Carpe Momentum: The Climate Crisis Won’t Be Fixed, It Will Be Exploited

Why system change, not restoration of the status quo, is our only hope for survival

If you listen to world leaders, corporate executives, or legacy media, you might believe the climate crisis is simply a matter of “fixing” a few things. Swap out coal for solar, make some green investments, and install more wind turbines, and we can have our modern world just as it is, cleaned up and polished, with a few more Teslas on the road and a little less smoke in the sky. This is a deadly fantasy. The climate emergency is not a glitch in the system; it is the logical, inevitable byproduct of the system itself.

The crisis we face today is not just one of rising emissions but of an economic and political order fundamentally incompatible with planetary survival. Capitalism, as practiced by the ruling elites of our time, thrives on extraction, commodification, and the financialization of human suffering. It does not solve crises, it profits from them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way financial giants have already begun planning for the coming decades of ecological breakdown.

Take JP Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the world, which has funneled hundreds of billions of dollars into fossil fuels while publicly advertising its commitment to sustainability. Led by CEO Jamie Dimon, the bank has created its own internal climate unit, not to help stop the crisis, but to advise clients on how to capitalize on it. Their public reports make no bones about the facts: temperatures are rising, catastrophic weather events are becoming more frequent, and global systems are destabilizing. But their response is not to decarbonize or divest, it is to pivot toward profit in a world of collapse.

JP Morgan’s climate strategy, and that of the capitalist class more broadly, is not prevention, it is adaptation for the rich. It is insurance portfolios and climate risk derivatives. It is buying up arable land, securing private water rights, and investing in Arctic shipping routes as the ice melts. It is inflating energy prices, cornering resource markets, and making billions off disaster recovery while the rest of the world struggles to survive. Dimon publicly ridicules green investment initiatives as “wasting money on stuff that won’t work,” even as his bank bets heavily on the collapse he derides, most notably in its Climate Intuition report, which openly maps out the financial risks of ecological breakdown and how to turn those risks into profitable opportunities.

A glaring example of this logic is Elon Musk, lionized by media as a visionary genius. Rather than devoting his fortune to repairing the only habitable planet humanity has ever known, Musk pours billions into fantasies of colonizing Mars. SpaceX is not a side project, it is the ultimate expression of capitalist escapism: to profit handsomely from the ruination of Earth while marketing himself as humanity’s savior, shuttling a lucky elite to a hostile wasteland. No rational plan for survival, it’s is a hedge fund strategy masquerading as ambition.

This is the reality we must confront: the climate crisis is no longer treated by the ruling class as an emergency to prevent, but as an inevitability to monetize. The very corporations that fueled this catastrophe are already strategizing how to own the wreckage, how to buy up what remains, and how to consolidate power in the ruins. Whether it’s land grabs, carbon markets, or Martian escape plans, the message is clear: those with power do not intend to fix the system, they intend to outlive it while the rest of humanity pays the price.

This essay is not about superficial solutions or polite reforms. It is about recognizing that the same economic engine destabilizing the planet is dismantling democracy, deepening inequality, and accelerating social collapse. The physical tipping points, melting ice sheets, ocean circulation collapse, atmospheric destabilization, are inseparable from the political tipping points of oligarchy, authoritarianism, and financial parasitism.

What follows is an exploration of how this system manufactures crisis and calls it growth, sustains itself by sacrificing the future, and why climate stabilization will only be possible through systemic transformation. It is not enough to save the environment; we must dismantle the machinery of planetary extraction before physics renders our political choices irrelevant.

The physical reality of the climate crisis is no longer theoretical, nor is it distant. It is unfolding now, with terrifying speed, and every passing month delivers fresh evidence previous predictions underestimated the scale and pace of collapse. The Greenland Ice Sheet is disintegrating before our eyes, dumping hundreds of billions of tons of freshwater into the ocean each year, enough to measurably slow the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a crucial engine of global climate stability. Scientists warn this circulation could irreversibly collapse within decades, triggering droughts in the Amazon, deadly heatwaves in Europe, and accelerating sea level rise.

In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctic sea ice has undergone a stunning collapse, while warming deep waters now dissolve the cold cap that shielded vast ice shelves. This destabilizes the Southern Meridional Overturning Circulation, unleashing glacial acceleration, releasing ancient carbon stores, and disrupting marine nutrient cycles.

These tipping points are materializing now, reshaping weather patterns and inflicting devastation. In just the last year, flash floods have wiped out communities, Europe has endured agricultural failure, Canada has suffered record wildfires, and oceans have hit unprecedented temperatures, collapsing fisheries and supercharging hurricanes. Every ecological foundation of modern life is eroding beneath our feet.

Climate scientists have warned of tipping points for years. We are now witnessing a planetary cascade: warmer oceans melt ice, ice loss alters ocean currents, stalled currents intensify heat, and atmospheric feedback loops accelerate carbon emissions. Drought-stressed forests become carbon sources; thawing permafrost releases methane. The world is not merely warming, it is destabilizing.

Meanwhile, human systems remain mired in delay and dysfunction. What should be a species-wide mobilization is reduced to negotiations between lobbyists and financiers, a profit-making exercise for those who engineered the crisis. The next section will explore that political rot, the engine driving our destruction.

If the accelerating collapse of Earth’s climate systems represents physical breakdown, then the economic order represents its political enabler. Climate collapse cannot be separated from capitalism’s deepening rot, a system re-engineered over the past half-century to concentrate wealth, destroy public goods, and neutralize democratic resistance.

Beginning in the mid-20th century, the world’s elites, particularly in the United States, embarked on a coordinated campaign to dismantle social democratic reforms. Corporate-funded think-tanks, compliant politicians, and captured academia promoted deregulation, privatization, and market supremacy. From Reagan and Thatcher through Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Trump, the neoliberal consensus held: tax cuts for the rich, gutted labor protections, deregulated finance, and privatized public services.

In the U.S., real wages stagnated from the 1970s even as productivity soared. Debt replaced wages, locking families into cycles of credit and bankruptcy. Trump pushed this to new extremes, delivering massive tax cuts for the wealthy while gutting environmental and labor protections. Biden’s reforms, while reversing some of Trump’s damage, maintained the core logic: public money enriches private developers, and corporate interests steer climate policy.

The result is a political system that does not just fail to respond to climate breakdown, it succeeds in shielding capital from accountability. Fossil fuel companies fund denial, courts dismantle protections, and corporations exploit “green” marketing while doubling down on destruction. The next section explores how even the energy transition is being twisted by capitalist imperatives.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the supposed “green transition.” Renewable energy is booming, not as a public good but as a private profit engine. Subsidies flow to corporate monopolies; land grabs, labor exploitation, and environmental injustice continue under a greenwashed banner.

“Net zero” has become a financial scam, with offsets and carbon markets enabling continued destruction. Energy access remains a class issue; renewables risk entrenching inequality as private equity hoards assets and new extraction zones emerge in the Global South.

The climate movement faces a stark choice: accept a capitalist “green transition” that preserves exploitation, or fight for a just transition where energy is public, transitions are equitable, and planetary repair replaces private profit. The stakes could not be higher.

In the final section, we turn to what an alternative path must look like: a rupture with capitalist governance, a commitment to justice-centered transformation, and a politics that refuses to settle for mere survival in the margins of collapse. The notion that simply electing more Democrats will deliver us from this crisis is a dangerous illusion, an illusion exposed every time the party machinery crushes insurgent candidates like Zohran Mamdani, who dare to challenge the status quo. It is a fantasy that ignores history: Democrats and Republicans alike have presided over the disintegration of our climate, the hollowing out of our public institutions, and the violent suppression of those who resist. The solution is not more blue candidates. It is system change, total, structural, uncompromising.

While the ruling class engineers profit opportunities from collapse, the burden of crisis falls squarely on the public. After every wildfire, hurricane, and flood, it is working families who pick up the pieces while corporations cash in their insurance claims, collect federal bailouts, and return to business as usual. Even in the face of ecological breakdown without precedent in human history, governments miraculously find trillions to backstop banks, prop up fossil fuel subsidies, and underwrite corporate risk. But when it comes to building resilient infrastructure, providing universal healthcare, or transitioning away from planetary destruction, we are told the money has run out.

The political system that has enabled our current crisis has been deliberately wired to ensure that the costs of collapse remain socialized while the profits remain privatized. Public goods are dismantled, essential services, energy, water, housing, are handed to private profiteers, and every crisis is met with the same fraudulent refrain: market solutions. Climate resilience is already becoming a luxury good, accessible only to those who can pay for fortress communities, private fire brigades, and boutique sustainability projects, while the majority are sentenced to escalating bills, collapsing infrastructure, and an unraveling social safety net.

All of this is cloaked in a thin veneer of green marketing. We are sold the myth of “green capitalism,” where billionaires will save the world with shiny tech gadgets, corporate net-zero pledges, and speculative offset schemes. But these false solutions do nothing to alter the fundamental engine of extraction that caused this crisis, they only deepen it. The climate emergency is not simply being ignored, it is being weaponized, used to discipline workers, fracture communities, and cement elite rule in a world of manufactured scarcity.

If we are to have any future at all, it will not come through polite reforms or incremental half-measures. It will come through organized, disruptive, systemic change: by dismantling the structures of capitalist plunder, reclaiming democratic control, and building a society where survival is not just reserved for the privileged few, but guaranteed for all.