In One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax, Dipesh Chakrabarty examines human interrelatedness with, and responsibility within, the Earth System from a decolonial perspective. Drawing on a diverse range of disciplines, this book is a critical intervention that considers perspectival gaps and differences around the climate crisis, writes Elisabeth Wennerström.

One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax. Dipesh Chakrabarty. Brandeis University Press. 2023.

In One Planet, Many Worlds, Dipesh Chakrabarty addresses existing perspectival gaps and differences around the Earth System. This latter term can be understood from the International Biosphere-Geosphere Programme’s definition (7) as a system integrated with the planet’s physical, chemical, and biological processes, of which humans are a part. Chakrabarty makes the “globe/planet distinction” (3) to navigate the climate crisis alongside the Earth System. The parallax is a helpful yet critical concept highlighting how appearances change depending on where the focal point rests.

Climate awareness is not a new concern, and the distribution of adverse climate impacts is highly unequal

The case in point: climate awareness is not a new concern, and the distribution of adverse climate impacts is highly unequal. Chakrabarti asserts that failures to act in relation to the Earth System are evidenced not only by the climate crisis but also in energy extraction politics (eg, 9 and19) and global justice debates (eg, 43 and 79). In contrast, he cites Kant’s emphasis on the “categorical imperative” to follow moral laws, regardless of their desires or extenuating circumstances. Arendt is further emphasised in the case for collective action. But in the Anthropocene, argues Chakrabarty (invoking Kant and Arendt on ethics), there are many signs of how the approach to addressing the climate crisis risks being “bereft of any sense of morality” (6).

Chakrabarty’s research interests intersect with themes in modern South Asian history and historiography, globalisation, climate change, and human history

As a leading scholar of postcolonial theory, comparative studies and the politics of modernity, Chakrabarty’s research interests intersect with themes in modern South Asian history and historiography, globalisation, climate change, and human history. This book demonstrates his extensive commitment to communicating change through a socio-historical narrative. The text is multidisciplinary in scope, moving freely between the natural and social sciences and the humanities. The critical premise is the need to learn from what may appear complex and from what is multifaceted.

He deconstructs “global warming” and “globalisation” by differentiating their relationship to the Earth System (eg, 19-21 and 56). Chakrabarty argues that the Earth System can be delimited as “a heuristic construct” when used in Earth System Science (ESS), wherein scholars’ focus on monitoring geological and biological factors (3). Chakrabarty finds a more fruitful discussion from a continued historicisation of “global histories” and the “geobiological history of the planet” in the different meanings of the “globe” – including “the 500-year-old entity brought into being by humans and their technologies of transport and communication…a human-told story with humans at its center” (3). The discussion includes the COVID-19 pandemic (Chapter One), postcolonial historiographies around an “Earth system” (Chapter Two), and the need to reconcile what Chakrabarty refers to “as ‘the One and the Many’ problem that makes climate change such a difficult issue to tackle” (15) (Chapter Three).

The climate crisis is entangled with political factors, economic growth processes and capitalism, in part seen in the reverberating effects of natural resource extraction

Chakrabarty contends that the climate crisis is entangled with political factors, economic growth processes and capitalism, in part seen in the reverberating effects of natural resource extraction – what many scholars refer to as the Great Acceleration. Complementary notes expand such negotiations to Derrida’s “democracy to come” (60) and Hartog’s discussion on the elements of time and space that pose a particular political problem in the Anthropocene (22, 69, 74). Here, perspectives differ not only over whether Anthropocenic humans lie at the centre, but around the Earth System, which is one while also entailing many differentiated and interrelated processes (7-8). He states: “Any human sense of planetary emergency will have to negotiate the histories of those conflicted and entangled multiplicities” (16).

Many injustices and inequalities in the Anthropocene are repressed, too; he gives the example of how many longed for the pandemic to be over and for life to return to normal, yet when it came to vaccinations, this desire turned political (22). The pandemic shows, according to Chakrabarty, how we are “entwined with the geological – over human scales of time and space” (73).

He references Foucault’s biopolitics where “natural history remains, ultimately, separate from human history” (31), and more of a critique on modern political thought: “We are a minority form of life that has behaved over the last hundred or so years as though the planet was created so that only humans would thrive” (39). In contrast, the biologist Margulis combined three Greek words (hólos for “whole,” bíos for “life,” and óntos for “being”), in the understanding of the holobiont, the superorganism that hosts a myriad of other life, of which humans are a part (38).

Chakrabarty offers no essential framework to address the climate crisis. Still, he contends that the critical question remains how to navigate the present and respond alongside the Earth System.

Chakrabarty offers no essential framework to address the climate crisis. Still, he contends that the critical question remains how to navigate the present and respond alongside the Earth System. He suggests that multiple entry points for the reconfiguration of hegemonic “contemporaneity,” can be found in the writings of thinkers across disciplines – from philosophers, physicists and botanists to activists, marine biologists and anthropologists, including Hartog (69), Latour (71), Todd (95), Winter (96), Haraway (98), and Kimmerer (103). By deconstructing “the globe” he reimagines the contours of connective global histories, citing the impetus of “Haraway and Indigenous philosophers—to make kin, intellectually and across historical difference” (102). Charabarty’s text draws together all these ideas to unpack the asymmetrical patterns of time and space in the Earth System and make a case for global environmental justice. Overall, Chakrabarti’s work One Planet. Many Worlds makes a critical intervention on how to think about the climate crisis, deconstructing the present way of being within the Anthropocene.

Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: Triff on Shutterstock.

I posted this video on YouTube this morning:

The transcript is:

I am deeply offended by welfare for wealthy people.

Now I don't particularly like the term welfare because I think that ‘social security’ or ‘benefits’ are much better terms than welfare, but it happens to work quite nicely in the context of making payments to the wealthy that they don't deserve.

What payments am I talking about? Well, since 2021, the Bank of England has increased its base rate of interest from 0.1 per cent to 5.25 per cent. And as a consequence, as we all know, vast amounts of extra interest has been charged in the UK on those who have had to borrow.

Mortgage holders are paying more.

People who pay rent pay more because their landlords, by and large, have mortgages.

And we're also paying more for many products that have interest implicit within them. Car loans, for example.

On the other side of the equation - and there is always another side of the equation in economics - somebody is benefiting hands down. Who's benefiting? Well, the owners of the wealth on which interest is paid are benefiting.

The interest rate went up from 0.1 per cent to 5. 25 per cent. It's unusual for anybody to have earned 5.25 per cent on their deposits, of course, over that period. But real interest rates have risen from well under 1 percent in 2021 to over 4 percent still if you search around. In other words, the wealthy have benefited enormously from the welfare that has been provided to them by the Bank of England's benevolence, which is biased in their favour.

That means they have vastly more income available to them at present, whilst those who have had to borrow to live and those on lower income - those who are younger by and large - have had much less. This has had a serious economic impact. The wealthy are, in effect, of course, able to spend more right now and have still been fueling inflation, despite the Bank of England's efforts to increase interest rates to suppress inflation.

Counterintuitively, they have, in fact, even more cash to spend and, therefore, have the most impact upon inflation - the consequence being that inflation has not gone away as fast as was anticipated.

It's bizarre. We have literally created a system where inflation control doesn't work, interest rates don't achieve the desired outcome, but the rich get richer.

What a great surprise. And what a news story that is. A news story that's not being said on any of the mass media, which is why I thought I'd mention it here.

I have just posted this video on YouTube:

The link is here in case it is needed.

The transcript is:

Why is there no national insurance on investment income in the UK?

I can't explain that. If you work for a living, and most people watching this video will probably either have worked for a living before they're retired or will be working for a living now, you pay national insurance on your earnings.

Quite a lot of national insurance, in fact. Jeremy Hunt has reduced the rate to 8 per cent for most people at present, but it's still a significant additional to your tax.

However, if you live off rent, or if you live off dividends from companies, or interest on savings, or distributions from trusts that might be made to you by your benevolent great aunt Agatha, or on capital gains that you make on the profit from sale of assets - if you live off any of those things - you won't pay national insurance, because It doesn't apply to investment earnings.

So, as a result, people who have to live off earnings from employment pay a much higher overall rate of tax than do people who live off investment income.

Now, that makes no sense at all. In fact, for decades, we tried to make sure that the reverse was true. Then employment had a more favourable tax rate than income from investment did.

But we've reversed that and in the UK now we have this amazing situation where we have a bias in the tax system towards income from wealth.

We could solve that. It would be incredibly simple. If we charge what is called an investment income surcharge on income from investments, rents, dividends, etc., and we charge it at 15%, which would provide an approximation to both the employer's and the employee's rate of national insurance, which is overall paid on earned income, then we would create a level playing field between earned and unearned income.

And those with unearned income would have to pay a lot more tax.

If it was charged on income from unearned sources in excess of £5,000 a year, excluding pensioners who would be let off this charge, then we could raise £18 billion a year to redistribute inside the UK tax system to relieve poverty or to provide the investment we need in public services.

So why don't we do it? I don't know because it would be fundamentally fair if we did.

And please accept an apology: the last slide should say £18bn and not £10bn. We are still learning how to quality check these videos.

There is more on this in the Taxing Wealth Report 2024, section 6.2.

Kemi Badenoch was reported by the Guardian yesterday to have said:

It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.

They added:

Instead, she said the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – which led to the development of the UK constitution and solidified the role of parliament – should be credited for providing the kind of economic certainty that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution.

As I said in the tweet that I issued in response:

There is nonsense, bullshit, fabrication and then whatever it is that Kemi Badenoch has to say on any subject.

If I failed to hide my contempt, I do not apologise.

I almost felt like asking on Twitter “Whatever did the Glorious Revolution do for you?“ Apart from the suppression of Catholicism, the creation of the Bank of England, the institution of the national debt, the imposition of a monarch who believed in the importance of the navy, largely as a weapon for imperialist, colonialist inspired territorial expansion, and who paved the way for the subjection of Scotland to the whim of the English, what did the Glorious Revolution do for you, after all?

The one thing I think we can say with confidence is that it did not deliver the industrial revolution.

It did however fuel demand for income to fund royal fantasies and foibles that most definitely required the exploitation of colonies in the USA, the Caribbean, West Africa and elsewhere.

So is Badenoch wrong? In my opinion, she is not just wrong, but is actively misrepresenting the truth.

Why would she do that? Partly because she does, for her own reasons, wish to deny Britain’s racist past, and present, because her denial of that racism is itself racist, in my opinion.

As significantly, she also wants to deny the role of monopoly-based rentier capitalism and exploitation as the common foundations of the wealth of this country.

She is, instead, pretending that entrepreneurial activity did deliver that wealth. But that is largely untrue. For example, those canal and coal pioneers who, if anyone did, started the industrial revolution later in the 18th century were able to do so on the basis of land ownership, wealth and property, all of which was supported by extraction of profits resulting from privilege, patronage, expropriation, rents and exploitation. Some of that undoubtedly would have been derived from colonial activity.

In that case Badenoch’s commentary does not just fail; it stinks because she is denying the truth and presenting a wholly false, politically inspired narrative that is unsupportable by evidence. But when did someone like her worry about things like that?