Page 22 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

4 G. MURDOCK AND B. BREVINI

(Brack 2017: 9–10). Secondly, while biofuels such as ethanol derived from
fermenting maize, sugarcane or wheat offer superficially attractive alterna-
tives to gasoline, as a recent report from the World Resources Institute
points out, “the dedicated use of land to generate bioenergy…is likely to
compete with food production and carbon storage”, making feeding the
planet more difficult and increasing greenhouse emissions (Searchinger and
Heimlich 2015: 26).
Writers on the Anthropocene have taken the volume of carbon dioxide
(CO 2 ) in the atmosphere as the signature index of climate change. In 1750
the atmospheric concentration of CO 2 stood at 277 parts per million
(ppm) by volume. By 1850 it had climbed to 285 ppm and by 1945 it was
25 ppm above the pre-industrial level, well outside the range of natural
variability displayed during the long era since the last ice age, the
Holocene, and providing “the first indisputable evidence that human
activities were affecting the environment on a global scale” (Steffen et al.
2007: 616). The inclusion of ‘carbon’ rather than ‘fossil fuels’ in the title
of this collection reflects the centrality of this argument.
Crutzen’s decision to date the start of the Anthropocene from the onset
of the industrial revolution in Britain also underlines the need to place
issues around climate change firmly in the context of fundamental trans-
formations in the organisation of production and consumption, and the
shifts in resource extraction and energy generation they required. In a later
paper, he adds deforestation and cattle farming to fossil fuel burning as
major contributors to the escalation of CO 2 and other major greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere. In the same paper he proposes a modification to
his original time line, arguing that that there has been a very significant
intensification in the impact of human intervention since 1950 and that this
second phase of the Anthropocene “stands out as the one in which human
activities rapidly changed from merely influencing the global environment
in some ways to dominating it in many ways”, to the extent that “Human
impacts on the Earth System structure and functioning now equal or
exceed in magnitude many forces of nature at the global scale” (Crutzen
and Steffen 2003: 253). Compelling evidence for this ‘Great Acceleration’
has come from the comprehensive analysis of temperature changes over the
last six centuries conducted by Michael E. Mann (who contributes to this
present collection) and his colleagues, and published in Nature in 1998
(Mann et al. 1998). Using proxy measures of change, including tree rings
and coral growth, to generate data for periods before formal observations
began, the research revealed a hockey stick pattern with a relatively stable