that functionally render the annihilation of ecosystems measurable, tradable, and ultimately profitable. What cannot be sustained in reality is sustained in accounting as ecological collapse is transformed into an opportunity for capital accumulation.

For decades, we have borne witness to a glaring reality. The process ecological destruction never reverses course in a capitalist world order. We saw it with cap-and-trade and we see it with the supposed transition to clean energy; each new technology marketed as sustainable still draws from the same extractive base, requiring metals, minerals, and labor taken from the earth and from people whose survival is already precarious. Toxic waste sites, deforestation, oil spills, and land grabs still concentrate in poor, black, brown, and Indigenous communities where resistance is weakest, where generations have already been brutalized by displacement and neglect.

In this environment there is no movement toward global unity in confronting the climate crisis. There is only the acceleration of rivalry across all fronts, with each capitalist state apparatus acting to secure supply chains, shape geopolitical blocs, and preserve its own accumulation path by killing life on earth and jeopardizing the survival of future generations.

For how long can we avoid our fate?

In his 2007 book The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock, the scientist best known for developing the Gaia hypothesis, described the Earth as a self-regulating system now pushed to the brink of failure by human activity. He wrote that “the climate centers around the world, which are the equivalent of pathology labs in hospitals, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years.” Lovelock explained that humanity has “poisoned the earth by our emissions of greenhouse gases and weakened it by taking for farmland and housing the land that once was the home of ecosystems that sustained the environment.” He warned that this damage has “driven the Earth to a crisis state from which it may never, on a human time scale, return to the lush and comfortable world we love and in which we grew up.”

He based this warning on evidence from the planet’s own history. “A similar event happened fifty-five million years ago,” he noted, “when a geological accident released into the air more than a terraton of gaseous carbon compounds.” The result was a global temperature increase of eight degrees Celsius in temperate regions and five degrees in the tropics, and “it took over one hundred thousand years before normality was restored.” Humanity has already released more than half of that amount, and the Earth is now far less resilient because “the sun is now warmer” and “the Earth is now returning to the hot state it was in before, millions of years ago, and as it warms, most living things will die.”

Data from the Global Carbon Project and Our World in Data show that cumulative carbon dioxide emissions since 1750 now exceed 2.5 trillion tons, or roughly 680 gigatons of carbon. Estimates of the carbon released during the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), the event Lovelock described from fifty five million years ago, range between 1,000 and 4,500 gigatons, meaning humanity may have already emitted roughly sixty percent of that amount. The difference lies in pace; whereas the ancient release unfolded over thousands of years, human industry has compressed a comparable volume of emissions into less than three centuries. This makes the present rate of carbon injection at least an order of magnitude faster than the geological event that once reshaped Earth’s climate.

Each year, roughly forty billion tons of carbon dioxide continue to enter the atmosphere, and natural carbon sinks are weakening as oceans acidify and permafrost begins to thaw. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds a near-linear relationship between cumulative emissions and temperature rise, meaning that as emissions climb, so does the long-term planetary temperature baseline. At the current pace, humanity could match or exceed the PETM-scale release within the next fifty to seventy years. Geological recovery from such a shift would take tens to hundreds of millennia, while ecosystems and human societies would confront the consequences within decades. Despite all the lip service paid to a green transition by politicians and corporations, the trajectory Lovelock described in 2007 has not slowed but accelerated.

According to writer for the World Socialist Website Thomas Scripps, Trump’s second term is expected to push roughly four billion extra tons of carbon into the air, which Scripps describes as “the combined yearly output of the European Union and Japan” and as more than undoing the gains from five years of renewable buildout. Despite goals of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees or at worst 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level, UN assessments now show the planet tracking toward about two point six degrees of warming by the end of the century even if governments follow through on every pledge.

Scripps points to studies showing that this path places billions in reach of extreme heat, repeating heatwaves, persistent droughts, growing wildfires, dangerous flooding, stronger storms, new diseases, and food instability. He notes that “each new study and experience” suggests earlier estimates were too low. As mentioned, the impacts of climate change concentrate on the world’s poorest communities, especially in sub–Saharan Africa, who have received little wealth from fossil fueled development yet stand exposed to its fallout.

These climate impacts are situated alongside other unfolding crises. Microplastics, forever chemicals, vanishing forests, and species loss deepen the strain on already vulnerable populations. An Amnesty International report states that more than two billion people live within five kilometers of a fossil fuel facility and face elevated risks of cancer, respiratory conditions, heart disease, premature birth, and early death, with almost half a billion living inside a single kilometer.

Science, which enabled the industrialization that created this mess, cannot save us by itself. As philosopher John Gray wrote in his book The Immortalization Commission:

“The irony of scientific progress is that in solving human problems it creates problems that are not humanly soluble. Science has given humans a kind of power over the natural world achieved by no other animal. It has not given humans the ability to remodel the planet according to their wishes. The Earth is not a clock that could be wound up and stopped at will. A living system, the planet will surely rebalance itself. It will do so, however, without any regard for humans.”

The collapse of carbon markets and the coinciding exacerbation of climate change demonstrates that a price cannot be set on absolution, and that moral transformation cannot occur within a system that commodifies everything it touches. Markets create a perverse incentive to profit from harm. In a capitalist system that depends on growth, every problem becomes an opportunity for accumulation. The more competitive the economy becomes, the stronger the pressure to find or manufacture new sources of profit. The system produces the opportunity to expand through destruction, and, like clockwork, industries form around exploiting crises, disasters, and scarcity itself, rewarding those all too eager to capitalize on ecological collapse. Markets have never purified themselves. They only rebrand their violence. Any pretense that capitalism can be humane is a cruel joke prompting laughter of those elites who have no illusions about the viciousness of their exploitative enterprises and their plans to maximally exhaust the earth and its life. The pitiless flippancy of the elite is seen clearly through the fact that an individual in the richest 0.1% has a 375 times larger carbon footprint than someone in the poorest 50%. 

James Lovelock has written “we have grown in number to the point where our presence is perceptibly disabling the planet like a disease.” To be clear, the disease is not human presence itself but the specific form that presence has taken under capitalism, which is a system that treats ecological limits as obstacles to overcome rather than conditions to respect. Lovelock continues by reminding us that in any disease, there are four possible outcomes:

“destruction of the invading disease organisms, chronic infection, destruction of the host, or symbiosis—a lasting relationship of mutual benefit to the host and the invader.”

Karl Marx had said the choice facing society was “socialism or barbarism.” Murray Bookchin wrote it was “anarchism or annihilation.” Today, we may say our choice is symbiosis or incineration.

Both unions and environmental organizations are dependent on the very corporations they were formed to restrain. Their financial and institutional survival hinges on maintaining the profitability of their adversaries. As a result, the labor and environmental movements seem incapable of genuine resistance. Their self-concern for their continued existence makes them afraid to disrupt production or challenge the market since doing so risks threatening their stability in a competitive environment where organizational survival depends on maintaining relationships with the powerful.

Any movement that seeks to protect life, let alone promote its flourishing, dies when it integrates itself into the machinery that profits from death. It is doomed unless it resists the seduction of corporate partnership and the lure of economic efficiency. It is true that restraining runaway carbon emissions, the deterioration of working conditions, and the weakening of workers’ purchasing power would not maximize productivity, efficiency, and GDP growth. However, perhaps that makes for a good opportunity to question the direction of our society.

We may consider what philosopher John Gray writes in his book False Dawn:

“maximal productivity achieved at the cost of social desolation and human misery is an anomalous and dangerous social idea.”

Gray recognizes what market advocates cannot: that treating productivity as the measure of social health is itself a form of fundamentalism, one that demands the sacrifice of actual human wellbeing for an abstraction.

Deadpanning in his book Against Empire, Michael Parenti elucidates just how dangerous and anomalous of an idea the pursuit of maximally efficient and infinite economic growth really is:

“The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead, gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many.”

How many times must we learn the lesson that moral responsibility is irreconcilable with market logic?

We do not need more proposals for better pricing, stronger regulations, or greener technology. What we need are forms of organization that treat human needs and ecological limits as the starting point rather than externalities to be managed. The question is whether such forms of organization can emerge, connect, and scale fast enough to matter, or whether the incineration Lovelock described will arrive first.

Peter S. Baron (http://www.petersbaron.com)  is the author of If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society.