By and large the writers in this issue of Mute accept that climate change is a reality. Earth’s rising temperature can no longer be attributed solely to natural fluctuations produced by solar and volcanic activity, it is instead the result of man’s massive consumption of fossil fuels. There are those who contest the science that underlies this idea, claiming that levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere follow rather than determine temperature – man’s activity is irrelevant. Clearly this claim should be taken seriously, and not least because the outrage it provokes indicates the economic and political stakes of man-made climate change. Rather than the ultimate causes of global warming, however, our focus in this issue is the way its spectre is put to work by the developed world.

As George Caffentzis points out in these pages, the traumatic effects of climate change will not be felt by capital but by those it commands. It seems that this is already the case. While the fundamental imperatives of the global economic system with its market (mis)managed allocation of energy resources remain unaltered, individuals in both the North and South are instructed to change their behaviour, while less powerful States must reorient their economies to dubiously ‘greener’ production.

The world’s poor will pay most dearly for what James Woudhuysen calls the ‘micro-action’ of governments, bearing the brunt both of what they do and do not do in response to the (ecological) crisis: the cost of maize, a basic food stuff, spirals as a result of the growth of the biofuel industry; green taxes and tariffs push up energy prices and the cost of movement; basic services such as refuse collection are cut. Meanwhile, nothing is done to address the threat of rising sea levels that will ravage coastal communities. As Zoe Young, Tim Forsyth, George Caffentzis and James Woudhuysen all argue, the new green order uses the threat of climate catastrophe to pursue other agendas. Climate change gives the developed world licence to check and restructure development in the South, impose austerity measures on domestic populations, or to break its own dependency on oil-producing nations that won’t, despite military intervention, toe the neoliberal line.

A bleak picture to be sure. But there is hope in the recognition that global warming is not an inevitable consequence of human behaviour but rather the result of capital’s inhuman drive to accumulate at any cost. In short, global warming is not made by man but by the capitalist mode of production. Perhaps arch-Thatcherite Nigel Lawson was right when he recently identified climate change as the left’s anti-capitalist vehicle of choice in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. While insecurity of employment impairs the willingness and ability of labour to organise against capital, climate change is potentially a globally unifying lever for resistance. On the other hand, as capital pits whole regions against each other in the battle over development and control of energy resources, much of the left has pioneered (and recycles) the now dominant Malthusian moralism regarding behaviour modification and the need to limit consumption. If climate change is going to provide a focus for anti-capitalist struggle it must be seen for what it is – a problem of capitalism, not ‘man’ per se.