Climate change is often presented as a collective failure of humanity to protect the planet. Governments, corporations and international institutions frequently emphasize that “we are all responsible” and that every country must contribute equally to solving the crisis. While this framing may appear morally appealing, it often conceals two fundamental questions that must be addressed: who created the crisis, and who now bears its consequences? Climate change is not merely a result of human activity but of a historically specific economic system—capitalism—whose pursuit of accumulation, expansion and profit has reshaped society’s relationship with nature and intensified ecological inequalities Marxist political economy provides an important framework for understanding this relationship. For Karl Marx, human beings are not external to nature but exist within it. Through labour, societies maintain a continuous metabolic interaction (Stoffwechsel) with the natural world. Nature provides the material conditions necessary for human survival, while human activity transforms nature to meet social needs. However, capitalism fundamentally alters this relationship. Production under capitalism is organized primarily around accumulation and profit rather than ecological sustainability. Nature is increasingly treated as a commodity and a source of raw materials for economic expansion. The ecological value of forests, rivers, minerals and land becomes secondary to their exchange value within capitalist production. The natural world is therefore incorporated into a system whose central objective is the continuous expansion of capital. Marx identified this as a fundamental contradiction within the capitalist mode of production. Later, John Bellamy Foster developed this argument through the concept of the metabolic rift, explaining how capitalism disrupts the sustainable relationship between society and nature by prioritizing extraction and accumulation over ecological reproduction. David Harvey further argues that capitalism depends on continuous growth because capital must constantly expand through investment, production and markets. Growth is therefore not........

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