Michael Lavalette spoke to leading ecosocialist Ian Angus about capitalisms’ ecocide, Trump and what we need to do stop global heating 

I wonder if you could tell us about your history of activism? 

I became a socialist in the 1960s, and have long been active in the antiwar and other movements. In 2007, I wrote an article about capitalism and ecological destruction and realised both that there was much more to be said about the connection between capitalism and ecological destruction than would fit in one article, and that, although a growing number of people viewed themselves as ecosocialists, there were no websites devoted to ecosocialism and ecological Marxism. So on January 29, 2007, I launched Climate & Capitalism as ‘an ecosocialist journal, reflecting the viewpoint of environmental Marxism’. As we approach our twentieth anniversary, the journal continues as a global forum both for information about environmental crises and for discussion about ecosocialist strategies and tactics. 

I’m not a member of any political party, but I work closely with socialists and Marxists in various groups around the world. As an extension of that, I was a founding member of the Global Ecosocialist Network, a loose formation with members on five continents 

You are a very articulate voice from the radical left on the extent and nature of the climate catastrophe, and your online journal Climate & Capitalism does a great job recording, monitoring and discussing the unfolding crisis, so how would you briefly summarise the present situation with the crisis? 

The Earth is in bad shape. We aren’t sleepwalking into disaster: we are running as fast as we can. Greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere are higher than even pessimistic models from a decade ago expected, and we are starting to see the serious consequences of global warming. 

James Hansen, one of the leading scientists in the field, has just published a paper that concludes that it is not going to be possible to keep the global average temperature increase below 1.5 degrees. That even 2 degrees is now unattainable. 

We are seeing forest fires on a scale never witnessed before. The Amazon forest is one of the greatest carbon sinks, but as a result of fires, it is now emitting more carbon than it absorbs. In addition to wreaking massive destruction, fires in Canada and the U.S. are producing vast amounts of greenhouse gases. Glaciers are melting faster than anticipated, driving faster increases in ocean levels.  

The combination of rising sea levels and more intense storms, caused by warmer ocean water, is causing larger storm surges and widespread flooding. Flood barriers built on twentieth-century assumptions no longer work. 

We are seeing heat like never seen before: 2024 was the hottest year on record. Scientists thought January would be cooler because the El Niño ended, but though ocean currents changed as expected, global temperatures increased: a really bad sign. 

In parts of the world, rising temperatures are getting deadly. For example, during the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca last year, temperatures went over 40 degrees every day, causing over 1300 deaths. 

Across the board everything is getting worse, worse than the most pessimistic scientific predictions of a few years ago. 

How does the election of Trump affect things? 

I’m half-way inclined to suggest it won’t have much effect! Because, despite their occasional nod in the direction of global reduction targets, no U.S politician, Democrat or Republican, has done much in practice. That’s true everywhere. In country after country, politicians have signed international agreements and promised to act, but in practice, have done little or nothing. With Trump at least we have some honesty; he says he is going to do nothing to protect the environment, and he won’t. 

But of course, Trump’s election does matter because he brings a new dynamic. His commitment is not just to do nothing, but actually to accelerate the damage: to boost oil and gas production, to increase coal production and to eliminate the few gains that we have won in past years. Other right-wing governments, particularly in Europe, are likely to follow his example. Trump’s election makes our struggles more difficult, and more essential.  

Your next book looks at how capitalism is generating ‘metabolic rifts’. Could you tell us what you mean by this term? 

Marx, following the scientists of his day, recognised that many natural processes involve cycles connecting various organisms, exchanges of matter and energy that make life possible. Life is dependent on recycling. As a very obvious example, we breathe oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, while plants breathe carbon dioxide in and oxygen out. That metabolic cycle allows both animals and plants to live. 

Marx focused in particular on agriculture and the depletion of soil caused by capitalist farming. Up to a few hundred years ago, farmers planted crops that took nutrients from the soil, and the soil was replenished by waste products that returned into the soil. But with the development of large cities and markets, food was shipped to the cities and waste products were dumped into rivers or the sea. The metabolic cycle was broken, the soil was deprived of nutrients, and crop yields declined. This is just one example of the way that capitalism breaks metabolic cycles and creates ‘metabolic rifts’. 

That doesn’t just occur in agriculture. Think about carbon dioxide. For hundreds of thousands of years, recycling has kept the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere roughly constant, and that has kept global temperatures within a narrow range. But now we are producing far more CO₂ than plants can consume, and, at the same time, we are destroying vast areas of forest and plant life. We have broken the metabolic cycle and global heating is the result. 

At least a dozen global metabolic cycles are now breaking down because capitalism’s short-term pursuit of profit undermines the Earth’s natural metabolic processes. Of course, people mistreated the planet and the land on local scales before capitalism, but capitalism is a truly global system and its destruction of metabolic cycles is planet-wide, so global changes are happening hundreds of times faster than ever before. 

What needs to happen to address all this? 

Let me start off by saying I don’t think we are facing short-term extinction. Humans will survive. The question is: what will our lives be like if we don’t stop capitalism’s runaway train? 

The major impacts of the climate crisis will be in equatorial regions, and the people most affected will be the poorest: those whose lives ‘don’t count’ as far as the governments of the major powers are concerned. 

Parts of the globe will be essentially uninhabitable most of the time, and pretty much everywhere will experience longer and more intense heat waves, increased flooding, more storms, probably more pandemics. 

What do we need to do? Well, the steps we need to take are well known. There is no magic to this! The main thing is that we must substantially reduce our use of fossil fuels, in transportation, industry, and agriculture. We need to prioritise public transport over private cars, we need well-built insulated homes and public buildings, we need to switch agriculture from mass industrial production to more locally resourced and sustainable farming.  

We have to stop doing the things that are purely wasteful, and so much of the capitalist economy is waste. Let’s start with the war machine, which only exists to kill and destroy.   Let’s stop spending billions on advertising.  

All of these measures require ending what old-time socialists correctly called the ‘profit system’. All economic decisions and actions must be based on promoting sustainable human development, not on enriching few billionaires.  

You know, people sometimes say Marx didn’t say much about the ecological costs of capitalism, but actually he did! He said, to paraphrase, that we don’t own the planet, we are just the temporary custodians or tenants of the world and our job is to hand it over to the next generation in good or better condition. If that revolutionary principle was embedded in all economic decision making, then most of the environmental and ecological crises we face could be eliminated. 

What do we need to do, as a left, to build and sustain a movement against climate change? 

I think the election of Trump has shaken the climate movement, but we need to re-engage and reconnect quickly. For too much of the left, the environment is just one item in a list of issues, given no particular emphasis. That needs to change. Capitalism is driving ecological crises that, in the lifetime of our children and our grandchildren, will disrupt social life and make our lives, their lives, much more difficult. We need to work together across the left to make campaigning around climate issues central to our work as ecosocialist anticapitalists.