The following is quoted from Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet by Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, interviewed by C. J. Polychroniou.

I recently finished reading this extraordinary and absolutely inspirational book and gave awarded it 5/5.

I've highlighted the penultimate paragraph because I think it's sobering in the extreme (as if Chomsky's other paragraphs are not; they are).

C. J. Polychroniou: We have known about the effect of greenhouse gases since the mid-nineteenth century, and some scientists began warning us of the potential risks of a hotter planet decades ago, even while there are still some who deny that climate change is happening or that human activity is behind the phenomenon of global warming. But is it enough to point to human activity as the cause of global warming? Shouldn’t we understand this crisis as resulting from the specific economic system that has been guiding economic life for the past five hundred years? And, if so, how exactly are capitalism and the climate crisis interconnected?

Noam Chomsky: [...] There was no more enthusiastic cheerleader for the achievements of capitalism than Karl Marx, who did not, of course, fail to emphasize and explore its horrifying human and material consequences, in particular the “metabolic rift,” a concept on which John Bellamy Foster has elaborated extensively: the inherent tendency of capitalism to degrade the environment that sustains life.

[...]

To return to the specific question: basic elements of capitalism, both ideological and institutional, lead directly to destruction of the basis of organized social life—if unconstrained. We see that dramatically every day.

Take the well-studied case of the huge energy conglomerate ExxonMobil. From the 1960s, its scientists were in the lead in revealing the extreme threat of global warming. In 1988, geophysicist James Hansen issued the first major public warning of the extent of the threat. ExxonMobil management reacted by initiating a program of denialism taking many forms: typically raising doubts, since outright denial is too easily refuted. That continues to the present. Recently ExxonMobil, along with the Koch brothers, filed a formal complaint with NASA objecting to its reporting that 97 percent of climate scientists agree on human-caused global warming. The 97 percent consensus is well established by very careful studies, but a crucial element of the denialist strategy has been to sow doubt about it, with no little success: only 20 percent of Americans realize that over 90 percent of climate scientists accept the overwhelming consensus.

All of this is done with full knowledge that they are engaged in pure deceit, with severely malignant consequences.

Even more malignant than the denialism is practice. ExxonMobil is in the lead in expanding fossil fuel production. Unlike some other oil majors, it does not want to waste even small sums on sustainable energy: “In a March [2014] report on carbon risk to shareholders,” the business press reports, “ExxonMobil (XOM) argued that its laserlike focus on fossil fuels is a sound strategy, regardless of climate change, because the world needs vastly more energy and the likelihood of significant carbon reductions is ‘highly unlikely.’”

In extenuation, it can be argued that ExxonMobil is only being more honest than its competitors in following capitalist logic. The same article reports the decision of Chevron to close its small and profitable sustainable energy projects because destroying the environment is more profitable. Others are not all that different. Royal Dutch Shell right now is celebrating the establishment of a huge plant to produce non-biodegradable plastic, in the certain knowledge that it will destroy the oceans.

The same cynicism also prevails elsewhere in the ruling class. The CEO of JPMorgan Chase understands as much about the extreme threat of global warming as other educated people—and in private life may well be a contributor to the Sierra Club. But he has been pouring huge resources into developing fossil fuels, including the most dangerous of them, Canadian tar sands—also a favorite of the energy industries.

It’s easy to expand the list. All are following impeccable capitalist logic, knowing exactly what the consequences are, but in a certain sense having no individual choice: if the CEO chooses otherwise, he will be replaced by someone who will do the same thing. The problem is institutional, not merely individual.

To this grim list we can add the regular euphoric articles in the finest journals on how fracking has propelled the US once again to the championship in production of the fossil fuels that will destroy us, achieving “energy independence”— whatever that is supposed to be—and providing the US with leverage to pursue its (by definition benign) international objectives without concern about energy markets, like seeking to impose maximal suffering on the people of Iran and Venezuela. Occasionally there are a few words about environmental consequences: fracking in Wyoming may harm water supplies for ranchers. But one will search in vain for a comment on what this means for the future of life.

Again, in extenuation, we must recognize that to refer to such side issues as human survival would violate the canon of “objectivity” and introduce “bias”: the story assigned by the editors is fracking and its contribution to US dominance of fossil fuel production. So survival must be left to the rare opinion column. The effect of course is to instill more deeply the sense of “don’t worry.” If there’s a problem, human ingenuity will figure out how to deal with it.

It might finally be worth noting that not only the management of major corporations but also the most extreme denialists are well aware of the impending disaster to which they are contributing. The capitulation to the Koch brothers a decade ago is one illustration. Or the president, who understands enough to appeal to the government of Ireland for permission to build a wall to protect his golf course from rising sea levels. Some things matter.

We can add finally a prime candidate for the most astonishing document in human history, produced by the Trump administration in August 2018: a five-hundred-page environmental impact statement by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which concluded that no new restrictions are needed for automotive emissions. The authors had a sound argument: their assessment concluded that by the end of the century temperatures will have risen 4ºC above preindustrial levels, about twice the level that the scientific community regards as catastrophic. Automotive emissions are only one contributor to total catastrophe. Accordingly, since we are going off the cliff anyway in the near future, why not drive freely while the world burns, far outdoing Nero?

If one can find a document of comparable malevolence in the historical record, I would be interested in knowing about it. Even the January 1942 Wannsee Conference of the Nazi leadership called only for the destruction of European Jewry, not of most human and animal life on Earth.

As usual, the study was released and circulated with virtually no comment.