Carpe Momentum: The Price of Breath

How capitalism turned life itself into a commodity, and why sustainability now means resistance.

Sustainability is simple enough to define. It means meeting the needs of the present without stealing from the future. It is, at its core, a moral compact across generations, a promise to live in such a way that others may also live. Society, by contrast, is more complicated, though no less elemental. It is the collective expression of that same promise: to build systems that allow our species to endure. Strip away the markets and borders, the flags and ideologies, and you find the same fragile truth, we survive together, or not at all.

Yet we’ve built a civilization that treats both sustainability and society as expendable luxuries. We speak of “growth” as though it were progress, as though acceleration itself were proof of direction. We burn through forests, fish, soil, and futures as if the bill will never come due. But the planet always collects. The question is only whether we’ll choose to pay with humility or extinction.

Every crisis unfolding around us, economic inequality, mass displacement, democratic collapse, ecological breakdown, shares a single cause: the concentration of wealth and power beyond any moral restraint. The result is an economy designed not to sustain life but to consume it.

Thomas Piketty gave us a formula that captures the engine of this decay: R > G. The rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth in the real economy. Wealth grows faster than wages, faster than production, faster than the planet can replenish itself. It is the mathematics of compound privilege, the quiet algorithm of empire.

Between 1945 and 1975, that equation briefly reversed. Growth outpaced returns to capital. Wages rose, unions were strong, public investment flourished, and the fruits of prosperity were shared, unevenly, but shared nonetheless. That era of balance was an historical anomaly, a 30-year window when democracy had enough leverage to tame the market. Then came Thatcher, Reagan, and the neoliberal restoration. The market was freed, unions were broken, and capital was unleashed to devour labor, nature, and time itself.

Since then, inequality has metastasized into its ecological form. Every billion added to the wealth of the few represents not only financial gain but environmental loss. Capital must expand to survive, and expansion now means extraction, of carbon, water, soil, and human life.

The latest Oxfam report makes the math visible: the ten richest Americans added nearly $700 billion to their fortunes in a single year. Half the country’s children live near poverty. The richest 1 percent emit twice as much carbon as the poorest half of humanity. The global economy is a machine built to convert the living world into private balance sheets.

And if proof were needed that we’ve crossed into parody, look no further than Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package, the largest in human history, a monument to hubris masquerading as innovation. It is billed as a reward for “visionary leadership” but is, in truth, a bribe for accelerating unsustainability. Musk’s fortune is built on lithium extraction, carbon-intensive manufacturing, and the dream of escape, Mars colonies for the few while Earth burns for the many. It’s the perfect capitalist fairy tale: profit from the disease, then sell the illusion of a cure. The idea that one man’s compensation should exceed the GDP of entire nations isn’t merely obscene; it’s physically unsustainable. The biosphere cannot finance that kind of ego indefinitely.

Environmental collapse and inequality are not separate crises. They are mirror images. The same forces that underpay workers also underprice ecosystems. The same policies that strip social safety nets also strip forests. The same ideology that calls public health “unaffordable” calls clean air a luxury.

The UNHCR now reports that climate disasters have displaced 250 million people in the past decade, seventy thousand human beings a day. They flee not from fate but from policy: from the profits of fossil empires, the negligence of governments, the indifference of markets. Half the world’s displaced now live in regions facing extreme climate exposure. They are the first citizens of a new global order, the exiles of unsustainability.

When we talk about sustainability, then, we must talk about justice. You cannot have social or economic equality on a dead planet, and you cannot have environmental recovery under a regime of hoarded wealth. The rich do not just steal from the poor; they steal from the future.

The defenders of this system love to speak of scarcity. They tell us we can’t afford the poor, can’t afford pensions, can’t afford public healthcare or renewable energy. But scarcity, like austerity, is not natural. It’s engineered. It’s the child of fiscal rules written by those who already have more than they could ever need.

The truth is that the poor subsidize the rich. Every rent payment, every interest charge, every inflated price for privatized essentials is a tax paid upward, the tribute demanded by a rentier class that mistakes ownership for virtue. These are the hidden taxes of capitalism: interest, rent, and profit. Together, they siphon not just money but meaning out of everyday life.

The wealthy depend on public infrastructure, cheap labor, and the stability of the state, all funded collectively, yet insist that society owes them gratitude for their “innovation.” Meanwhile, governments insist that helping ordinary people is “unaffordable,” while quietly underwriting the wealth of billionaires through

As we debate budgets and deficits, the Earth’s physical systems are reaching their own fiscal cliff. Scientists warn that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the ocean current that carries warmth from the tropics to the North Atlantic, may collapse within decades. This current, the planet’s great heat engine, keeps Europe’s climate mild and regulates rainfall across continents. If it falters, the consequences will be apocalyptic: frozen winters in northern Europe, failed crops across Africa and Asia, disrupted monsoons, accelerated Antarctic warming.

The Atlantic current carries fifty times the total energy use of humanity. Its weakening is our mirror, a planet out of balance, circulation slowing, life stagnating. The parallels are inescapable. Just as the rich hoard wealth, the warm waters of the Earth are hoarding heat. Just as inequality strangles society, feedback loops strangle the biosphere. The same logic governs both: extraction without renewal, privilege without reciprocity.

If the oceans stop circulating, politics becomes irrelevant. Borders dissolve, markets fail, and the idea of “affordability” evaporates. You can’t deregulate thermohaline circulation. Sustainability is not a lifestyle or a brand; it is the act of keeping the planet alive long enough for morality to matter.

On land, the privatization of life continues apace. In East Texas, hedge fund managers are buying up aquifers, claiming billions of gallons of groundwater as private property to sell back to the same communities that depend on them. Water is the new oil, they say, and the law agrees. Under the “Rule of Capture,” whoever has the biggest pump wins.

This is how the market defines progress: the right to drain your neighbor’s well, sue the town that protests, and call it a societal benefit. It’s disaster capitalism in its purest form, turning scarcity into profit, turning thirst into yield.

The Texas water wars are a preview of the next frontier of privatization. Once you can own water, air and sunlight are not far behind. The final enclosure will be of existence itself. Investors will monetize the act of staying alive.

And yet, amid the lawsuits and lobbyists, small local groundwater boards, under-funded, outgunned, but unwilling to surrender, have begun pushing back. For now, they’ve stalled one billionaire’s plans. It’s a small victory in a global war over the commons, but it matters. Because if they lose, if the right to drink becomes a subscription service, civilization as we know it will not survive the century.

Sustainability has always been about moral choice. It asks not just how we live, but who gets to live. The myth that we cannot afford equality, care, or ecological restoration is collapsing under its own absurdity. What we truly cannot afford is a system that rewards destruction and calls it growth.

When Iceland declares the collapse of an ocean current an “existential threat,” it is not speaking metaphorically. It is naming the truth that the market will not face: the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere. There are no profits on a dead planet.

The future will not be determined by technological innovation or financial engineering, but by a far older question: whose lives do we consider valuable enough to sustain? Right now, our answer is clear, the lives of the wealthy, at any cost. But the cost is now everything.

We can still choose differently. We can reclaim the meaning of “affordable” to include survival, dignity, and care. We can make the economy serve life instead of sacrificing life to the economy. We can remember that the commons, air, water, sunlight, and time, belong to everyone, or they belong to no one.

We have been affording the rich for far too long. The time has come to afford each other.

Sustainability, in the end, is not a technocratic goal. It is an act of solidarity, a decision to live as if the future matters, and as if all lives are worth the cost of keeping the world alive.