Offloading costs and risks to labor and the public at large is a more viable solution for the capitalist class than a race to the bottom of the extraction barrel that would pit capitalist against capitalist and accelerate the earth’s chaotic exhaustion. Private green investments will help reduce climate change in the future, but they’re not immune to its effects now. Clean energy infrastructure doesn’t get an extreme-weather exemption—consider the unprecedented March 2024 hailstorm that smashed up a giant solar farm in Texas, leaving neighbors to worry about chemicals penetrating the water table, for example.48 Green stuff, then, is not an answer for investment capital, certainly not when it can’t lay the risks off on the public. Instead, profitable innovation means finding sustainable ways to steal from people, like generative AI software that chews up genuine creative work and spits it out again in flavorless chunks, for a fee. Constant downward pressure on the working class eventually causes people to start buckling. The wage—minus the unavoidable fees, fines, scams, and other connivances—ceases to be sufficient to reproduce people’s lives, forcing them to take extra jobs, to commit crimes themselves, to forage for food, to migrate. The price of labor drops below its cost, and capital increasingly finds its gains at the working class’s direct expense, digging into bodies like a long rope on the bare palms of someone sliding down.