The Color of Carbon: Racial Capitalism, Climate Change, and Law

Climate change is a direct consequence of capitalism’s drive to maximize profits through the unbridled extraction of wealth from humans and nature, aided and abetted at every turn by law. In its voracious demand for cheap labor, cheap raw materials, and cheap waste disposal, capitalism has created a treadmill of fossil fuel–dependent production and consumption that has triggered a planetary emergency. It has also produced extreme economic inequality—a racialized division of wealth grounded in colonialism that enables the ultrarich to capture the spoils of the capitalist global economy while billions of people continue to live in extreme poverty. The articles published in this special issue examine the climate emergency and other ecological crises through the framework of racial capitalism. The theory of racial capitalism offers valuable insights into capitalism’s inherently eco-destructive logic and its reliance on racial stratification for the extraction of profit.