There Is No Such Thing as Green Capitalism

David Shipko explores climate denialism in speculative literature and culture.

By David ShipkoMay 26, 2025

• SF

• Environment

AS AMITAV GHOSH has argued in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), we are experiencing a crisis of imagination when it comes to confronting the dangers of climate change. Yet as Mark Bould counters in The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (2021), this crisis is much worse than the failure to represent the issue imaginatively, since the Anthropocene leaves indelible marks on all forms of contemporary cultural production. Rather, the true great derangement of our time—across cultural production, public policymaking, and every other domain—is the denialism that acknowledges the changing climate but seeks resolution through the very systems that are causing global warming. To navigate and resolve this crisis, we need better stories that do not settle for surface appearances, that instead seek and expose root causes. We must begin by confronting one of the most dangerous stories ever told: that capitalism can become ecologically sustainable. This is a delusional fantasy.

Climate change is caused by the emission of carbon and other greenhouse gases, but the larger driver of global warming is capital accumulation itself. Every day, we witness evidence of Marx’s argument that capitalism drives tirelessly toward endless accumulation. This accumulation requires continuously expanding resource extraction, production, consumption, and—most importantly—multiplication and intensified exploitation of a proletariat. Even mere threats of a contraction of growth rates can cause great panic among the capitalist class.

Accumulation depends upon fossil fuels, but not for the reasons one might suspect. As Andreas Malm demonstrates in Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016), capitalism availed itself of coal-fueled steam power not because it was a better technology than the water wheel but because it granted capitalists social power over workers and mechanical power that better suited capitalism’s demand for ceaseless production of commodities.

In short, global warming is a direct consequence of capital accumulation because the capitalist class, in its quest for endless accumulation, relies on carbon burning as a means of maintaining social and mechanical power. Even in the face of climatological devastation, as Kohei Saito demonstrates in Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (2023) and Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (2024), capitalism is incapable of healing the ecological wounds it has created. It cannot even stop itself from making the wounds deeper. Ecology is thus a class issue; ecological devastation is class violence.

Capitalism will sacrifice everything, including the universal metabolism of nature, to continue what Beverley Best, in The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital (2024), has called “value metabolism.” Value—translated from the German “Wert,” derived from “werden,” to become—is nothing other than the possibility of becoming. The accumulation of value in the abstract is the disaccumulation of concrete possibilities. To grow piles of money endlessly is inherently antagonistic to the realization of material forms of social wealth: schools, hospitals, free time, green energy infrastructure, a livable environment, and so on.

The problem is not how money is spent; the problem is that money exists. Money can never serve as the material foundation of truly social wealth. A simple thought experiment confirms this: in a world where everyone would possess the exact same amount of money, all money would be worthless. Money’s only purpose is to be taken away, hoarded, and used to renew and expand the value metabolism that necessarily threatens the universal metabolism of nature.

This is why capital accumulation and ecological sustainability can never be reconciled. One is always necessarily wrecking the other. The climate is not merely changing; it is being wrecked. There are those among the ranks of capitalist economists and insurers who understand that climate wreckage will also wreck capitalism “as we know it,” but even they cling to the hope of decarbonized endless growth. They refuse the lesson of climate wreckage—that attempting to extract infinite value from finite labor and matter can only create destruction and death on ever-greater scales.

To understand how stories about climate wreckage shape what we believe is possible, we must acknowledge the underlying contradiction that drives them: the conflict between profit and sustainability. Climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels, but more deeply, it’s caused by an economic system that demands endless growth, no matter the cost. Every story about climate change—whether told through policy, media, or speculative fiction—tries to resolve this basic conflict in one of four ways:

1) Profit over sustainability—the path of “business as usual,” where growth comes first, and ecological collapse is ignored or denied.

2) Sustainability over profit—a vision of the regulatory state, where government rules limit capitalist excess.

3) Profit and sustainability together—the dream of “green capitalism,” which promises endless growth through clean energy and innovation.

4) Neither profit nor sustainability—a truly different future, one beyond capitalism entirely.

The first three are the most common, but all of them, even the second and third, ultimately protect the system that caused the crisis in the first place. Even when capitalism temporarily reins itself in—through regulations, carbon credits, or green investments—it still relies on growth and private profit. Eventually, the drive for profit comes roaring back, dismantling whatever protections may have been put in place.

This is why the only real alternative lies in the fourth option: not a version of capitalism with new rules but a new kind of system altogether, one where profit isn’t the goal and “sustainability” isn’t a last-ditch effort to patch over disaster. In this system, which Kohei Saito calls “degrowth communism,” we build an economy based on meeting the needs of all, not maximizing the private gain of a few, with all production organized to respect the planet’s material boundaries. This kind of future might seem hard to imagine, but that’s because our language, media, and culture are shaped by the very system we need to move beyond. Once we name the problem—capitalism’s insurmountable contradiction between endless growth and a finite planet—we can start to name the solution. It can never come from tinkering with the rules of capitalism. It can only come from choosing life over profit.

The texts that produce denialist solutions to the principal contradiction driving climate wreckage are the substance of a powerful and growing denialist unconscious, for which speculative cultural production plays a central role. Within the realm of speculative cultural production, three particular “novums”—new things—are crucial to the production (and contestation) of the denialist unconscious. These are the ark spaceship, the arcology city-inside-a-building, and geoengineering, the direct technological manipulation of the planetary climate system. Some examples of these are, respectively, the Endurance spaceship and Cooper Station of Interstellar (2014), the train of Snowpiercer (2013), and the global-cooling technologies of Neal Stephenson’s novel Termination Shock (2021). These novums also appear in contemporary real-world projects, such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Saudi Arabia’s The Line, and an increasing number of would-be geoengineering firms, such as Make Sunsets and Stardust, as well as the very real and very dystopian University of Chicago Climate Systems Engineering Initiative.

Each of these novums—ark, arcology, and geoengineering—produces climate denialism by repressing different aspects of the reality of climate wreckage. The ark represses our inextricable entanglement with the earth, the arcology represses the interconnection and interdependence of all terrestrial spaces, and geoengineering represses the chaotic, uncontrollable nature of earth’s climate. These repressions mystify the real relations of climate wreckage, proposing means of “doing something” that ultimately ensure the crisis will only be intensified and rendered increasingly overwhelming and confusing. This process depends upon and produces representations of climate change that are simultaneously acts of climate denial, because they enable the renewal of the root cause of climate wreckage: expanding value metabolism.

This theory of the denialist unconscious and its repressive novums provides a useful tool for reconsidering the function of all discourse and cultural production that mediate climate wreckage, whether explicitly or implicitly. For example, it helps us see how Interstellar is ultimately less interested in the salvation of humanity from climate wreckage (reduced to a blight of ambiguous origin) than in deliverance from material fetters to endless expansion, to “infinite time and space.” Despite consistently appearing on cli-fi film lists, it is a denialist film. This theory also equips us to reconsider texts such as Stephenson’s Termination Shock, a near-future techno-thriller in which a rogue oil billionaire takes it upon himself to perform the sort of geoengineering being researched by real life physicist David Keith at the University of Chicago: scattering sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere to reflect a percentage of solar radiation and produce a global cooling effect.

Keith and other boosters of solar radiation management (SRM) envision a future in which geoengineers lower the global average temperature for the benefit of all while minimizing or even avoiding potential negative side effects. They propose accomplishing this through the use of highly sophisticated climate models, with some suggesting the use of so-called “artificial intelligence” to improve predictions. This outcome is a speculation beyond the limits of our knowledge about geoengineering, and it represses much of what we do know about the climate. The climate is a chaotic system, determined by natural laws but complex enough that it defies perfect prediction. This is why scientists can accurately model general climate trends over long periods of time, but reliable forecasting of specific weather events beyond a 10-day window is impossible.

No scientific evidence verifies the would-be geoengineer’s desire for a planetary climate system susceptible to consequence-free fine-tuning. Instead, researchers have identified a wide range of potential negative consequences, including radical shifts in the water cycle that could devastate agriculture, dangerous accelerations of disruptive changes to weather patterns, and termination shock, a period of rapid catch-up warming or climate reshuffling that would follow the sudden cessation of SRM. As a growing legion of researchers and activists have argued, geoengineering is not a rational solution; it is an irrational project motivated by capitalism’s desire for a cost-effective techno-fix to buy more time for carbon burning.

Making the geoengineer’s irrational fantasy seem rational is precisely the aim and effect of Termination Shock. In her LARB review, Rebecca Evans observes that this novel is most interested in “the way that the daring and wealthy might accomplish what stagnant nation-states and entrenched political interests would never dream of doing,” but she suggests that “it wouldn’t be reading too much against the grain to situate all of this as satire,” in which light the novel seems “less visionary thriller than biting cautionary tale.”

While some individual aspects do invite identification as satire, this reading of the novel strikes me as too generous. Termination Shock does represent climate change as anthropogenic and unaddressed—but because of political deadlock caused by government regulators and environmentalists. Through the perspectives of four characters whose destinies cohere around the geoengineer and his machine, the novel ultimately positions geoengineering as an effective and viable—though politically fraught—climate intervention, one that works as promised. From beginning to end, the geoengineer remains convinced that, with proper statistical climate modeling, he can make calculated climate interventions. Yes, geoengineering causes a delay of the Indian monsoon—maybe—but the monsoon still arrives, and the geoengineer remains certain that additional geoengineering sites will provide “more knobs and levers” on the climate “dashboard,” with which future problems can be averted. The novel does nothing to suggest otherwise.

Meanwhile, the looming “specter of termination shock” never arrives. In the end, the novel raises this specter only to exorcise it, locating the real danger not in the climate tinkering of rogue billionaires but in the obstruction by individuals and institutions that would stand in the way of capitalist technological progress. Through its narrative, Termination Shock envisions a denialist future of green capitalism, in which global warming is counteracted, sea level rise is slowed, and threatened real estate values (the means by which the novel’s geoengineer makes geoengineering pay for itself) are secured, all thanks to further expansion of capitalist machinery. The geoengineer is not above reproach, but his greatest development is merely learning that he needs to “listen” to others and not always act unilaterally. As for the rest of us, we may petition the geoengineer, but we are not to impede him. The one point-of-view character who does is also the one point-of-view character who winds up dead—killed, albeit reluctantly, by another point-of-view character who has sided with the novel’s notion of progress.

Despite weak gestures toward satire or critique, Termination Shock ultimately valorizes capitalist desires, means, and ends, thus renewing faith in the capacity of capitalism not only to survive but also to thrive—and to save us all too. Representing the climate crisis in order to unsee what it reveals daily —i.e., that we must choose between life or capital’s death cult—this renewal of faith is also an act of class struggle. Through such unseeing, the capitalist class aims to deceive not only others but also itself, to conceal the devastation of its own hand, so that it may willingly recommit itself to the expansion of the value metabolism that destroys the universal metabolism of nature, the conditions of life upon which it also depends.

Contemporary cultural production overflows with repressive novums and climate denial, but our situation is not hopeless. In order to accomplish its ideological work, capital must invoke the specter of that radically different futurity it seeks to repress, what Saito has called degrowth communism. Denial only occurs against what is acknowledged. Every denialist text is also already a text of the degrowth communism it seeks to deny. Once we have identified the means by which capitalist ideology symbolically represses our only livable futurity, we can reread these same symbolic acts for what they reveal through that repression. Our future is detectable not in the solutions these texts envision but in what they everywhere repress but cannot prevent from endlessly returning: class struggle.

Denialist texts bear the marks of the class struggle they seek to delay and decide. From its preference for ruling-class characters and their willing servants to its representation of a working-class Sikh Canadian martial artist, who becomes a cyborg commando sent by the Indian military to destroy the geoengineer’s machine and dies in an ultimately futile gesture, Termination Shock constructs a model of the world in which progress can only come from working with the capitalists who have profited from destroying the climate. This novel’s greatest utility lies in its clear articulation of capitalist ideology.

With such texts, we must not simply read against the grain. We must write against it. We must act against it. Whatever we may wish, whatever we may be assured by some comforting narrative, we are already in a class struggle. The outcome of this struggle will decide the fate of our species and our planet. If we feel or believe otherwise, it is because we are surrounded by mystifying stories that conceal our real situation from us. This is why, whatever we might yet build together, we must begin by dealing, once and for all, with the cultural production of the denialist unconscious.