The Great “Solutions” Swindle: Capital, Products, Technology and the Civilisational Lie

Global capital has deceived billions who cared about the planet by selling them “green solutions” that are anything but green, simply by virtue of the fact that these solutions are products.  All products are harmful to the planet, however green their credentials might be.  Bringing a product to market inflicts immense devastation: the minute a product comes online, a huge chain of carbon-intensive operations is activated, as well as an army of specialised employees mobilised to cater to those tasks.  Even a solar panel makes use of all the carbon-intensive industries our self-destructive economy depends on: research, design, extraction, construction, electricity, transportation, communication, marketing, buying, selling.  All these people need to use energy and transportation for their work and their meetings.  They must be paid, which means more money circulating in the economy causing more consumption and more carbon emissions. 

In other words, any product created for the purpose of profit is incredibly toxic to the planet however “green” it is, whatever claims it makes that it can “cancel out” its hidden emissions.

Aside from deceiving consumers, the green industrial complex has also deceived itself.  By appropriating the term “sustainability” and plastering it on every product and job title it creates, it has built an image of sustainability as a path for growth, construction and expansion: in other words, more capitalism.  The average citizen today thinks of “sustainability solutions” as new technologies and innovations, as opposed to the most obvious forms of sustainability: minimalism, deconstruction, reuse, repair, upcycling, simplification, contraction, degrowth and rewilding. 

This deception is the result of deliberate manipulative propaganda from global capital as it tries to find ways to continue to operate within the new set of parameters.  The vast majority of today’s “sustainability solutions” are ultimately not solutions, but problems.  This is not an issue exclusive to the sustainability industry but a behavioural and cognitive bias humans have always suffered from in how they view technology. Rather than simply undoing our damage, we prefer to invent technologies which “repair” it, forgetting each time that technologies always introduce new problems.  This of course perpetuates the cycle: humanity has spent thousands of years continuously inventing new technologies to solve the problems that the previous technologies caused.  This vicious cycle has put technology in charge of the future of humanity, rather than the other way round.  The hope that technology would save us was tragically misguided, given that technology ultimately only cares about itself.  A species which considers this as “progress” surely does not deserve to progress down the evolutionary journey. It has already amputated itself.

The problem with minimalism and degrowth is that they don’t fit within a capitalist economy. Our economy only knows how to thrive through construction, destruction, exploitation and the generation of waste.  Even more worrisome is that human consciousness by its nature seems to only understand doing and achieving, and has limited cognition for undoing, or stopping altogether.  We are hyperactive, hyper-thinking beings who look down upon the cessation of any of our activities, while being too proud to simply “undo” our errors as this would be a shameful admission of defeat.  Instead, if we invent a new technology that promises to “repair” things, we are saviours and geniuses.  The extremely negative bias humans have towards deconstructive and recessive solutions to our problems is largely responsible for the worsening situation we have trapped ourselves in.

Sustainability movements have failed because they have been bought out by capitalism, which exemplifies this maximalistic bias towards growth.  The global corporatocracy has repositioned itself very effectively as a “green” industry who “gets things done”, when in fact, if they knew anything about sustainability at all, they should be working to get things undone. On LinkedIn you will find hundreds of thousands of “professionals” who dare to put “eco warrior” in their job title when in fact they are corporate fraudsters selling carbon credits and other “green services”.  Equally, there are hundreds of thousands of highly paid job advertisements for environment and sustainability positions.  With all these jobs out there, you would think we are doing something right, yet curiously, the planet is heading faster and faster towards Armageddon.  These jobs are in fact the reason, most of them being full-time greenwashing positions helping global capital conceal its crimes and carry on. It is easy to see what they advocate: they talk about an energy transition when it should be energy reduction. They talk about family and prosperity when it should be population decrease. They talk about jobs and growth when it should be rapid economic contraction.  They talk about protecting nature when it should be about simply leaving nature alone.

The more obsessed humans become with “solutions” to the climate crisis the further they will fail as long as these solutions are designed to be funded by their own profits, supported by technologies that come with their own problems, and promise continued population growth and prosperity for all.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

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