“We don’t plan to lose money,” the Shell analyst told me. When I met him, he was a young man, still completing his transition from geoscientist to bean counter. We talked over drinks as he explained how he ended up working at the multinational oil conglomerate—Shell acquired the small firm where he’d been a researcher—and how he hoped that switching to the energy industry’s finance side would provide job security as the oil and gas sector contracted. His role involved analyzing what kind of return Shell could expect from new wells if and when the company is compelled to relinquish them by climate restrictions. Of course, the wells would not then shut down. Rather, the analyst explained, they’d be sold to shadier operators who would continue to pump the wells at lower costs by evading safety and environmental regulations. The firm is incapable of aspiring to abandon its assets; as the analyst said, “We don’t plan to lose money.”

It’s easy to see how individuals are recruited—volunteer themselves, even—into projects that are hostile to their own existence.vii After all, every worker already does the same thing by definition, to a certain degree. Think back to the Shell example. No one wants to work at an underregulated oil field that’s flaring ten million cubic feet of gas every week. Nor would people choose to live in the world that kind of activity is rapidly creating, not if they got to pick. But if that’s workers’ only or even best way to fit into the social metabolism, to access the mediations between themselves and the world that make life possible, we know they’ll take it. They don’t have much of a choice. All the players are then compelled to cooperate: Shell needs to sell the field; the new operator needs to start flaring; and the workers need to operate it the way they’re told to. This doesn’t require us to think of humans as utility-maximizing automatons; the individuals involved could find themselves overcome with moral qualms and quit—people do it all the time. But that protest presents itself to the system as a personnel problem, not a structural challenge, and such personnel problems mostly solve themselves.

If Shell isn’t willing to plan to lose money, should we expect the Société des Hydrocarbures du Tchad to behave differently? The largest economies hope not, because they’ve continued investing tens of billions of dollars a year to finance oil and gas projects in poor nations.25 It’s nonsensical to blame the workers of Chad for the climate crisis—they rank among the least culpable people in the world, consuming fewer fossil fuels per person than the citizens of almost any other country on earth—yet their vulnerability puts the whole world at risk. That is the consequence of operating our social metabolism according to value production. It’s no one’s fault, not in particular. We all have to make a living, and these impersonal forces dictate which lives are worth it. Good luck trying to live one that’s not.