S ecurities and E xchange C ommission 2010
(http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/101063/000119312510163782/ds8.htm)
UNITED STATES
SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
Washington, D.C. 20549
FORM S-8
REGISTRATION STATEMENT
UNDER
THE SECURITIES ACT OF 1933
Chiquita Brands International , Inc .
(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)
New Jersey 04-1923360
( State or other jurisdiction of incorporation or organization)
(I.R.S. Employer
Identification No.)
250 East Fifth Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202
(Address of principal executive offices) (Zip code) discusses t he sit uations i n which c ourts s hould appl y s uch punishment.

(John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, Brett, assist. prof of sociology @ NCSU, and
Richard, assoc. prof of sociology @ U of Oregon, Monthly Review Vol. 62.6 November JF)
Seen in the context of a capitalist society, the Jevons Paradox therefore demonstrates the fallacy of current notions that the environmental problems facing society can be solved by purely
technological means.
Mainstream environmental economists often refer to “dematerialization,” or the “decoupling” of economic growth, from consumption of greater energy and resources.
Growth in energy efficiency is often taken
as a concrete indication that the environmental problem is being solved. Yet savings in
materials and energy, in the context of a given process of production, as we have seen, are nothing new
; they are part of the everyday history of capitalist development.36 Each new steam engine, as Jevons emphasized, was more efficient than the one before. “Raw materials-savings processes,” environmental sociologist Stephen Bunker noted, “are older than the Industrial
Revolution, and they have been dynamic throughout the history of capitalism.” Any notion that reduction in material throughput, per unit of national income, is a new phenomenon is therefore “profoundly ahistorical.”37 What is neglected, then, in simplistic notions that increased energy efficiency normally leads to increased energy savings overall, is the reality of the Jevons Paradox relationship—through which energy savings are used to promote new capital formation and the
proliferation of commodities, demanding ever greater resources.
Rather than an anomaly, the rule
that efficiency increases energy and material use is integral to the “regime of capital” itself.
38
As stated in The Weight of Nations, an important empirical study of material outflows in recent decades in five industrial nations
(Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and Japan):
“Efficiency gains brought by technology and new management practices have been offset by [increases in] the scale of economic
growth.”39 The result is the production of mountains upon mountains of commodities, cheapening unit costs and
leading to greater squandering of material resources.
Under monopoly capitalism, moreover, such commodities increasingly take the form of artificial use values, promoted by a vast marketing system and designed to instill ever more demand for commodities and the exchange values they represent—as a substitute for the fulfillment of genuine human needs. Unnecessary, wasteful goods are produced
by useless toil to enhance purely economic values at the
expense of the environment. Any slowdown in this process of ecological destruction, under
the present system, spells economic disaster.
In Jevons’s eyes, the “momentous choice” raised by a continuation of business as usual was simply “between brief but true [national] greatness and longer continued mediocrity.” He opted for the former—the maximum energy flux. A century and a half later, in our much bigger, more global—but no less expansive—economy, it
is no longer simply national supremacy that is at stake, but the fate of the planet itself.
To be sure, there are those who maintain that we should “live high now and let the future take care of itself.” To choose this course, though,
is to court planetary disaster. The only real answer for
humanity
(including future generations) and the earth as a whole is to alter the social relations of production, to create a system in which efficiency is no longer a curse—a higher system in which equality, human development, community, and sustainability are the explicit goals.

(John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at University of Oregon, and Brett Clark, assistant professor of sociology at the
University of Utah., “The Planetary Emergency,” Monthly Review, December 2012, vol. 64, issue 7) BSH
Capitalism
today is caught in a seemingly
endless crisis, with economic stagnation and upheaval circling the globe
.1
But while the world has been fixated on the economic problem, global environmental conditions have been rapidly worsening, confronting humanity with its ultimate
crisis: one of long-term survival. The common source of both of these crises resides in the process of capital accumulation.
Likewise the common solution is to be sought in a “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,” going beyond the regime of capital.2
¶
It is still possible for humanity to avert what economist Robert
Heilbroner once called “ ecological Armageddon.”
3 The means for the creation of a just and sustainable world currently exist, and are to be found lying hidden in the growing gap between what could be achieved with the resources already available to us, and what the prevailing social order allows us to accomplish. It is this latent potential for a quite different human metabolism with nature that offers the master-key to a workable ecological exit strategy.
¶ The Approaching Ecological Precipice ¶
Science today tells us that we have a generation at most in which to carry out a radical transformation in our economic relations, and our relations with the earth, if we want to avoid a major tipping point or “point of no return,” after which vast changes in the earth’s climate will likely be beyond our ability to prevent and will be irreversible.4
At that point it will be impossible to stop the ice sheets in Antarctica and
Greenland from continuing to melt, and thus the sea level from rising by as much as “tens of meters.”
5
Nor will we be able to
prevent the Arctic sea ice from vanishing completely
in the summer months, or carbon dioxide and methane from being massively released by the decay of organic matter currently trapped beneath the permafrost— both of which would represent positive feedbacks dangerously accelerating climate change. Extreme weather events will become more and more frequent and destructive
. An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrated that the record-breaking heat wave that hit the Moscow area in 2010 with disastrous effect was made five times more likely, in the decade ending in that year as compared with earlier decades, due to the warming trend, implying “an approximate 80% probability” that it “would not have occurred without climate warming.” Other instances of extreme weather such as the deadly European heat wave in 2003 and the serious drought in Oklahoma and Texas in 2011, have been shown to be connected to earth warming.
Hurricane Sandy
, which devastated much of New York and New Jersey at the end of October 2012, was impacted and amplified to a considerable extent by climate change
.6
¶ The point of irreversible climate change is usually thought of as a 2°C (3.6°F) increase in global average temperature, which has been described as equivalent at the planetary level to the “cutting down of the last palm tree” on Easter Island. An increase of 2°C in global average temperature coincides roughly with cumulative carbon emissions of around one trillion metric tons. Based on past emissions trends it is predicted by climate scientists at Oxford University that we will hit the one trillion metric ton mark in 2043, or thirty-one years from now. We could avoid emitting the trillionth metric ton if we were to reduce our carbon emissions beginning immediately by an annual rate of 2.4 percent a year.7
¶ To be sure, climate science is not exact enough to pinpoint precisely how much warming will push us past a planetary tipping point.8 But all the recent indications are that if we want to avoid planetary disaster we need to stay considerably below 2°C.
As a result, almost all governments have signed on to staying below 2°C as a goal at the urging of the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. More and more, 2°C has come to symbolize the reality of a planetary point of no return. In this sense, all the discussions of what the climate will be like if the world warms to 3°C, or all the way to 6°C, are relatively meaningless.9 Before such temperatures are attained, we will have already reached the limits of our ability to control the climate- change process, and we will then be left with the task of adapting to apocalyptic ecological conditions. Already Arctic sea ice experienced a record melt in the summer of 2012 with some scientists predicting an ice-free Arctic in the summer as early as 2016–
2020. In the words of James Hansen, the world’s leading climatologist, we are facing a “planetary emergency”—since if we approach
2°C “we will have started a process that is out of humanity’s control.”10 ¶ Given all of this, actually aiming for the one trillion metric ton mark in cumulative carbon emissions, or a 2°C increase in global temperature, would be courting long-term disaster. Some prominent climate analysts have proposed a target of staying below 750 billion cumulative metric tons of carbon—estimated to provide a 75 percent chance of staying below the climate-change tipping point. At current rates of carbon emissions it is calculated that we will reach the 750 billion metric tons mark in 2028, or sixteen years. We could avoid emitting the 750 billionth metric ton if we were to reduce our carbon emissions beginning immediately at an average annual rate of 5.3 percent.11 To get some perspective

on this, the Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change issued by the British government in 2007, which is generally seen as representing the progressive side of the carbon debate, argued that a reduction in emissions of more than a 1 percent annual rate would generate a severe crisis for the capitalist economy and hence was unthinkable.12
¶ M any thought that the Great
Financial Crisis would result in a sharp curtailment of carbon emissions, helping to limit global warming.
Carbon emissions dipped by 1.4 percent in
20
09, but this brief decline was more than offset by a record
5.9 percent growth of
carbon emissions in 2010, even as the world economy
as a whole continued to stagnate
. This rapid increase has been attributed primarily to the increasing fossil-fuel intensity of the world economy, and to the continued expansion of emerging economies, notably China.13
¶
In an influential article published in Nature Climate Change,
“Asymmetric Effects of Economic Decline on CO2 Emissions,” Richard
York used data for over 150 countries between 1960 and 2008 to demonstrate
that carbon dioxide emissions do not decline in the same proportion in an economic downturn as they increase in an economic upturn
. Thus for each 1 percent in the growth of GDP per capita, carbon emissions grew by 0.733 percent, whereas for each 1 percent drop in GDP, carbon emissions fell by only 0.430 percent. These asymmetric effects can be attributed to built-in infrastructural conditions—factories, transportation networks, and homes—meaning that these structures do not disappear during recessions and continue to influence fossil-fuel consumption.
It follows of necessity that a boom-and-bust economic system cannot reduce carbon
emissions; that can only be achieved by an economy that reduces such emissions on a steady basis along with changes in the infrastructure of production and society in general.
14 ¶ Indeed, there is reason to believe that there is a strong pull on capitalism
in its current monopoly-finance phase to seek out more fossil-fuel intensive forms of production
the more deeply it falls into the stagnation trap, resulting in repeated attempts to restart the growth engine by,
in effect, giving it more gas
. According to the Low
Carbon Index, the carbon intensity of world production fell by 0.8 percent in 2009, and by 0.7 percent in 2010. However, in 2011 the carbon intensity of world production rose by 0.6 percent. “
The economic recovery
, where it has occurred, has been dirty
.”15 The notion that a stagnant-prone capitalist growth economy (what Herman Daly calls a “failed growth economy”) would be even more intensively destructive of the environment was a thesis advanced as early as 1976 by the pioneering Marxist environmental sociologist Charles H. Anderson. As Anderson put it, “ as the threat of stagnation mounts, so does the need for throughput in order to maintain tolerable growth rates.
”16 ¶ The hope of many that peak crude oil production and the end of cheap oil would serve to limit carbon emissions has also proven false. It is clear that in the age of enhanced worldwide coal production, fracking, and tar sands oil there is no shortage of carbon with which to heat up the planet.
To day’s known stocks of oil, coal, and gas reserves are at least five times the planet’s remaining carbon budget, amounting to 2.8 gigatons in carbon potential, and the signs are that the capitalist system intends to burn it all.
17 As Bill McKibben observed in relation to these fossil-fuel reserves: “Yes, this coal and oil is still technically in the soil. But it’s already economically aboveground.”18
Corporations and governments count these carbon resources as financial assets, which means they are intended for exploitation.
Not too long ago environmentalists were worried about the world running out of fossil fuels (especially crude oil); now this has been inverted by climate-change concerns.
¶
As bad as the climate crisis is, however
, it is important to understand that it is only a part of the larger global ecological crisis
—since climate change is
merely one among a number of dangerous rifts in planetary boundaries arising from human transformations of the earth. Ocean acidification, destruction of the ozone layer, species extinction, the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, growing fresh water shortages, land-cover change, and chemical pollution all represent global ecological transformations/crises.
Already we have crossed the planetary boundaries
(designated by scientists based on departure from Holocene conditions) not only in relation to climate change, but also with respect to species extinction and the nitrogen cycle.
Species extinction is occurring at about a thousand times the “background rate,”
a phenomenon known as the
“sixth extinction” (referring back to the five previous periods of mass extinctions in earth history—the most recent of which, 65 million years ago, resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs).
Nitrogen pollution now constitutes a major cause of dead zones in oceans.
Other developing planetary rifts, such as ocean acidification
(known as the “evil twin” of climate change since it is also caused by carbon emissions), and chronic loss of freshwater supplies
, which is driving the global privatization of water, are of growing concern. All of this raises basic questions of survival: the ultimate crisis confronting humanity.
19 ¶ The Ultimate Crisis ¶
The scale and speed of the emerging ecological challenge
, manifested not only in climate change but also in numerous other planetary rifts, c onstitutes irrefutable evidence that the root cause of the environmental problem lies in our socioeconomic

system, and particularly in the dynamic of capital accumulation.
¶
Faced with such intractable problems, the response of the dominant interests has always been that technology
, supplemented by market magic and population control, can solve all problems,
allowing for unending capital accumulation and economic growth without undue ecological effects by means of an absolute decoupling of growth from environmental throughput. Thus, when asked about the problems posed by fossil fuels
(including tar sands oil, shale oil and gas, and coal) President
Obama responded: “All of us are going to have to work together in an effective way to figure out how we balance the imperative of economic growth with very real concerns about the effect we’re having on our planet. And ultimately I think this can be solved with technology.
”20
¶
Yet, the dream that technology alone
, considered in some abstract sense, can solve the environmental problem
, allowing for unending economic growth without undue ecological effects through an absolute decoupling of one from the other
, is quickly fading
.21 Not only are technological solutions limited by the laws of physics
, namely the second law of thermodynamics (which tells us, for example, that energy is partially dissipated upon use), but they are also subject to the laws of capitalism itself
.22
Technological change under the present system routinely brings about
relative efficiency gains in energy use,
reducing the energy and raw material input per unit of output.
Yet, this seldom results in absolute decreases in environmental throughput at the aggregate level; rather the tendency is toward the ever-greater use of energy and materials.
This is captured by the well-known Jevons paradox, named after the nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons. Jevons pointed out that gains in energy efficiency almost invariably increase the absolute amount of energy used, since such efficiency feeds economic expansion. Jevons highlighted how each new steam engine from Watt’s famous engine on was more efficient in its use of coal than the one before, yet the introduction of each improved steam engine nonetheless resulted in a greater absolute use of coal.23
Faber 18 (6/14/18, Daniel Faber is director of the Northeastern Environmental Justice
Research Collaborative in Boston. He co-founded the international journal Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism and is the author or editor of several books, including Foundations for Social Change.
“Global Capitalism, Reactionary Neoliberalism, and the Deepening of Environmental Injustices” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10455752.2018.1464250?needAccess=true//TU-
SG )
Generally speaking, from the United States perspective there are two mechanisms related to the ecological crisis
— one domestic
, the other international — by which capital is reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and facilitating capital accumulation
. First of all, in the United States and the global North, capital is responding to threats posed by the growth of low-cost imports from foreign competitors, as well as the need to boost the competitiveness of its exports abroad, by reducing the costs of doing business inside their home countries. Along with labor costs, environmental protection measures are considered by many
“dirty” industries to be some of the most burdensome
.
Companies therefore seek to protect profi ts not only by “downsizing” the labor force but also by cutting “unproductive expenditures ” on pollution control equipment, environmental conservation, and worker health and safety
. Simply put, the key to cost containment lies in processes of capital restructuring that enables corporations to extract greater value from labor power and nature in less time and at a lower cost (i.e. to increase the rate of exploitation of labor and nature). Under the reactionary neoliberal regimes this entails launching a renewed domestic political assault on the EJ movement, trade unions
, environm more likely they are to experience arduous environmental and human health problems. The weight of the ecological burden upon a community depends upon the balance of power between capital, the state, and social movements responding to the needs and demands of the populace. In capitalist countries such as the United States
, it is working-class neighborhoods, ethnic minorities, and poor communities of color that most often experience the worst problems
.
Environmental inequality is now increasing faster than income inequality in the U nited
S tates (Boyce, Zwickl, and Ash 2014).
Similar to the “domestic” strategy
of reducing production costs by displacing ecological and public health hazards onto poor people of color and the white working class inside the United States and other countries of the global North, corporations also reduce costs by adopting the “international” strategy of exporting ecological hazards outside America’s national boundaries
(Pellow 2007; Faber 2008).
The worsening ecological crisis in the global South is directly related to an international system of economic and environmental stratification
in which the United
States and other advanced capitalist nations are able to shift or impose the environmental burden on weaker states (Adeloa 2000; Li and Zhou 2017). In fact, one of the primary aims of the neoliberal agenda is to facilitate the displacement of externalities by capital onto poorer nations.
The export of

ecological hazards to the global South reflects the economic logic of neoliberal policymakers aligned with the interests of transnational corporations
, which deems human life in the global South worth much less than in the North
. If the poor and underemployed masses of Africa become sick or die from exposure to pollution produced by domestic capital or exported from the North, it will have a much smaller impact on the profits of international capital. Aside from the higher costs of pollution-abatement in the advanced capitalist countries, if highly skilled and well-compensated workers in the global North fall prey to environmentally related health problems, the expense to capital and the state can be significant. Similarly, if African Americans living in Flint, Michigan are so devalued that their “premature deaths” do not constitute a cost to the capitalist system, neoliberal policymakers will remain indifferent to the public health abuses inflicted on the community by lead poisoning (Pulido 2016, 2). Although morally reprehensible, under the global capitalist system it pays for business to shift pollution onto poor communities and countries. And this is precisely the goal of neoliberals dominating global power structures
.
Given the willingness of neoliberal governments in the global South to tradeoff environmental protection in favor of capital investment and accumulation, the growing mobility of capital
(in all forms) is facilitating the export of ecological problems from the advanced capitalist countries to the global South and sub-peripheral states
. This export of ecological hazard from the United States and other Northern countries to the less-developed countries takes place as the following: (1) in the money circuit of global capital, in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) in domestically owned hazardous industries, as well as destructive investment schemes to gain access to new oil fields, forests, agricultural lands, mining deposits, and other natural resources
; (2) in the productive circuit of 12
D. FABER global capital, with the relocation of polluting and environmentally hazardous production processes and polluting facilities
owned by transnational capital to the global South
; (3) in the commodity circuit of global capital, as witnessed in the marketing of more profitable but also more dangerous foods, drugs, pesticides, technologies, and other consumer/capital goods; and
(4) in the “waste circuit” of global capital, with the dumping in the global South of toxic wastes, pollution, discarded consumer products, trash, and other commodified and noncommodified forms of “anti-wealth” produced by Northern industry
. In effect, international capital is appropriating ecological carrying capacity for the core by transferring
(“distancing”) externalities to the global South
(Frey 2003). As in the United States, it is the poorest and most politically repressed people in the South that bear the greatest brunt of the global ecological crisis . In the age of reactionary neoliberalism susceptibility to the “negative externalities” of global capital is ever more deeply related to social positionality, that is, to where a person or group of people are situated in multiple power structures centered on class, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and more
(Walker 2012). The variou s social positions or “identities” held in these power structures intersect to create different social “axes” of advantage and disadvantage.
A poor workingclass African-American woman in the United States encounters multiple disadvantages in comparison to the control capacity exercised by a white, middleclass woman (or male) in Sweden. A poor woman that is part of the Ogoni ethnic minority living in the Niger Delta of Nigeria is even more disadvantaged. In the United States communities that lack control capacity over politicaleconomic power structures are typically made up of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as the white working class (Schnaiberg 1994). For instance, rural white women and their families in Appalachia are especially harmed by extractive energy schemes such as coal mining (Bell 2013
). For those members of the socially and spatially segregated
“underclass,” powerlessness is even more pervasive
.
,
Chicano farmers, indigenous peoples, and other dispossessed people of color are the ones being selectively victimized to the greatest extent by environmental health abuses
(Johnston 1994).
As part of the country’s subaltern experiencing multiple forms of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural oppression, they are effectively devalued in American society
(Pulido 1996).
The resulting environmental injustices take the form of noxious industrial pollutants and hazardous waste sites being situated in poor African-
American communities in the rural South
(Bullard 1994; Holifield, Chakraborty, and Walker 2017), or of undocumented Mexican workers laboring in the pesticide-soaked agricultural fields
of California, Texas, and Florida (Berkey 2017). In short, the concentration of environmental and health hazards among the subaltern is creating ecological sacrifice zones
—areas where it is simply dangerous to breathe the air or take a drink of water
(Lerner 2010). As such, ecological sacrifice zones serve as locations where capital can substantially lower or ignore the costs of compliance with environmental regulations. In this light, environmental injustices are rooted in power structures and models of capital accumulation that confer social class advantages and racial/ gender privileges
(Sicotte 2016, 13). And when analyzing environmental CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 13 inequality, we should be aware that there are multiple political-economic forces at work that give the injustice a particular context and form (Holifield 2001). In the United States and the world eco nomy racism is a “constituent logic” of capitalism and, as stated by Pulido, “creates a variegated landscape that cultures and capital can exploit to create enhanced power and profits” (Pulido 2016, 7; see also Ranganathan
2016). As we shall see, environmental racism facilitates capital accumulation in a variety of critically important ways, and is central to the reactionary neoliberal project. As a result, poorer people of color face a “quadruple exposure effect” to environmental health hazards.
Faber 18 (6/14/18, Daniel Faber is director of the Northeastern Environmental Justice
Research Collaborative in Boston. He co-founded the international journal Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism and is the author or editor of several books, including Foundations for Social Change.
“Global Capitalism, Reactionary Neoliberalism, and the Deepening of Environmental Injustices” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10455752.2018.1464250?needAccess=true//TU-
SG )

Facilitating Global Capital’s Appropriation of Nature Belonging to the Popular Classes
Under the new ecological imperialism brought about by neoliberal globalization
, the prosperity of transnational capital is becoming increasingly predicated on the racialized appropriation of surplus environmental space from the global South
(Foster and Clark 2018). By expanding its ecological footprint
and other forms of unequal ecological exchange, global capital accumulation depends upon the confiscation of biomass production from the global South (Hornborg 2011). In other words, the expansion of wealth
on behalf of the United States, China, and the core European Union states under globalization fundamentally involves the use of greater quantities of undervalued natural resources from other territories occupied by the global subaltern
, as well as the increased displacement of environmental harm
(such as pollution) to those territories, and it is
(Jorgenson and Clark 2012). In contrast, economic growth in the global South has been led by exports of energy, raw materials, and consumer goods to the North
. This turn toward export-oriented industrialization is being driven by (FDIs) and foreign lending provided by the United States and other advanced capitalist countries, and is intended to facilitate the appropriation and development of domestic business facilities, energy supplies, and natural resources by transnational investors.
Thus
, global free trade is creating a new international division of labor in which, on one hand, the South favors exports of cheap raw materials, energy, technology components, and consumer goods to the U nited
S tates, and
on the other, the U nited
S tates favors capital goods and services for export within the North and to the South
. In short, while the global South produces wealth in the commodity form, the United States produces wealth in the
“capital form” (O’Connor 2000, 162). Under processes of unequal ecological exchange the massive quantities of physical wealth now entering the United States (in the form of energy, raw materials, foodstuffs, and durable consumer goods) are greatly undervalued in the world economy.
With international trade largely under the control of Northern-based transnational corporations
, the concrete and potential natural wealth found in United States imports of energy and raw materials are in much greater proportion than the monetary (abstract) wealth that is exported back to the global South. Through exploitative world trade relations, the U nited
S tates appropriates the bio-capacity of the global South
. This process also includes the damage done to the economies of the global South resulting from United States exports of pollution, hazardous waste, greenhouse gases, and other ecological hazards
(Warlenius 2016). Moreover, the ecological debt arising from excessive use of the South’s environmental space by transnational capital is accelerating in the new millennium, even as the economic debt owed by many in the global South countries to U.S. banks continues to grow
(MartinezAlier 2007). The South’s economic debt and the North’s ecological debt are symptomatic of the “unfair” trade-off brought about by neoliberal globalization, a facet that can only worsen under Trump’s “America First” political philosophy. 22 D. FABER
Defined in terms of global North versus global South, corporate-led globalization is seen as magnifying externally- and internally based environmental injustices to the advantage of transnational capital. In much of the developing world access to natural resources is being restricted by the transformation of commonly held lands into capitalist private property
, that is, by the
“commodification of nature” (Goldman 1998). Those peoples in the global South who draw their livelihood directly from the land, water, forests, coastal mangroves, and other ecosystems are becoming displaced in order to supply cheap raw materials for local dominant classes and foreign capital
. Laboring in service of this new global order, but receiving few of its benefits, the popular majorities of the developing world
— the poor peasants, workers, ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples who make up the subsistence sector —struggle to survive by moving onto ecologically fragile lands or by migrating to the shantytowns of the cities by the million to search for employment
. Often left with little means to improve the quality of their lives, the world’s poor (especially women) are being forced to over-exploit their own limited natural resource base in order to survive
(Shiva 2005). In much of the Third World, these survival strategies by the popular classes in response to their growing impoverishment result in the widespread degradation and ecological collapse of the environment. As a result, globalization-inspired development models are becoming increasingly unviable in the global South, giving birth to popular-based movements for social and ecological justice, i.e. to an environmentalism of the poor (Martinez-Alier 2002).
Former Prof. of Political Science at University of Berlin
(Elmar, “The Social and
Natural Environment of Fossil Capitalism,” http://www.globallabour.info/en/Altvater-Fossilism-
SR-2007%20(rev.).doc, NMS)
The reason for capitalism’s high economic impact on the environment is to be found in its
double character. It has a value dimension (the monetary value of the gross national product, of world trade, of FDI, of financial flows, etc.) but is also a system of material and energy flows in production and consumption, transportation and distribution.
¶
Economic decisions concerning

production first consider values and prices, profit margins and monetary returns, on capital invested. In this sphere the ruling principle is only the economic rationality of profit-
maximizing decision-makers. But the decisions they take have important impacts on nature, due to the material and energy dimension of economic processes.
¶
Under capitalist conditions
the environment is more and more transformed into a contested object of human greed. The exploitation of natural resources, and their degradation by a growing quantity of pollutants,
results in a man-made scarcity, leading to conflicts over access to them. Access to nature (to resources and sinks) is uneven and unequal and the societal relation of man to nature therefore is conflict-prone. The “ecological footprints” of people in different countries and regions of the world are of very different sizes , reflecting severe inequalities of incomes and wealth.
Ecological injustices therefore can only usefully be discussed if social class contradictions and
the production of inequality in the course of capital accumulation are taken into account.
, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon,
(John Bellamy. The Monthly
Review “A Failed System: The World Crisis of Capitalism and its Impact on China” http://monthlyreview.org/2009/03/01/a-failed-system-the-world-crisis-of-capitalistglobalization-and-its-impact-on-china NMS)
As the foregoing indicates, the world is currently facing the threat of a new world deflation- depression, worse than anything seen since the 1930s. The ecological problem has reached a
level that the entire planet as we know it is now threatened. Neoliberal capitalism appears to be at an end, along with what some have called “neoliberalism ‘with Chinese characteristics.’”54
Declining U.S. hegemony, coupled with current U.S. attempts militarily to restore its global hegemony through the so-called War on Terror, threaten wider wars and nuclear holocausts.
The one common denominator accounting for all of these crises is the current phase of global monopoly-finance capital. The fault lines are most obvious in terms of the peril to the planet. As
Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, has recently stated: “Under capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under capitalism mother earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials.” In reality, “the earth is much more important than [the] stock exchanges of Wall
Street and the world. [Yet,] while the United States and the European Union allocate 4,100 billion dollars to save the bankers from a financial crisis that they themselves have caused,
programs on climate change get 313 times less, that is to say, only 13 billion dollars.Ӧ
(Internationalist Perspective “Capitalism, Technology and the Environment” http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_50_environment.html
NMS)
Fundamental to my whole approach to capitalism’s relationship to nature is that it is, in the end, essentially the same as capital’s relationship to wage labour. Capital dominates both,
living labour and nature, in order to exploit them both. In both cases, capital uses technology as a mediating factor in order to realize, enforce and reproduce at a higher level these relations of domination and exploitation. In both cases, the relationships and the processes involved are linked and analogous. Capital is antagonistic toward the natural environment just as it is

antagonistic to wage labour. Capital’s domination and exploitation of nature, given the latter’s finite limits and specificities, leads to destruction, degradation and despoliation of that nature, just as its domination and exploitation of wage labour, given the physical limits and specificities of human beings, leads to destruction, degradation and exhaustion of the working class. Capital utilizes technological means in order to facilitate its maximum exploitation of both living labour and ‘natural resources’. Further still, just as the working class fights back against capital’s depredations, so too does nature in ways we are all too familiar with today, such as irreversible climate change, widespread industrial diseases such as cancer, ‘natural disasters’
of all sorts, etc. But in reality, it is not nature taking revenge on humanity. That would be to personify or subjectify nature, to ascribe to it intentionality. In fact, all of these environmental catastrophes, which constitute an expanding environmental crisis, result from capital’s
technological transformation (and mutation (thus: trans-mutation?)) of natural ecosystems and
processes into monstrously destructive forces for humankind which previously, naturally, they were not. Highly developed capitalist domination of humanity and nature has intervened in and transformed the myriad intricate and inter-related natural processes of the planet to such an extent that the current ‘natural environment’ we live within cannot be truly said to be natural; it has been adulterated, contaminated, poisoned and destroyed to such an extent that it is more accurately described as the capitalistically modified ‘natural’ environment.
(Kasama Project, “Earth Day to May Day: Targeting Exploitation and
Ecocide” http://kasamaproject.org/environment/3186-18earth-day-to-may-day-targetingexploitation-and-ecocide NMS)
Capitalism is the economic system that dominates the planet. It runs on the exploitation of
human labor to turn the living world into dead commodities, for the profit of a few . The small, powerful minority who own the means of production enforce their dominance through their control over political and cultural institutions, and their monopoly on force. They create a situation of dependency—forcing us to work for them to obtain basic needs like food and shelter. They annihilate those who resist or refuse to assimilate.
¶
This system values profit over life itself. It has been built on land theft and destruction, genocide, slavery, deforestation and
imperialist wars . It commits numberless atrocities as a matter of routine daily functioning. It kills nearly 10 million children worldwide under age 5 each year, because it’s not profitable to
save them.* It kills 100,000 people annually in the US by denying decent health care. More than 54% of the US discretionary budget is spent on imperialist aggression. Recent casualties include more than a million civilians in Iraq, and more than 46,000 American soldiers in
Afghanistan and Iraq. The economic and psychological violence wrought upon the world’s inhabitants is so extensive and comprehensive that it’s effectively all-encompassing.
¶
The system is killing the entire planet, the basis for all life. It’s converted 98% of old growth forests into lumber. 80% of rivers worldwide no longer support life. 94% of the large fish in the oceans are gone. Phytoplankton, the tiny plants that produce half of the oxygen we breathe,
have declined by 40% since 1950. 120 species per day become extinct.
¶
Industries produce 400 million tons of hazardous waste every year. Recently, the water in 89% of US cities tested has been found to contain the carcinogen hexavalent chromium. To feed capitalism’s insatiable need for economic expansion, increasingly dangerous methods of energy extraction are being perpetrated: deep sea drilling, oil extraction from tar sands, mountaintop removal, fracking.

No matter the consequences, no matter what the majority of people may want, those in power insist on (and enforce) their non-negotiable right to poison the land, water and air in pursuit of maximum profit.
¶
The threat to our common existence on Earth is accelerating and
intensifying. This is a situation of extreme urgency.¶ Clearly, a global economic system based
on perpetual expansion is unsustainable. A system characterized by oppression and coercion is pure misery for the majority. The obvious conclusion is that we need to get rid of it, and change to a way of life that doesn’t involve exploitation and ecocide. But first we must face one hard fact: this system won’t stop unless it’s stopped. It can not be escaped, reformed, redeemed, cajoled, abandoned, or rejected. The system must be fought, defeated and dismantled.
¶
, Editor of Monthly Review and worked for the United States
Department of Commerce, Professor of Plant and Soil Science at University of Vermont and a director of the Monthly Review Foundation,
(Harry and Fred. July 1st 2005. Monthly
Review. “Approaching Socialism” http://monthlyreview.org/2005/07/01/approaching-socialism
NMS)
Ecological degradation occurred in numerous precapitalist societies. But with capitalism there is a new dimension to the problem, even as we have better understood the ecological harm that human activity can create. The drive for profits and capital accumulation as the overriding
objective of economic activity, the control that economic interests exert over political life, and the many technologies developed in capitalist societies that allow humans rapidly to change
their environment—near and wide, intentionally or not—mean that adverse effects on the
environment are inevitable. Pollution of water, air, and soil are natural byproducts of
production systems organized for the single goal of making profits.
¶
Under the logic of capitalist production and exchange there is no inherent mechanism to encourage or force
industry to find methods that have minimal impact on the environment. For example, new chemicals that are found useful to produce manufactured goods are routinely introduced into
the environment—without the adequate assessment of whether or not they cause harm to humans or other species. The mercury given off into the air by coal-burning power plants
pollutes lakes hundreds of miles away as well as the ocean. The routine misuse of antibiotics,
added to feeds of animals that are being maintained in the overcrowded and unhealthy conditions of factory farms, has caused the development of antibiotic resistant strains of
disease organisms. It is a technique that is inconsistent with any sound ecological approach to raising animals, but it is important to capital because profits are enhanced. In addition, the development of an automobile-centered society in the United States has had huge environmental consequences. Vast areas of suburbs, sometimes merging into a “megatropolis,” partially erase the boundaries between communities. The waste of fuel by commuting to work by car is only part of the story of suburbanization, as some people work in the city while others work in different suburbs. Shopping in malls reachable only by cars and taking children to school and play require transportation over significant distances.
¶
Climate change resulting from global
warming, not completely predictable, but with mostly negative consequences, is another
repercussion of unfettered capitalist exploitation of resources. As fossil fuels are burned in large quantities by factories, electrical generation plants, and automobiles and trucks, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased. There is some concern that the gradual warming could actually lead to a fairly rapid change, with such factors as the melting of polar ice, changes in precipitation and river flow, and a cessation of the thermohaline conveyor (of which the Gulf Stream is a part) that brings warm water to the north Atlantic and helps keep

North America and Europe warm (see “The Pentagon and Climate Change,” Monthly Review,
May 2004).
(Richard, Institute for Policy Research & Devolopment, London, “Capitalism and the
Destructions of life on Earth: six theses on saving the humans” , real- world economics review, issue 64, http://paecon.net/PAEReview/issue64/Smith64.pdf)
1.
Capitalism is,
overwhelmingly, the main driver of planetary ecological collapse
.
From climate change to resource overconsumption to pollution, the engine that has powered three centuries of accelerating economic development revolutionizing technology, science, culture, and human life itself is, today, a roaring out-of-control locomotive mowing down continents of forests, sweeping oceans of life, clawing out mountains of minerals, drilling, pumping out lakes of fuels, devouring the planet’s last accessible resources to turn them all into “product” while destroying fragile global ecologies built up over eons of time
. Between 1950 and 2000 the global human population more than doubled from 2.5 to 6 billion, but in these same decades consumption of major natural resources soared more than 6 fold on average, some much more. Natural gas consumption grew nearly 12 fold, bauxite (aluminum ore) 15 fold. And so on.3 At current rates, Harvard biologist E.O Wilson says that “ half the world’s great forests have already been leveled and half the world’s plant and animal species may be gone by the end of this century.” Corporations aren’t necessarily evil
, though plenty are diabolically evil, but they can’t help themselves. They’re just doing what they’re supposed to do for the benefit of their shareholders.
Shell Oil can’t help but loot
Nigeria and the Arctic and cook the climate. That’s what shareholders demand.4 BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and other mining giants can’t resist mining Australia’s abundant coal and exporting it to China and India. Mining accounts for 19% of Australia’s GDP and substantial employment even as coal combustion is the single worst driver of global warming. IKEA can’t help but level the forests of
Siberia and Malaysia to feed the Chinese mills building its flimsy disposable furniture (IKEA is the third largest consumer of lumber in the world). Apple can’t help it if the cost of extracting the “rare earths” it needs to make millions of new iThings each year is the destruction of the eastern Congo – violence, rape, slavery, forced induction of child soldiers, along with poisoning local waterways.5
Monsanto and DuPont and Syngenta and Bayer Crop Science have no choice but to wipe out bees, butterflies, birds, small farmers and extinguish crop diversity to secure their grip on the world’s food supply while drenching the planet with their Roundups and
Atrazines and neonicotinoids.6
This is how giant corporations are wiping out life on earth in the course of a routine business day. And the bigger the corporations grow, the worse the problems become.
In Adam Smith’s day, when the first factories and mills produced hat pins and iron tools and rolls of cloth by the thousands, capitalist freedom to make whatever they wanted didn’t much matter because they didn’t have much impact on the global environment. But today, when everything is produced in the millions and billions, then trashed today and reproduced all over again tomorrow, when the planet is looted and polluted to support all this frantic and senseless growth
, it matters – a lot.
The world’s climate scientists tell us we’re facing a planetary emergency
.
They’ve been telling us since the 1990s that if we don’t cut global fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions by 80-90% below 1990 levels by 2050 we will cross critical tipping points and global warming will accelerate beyond any human power to contain it
. Yet despite all the ringing alarm bells, no corporation and no government can oppose growth and, instead, every capitalist government in the world is putting pedal to the metal to accelerate growth, to drive us full throttle off the cliff to collapse
. Marxists have never had a better argument against capitalism than this inescapable and apocalyptic “contradiction”.

Fletcher ‘12
(Robert, Assistant Professor of Human Geography @ the University of Utrecht, “Capitalizing on chaos: Climate change and disaster capitalism,” http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/capitalizing-chaos-climatechange-and-disaster-capitalism)
In a sense, the application of Klein’s disaster capitalism thesis to environmental policy can be seen as a twist on the rapidly growing literature analyzing neoliberalization within natural resource management generally (see e.g., McCarthy and Prudham, 2004; Bakker, 2005; Heynen and Robbins, 2005;
Swyngedouw, 2005; Heynen et al., 2007; Smith, 2007; Castree, 2008). This research documents numerous cases in which natural resources previously externalized within conventional commodity markets are themselves commodified as a source of further profit through enclosure and sale within neoliberal markets .
Hence, Castree (2008) describes such activities as providing a seri es of ‘environmental fixes’ for capitalism’s central contradiction in pursuit of new sources of income to combat falling rates of profit, including : 1) commodifying and trading new forms of ‘ natural capital’
; 2) replacing state control of resources with capitalist markets; 3) intensifying exploitation of a given natural resource to yield increased short-term profits; and 4) transferring resource governance responsibility (and thus revenues) from states to nonstate actors. In this sense, neoliberalization of natural resources can be seen as part and parcel of the strategy of ‘accumulation by dispossession ’ that Harvey (2005) finds characteristic of neoliberalism in general, in terms of which wealth is generated less through creating wholly new sources of value than by appropriating resources formerly controlled by others or held in the public domain for the enrichment of a minority elite.∂
Addressing climate change (which the Stern Review (2006) famously pronounced the world’s greatest externality) through creation of carbon markets has been described in just this manner by Bumbus and Liverman (2008). Yet, the majority of the neoliberal nature literature describes attempts to create markets for the sustainable use of natural resources. Climate change response stands somewhat distinct from this, however, in that its aim is, on the contrary, to encourage resources’ non-use, by, for instance, leaving forests intact and fossil fuel in the ground to avoid the release of greenhouse effectinducing carbon into the atmosphere. In this respect, climate change response is best considered as an aspect not of neoliberal natural resource management generally but of neoliberal conservation in particular. As researchers increasingly observe, the global effort to preserve natural resources from extraction and use has itself become progressively neoliberalized over the past several decades (e.g., Sullivan, 2006,
2009, forthcoming; Igoe and Brockington, 2007; Brockington et al., 2008; Brockington, 2009; Brockington and Duffy,
2010 b; Büscher, 2010; Fletcher, 2010a), and this practice requires distinct mechanisms for attempting to harness the value of resource s in situ (Büscher et al., 2012), as I describe further below.∂
What Klein’s disaster capitalism frame adds to this analysis is an understanding of how the perception of crisis is employed as a strategy to facilitate this neoliberalization of resource control and marketing . And while this dynamic has been alluded to within the neoliberal conservation literature (Brockington et al.,
2008; Sullivan, 2009, forthcoming), its application to address climate change response remains little developed (cf.
Cooper, 2010). It is this dimension of harnessing the image of climate change as an impending disaster to promote new forms of neoliberal governance and market enclosure that my analysis seeks to highlight.∂ Importantly, Klein’s analysis also suggests an intriguing amendment to O’Connor’s
(1988, 1994) analysis of capitalism’s second contradiction that has recently been highlighted by neoliberal conservation researchers (Brockington et al., 2008; Igoe et al., 2010; Neves, 2010; Sullivan, forthcoming; Fletcher, 2011). While
O’Connor’s analysis predicted that exhaustion of the conditions of production would eventually raise costs and thus reduce the profit gleaned from capitalist enterprise, Klein’s thesis suggests that in the short term, paradoxically, the ecological degradation caused by capitalist production can itself be harnessed as a further source of profit in its own right . Researchers have documented this process, for instance, in the practice of ecotourism, which is able to generate greater revenue in the form of heightened admission charges as its objects (whales, rainforest, etc.) become increasingly scarce (Neves, 2010; Fletcher, 2011). As I describe below, climate change response via carbon markets displays much this same dynamic.