Essay by Eric Worrall
“… The role they discharge as climate criminals is quite willful. …”
Climate Change for Capitalists
John Clarke 16 September 2026
Capitalists have long been aware of the consequences of fossil-fuel use, but the profit system requires them to seek to benefit from it, or escape it as individuals, explains John Clarke
The scale and pace of climate breakdown are now well-established realities of life on this planet, as extreme weather and chronic impacts impose themselves on us to an ever-greater degree.
It is equally well understood that fossil-fuel companies and political leaders are doggedly compounding these catastrophic results by doubling down on oil and gas production, resulting in levels of carbon emissions that will make things even worse.
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Though the ranks of the ruling establishments include crude climate deniers like Donald Trump, it would be wrong to imagine that the major capitalists and their leading functionaries are unaware of the implications of the course that they are on. The role they discharge as climate criminals is quite willful.
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It would be useful, however, also to consider how the capitalists themselves, along with their political agents and intellectual enablers, view the question of climate change. We have already seen how they work to stifle a clear understanding of the threat that it poses and try to delay meaningful action to address this dire threat. Nonetheless, the harsh and intensifying reality of the issue can only force itself upon them and they are compelled to consider its implications.
…Working-class people across this planet have no luxury bunkers to escape into and very limited means of mitigating the impacts of climate breakdown, as they intensify to the point of catastrophe. Our survival hinges on our collective struggles against climate-wrecking capitalism and the creation of a just and sustainable socialist society.
Read more: https://www.counterfire.org/article/climate-change-for-capitalists/
Can you imagine the kind of horror show world someone like the author John Clarke would build, if he and his friends were in charge?
If you disagree with extreme climate claims, you’re not someone with legitimate concerns about the quality of the science, you are an “intellectual enabler”, as much of a criminal as people who build businesses which emit CO2 in order to put food, goods and services at our disposal.
Yet John thinks such a world would be “just”.
Actually we don’t have to imagine what such a world would be like – events like China’s Cultural Revolution and Cambodia’s Pol Pot have already demonstrated how badly intellectuals are treated by “just” socialist societies. Scientists like Ye Qisun, who trained many famous scientists including a Nobel Prize winner, was brutally persecuted by the Communist regime because – who knows why. But Ye got lucky, if you can call such cruelty luck. Many of his fellow scientists were murdered.
I’m glad the climate alarmists lost, because recent history shows us things could have gotten so much worse. I know places like Britain and Europe and Canada it might not feel like they lost, but they’re on the way out. They will never get the kinds of show trials of capitalist criminals and “intellectual enablers” they appear to want – at least, they’ll need to find a new cause to frighten society into acting like barbarians. Too many people have seen through the fake climate crisis.
