They’re out to save themselves.

Each one of these so-called environmentalists is either a bare-faced liar — someone with a vested interest in destroying the planet — or a monster willing to sacrifice the rest of humanity for their own, post-cataclysm comfort. Climate change — more properly, the ecocide, the knowing murder, of the planet — is something that is already affecting both capitalist bosses and us workers alike, but, critically, not to anywhere near the same degree. Every drought-triggered crop failure causes agricultural capitalists to miss out on their profits, but meanwhile, thousands of workers are laid off or starve. In fact, most capitalists clearly plan to use their stolen and hoarded wealth to protect them from the worst side-effects of the ongoing climate catastrophe. They’re hiring up guards, building fortified strongholds, and preparing for the worst.

From the outset, we need to be clear: even if it were true that the five listed billionaires above were actively trying to save the planet, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. They’d be outvoted and outmaneuvered by the other capitalists, the ones who aren’t trying to save the planet and who are willing to make money off of climate-destroying industries. Then, once these “saviors” were outmaneuvered in the marketplace by their more ruthless capitalist cousins, they would be relegated to political unimportance by the power of superior money. The fact is that it’s cheaper and more profitable to destroy the environment. As long as we live in a capitalist economy, this is going to remain true. So long as it’s true, it necessarily follows that those capitalists willing to destroy the economy for an advantage will out-compete and out-perform those who aren’t. And hey, we live in a bourgeois republic, where money is power. These ruthless capitalists will simply buy more politicians and legislation than any would-be climate heroes.

But the fact of the matter is that it’s not even true that Buffet, Bezos, and company are trying to save the planet. What they’re doing is paying a lot of lip service to the idea of environmentalism, and then just going about their business. Just like giving to a charity (that they conveniently own, which furthers their political ends, reduces their taxes, and gets cushy contracts for their corporations), climate activism among the ruling class is nothing more than a dodge, a con, a public relations stunt.

What have these men done to earn this reputation?

In 2012, Buffett argued that “what’s bad for the environment is also bad for the bottom line” in what was essentially a fluff piece put out by one of his corporations. “Taking shortcuts is not the pathway to achieving sustainable competitive advantage,” he warned. In 2022 Forbes glowingly wrote that Buffett’s holding and investment company,  Berkshire Hathaway, “escaped ‘The Coal Trap.’” Berkshire Hathaway energy features a large page on their website devoted to the advancement of “Cleaner Energy” and company jargon cheerily mentions PacifiCorp, the Berkshire Hathaway power company in the Pacific Northwest, and its investments in such glitzy-sounding nonsense as “noncarbon generation,” “modernized transmission,” and the Berkshire Hathaway wind and solar plant. But PacifiCorp not only operates over eleven coal power plants; it also operates captive coal mines. On June 12 of this year, a Multnomah County jury returned a verdict against PacifiCorp finding them liable for more than $70 million in fines for its negligent and reckless management of its power lines that caused one of the biggest and most devastating fires in the history of Oregon, the 2020 Labor Day Fires. Buffett’s words to the public are one thing, and his words to his shareholders are quite another. He has called climate catastrophe an overall benefit to his insurance companies. His real view is the view he shares with the rest of his class: that, overall, climate catastrophe won’t be that bad, that they’ll find ways to make money from the chaos.

So much for Buffett. What about Bezos? The bald gnome responsible for piloting Amazon to the heights of the U.S. market founded the Bezos Earth Fund, investing $1 billion to help “transform food systems to feed a growing population,” after all. In 2021, Bezos pledged $2 billion to help protect the environment. At the same time, the Amazon corporation’s carbon footprint grew by 19%. The $10 billion total investment over all his contributions amounts to little more than 17% of his hoarded fortunes. Not only that, but grants from his foundations come with strings attached; do what Mr. Bezos says, print what Mr. Bezos agrees to, or this sudden flood of funding will dry up. This is one of the shady ways billionaire “philanthropy” works.

Bernard Arnault, one of the richest men in the world, owner of brands like Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Fendi, also masquerades as one of these saviors of Earth and humanity, despite the fact that his companies consistently exploit slave labor. But this contradiction — between the supposed philanthropic environmentalist and the slave magnate — is more apparent than real. There’s no real contradiction between capitalist environmentalism and slavery, even if it seems out of place that a so-called philanthropist would rely on exploitation to fuel his supposed generosity. Slave labor is the modus vivendi of the “green” capitalist movement. For those capitalists who buy into their own bullshit a little more than Bezos and Buffett do, their “green” capitalism is actually a kind of fascist vision of the future. They harken back to the Nazi Reichsminister for Agriculture, R. Walter Darré, the man who coined the phrase “blood and soil,” and who envisioned the future of the earth as a kind of vast eco-preserve administered by “racially pure” hierarchs with a mystic connection to the land — after eliminating all “undesirables,” of course. These green fascists have a long heritage; they’ve inherited the self-satisfied attitude of great feudal lords who kept “pristine” forestland for the sole purpose of hunting. For men like Arnault, the environment is important because it exists to serve them. It exists, not for itself, for its own beauty, but rather to be a parkland where they can unwind. That is the future the far-right green capitalists foresee: a parkland earth, a nature preserve, kept empty of other people, for their own pleasure, whose upkeep falls on the slaves they intend to work out of existence. So it is wrong to call all these capitalists little Hitlers — some of them are little Goerrings and little Darrés instead.

Musk, heir to a Zambian emerald mine and a white South African fortune, also falls into the category of a little Darré-like fascist. This technologically-incompetent Tony Stark prances around with his proclamations of “saving the human race,” but what he really means is that he plans to colonize the Red Planet using glorified indentured labor. He has already revealed plans for laborers to take out loans to pay him for the pleasure of moving to Mars, with the principal to be paid back through work. Never mind the fact that his transportation company, SpaceX, so far can’t get its rockets to function, unless their intended function is egregious pollution in the form of concrete dust, which his rockets habitually create. When Musk talks about environmentalism, he’s talking about a red blood and soil — with a Martian aristocracy living off of indentured colonial labor.

As for Bill Gates, he’s publicly copped to his impact on the environment. “It’s true that my carbon footprint is absurdly high,” he tells us. But don’t worry, he’s “buying offsets through a company that removes carbon dioxide from the air and a nonprofit that installs clean energy upgrades in affordable housing units in Chicago.” So he’s pouring money into startups, which is being suctioned off into the pockets of small scale tech capitalists. Gates has always been loud on climate change — loud in the media, loud in personal conversations, loud everywhere but where it counts: with his investments. In 2011, even as he was publicly declaring his dedication to green solutions, Gates invested in NEOS GeoSolutions, a firm that helps gas and oil companies decide where to drill. In 2020, the Gates Foundation Trust owned 17 million shares — some $1.54 billion worth — of Canadian National Railway Company, which transports oil from Canada’s tar sands.

What else does he spend his time saying about the environment? Oh, only that “[d]ivestment… has reduced about zero tonnes of emissions.” Gates has bought his way into the environmentalist media space so he can champion goofy tech solutions that put money in the pockets of greedy angel investors (like him) and fight real climate change solutions — like divestment from fossil fuels or the implementation of the only real long-term answer: the complete and radical alteration of the economy such to remove the profit motive entirely from production.

So long as the economy remains the private preserve of wealthy individuals, and so long as production is designed not to satisfy the needs of individuals and populations but rather to make certain men (and, occasionally, women) obscenely wealthy; so long as the driving force behind all our industries remains the production of profit rather than the fulfillment of needs; so long as we are forced to deal with the anarchic, disorganized, and individualistic whims of the market to determine what is made and what is wasted, the environment can never be truly safe. So long as Capital remains in control of the economic decision-making, there are only two roads down which we can travel: the utter depletion of the planet and environment’s life-sustaining capacity, or the institution of the parkland fascism that certain sects of the wealthy plan in the gilded rooms of their mansions and yachts. These men are not, by any stretch of the imagination, climate heroes. They are champions of nothing but their own vanity and greed. Capitalism, which has given them such wealth, has also mutilated them. They are incapable of seeing the world as anything other than a subject, something to manipulate and control. The only world they’re out to save is their world, the world that exists for their pleasure, the world that is an extension of themselves. The rest of us? Well, to them, we’re just fuel for the fire.

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England

Every year, around 1,330 people are killed by the purposeful neglect of the capitalist state in the richest and most powerful of the Western capitalist countries, where we are told resources are the most plentiful. These 1,330 people — some years more, some years less — are left to freeze to death. Over the 2022 holiday weekend in December, a killing winter storm swept across North America. The death toll currently stands at or above 60 individuals, more than half of them in upstate New York. Power across the worst-affected regions exacerbated the effects of the storm. At its height, the storm left 1.2 million homes and businesses without power. Two-thirds of the U.S. population were under winter warnings or advisories. Overnight temperatures were as low as 9 degrees below zero, and that’s before accounting for wind chill. As always, it is those with the fewest resources and least able to deal with a dire event like this that were most affected.

The U.S. imperialist news turned the storm into a spectacle of horror, but not once was a serious attempt made by the federal government to reduce the impact of the storm on the unhoused or those who could not afford their power bills. No, indeed, in places like Connecticut, electricity and heating prices are set to spike on 1 January. But we must not lie to ourselves: the deaths that came after this storm are no different than the deaths that follow every major weather event in the U.S. Empire. This isn’t an outlier; this is the status quo. It is accepted and expected that thousands of unhoused persons and lower-income members of the working class will die whenever a seasonal weather disturbance hits the country. Meanwhile, COVID is still killing hundreds and sometimes thousands of people every day, and the capitalist government has completely given up the pretense of trying to combat it.

Every last one of these deaths is directly attributable to the iron laws of capitalism: the private ownership and control of economic production and the exploitation of billions of workers by and for the profit of a small class of capitalists. The capitalist state takes great pains to preserve the private property and hoarded wealth of the opulent capitalists, while it lets those who have the least — the workers, the unemployed, the elderly and disabled poor, the unhoused — suffer and die with little more than a shrug and a few misery-porn stories in the capitalist media. When, for instance, the stock market begins to crash, like it did in 2020, or when the “too big to fail” capitalist institutions of the country crumble under their own weight, like they did in 2008, the state is always ready to lend a helping hand. Oh, I’m sorry, did your value-per-share drop? Here comes the state to make up the difference. Oh my, did your rampant speculation destroy your company and other big banks like it? Well, here is a prop and a taxpayer-funded loan to help keep it afloat. “Too big to fail” was the phrase they used, and too big to fail is what they mean: the wealthy are the state. For the capitalist, society exists only to service and protect those of means. There is a corollary to “too big to fail” — “too small to care.” The lives of the working people are meaningless to the capitalist state. Let ten, let one hundred, let two thousand die each day — of what concern is it to Washington or Wall Street?

But COVID and this latest winter storm are hardly the beginning or the end of the weather catastrophes that struck the beleaguered working class of the U.S. Empire this year. 83 tornadoes struck the U.S. South. Hurricane Ian blasted Florida and killed more than 125 people. Nearly 7.5 million acres burned in wildfires. The drought in the U.S. West continues unabated, even as new data centers and chip-building facilities that threaten to use the last remnants of the Colorado River reserves are being constructed or opened.

These are not isolated events. This is the result of a regime that thrives on, relies on, and profits from social murder. The capitalists that run the U.S. Empire don’t care what happens to the environment. The only thing they care about — the only thing they’re capable of caring about — is lining their own pockets. If that means the planet’s ecosphere dies, they’re willing to kill it. If it means thousands and hundreds of thousands of working class people die, they’re ready to commit social mass-murder. Oh, how they’ll cry for us on television, but don’t think for a moment that they aren’t laughing as soon as the cameras are off… and all the way to the bank.

Since the advent of capitalism itself, the ruling class have used natural disasters, cold, and hunger as weapons against the working people. Today, they want you to know that unless you take their minimum wage job, you will freeze to death in the snow — freeze to death in incredible storms created by their own greed. That is the legacy of the U.S. Empire and its capitalist masters: a world ruined by rapacious, never-ending greed, and lives thrown away into the frigid winter they themselves have brought.

Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, is drying up. Its destruction threatens the lives of over 20 million people across the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, and is a direct consequence of capitalist extractive processes. The lake itself is an artificial reservoir east of Las Vegas, formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in 1935. It was intended to supply water and hydroelectricity to the rapidly growing urban areas of the Mojave desert which were developed, in part, to help secure the West against the possibility of reclamation by the region’s Indigenous peoples. For nearly a century it has, but climate change and recklessly irresponsible use of the Colorado’s water now imperils the lake’s, and, therefore, millions of the most vulnerable and oppressed people across the whole region’s, continued existence.

The climate naturally goes through periods of drought. Historically, these droughts have been damaging to those who experience them, but the relatively lower density of population and agriculture in the area meant that the threat was more local and of a smaller scale than the danger posed today. The Las Vegas metropolitan area has grown from a population of 708,000 in 1990 to over 2,800,000 in 2022 according to US Census Bureau data.

The drought currently afflicting the U.S. west began in the year 2000, twenty-two years ago. According to a UCLA research paper analyzing soil moisture, this 22-year period has been the driest of any, going back twelve hundred years. Let’s put that in perspective: this has been the driest period in the southwestern US at least as far back as the year 800 C.E., and possibly even farther. 2021 alone, they say, was probably drier than any other year in the last three centuries, and likely ranks 10th or 11th driest since the year 800. While drought is inevitable in such arid regions as the American southwest, their research demonstrates that fully 42% of the soil moisture anomaly of 2000-2021 was caused by anthropogenic — man-made — climate change.

Local and federal agencies have monitored water levels at Lake Mead very closely since the area was first flooded in 1935. The water has fallen over 170 feet between 1998 and July of this year, threatening to pitch the lake over into “dead pool” status, at which point the levels will be too low to extract power from via the Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric turbines. In fact, had several of those turbines not been retrofitted between 2011 and 2016, the lake would already be a dead pool today. As it stands, a further reduction of 90 feet from levels recorded in August of this year would make it impossible for the dam to function at all.

Lake Mead supplies drinking water to millions across the southwest, but it also serves another function. According to the Bureau of Reclamation, about 75% of the reservoir’s water outflow flows directly from the lake into Nevada’s and Arizona’s farmlands, fueling an agribusiness sector which focuses on the industrial production of highly water-intensive monocrops. None of these are native: lettuce, kale, almonds, and pistachios rely on the water from Lake Mead, as does extensive dairy farming. Yuma County, in fact, is the country’s largest supplier of iceberg lettuce and Arizona as a whole produces almost 30% of the country’s supply of the winter vegetable despite the incongruous-sounding fact that it’s a desert.

Should water levels at Lake Mead fall, the turbines that provide over 300 megawatts of energy to customers primarily in California and Arizona would shut down. People in those states, as well as those in Las Vegas which recently started drawing energy from the dam, would see a significant hike in energy prices, compounding with already historically high costs associated with natural gas fired energy. The power grid won’t fail, but coal and gas will have to be fired to cut the shortfall.

If the water line falls below that minimum level necessary to keep water flowing through the turbines, all of the Colorado River south of the Hoover Dam will be cut off from its headwaters. That would be catastrophic for communities that draw from the river below the dam, especially in California and Arizona which use the river extensively for both residential and agricultural use. Up to a third of Southern California’s water is drawn from the Colorado south of the dam. If the bourgeois authorities permit the Colorado to stop flowing, the entire environment will be destabilized.

The danger to Lake Mead is disproportionately a threat to the Indigenous people who rely on it. The western U.S. states allocate water rights by seniority; those who had the first allocations take priority. This had the, presumably, unintentional side-effect of working in the favor of Indigenous claimants to water resources, as those claims date back to the 19th century. Collectively, members of the Colorado River Basin Ten Tribes Partnership enjoy the rights to 2.8 million acre-feet of water from the river and its tributaries. Yet, these communities lack the funds and infrastructure to make use of the water Non-Indigenous water users often take the “remaining” water that the Indigenous nations cannot use once the year is out. In a period of tightening water supply and increasingly fierce competition for rights to the existing allocations, this provides a dangerous incentive to attack the remaining rights of the Indigenous peoples in the southwest. The quiet expropriation of the waters of the Colorado and its diversion away from Indigenous peoples to sustain unsustainably large settler monocrop farms is a hidden dimension of this struggle; it’s yet another expression of settler-colonial relations within the U.S. Empire.

Agriculture is by far the largest use of Colorado water by Indigenous peoples. While most non-Indigenous farmland in the basin is devoted to the industrial production of high-profit monocrops like almonds, the majority of Indigenous agricultural land consists of subsistence farms and other small agricultural plots. According to the USDA’s 2017 agricultural census, in Arizona nearly 70% of farmland is owned by Indigenous producers, who collectively account for about 2% of the state’s total agricultural revenue and in that year, 73% of Indigenous operated farms grossed under $1,000 in revenue. USDA figures also reflect that between 2007 and 2017, Indigenous owned land was reduced by over 600,000 acres, though that document cannot offer an explanation for this loss. White farm operators, however, held a small minority of the state’s farmland, only 24%, and collected a truly staggering 96% of the state’s agricultural revenue. 

This data paints a picture of an indigenous agricultural sector in Arizona that’s operated primarily by subsistence farmers and people who cultivate the soil to supplement the food they’re able to buy with regular wages. The destruction of the primary agricultural water source would have a distinctly different effect on them than it would for the white petit-bourgeois and bourgeois agricultural operators in other parts of the state. For the Indigenous peoples, already some of the most acutely impoverished in the country, the loss of the waters of the Colorado River represents not just the promise of an unprofitable year or the bankruptcy of individual producers, but an existential threat to their whole communities.

Monopoly capitalists, the engine of the U.S. Empire’s economy, perhaps sensing blood in the water, have descended upon the southwest hoping to collect on the peoples’ increasingly desperate situation. According to the New York Times, such giants of finance as MassMutual, a conglomerate based in Springfield, Massachusetts, are buying up water rights in rural agricultural towns in the region and selling them at a staggering profit to fast-growing urban centers like Phoenix and its suburbs. Panic is setting in among circles in the major cities, and a savvy capitalist can leverage that fear and uncertainty to promote bidding wars between cities for the rights to water allocations appropriated from the poorer, economically and politically weaker, rural communities. In their wake, they leave isolated towns and counties full of workers and petit-bourgeois landholders struggling to pay water bills that have skyrocketed over the span of just a few short years. This is not an unexpected, accidental byproduct of the commodification of water — it’s an intentional decision made by the vultures who nest on Wall Street half a continent away.

Volatility in this newly emerging water market (which the New York Times compares to the energy bubbles of the 1990s, made infamous by the spectacular collapse of Enron in 2001), the steady and uninterrupted escalation of prices, and the vice-like squeeze on the people of the southwest make this a prime target for capitalists looking for profitable opportunities for investment in the face of looming recession and economic crisis. 

As the lake starts to run dry, as the flow of water slows and the power provided by the Hoover Dam falls off, the negotiators for the states that draw from the Colorado River Basin seek to protect agribusiness that produces revenue measured in the tens of billions of dollars annually at the expense of the most vulnerable in the region. In June, the federal Bureau of Reclamation gave seven states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah – a deadline to determine how they would draw 15% less water from the river in 2023, or else have a plan drafted and imposed on them. That deadline is fast approaching, and, at the time of writing, negotiators representing the concerned states are locked in increasingly bitter disagreement over who among them should shoulder the brunt of the cuts. States in the upper basin argue that those in the lower basin should suffer the most drastic cuts, owing to the fact that they draw the majority of the water. Lower basin states retort that the upper basin should instead have its ration cut, considering that those states usually don’t make use of all the water they have negotiated for in the past, and because their contention that they need to keep the extra to accommodate future growth is a secondary priority in such a time of crisis.

We need to be absolutely clear on this point: this conflict is among and between the ruling classes of those states, not the workers. The figures they manipulate and throw at each other like hand grenades and the stakes at play during these negotiations are measured not in lives or the peoples’ health, but in future profit estimates for the richest residents and business owners. At the end of the current negotiation cycle, even if the federal government has to step in and impose a rationing plan upon them like a referee separating violent players on the field, whatever plan is agreed upon will still see over 70% of the Colorado’s waters diverted for an unsustainable agricultural industry. It will still see rising costs for the workers and the continued expropriation of Indigenous property (along with the revocation of the few rights the bourgeois state still pretends to recognize), and will still invite the barons of capital to descend with ever-increasing ferocity upon this suffering region.

James Eklund, formerly the head of Colorado’s water management, stands as a shining example of the priorities of the capitalists. Speaking on the developing water crisis, he says “I have seen time and again the wisdom of using incentives that attract private sector investment and innovation. Dealing with the threat of climate change to our water requires all sectors, public and private, working together.” Eklund isn’t unaware of the predatory nature of capital’s creation of, and intervention into, the water market. In declaring that the only solution to this crisis is to open the floodgates to capital and the commodification of water itself, Eklund says, without shame, that he stands on the side of the vultures and robber barons who would sharpen a humanitarian catastrophe for the promise of healthy profits in the futures markets. Here, he speaks not as an individual but as the representative of the entire bourgeois class and the government they’ve erected to defend their class dictatorship. These are the jackals who are negotiating for 40 million people’s access to water. They have every intention of leaving the people of the Colorado River Basin and every community that draws upon it to a slow, choking death; just as the bourgeois government has turned its back on the suffering caused by COVID.

This period, when public awareness of the water crisis is at its peak, when the nature of the ruling class’ nihilistic and reckless disregard for our health and the health of our environment is the most plain for all to see, offers the working class an opportunity to take advantage of the cracks in ruling class unity and to push for a more sustainable, humane solution to the water crisis. We can only make that happen if we act together. Educate yourselves and your neighbors about the destruction being intentionally visited upon us by the extractive policies of the rich. Build bridges with the communities most affected by the new plan for ecocide being negotiated by the State governments, especially the Indigenous peoples of the region and the many, many exploited migrant workers who are forced to toil in inhumane conditions in the southwest’s agricultural fields. March against the unjust and unsustainable deals made between those who’s only conceivable risk in all of this is the loss of profits, and announce to them that the working class rejects as a matter of principle the notion that the richest exploiters have the right to bargain away the peoples’ future in exchange for profits.

It is crucial that the workers take for themselves an independent seat at the negotiating table. Direct organization of the working class, and its exercise of political power, is necessary to protect not only the white working class communities of the southwest, but to help secure the very existence of the Indigenous peoples under attack.

If a deal is agreed upon by the states without the direct input of the working class, or imposed upon them by the federal government, the workers must demand its repeal and replacement by one written entirely by our class, without the input of the exploiters. The working class and the oppressed are the only groups in whose interests it is to build a sustainable, just future. The capitalists are willing to sacrifice every tomorrow for today.

We must seize the opportunity, today, to begin crafting it or else resign ourselves to a future of ever worsening environmental disaster and poverty.