Cai Huajie and Wang Yue: Save the Ecological Environment or Save Capitalism?
After the economic crisis of the 1970s, capitalist society shifted toward an era where neoliberalism dominated economic and social operations. Its blind fetishization of the "panacea" of free-market mechanisms led many to mistakenly believe that this trend of thought was dismissive of the ecological crisis. Anthony Giddens once pointed out that "the neoliberal attitude towards ecological problems is often one of hostility; it was once argued that the ecological crisis was exaggerated or non-existent, a trick invented by peddlers of doomsday myths; now the evidence suggests precisely that human society is heading toward an era of unprecedented universal prosperity." In reality, the view Giddens highlights underestimates the impact of neoliberalism on global ecological environmental governance. Since the 1970s, the two intellectual currents of neoliberalism and ecologism have gradually risen and influenced one another, leading to a phenomenon of "neoliberalization" within the field of global ecological environmental governance. This article attempts to analyze this phenomenon and its impact to reveal its true nature.
I. Ecological Capitalization: Neoliberalism’s "Ecological Environmental Governmentality"
In the 1960s and 1970s, with the publication of works such as Silent Spring, Only One Earth, and The Limits to Growth, modern ecologism gradually emerged. Simultaneously, neoliberalism succeeded Keynesianism as the mainstream ideology dominating the economic and social operations of capitalism. Under the mutual influence and interaction of these two currents, neoliberalism’s latent environmental thought finally surfaced after a long period of silence, influencing ecological environmental governance across the globe. This is manifested as the protection and restoration of the ecological environment within the framework of capitalism, aiming to achieve the symbiotic prosperity of capitalism and the environment. Their fundamental "governmentality" [1] is "ecological capitalization"—namely, the transformation of all natural resources and the goods and services they provide into capital to extract profit. This is claimed to result in a "multi-win" scenario for socio-economic, social, and ecological benefits.
Ecological capitalization is constructed through a series of specific logics and practical measures. It posits that the cause of contemporary ecological destruction lies in the "tragedy of the commons." To address this, ecological capitalization demands the complete privatization of the allocation of property rights for natural resource assets. It argues that under this premise, to encourage private owners to protect natural resources, they should be allowed to profit from the trade of such resources; that is, natural resources must be transformed into commodities and markets must be created for their exchange. This allows private owners of natural resources to use market mechanisms to decide a series of questions such as "what to produce, for whom to produce, how much to produce, and how to produce." As capitalism entered the stage of financial monopoly, capital also gradually began to flow into the field of the natural ecological environment, creating numerous green financial derivatives in capital markets. In short, we can summarize neoliberalism’s "ecological environmental governmentality" into four aspects: privatization, commodification, marketization, and financialization of natural resources. Among these, privatization and commodification are the prerequisites for marketization and financialization, while the latter two are the inevitable results of the former two developing to a certain degree.
Today, we can already observe the implementation of neoliberal "ecological environmental governmentality" on a global scale. Regarding the privatization of natural resources, we can describe it through two dimensions based on the transformed subjects and objects of ownership, as well as the different forms of privatization. First, natural resources that formerly belonged to the state, the collective, or were unowned ( res nullius) are transformed into the property of private individuals or private groups. For example, since 1989, England and Wales sold off formerly public water authorities to private enterprises, thereby privatizing services such as water supply and sewage disposal. During the 1980s and 1990s, driven by the World Bank, the Moroccan government used legislation to transform formerly collectively owned land into private property. Since the late 1980s, North Pacific fisheries, which were formerly state-owned, have gradually transitioned to private ownership. Since the 1980s, the United States has achieved the privatization of wildlife by issuing hunting licenses and allowing the establishment of private hunting farms. Second, existing forms of natural resource privatization exhibit diverse characteristics, including the following three aspects: full privatization, where ownership (including rights of possession, contracting, use, management, and revenue) is completely transferred to private hands; functional privatization, where public functions related to natural resources are handed over to private operation—for instance, in various Public-Private Partnership (PPP) models, the public and private sectors share property and revenue rights according to agreed terms while bearing different responsibilities; and financial privatization, where private individuals or groups provide funding for public affairs involving natural resources and receive a corresponding return.
Regarding the commodification of natural resources, ecotourism, bioprospecting, and Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are typical policy measures, involving the commodification of ecological space, biological genes, and ecological functions. American scholars Jessica Dempsey and Morgan Robertson argued that even if PES is not the "flagship product" of the neoliberalization of nature, it should at least be regarded as its "vanguard product." As of 2018, there were over 550 PES programs worldwide, with an estimated annual transaction value of 36–42 billion USD. For nature to achieve true commodification, its value must be expressed in monetary form; that is, natural value must be valuated. Although questions remain about how to conduct such valuations, the necessity of this premise is considered beyond debate by neoliberal economics. In its view, if valuation is not performed, environmental value defaults to zero, which is detrimental to making better decisions. So, what is the actual value of the global ecological environment? The most famous valuation came from American scholar Robert Costanza. In a 1997 article titled "The Value of the World's Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital" published in Nature, he and numerous other scholars assessed 17 global ecosystem service functions and concluded that the global ecosystem provides services worth at least 33.268 trillion USD annually. In 2014, Costanza and other scholars published "Changes in the Global Value of Ecosystem Services" in the journal Global Environmental Change, updating the data. Using the same measurement methods as in 1997, they estimated the 2011 value of global ecosystem services at 125 trillion USD (assuming updated unit values and changes in biome areas) or 145 trillion USD (assuming only unit values changed).
Regarding the marketization of natural resources, widely used global policies include environmental taxes, emissions trading, and subsidies for pollution reduction or environmental industries. For example, in terms of emissions trading, the world's largest carbon market is the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). Trading began in 2005, covering member states of the European Economic Area (EEA), limiting carbon emissions from nearly 11,000 power plants and manufacturing factories, as well as over 500 airlines flying between EEA airports, contributing to more than three-quarters of global transaction volume. The EU Carbon Market Report released by the European Commission in 2018 claimed that the introduction of this system promoted a decline in emissions from market participants; as of 2016, emissions in the European carbon market had declined for six consecutive years. Although there was a slight rebound of 0.18% in 2017 compared to 2016, this was mainly because real GDP grew by 2.4% compared to previous years. According to the World Bank’s 2018 State and Trends of Carbon Pricing report, as of 2018, 51 carbon pricing initiatives had been implemented or were planned worldwide. In 2018, the total value of emissions trading systems and carbon taxes was 82 billion USD, a 56% increase from 52 billion USD in 2017.
Regarding the financialization of natural resources, in a broad sense, the aforementioned marketization of natural resources is also a component of financialization and can be seen as its initial stage. However, the term "financialization of nature" received little attention before the 2008 financial crisis. Under the influence of neoliberalism, as financial capital increasingly dominated socio-economic life, and as the gravity of national economic activity shifted from the real economy to the virtual economy—with the financial sector becoming the heart and lifeblood of the national economy—nature was also incorporated. This led to the financialization of environmental protection and restoration, prominently seen in the development of the green bond and insurance industries. In 2001, San Francisco approved the issuance of 100 million USD in bonds to fund the development of renewable energy such as solar and wind power. In July 2007, the European Investment Bank issued the first "climate awareness bonds," recognized as the world's first green bond. In 1992, after Category 5 Hurricane Andrew devastated the southeastern United States and dealt a heavy blow to the insurance industry, the Chicago Board of Trade issued catastrophe insurance futures for the first time, marking the official entry of insurance-linked securities into capital markets. Catastrophe bonds are a type of bond where interest payments and principal repayment depend on the occurrence of specified catastrophic losses; nearly 40 billion USD of such bonds were issued between 1997 and 2011.
II. Questioning the Political Legitimacy of Neoliberal "Ecological Environmental Governmentality"
Max Weber categorized three types of foundations for political legitimacy: traditional authority based on established customs or habits; charismatic authority based on the extraordinary personality or exceptional appeal of a political leader; and legal-rational authority based on rational rules and procedures. However, as new problems continuously emerge with the development of the era, the elements considered in maintaining the foundation of legitimacy have increased. Whether a government can effectively respond to its country's ecological environmental problems has gradually become a source of political legitimacy. Meanwhile, what laws and regulations a government formulates, what policy tools it adopts, and through which organizations it implements these laws and policies also involve questions of political legitimacy. This represents the degree to which stakeholders or the public recognize and obey these laws, policy tools, and governance subjects voluntarily. While the former concerns the demand for environmental governance within political legitimacy, the latter concerns the demand for political legitimacy within environmental governance. There is not necessarily a linear positive correlation between the two—a government may have high political legitimacy and a high demand for environmental governance, but this does not mean the political legitimacy of its specific environmental governance methods is necessarily high. As for neoliberal ecological environmental governance, its source of legitimacy has not been strengthened by the neoliberalization of various governments and relevant transnational organizations since the 1970s. We can make a judgment on this based on the efficacy-based (output) legitimacy, moral legitimacy, and cognitive legitimacy of environmental governance, thereby questioning the political legitimacy of neoliberal ecological environmental governance based primarily on marketization.
First, from the perspective of efficacy-based legitimacy, neoliberal ecological environmental governance faces challenges regarding long-term and holistic effectiveness. Although neoliberal governance has shown certain local and short-term results, we must have a clear understanding of these results. The following two aspects deserve our close attention.
First, from a holistic perspective, the neoliberalization of ecological and environmental governance has not brought about significant environmental improvement. The sixth Global Environment Outlook, published by the United Nations Environment Programme in 2019, offered a pessimistic expectation for current progress: "Overall, the world is not on track to achieve the environmental dimension of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development... nor is it on track to achieve the internationally agreed environmental goals by 2050." In its "Projections of global progress toward selected Sustainable Development Goals and internationally agreed environmental goals," the report categorized the outlook for the "limiting global warming" target element as "off track." Indeed, on a global scale, since the signing and implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, market-based mechanisms for addressing global climate change have not achieved clear results; the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to climb. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), carbon dioxide levels recorded at the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory reached 414.7 ppm in May 2019, the highest seasonal peak in the observatory's 61-year history. Not only is the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere rising annually, but the rate of growth is also accelerating: it increased by approximately 0.7 ppm per year in the 1970s, 1.6 ppm in the 1980s, 1.5 ppm in the 1990s, and 2.2 ppm over the past decade. At the regional level, examples of the failure of neoliberal eco-environmental governance abound in both developed and developing countries. An example of the former is Walkerton, Ontario, Canada, where neoliberal measures such as environmental spending cuts and the privatization of water supply services were introduced starting in 1990, ultimately resulting in the most tragic drinking water contamination accident in Canadian history in May 2000. An example of the latter is the Brazilian Amazon, where the privatization of iron ore and manganese mining was far more effective at protecting the local environment than previous nationalization; however, such privatization still fails to solve the environmental externalities generated by extraction outside the mining areas.
Second, the reasons for those environmental problems that have clearly improved are complex and are not necessarily the result of adopting neoliberal policies. Both the improvement of air quality in the United States and the reduction of public nuisances [2] in Japan benefited from command-and-control environmental regulatory measures adopted before the rise of neoliberalism. Daniel Cole revisited the US Clean Air Act, pointing out that due to technical constraints in controlling atmospheric pollution (lack of information on air pollution, including severity and required reduction amounts) and institutional constraints (lack of sufficient personnel responsible for implementation), the 1970 Clean Air Act and its 1977 Amendments implemented public property rights and command-and-control regulatory methods for environmental protection. From 1977 to 1990, emissions of all criteria pollutants in the United States declined (by an average of 24%), and ambient air quality significantly improved; environmental concentrations of national criteria pollutants decreased by an average of 22.6% from 1981 to 1988. The Japanese eco-socialist Shigeru Iwasa has also pointed out: "The reason Japan was able to alleviate the public nuisances brought about by rapid economic growth was primarily due to the formulation and strict implementation of rigorous environmental standards. Formulating and carrying out environmental standards can directly regulate sources of pollution and destruction; this direct regulation is currently the most effective means of environmental protection." Conversely, since the U.S. and Japan advocated neoliberal reforms in the late 1970s, policies advocating for the relaxation of environmental regulation have had a negative impact on environmental improvement. In January 1981, the Reagan administration established the "Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief" and began relaxing regulations on public nuisances while cutting the budget and staffing of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As a result, it reached a point where the agency could not even publish an environmental white paper. In response, American environmental organizations sharply criticized the Reagan administration for setting back the history of regulating public nuisances and improving public health by 30 years. Furthermore, cases of collusion between EPA officials and corporations occurred during this period. A similar situation took place in Japan, where the government relaxed regulations on private investment for pollution prevention and loosened emission standards for nitrogen dioxide, leading to the implementation of environmentally destructive development projects such as land reclamation.
Second, from the perspective of the moral legitimacy of environmental governance, neoliberal eco-environmental governance faces severe challenges regarding environmental justice. Neoliberalism endows the market mechanism with an inherent moral legitimacy, which is "essentially ethical, capable of guiding all human behavior and replacing all prior ethical beliefs." Looking at the environmental effects produced by neoliberalism, there have indeed been cases of successful governance in various regions. For example, after neoliberal reforms in water policy, England and Wales privatized water supply services, and the quality of residential drinking water significantly improved. However, if such environmental improvements come at the cost of harming the relevant interests of others, then a question of moral legitimacy in environmental governance arises—namely, the issue of environmental justice. In the case of water resources in England and Wales, differences emerged between low-income and high-income groups in the burden of water and sewage fees. For instance, low-income households spent an average of about 4% of their weekly budget on water bills, much higher than the 1% average for all households. An increasing body of research also indicates that neoliberal eco-environmental governance policies primarily harm vulnerable groups, such as the economically poor and the politically disenfranchised, whose rights to access resources are often infringed upon by powerful groups. For example, while the introduction of the private organization "Friends of Virgin Islands National Park" to the Virgin Islands National Park in the United States made up for the lack of state funding and protected the park, the move still faced numerous controversies.
Third, from the perspective of the cognitive legitimacy of environmental governance, neoliberal eco-environmental governance faces challenges from the ecological rationality of traditional and local knowledge. Public identification with and willingness to obey environmental governance is influenced by existing systems of knowledge and belief. When the original knowledge and belief systems are themselves rich in ecological rationality, the forced infiltration of an alternative system will be resisted and its legitimacy questioned. Neoliberal eco-environmental governance faces similar issues. If we re-examine the market mechanisms that have recently occupied a central position in the "ecologization" of capitalism, we find that this has not always been the dominant mode of environmental governance, but is a product of the rise of neoliberalism. The potential danger of viewing it as a "natural" mode of governance lies in the fact that it obscures the possibility of alternative choices. Among the four aspects of the capitalization of ecology, the most core is the marketization of natural resources; however, market-oriented environmental policy is only a recent policy and a product of neoliberal politics. In the two waves of capitalist ecologization that have occurred historically, we find that the first wave in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led capitalist states to emphasize environmental protection, but market-based governance did not become the dominant means. Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the United States Forest Service, upheld utilitarian values in forest conservation; he not only advocated that natural resources be shared by all citizens and opposed their ownership by a wealthy few, but he also did not resort to market mechanisms in governance. Instead, he encouraged the adoption of expert opinions, demonstrating a high degree of trust in specialists. It was not until the mid-1980s, during a rethink of Forest Service policy, that the idea of protecting forests by introducing open competition through free-market mechanisms emerged—a period that coincided with the rise of neoliberal thought. In the second wave of capitalist ecologization that began in the late 1970s, the governance of the ecological environment through a logic of thorough marketization gradually achieved dominance. In 2018, William Nordhaus, a member of the "market school" of environmental economics, received the Nobel Prize in Economics, an event viewed as a sign that this governing logic had reached its zenith.
If one regards market-based environmental governance mechanisms as something that has always existed and cheers for their brief and localized successes—thereby viewing this as the "end of green history" for human environmental governance—then the latent danger is the exoneration of the market mechanism as a cause of the ecological crisis. This leads to an inability to find the true root causes of the crisis and obscures the effectiveness of other methods in resolving it. The Japanese scholar Kohei Saito once pointed out that under capitalist conditions, "Liberals hope that carbon trading or other market transactions can solve the problem of climate change. This view only serves as an ideological tool, preventing us from facing real dangers and threats, as if the market can automatically solve problems without our having to consciously make radical changes to existing modes of production. In this regard, liberals are very dangerous." In fact, outside of market mechanisms, there already exist many modes of production and life that are ecologically compatible. If viewed from the perspective of value creation and capital accumulation, these modes are clearly "backward" and thus at risk of being eradicated. For example, "For arid and semi-arid regions, nomadism is the most ecological and sustainable way of making a living in a water-scarce environment. This is why many people in East Africa are pastoralists, and they have been successful in this regard for a long time. But when the Kenyan government considers its future development, it believes there is no place for nomadism; it is essentially something that must be eradicated because, in the eyes of some powerful forces, it is 'backward.' No government is willing to let 18% of its people live freely and make an independent living. Living a pastoral life across the borders of several countries, while remaining relatively independent of central government control, is a subconscious challenge to capitalist land-use standards and private property norms." Therefore, in the face of any traditional mode of production and life, the logic of capital [3] cannot claim to be a panacea for all ills, nor can it obscure the effectiveness of alternative modes of production and life aimed at socialist institutional design and values to solve the ecological crisis. Otherwise, human society will travel further and further down a seemingly correct but erroneous path.
3. Saving Capitalism: The Essential Face of Neoliberal "Eco-Environmental Governmentality"
Although we can question the political legitimacy of neoliberal "eco-environmental governmentality" from the three levels mentioned above, neoliberalism may be dismissive of this because it assumes the posture of a "savior" dedicated to "saving ecology," claiming its original intentions are good even if the results are unsatisfactory. However, upon closer reflection on neoliberal "eco-environmental governmentality," we find that just as neoliberalism itself is merely a developmental stage in the process of capital accumulation, its proposed "eco-environmental governmentality" is also a mere expedient for capital seeking further accumulation. As Morgan Robertson has pointed out, the neoliberalization of nature is a project that promotes ecological forces to serve neoliberal hegemony, establishing and stabilizing new frontiers for capitalist activity.
To understand the essence of neoliberal "eco-environmental governmentality," one must first reduce the problem to the primordial question of the "relationship between man and nature," and from there derive the issue of the "relationship between capital and ecology" to reveal its nature. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and subsequent Marxist interpreters have explored this topic in depth. The Marxist-Engelsian view of nature is not only a materialist dialectical view that reveals the mutual penetration of man and nature, but also a practical-materialist view of nature that reveals how nature and society interpenetrate, and how nature’s "mode of existence" shifts alongside changes in social formations. Once the relationship between man and nature is mediated by labor, its form changes according to the form that labor takes. Therefore, for Marx and Engels, whether it be man, nature, or the relationship between the two, all are objects mediated by historical labor practices.
The young György Lukács and Alfred Schmidt of the Frankfurt School inherited these views from Marx and Engels. In his work History and Class Consciousness, Lukács defined nature as a social category in the sense of socio-historical ontology. Schmidt argued: "Marx, through the whole development of matter, firmly grasped the socially mediated quality of what is often called nature; he was concerned not so much with the changing content of natural phenomena as with the historical conditions under which they change." Since the "changing content of natural phenomena" that concerned Marx is merely the result of the "historical conditions of its change," the problem is transformed into an investigation of these "historical conditions." Following Schmidt, Neil Smith directly entered this level of inquiry to examine the Marxist discourse on the relationship between man and nature. Starting from the "historical conditions of change," Smith described the historical evolution of the production process as consisting of three stages: "production in general," "production for exchange," and "capitalist production."
In the "production in general" stage, the relationship between man and nature is one defined by use-value; humans produce use-values from nature that are useful to themselves and consume them. In the "production for exchange" stage, use-values are produced for others, and products are transformed into commodities. "Capitalist production" is also a form of production for exchange, but for Smith, its difference from an exchange economy lies in the fact that exchange-value becomes the form of appearance of value. In production, there emerges a bourgeoisie that owns the means of production but does not labor, and a proletariat that has lost the means of production and lives by selling its labor power. The bourgeoisie can only survive competition through continuous capital accumulation, while the proletariat can only survive by creating value that exceeds the value of its labor power. In a society of "production for exchange," the purpose of production is to create use-values for consumption by others, but in "capitalist production," the purpose is to create value and extract profit from it. These profits are then converted back into means of production; moreover, everything in nature must be transformed into a commodity and labeled with a price tag to be traded in the market.
From Smith's division of the three stages of production, it is clear that as the purpose of production shifts across different stages, the relationship between man and nature changes accordingly. Under forms of production aimed at subsistence and the exchange of use-values, although humans attempted to produce a surplus by altering nature, the appropriation of surplus at this time was only for survival. The form of the surplus was limited to use-values; thus, humans did not develop an impulse or obsession to radically transform nature beyond its inherent regional boundaries and properties, and man remained subordinate to nature. However, under the form of production aimed at the maximization of surplus value, both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat must create value and continuously accumulate capital as a necessary condition for survival. Consequently, humanity is bound to reshape nature according to this requirement. Nature no longer appears in its original form, but in the form required by the maximization of surplus value. This includes both quantitative changes—where nature beyond a certain regional scope is incorporated into the conditions of capitalist production—and qualitative changes in the way nature manifests its value—where nature must be transformed into a commodity with a certain value and a specific price to be traded against other commodities in the market. Therefore, in the stage of capitalist production, man reverses the relationship with nature: man is no longer subordinate to nature, but nature is subordinate to man, whereby the whole of nature is objectified as a historical existence.
In Capital, Marx described the change in the subordination of labor to capital during the process of capitalist development—namely, that as the method of producing surplus value shifts from absolute surplus value to relative surplus value, labor evolves from a formal subordination to capital into a real subordination to capital. Later, drawing on this exposition, Smith described the relationship between capital and nature in the historical development of capitalism as the subordination of nature to capital, evolving from "formal subordination" to "real subordination." Since labor, as an essential constituent element of the capitalist production process, undergoes such a change in subordination, nature—as another essential constituent element—necessarily changes as well. Smith argued that, similar to how absolute surplus value expands in a quantitative sense by extending surplus labor time and increasing the number of hired workers, the formal subordination of nature to capital manifests in capital accumulation utilizing colonialism to extract natural resources like timber, cotton, coal, and oil from across the world for production. This is a process of continuous quantitative expansion to acquire natural resources. The real subordination of nature to capital, however, manifests in two dimensions: on the one hand, capital circulates through nature, such as through agricultural production or activities like land "improvement." The real subordination of nature to capital not only intensifies this type of circulation but also transforms it from something "occasional" into a "deliberate strategy." On the other hand, and conversely, nature circulates through capital, which has likewise shifted from being "occasional" to a "deliberate strategy." Biotechnology (such as GMOs and cloning) and various nature-related commodity futures, ecological credits, corporate stocks, and environmental derivatives are the means by which this strategy is implemented. Essentially, in both modes, the original uniqueness of nature has undergone a "complete makeover" following the needs of capital accumulation. What nature is, and what kind of nature is useful, depends on the requirements of maximizing surplus value. Capital either uses technological means to create "nature" that did not originally exist, or the holistic functions of nature are dismembered into single, one-sided elements to be bought and sold. Capital thus reshapes nature according to the need for profit, rendering nature’s "mode of existence" completely subordinate to capital. Ecomodernism, as a theoretical reflection of this essence, carries the inherent danger of an infinite artificialization of nature by humanity.
At this point, looking back at the entire trajectory of capitalist development, we find that the essence of neoliberal "eco-environmental governmentality" is not so much a "savior" of the ecological crisis as it is a "savior" of the capitalist crisis. It is a means for capitalism to maintain its "last gasp" through "ecological fixes" [4].
The essence of capitalism is self-valorization; "grow or die" is the iron law of capitalist operation. Pursuing the maximization of surplus value is its ultimate goal, and maintaining capital accumulation is the law of its survival. Natural resources constitute the basic conditions of production for this accumulation. In this sense, the extraction of near-free natural resources from Northern and Eastern Europe by Western European states during the early formation of capitalism was merely the beginning of nature's formal subordination to capital. Later, the extraction of natural resources from the Third World by capitalist powers through colonialism was the continuation of this beginning, merely expanding the geographical scope from Northern and Eastern Europe to the entire globe.
To sustain continuous capital accumulation, quantitative expansion alone is insufficient. The subordination of nature to capital must evolve from "formal" to "real," because the wanton plunder and exploitation of nature by capital on a global scale inevitably raises the price of raw materials, thereby hindering accumulation. Consequently, capitalism relies on technological innovation to maintain its profitability by constantly shifting the "terrain" of capital accumulation. In different historical periods, the technological vehicles and terrains for maintaining capital accumulation have varied: the 19th-century stage of free competition and private monopoly capitalism used the steam engine and railroad construction as vehicles; the Fordist stage prior to the 1970s used fossil fuels and the construction of the "automobile society." When the roles of these technological vehicles in helping capital profit were nearing exhaustion, capital sought "ecology" to act as the relay baton, tasking it with the burden of saving capitalism from crisis. This led to the "marriage" between neoliberalism and the field of eco-environmental governance after the 1970s. Unlike previous quantitative expansions, the status and role of "ecology" in capital accumulation is no longer just a prerequisite factor of production entering the process. Nature is no longer formally subordinate to capital; it has been refashioned according to the profit requirements of capital. Through the aforementioned methods of privatization, commodification, marketization, and financialization—and under the "green" guise of ecotourism, biotechnology, carbon credits, and green bonds—it has been dissolved into market transactions and transformed into a "business strategy" for capital profit. Louis Demora, from the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Brazil—the largest social movement organization in Latin America—angrily remarked: "Capitalism caused global warming, and now they want to profit from it by turning the atmosphere into a commodity, privatizing and marketizing it. They want to put a price tag on everything."
Nature has effectively become subordinate to capital and has been turned into a vital strategic terrain for capital accumulation. Capital, wrapped in a green cloak, continues to seek the maximization of surplus value, attempting to "fix" its own internal contradictions and crises through the "ecological" terrain. However, the attempt by neoliberal "eco-environmental governmentality" to save capitalism by forcing the "real subordination" of nature to capital will never succeed, because its infinite expansion, driven by the fundamental interest of maximizing surplus value, can never leap over the barrier of the finiteness of natural resources.