If capitalists rob nature, and if nature undermines capital, everyone ends up broke. Where is the money supposed to come from? It’s a real concern: The World Bank called the early 2020s the “slowest half-decade of GDP growth in 30 years,” driven by timid capital investment.45 There are fanciful solutions—asteroid mining, for example, or magic software—but the likely answer is much more prosaic: us. If climate change means the future is progressively less guaranteed, then capital looks to protect itself by reducing costs instead of riskily planning to increase output or venture into new fields. For firms, that could mean consolidating with competitors, hiring consultants to “trim the fat,” wheedling subsidies out of the government, increasing prices, reducing product quality and/or quantity without changing the price, or getting customers to do some of the work for them.v But the tried-and-true way to reduce costs is to increase the rate of labor exploitation. That can be as simple as neglecting to award raises to employees fast enough to keep up with the cost of living or as dastardly as union busting or wage theft or child labor. In 2021, UNICEF and the ILO issued a joint statement warning that they had measured the first increase in decades in the number of child laborers around the world. In the United States, the Economic Policy Institute tracked ten state-level bills meant to weaken child labor protections, concluding that such efforts “are part of a coordinated campaign backed by industry groups intent on eventually diluting federal standards that cover the whole country.”46 The ILO estimates that ten million additional people fell into what it calls modern slavery between 2016 and 2021.47 By attacking the working class, capital can find a way out of its profit squeeze, and indeed we’ve seen workers and consumers rather than capitalists pay for the slowdown in growth.