4 By that time, the IPCC was preparing its fifth report – each edition more certain of the disastrous implications of ‘business-as-usual’ than the previous one – as a permanent hailstorm of scientific warnings rained down on humanity. Yet in 2012, global CO 2 emissions were 58 percent higher than in 1990. The facts and projections served as the basis for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and ratified by all UN members, who pledged to ‘prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’ by cutting their emissions of greenhouse gases, chief among them carbon dioxide. It has been so, in its basic outlines, for roughly as long as capitalism has been free of really existing adversaries: in 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) submitted its first report on the likely fate of a warming world. 2īy now the science of the by-product is perfectly clear. 1 He made his fleeting remark some three decades before John Tyndall explained the greenhouse effect and some six decades before Svante Arrhenius first calculated the rise in surface temperature on the earth following an increase in emissions of carbon dioxide (called ‘carbonic acid’ by Arrhenius as well). Babbage is credited with being the father of the modern computer his book is considered the first to introduce ‘the factory into the realm of economic analysis’. One notable flash of apprehension about the atmospheric consequences of employing steam power in factories can be found in the first chapter of Charles Babbage’s classic treatise On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. Nonetheless, sporadic forebodings appear in the literature of the time.

A cotton manufacturer of early nineteenth-century Lancashire who decided to forgo his old waterwheel and invest in a steam engine, erect a chimney and order coal from a nearby pit did not, in all likelihood, entertain the possibility that this act could have any kind of relationship to the extent of Arctic sea ice, the salinity of Nile Delta soil, the altitude of the Maldives, the frequency of droughts on the Horn of Africa, the diversity of amphibian species in Central American rain forests, the availability of water in Asian rivers or, for that matter, the risk of flooding along the Thames and the English coastline.

Global warming is the unintended by-product par excellence.

Fossil capital by andreas malm