Page 24 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

6 G. MURDOCK AND B. BREVINI

homogenous acting unit. Inequality, commodification, imperialism…and
much more, have been largely removed from consideration” (Moore 2015:
170).
Writing on the Anthropocene tends to focus on the extension of
industrialisation rather than transformation of capitalism. While industri-
alisation outside the orbit of capitalism, most obviously in the Soviet
Union, has played a role in the acceleration of climate change, the major
contributors to greenhouse gases since 1750 have been the capitalist
economies of Western Europe and North America. With the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the turn to the market in China and India and the rise of
South Korea and other emerging economies, variants of capitalism have for
the first time achieved global reach. This has led commentators to argue
that we need to talk about the ‘Capitalocene’ rather than the
‘Anthropocene’ (see Moore 2016) and examine how the changing
organisation of capitalism has shaped the systems of extraction, production
and consumption that are propelling climate change.
Moving capitalism to the centre of the analysis also forces us to confront
the unequal responsibilities and impacts of climate change. “The dominant
narrative of the Anthropocene presents an abstract humanity uniformly
involved-and, it implies, uniformity to blame” (Bonneuil and Fressoz
2016: 66). Rising rates of personal consumption have contributed to cli-
mate crisis, but the major damage has been done by corporations relent-
lessly pursuing profit generation at the minimum cost. The consequences
have born down hardest on those with the least resources to protect or
insulate themselves. The accelerating destruction of habitats and native
lands, and the exhaustion of scarce natural resources has been central to a
process of accumulation that has progressively concentrated wealth in the
hands of a diminishing group of super-rich captains of capitalism. The
heads of digital communication companies now figure prominently in this
elite group. The current Forbes list of the world’s leading billionaires has
Bill Gates of Microsoft in first place, Jeff Bezos of Amazon in third place,
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook in fifth place, with Larry Ellison of Oracle
and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google in the top thirteen (Forbes
2017). The movement of communication companies to the centre of
contemporary capitalism and the battle over climate crisis is the end result
of a long process.