![]() This observation, however, does not solve the question of how exactly capitalist growth has been linked to fossil fuel consumption over the course of its history it merely poses it. ![]() The more growth you have, the more forceful the push will be, and the stronger the blast. If one of the handles is the ceaseless growth that defines capitalism, the other is made up of coal and oil and gas out of the nozzle comes a blast of CO2 that fans the flames of the fire of global warming. ![]() ![]() By this step - surely one of the most fateful in its history - capitalism sired a peculiar formation I describe as the fossil economy, most simply defined as an economy of self-sustaining growth predicated on the consumption of fossil fuels, and therefore generating a sustained growth in CO2 emissions. It then adopted fossil fuels, coal first of all. ![]() Originally - and this holds however one wishes to date the birth of this mode of production: to the fourteenth, sixteenth, or late eighteenth century - capitalism relied on what would today be called renewable energies: wood, muscle, wind, and water. The latter have grown in tandem with the former, not coincidentally but constitutively. Only those who most stubbornly hold fast to their ideological blinders would today deny that there is a link between capitalism and emissions of carbon dioxide. ![]()
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