Future Theft: Fossil Capitalization, Ecological Dispossession, and Climate Reparations

This article criticizes the way fossil capitalization dispossesses the future. Turning fossil fuel into capital entails the legal enclosure, calculative cheapening, and material extraction/pollution of the future. Fossil investors’ ‘present values’ hinge on the misery of those dispossessed by climate emergencies. Fossil capitalization is premised on ‘future theft’ understood as a temporally inverted form of ‘original accumulation’. The durability of inequality created by asset wealth is compounded by the durability of carbon waste. Climate economics legitimizes and entrenches this pattern by discounting the future and failing to assign responsibilities for climate costs. Tort litigations allow climate victims to sue fossil fuel companies for compensation. However, they remain limited by the strictures of liberal property law. Climate reparations promise to overcome these limits by reclaiming the stolen future without recourse to previously settled property rights. Still, they cannot escape the vicious tempo-material trajectories engendered by fossil assets and their carbon afterlives.