In the seventeenth century, English revolutionaries declared “the earth a common treasury for all.” Climate change is the polite name for the one percent robbing the commons. Capitalism began with the enclosure of the commons and continues to expand today through the fossil fuel and mining industries. All these actions were, and are, thefts from the commons.

What we call the climate and the economy are both complex systems with real effects. Since the beginning of the industrial era, what we call climate has become the product of the economy. This includes temperature, rainfall, sea levels, drought, ice melt, species extinction, flooding, and other variations in formerly stable conditions.

There is no longer such a thing as nature or the environment. You can argue if there ever was but human action in the industrial era has transformed everything that there is, from the rocks to the air: it is real in the sense that it exists and artificial in the sense that humans made it.

To stop climate change, we have to stop neoliberal capitalism. It is a political choice, not an argument as to who is right or wrong about data. What we now call climate change is the clearest evidence we have that capitalism should not continue. What we also now know is that it will do so until it is made to desist.

It’s a Good Thing

The response to the neoliberal destruction of the commons will open a new age of leisure for all. Automated production powered by renewable energy can sustain our needs, including modern conveniences and medicines, without the built-in obsolescence, waste and endless debt-slavery of the current system.

For half a millenium, priests, colonizers, industrialists and moralizers of all stripes have been bemoaning the laziness of the common people, while extolling the leisure required by the monk, the scholar and the aristocrat. Reclaiming the commons opens the contemplative life to all those who might want it and ends the necessity of pointless labor.

Another World Is Necessary

Agriculture and non-nomadic settlement became possible during a geologically brief window that our actions are now closing. You can measure it: 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere allowed for the climate our parents remember. Right now we’re at 393 or so. The International Energy Authority says that we’ve already used all the extra fossil fuels that will take us up to 450 parts per million at which point no one really knows what will happen. It has to stop.

The Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan flooded last year for the simple reason that there is now more water in the Western Pacific than there used to be thanks to climate change. High sea-level events like tsunamis and hurricanes multiply small sea-level rises by factors of up to 10,000. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced this in Delhi. No Western media reported it.

Conservative estimates predict that such sea-level rise will mean 33 million people in the U.S. will have to move, part of 250 million worldwide. That’s one in ten of the current U.S. population. Live in New York? That’s you. And me.

First, flooding is affecting the island cultures of the Pacific. One-third of the world’s existing spoken languages are found in this region. Capitalism is stealing our cultural commons as well as the air, sea and land. It’s ours and we want it back.