Capitalism and Environmental Collapse

Foreword
Preface to the English Edition
	Reference
Acknowledgments
Contents
Part I: The Convergence of Environmental Crises
	Chapter 1: Introduction
		1.1 The Great Inversion and the Limits of Environmental Awareness
		1.2 An Ongoing Change in the Nature of the State: The “State-Corporation”
		1.3 The Regression of Multilateralism
		1.4 From Rio+20 to the Present
		1.5 Natural Reserves and Horror Vacui
		1.6 Unsustainability and the Increasing Severity of Environmental Crises
		1.7 The Phoenix That Turned into a Chicken
		1.8 “What Were We Thinking?”, Denial, and Self-Deception
		1.9 The Goal and the Two Central Arguments of This Book
		References
	Chapter 2: Decrease and Degradation of Forests
		2.1 We Can’t Live Without Forests
		2.2 The Upward Curve of Deforestation (1800–2019)
		2.3 Acceleration
		2.4 Global Forest Watch (GFW)
		2.5 Boreal Forests
		2.6 Deforestation Accelerates in the Tropics
		2.7 Intact Forest Landscapes (IFL)
		2.8 Brazil (1970–2019): The Most Fulminating Ecocide Ever Perpetrated by the Human Species
		2.9 The Cerrado Might Disappear by 2030
		2.10 Amazon: The Other Ecocide
		2.11 The Military Catastrophe
		2.12 The End of the World Machine
		2.13 Tipping Point: Forest Dieback
		2.14 Cavitation or Plant Embolism: The Threshold of Hydraulic Failure
		2.15 Last Century of the Rainforests
		2.16 The Socio-environmental Cancer of Deforestation
		References
	Chapter 3: Water and Soil
		3.1 Decline of Water Resources
			3.1.1 Intensification of Water Scarcity on a Global Scale
			3.1.2 The Impact of Climate Change
		3.2 Rivers, Lakes, and Reservoirs
			3.2.1 Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh
			3.2.2 Brazil, Mexico, and the USA
			3.2.3 Middle East and Central Asia
			3.2.4 “Water: China’s Achilles Heel”
			3.2.5 Degradation and Death of Lakes
			3.2.6 Lakes of Central Asia: Aral, Balkhash, Urmia, Hamoun, Baikal, etc.
			3.2.7 China’s Lakes
			3.2.8 Africa: Chad, Songor, Faguibine, etc.
			3.2.9 The Americas
		3.3 Aquifers
			3.3.1 India
			3.3.2 China
			3.3.3 United States
			3.3.4 Middle East
		3.4 More Severe and Widespread Droughts
			3.4.1 The Amazon Region
			3.4.2 South Europe and the Mediterranean Basin
			3.4.3 China, Central Asia, and Iran
			3.4.4 Australia and Africa
			3.4.5 Southwest and Central Plains of the USA
		3.5 Soil Degradation and Desertification
			3.5.1 Desertification
			3.5.2 Latin America
			3.5.3 China and Mongolia
			3.5.4 Soil Impoverishment by Industrial Agriculture
		References
	Chapter 4: Waste and Industrial Intoxication
		4.1 Preponderance of Waste
		4.2 Three Factors for the Increase in Waste
		4.3 From Mundus to WALL-E
		4.4 The Global Increase in Waste
		4.5 Sewage and Municipal Solid Waste (MSW)
		4.6 Plastic, the Throwaway Lifestyle
		4.7 Plasticene: The World as a Continuum of Polymers
		4.8 BPA and Phthalates
		4.9 Plastic in the Oceans
		4.10 Industrial Pesticides
		4.11 Chemical Warfare and the War Already Lost
		4.12 A Growing Threat
		4.13 Increase in Consumption and Variety of Pesticides Since 2004
		4.14 The Examples of France, the USA, and South America
		4.15 GMO = More Pesticides
		4.16 Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs)
		4.17 Particulate Matter and Tropospheric Ozone
		4.18 Tropospheric Ozone
		4.19 Rare-Earth Elements (REEs)
		4.20 Toxicity
		4.21 Electronic Waste (E-Waste)
		4.22 Export of E-Waste
		4.23 Conclusion
		References
	Chapter 5: Fossil Fuels
		5.1 Pollution in the Extraction and Transportation Processes
			5.1.1 Spills from Ships (ITOPF) and Offshore Platforms
			5.1.2 2010–2018: From the Gulf of Mexico to the China Sea
			5.1.3 Acts of War
			5.1.4 Acute and Long-Term Impacts
		5.2 The Devastation of Tropical Ecosystems
			5.2.1 Brazil (1975–2017)
		5.3 Subsidies and Investments in the Oil Industry
		5.4 Unconventional Oil and Gas: Maximized Devastation
			5.4.1 Tar Sands and Petcoke
			5.4.2 Hydraulic Fracturing or Fracking
			5.4.3 The Six Major Harms of Hydraulic Fractioning
		5.5 Collapse by Detox or Overdose?
			5.5.1 There Is No Peak in Oil Demand for the Foreseeable Future
			5.5.2 The Hypothesis of Scarcity
			5.5.3 The Hypothesis of an Overdose
		References
	Chapter 6: The Regression to Coal
		6.1 The Coal Saga
			6.1.1 2014–2016
		6.2 A Still Distant Peak Coal
			6.2.1 The Second Childhood of the Industrial Revolution
		6.3 The Most Polluting Fossil Fuels
			6.3.1 Extraction
			6.3.2 Water and “Airpocalypse”
		References
	Chapter 7: Climate Emergency
		7.1 The Peak in Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Is Not Yet in Sight
		7.2 The Current CO2 Atmospheric Concentration Is Unprecedented Over the Past 3 Million Years (and Its Rate of Increase Is Unprecedented Over at Least the Past 55 Million Years)
		7.3 Between 1.2 °C and 1.5 °C and Accelerating
			7.3.1 Spatial Distribution: Global vs. Regional Warming
		7.4 Suffering and Greater Lethality due to the Current Warming
		7.5 2 °C: A Social–Physical Impossibility
			7.5.1 The Imminence of 1.5 °C
			7.5.2 “The Great Deceleration”?
			7.5.3 A 2 °C Warming Will Be Reached in the Second Fourth of the Century
		7.6 The Current Trajectory Leads to a Warming Beyond 3 °C
			7.6.1 Deadlines and Impacts
		References
	Chapter 8: Climate Feedbacks and Tipping Points
		8.1 The “Hothouse Earth” Hypothesis
			8.1.1 Heightened Climate Sensitivity
		8.2 The Arctic Methane Conundrum
			8.2.1 The Permafrost Carbon Feedback
			8.2.2 Methane Hydrates or Clathrates: The Thawing of Subsea Permafrost
			8.2.3 A Slow-Motion Time Bomb or a Methane and CO2 Burst?
		8.3 Higher Rises in Sea Level
			8.3.1 An Average Rise of 5 mm per Year That Is Accelerating
			8.3.2 Greenland
			8.3.3 Antarctica
			8.3.4 Projections of 2 Meters or More by 2100
			8.3.5 A New Projection: “Several Meters Over a Timescale of 50–150 Years”
			8.3.6 Climate Refugees
			8.3.7 Consequences of a Rise in Sea Level of Up to 1 Meter
			8.3.8 Cyclones, Hurricanes, Typhoons, Tornadoes… and Nuclear Power Plants
			8.3.9 A Call to Arms
		References
	Chapter 9: Demography and Democracy
		9.1 Demographic Choices and Democracy: Reciprocal Conditioning
		9.2 Beyond the Arithmetic Addition: Urbanization, Tourism, and Automobiles
			9.2.1 Tourism
			9.2.2 Automotive Vehicles
		9.3 The Destructiveness of Technology (the T Index)
			9.3.1 A Fragile Premise
		References
	Chapter 10: Collapse of Terrestrial Biodiversity
		10.1 Defaunation and Biological Annihilation
		10.2 The 1992 Convention on Biological Biodiversity
		10.3 The Biodiversity of the Holocene
		10.4 The Sixth Extinction
		10.5 The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species
		10.6 The Living Planet Index (LPI) and the Decline in Terrestrial Vertebrate Populations
		10.7 The Two Extinction Pathways
		10.8 The International Financial System
		10.9 Systemic Destruction: 70% of Biodiversity Loss Comes from Agriculture and Livestock
		10.10 Mammals
		10.11 Birds
		10.12 Terrestrial Arthropods and the Decline in Pollinators
		10.13 The Ongoing Collapse of Flying Insect Biomass
		10.14 Pollinators and the Crisis in Pollination
		10.15 Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and the Pesticides
		10.16 Three Certainties Among So Many Uncertainties
		References
	Chapter 11: Collapse of Biodiversity in the Aquatic Environment
		11.1 Mammals
		11.2 Noise Pollution
		11.3 Overfishing and Aquaculture
		11.4 Fish Stocks on the Verge of Collapse
		11.5 Regional Declines, Some Irreversible
		11.6 Bottom Trawling: Fishing as Mining
		11.7 Hypoxia and Anoxia
		11.8 Industrial Fertilizers
		11.9 Ocean Dead Zones: An Expanding Marine Cemetery
		11.10 Up to 170% More Ocean Acidification by 2100
		11.11 Ongoing Effects
		11.12 Corals Die and Jellyfish Proliferate
		11.13 Jellyfish
		11.14 Plastic Kills and Travels Through the Food Web
		11.15 Ocean Warming, Die-Offs, and Decline of Phytoplankton
		References
	Chapter 12: Genesis of the Idea of the Anthropocene and the New Man–Nature Relationship
		12.1 Cold War, the Atomic Age, and the Industrial and Agrochemical Machine
		12.2 Anthropization: A Large-Scale Geophysical Experiment
			12.2.1 “The Masters of the Apocalypse”
			12.2.2 From the Nuclear to the Ecological
			12.2.3 1972–2002: The Final Formulation of the Multiauthored Concept of the Anthropocene
			12.2.4 The Great Acceleration and Other Markers of Anthropic Interference
		12.3 The New Man–Nature Relationship
			12.3.1 The Powerlessness of Our Power
			12.3.2 A New World, Biologically, Especially in the Tropics
		12.4 Hypobiosphere: Functional and Nonfunctional Species to Man
			12.4.1 The Increase in Meat Consumption
			12.4.2 Doubling of Per Capita Consumption Between 2000 and 2050
			12.4.3 Meat = Climate Change
			12.4.4 Meat = Deforestation, Land-Use Change, and Soil Degradation
			12.4.5 Meat = Water Depletion
		References
Part II: Three Concentric Illusions
	Chapter 13: The Illusion of a Sustainable Capitalism
		13.1 The Capitalist Market Is Not Homeostatic
			13.1.1 The Inversion of Taxis
		13.2 Milton Friedman and Corporate Mentality
		13.3 Three Aspects of the Impossibility of a Sustainable Capitalism
		13.4 Regulation by a Mixed Mechanism
			13.4.1 The State and the Financial System
			13.4.2 The Obsolescence of the Statesman
			13.4.3 Threats to the Democratic Tradition of Political Representation
			13.4.4 State Indebtedness
			13.4.5 Tax Evasion, the Huge “Black Hole”
			13.4.6 What to Expect from States?
		13.5 A Super-entity. The Greatest Level of Inequality in Human History
			13.5.1 An Emerging Subspecies of Homo sapiens: The UHNWI
		13.6 “Degrowth Is Not Symmetrical to Growth”
			13.6.1 The Idea of Managed Degrowth
		13.7 Conclusion
		References
	Chapter 14: More Surplus = Less Security
		14.1 Conviction of the Conquerors, Seduction of the Conquered
		14.2 From Ceiling Effect to the Principle of Infinite Accumulation
		14.3 The Primitive Character of the Monetary Accumulation Drive
		14.4 Living Space of the Species and the Age of the Finite World
		14.5 The Predominance of Centripetal Forces in Mediterranean Antiquity
			14.5.1 The Spatial Limit as a Sign of Wisdom: The Pillars of Hercules
				14.5.1.1 Dante
				14.5.1.2 From Dante’s Cosmography to Petrarch’s Psychology
		14.6 The Emblem of Charles V and the Affirmation of Centrifugal Forces
		14.7 Technolatry, Manifest Destiny, and Dystopia
			14.7.1 Manifest Destiny
			14.7.2 From Dominion to Self-Control: The Audacity of Prudence
		References
	Chapter 15: The Anthropocentric Illusion
		15.1 Three Historical Emphases of the Anthropocentric Presumption
			15.1.1 The Cosmotheological and Teleological Emphases
			15.1.2 The Biological Emphasis
			15.1.3 From Descartes to Kant: Anthropocentrism as Discontinuity
			15.1.4 The Ecological Presumption
		15.2 The Fourth “Severe Blow”
			15.2.1 The Limit Between Adaptation and Counter-Adaptation
			15.2.2 Counterproductivity: a Defining Feature of Our Time
		15.3 Human Health Backfires
		15.4 The Great Mental Block
		15.5 Conclusion
		References
	Chapter 16: Conclusion: From the Social Contract to the Natural Contract
		16.1 Decentralization and Power Sharing
		16.2 Neither Nation nor Empire: Overcoming the Notion of Absolute National Sovereignty
		16.3 A Power of Arbitration and Veto Emanating from Society
		16.4 Citizens Must Summon Science to Understand Their Own Political Interest
		16.5 From the Negative to the Positive Principle: The Natural Contract
		16.6 Our Plan Is Survival
		References
Index