Groucho Marxism

The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly known as COP30, will be held in Brazil from 10 to 21 November. In this context, COP stands for Conference of the Parties, and refers to the annual meeting of the nearly 200 countries that have signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. At these conferences, representatives from around the world meet to review progress, negotiate new measures, and make decisions on how to tackle climate change. At least that’s what is supposed to happen. As the COP30 name suggests, this will be the 30th of these meetings, yet we are still nowhere near solving the problem of global warming. It seems fair to say therefore that the COP initiative has not been a success.

One thing COP meetings have been successful in doing is setting targets, such as the agreement to keep warming below 2 degrees (Celsius) and ideally below 1.5 degrees, which was negotiated at COP21 in Paris. Another agreement was made at COP28 to triple renewable energy capacity and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030. But anyone can set targets; sticking to them is what matters. And in this respect, the COPs have been a failure. Global emissions continue to rise, atmospheric carbon concentrations are increasing, and the world is on a path to significantly exceed the 1.5 degree warming limit. Most projections put the world on a path to warming of 2.3-2.5 degrees by the end of the century, with the 1.5 degree threshold likely be permanently breached by the 2030s.

There are several reasons why the COPs have had such limited success in addressing the climate crisis.  First, there is a lack of political will, with politicians invariably being more preoccupied with short-term concerns. Second, there is a shortfall in climate finance, with wealthier nations being unwilling to provide promised and adequate support to developing countries for climate change adaptation. Third, the negotiating process has been heavily influenced by the fossil fuel lobby, with a large number of lobbyists attending the conferences. Fourth, the agreements made, although legally binding in principle, are not legally enforceable in practice. And fifth, increased geopolitical tensions are now diverting attention and resources away from collaborative climate action.

All of these reasons stem from the fact that under capitalism, nations and corporations are forced to compete rather than collaborate. To understand why this leads to the issues outlined above, we need to invoke a classic problem in game theory known as the prisoner’s dilemma. This problem involves two ‘rational’ agents, each of whom can either cooperate for mutual benefit or betray their partner (‘defect’) for individual gain. The dilemma arises from the fact that while defecting is ‘rational’ for each agent, cooperation yields a higher payoff for each. Climate change can be modeled as a prisoner’s dilemma because competition leads nations to avoid actions required for global cooperation (i.e. to ‘defect’), even though cooperation would yield the best long-term outcome for everyone.

To solve the problem of climate change, therefore, we need to find a way to solve the prisoner’s dilemma. Luckily, someone has already done this. The American Marxist economist John Roemer has demonstrated that the dilemma arises from the definition of ‘rational’, which in game theory and in economics more generally is usually taken to mean ‘acting purely out of self-interest’. But there is no reason that we need to define ‘rational’ in this way. Roemer has come up with an alternative definition based on Kant’s categorical imperative: ‘act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’. He (Roemer) then goes on to demonstrate that under this definition of rationality, the prisoners will cooperate and achieve the optimal outcome.

Now that’s all well and good, a critic might say, but that is not how nations and corporations act in the real world. And of course that’s true, as the lack of action on climate change clearly demonstrates. The reason for this was already stated above: under capitalism, nations and corporations are forced to act out of self-interest. In other words, they are forced to action ‘rationally’ in the usual sense of the term, rather than in the Kantian sense as defined by Roemer. But there is nothing special or natural about the acting out of self-interest form of rationality; it is simply how nations and corporations are forced to act under capitalism. To stop them from doing this, we need to get rid of capitalism and replace it with a system that encourages Kantian-style cooperation. The future of our planet depends on it.