6.62607015 x 10⁻³⁴ J Hz⁻¹

“Maybe it was the smell of ripe tomatoes, or the oriole singing, or that certain slant of light on a yellow afternoon and the beans hanging thick around me. It just came to me in a wash of happiness that made me laugh out loud, startling the chickadees who were picking at the sunflowers, raining black and white hulls on the ground. I knew it with a certainty as warm and clear as the September sunshine. The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That’s what good mothers do.”

Why did our ruling class not invest in decarbonising faster to avoid this acceleration in deadly heatwaves that scientists warned would come? Because of the capitalist law of value. Capital invests in what is most profitable to capital, rather than what is most necessary for humanity, so our ruling class keeps ploughing investment into fossil fuels and SUVs, while we get far too little in renewables and public transit, even while the world burns around us. We have more than enough capacity (labour, factories, technology) to address the climate crisis, but as long as capital controls investment and production we are prevented from doing it. We are trapped by the capitalist law of value, living in a miserable shadow of the world we could have.