Two years ago, Time magazine named novelist Sally Rooney as one of its 100 most influential people in the world. In that case, the world will presumably be moving very quickly to abolish capitalism, because Rooney has declared it – not entirely originally – to be the root cause of climate change.
Rooney really does seem to be asserting that it is a bad thing that agricultural yields increased beyond their medieval levels
Carbon emissions, according to her, are leading us rapidly to ‘apocalyptic civilizational collapse’. Not that this is an especially profound observation in Rooney’s mind because ‘there is no longer much serious disagreement of this claim.’ But presumably she does still think the case for finishing off capitalism still needs to be made because she has devoted a rather large piece in the Irish Times to making that point.
What’s killing the planet, she observes, is a ‘special kind of greed’ which emerged ‘puzzlingly late in the history of our species’. Capitalism, it is you.
Where to start? Perhaps we might start there, in fact. Is capitalism really a recent invention? I thought that Jesus had to throw the money-lenders out of the temple, weren’t they capitalists? Not according to Rooney, who seems to think that capitalism – which she seems to define as a fatal addiction to growth – only began some time after 1600. Before that, ‘the same fields produced the same yields in 1600 as in 1200’. There does appear to be some support for this thesis, as least in the context of England – according to a paper published in the Economic History Review in 1991, the year Rooney was born. But that rather misses the point. Rooney really does seem to be asserting that it is a bad thing that agricultural yields increased beyond their medieval levels. That is not just being anti-capitalist: it is romanticising the poverty of the distant past, a luxury which people tend to indulge only when they have a full stomach.
Industrial societies certainly produce more greenhouse gases than primitive ones, but do capitalist ones spew out more than communist ones? Maybe Rooney is too young to remember the belching chimneys of the Soviet Union, but between the late 1950s and 1990, Russia (to quote figures which detach it from the rest of the Soviet Union) was the world’s second largest emitter of carbon dioxide. In 1988 its emissions peaked at 2,670 Mt of carbon dioxide. Three years later, communism fell – and with it Russia saw the sharpest drop in carbon emissions experienced by any country in modern history, enough to make Ed Miliband swoon with admiration. Within seven years they had nearly halved to 1,480 Mt. Admittedly, this was not all for positive reasons – some of it was down to economic decline. But a lot of it was down to the abandonment of wasteful industrial practices. Capitalist societies inevitably end up with a greater responsibility towards the consumption of resources because they punish wastefulness mercilessly.
Let’s brush over Rooney’s climate catastrophism, like her lazy assertion that ‘destructive storms are increasing in regularity and intensity’ – no, naming storms doesn’t make them more frequent or worse. Over the British Isles the trend is actually in the opposite direction: with a falling trend in extreme wind speeds. Neither has there been any increase in Atlantic hurricanes in 200 years.
But I do love this bit of Rooney’s thesis: apparently, it is not the fault of ordinary folk that carbon emissions have risen; it’s just those nasty capitalists. ‘Growth,’ she writes, ‘is the principle of the capitalist not the consumer’. If last year we bought ten shirts and this year we bought 14 it wasn’t because we wanted them; we were just somehow duped into buying them. Listening to Rooney you would never think that anyone ever eagerly lit a coal fire to warm their homes or filled their car with petrol; it was the coal-mining capitalists alone who were responsible for the resulting emissions. Were it not for them we would have been happy going cold.
As for the capitalists who are building the wind farms, solar farms, electric cars, LED lightbulbs and all the other stuff which is helping reduce emissions industrial societies, I’m not sure where they fit in Rooney’s worldview. Her thesis is drivel. Sadly, I fear it may be influential drivel, but thankfully I don’t think she has the world’s ear quite as Time magazine imagines she does.
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