Capitalismo de extinção: a crise climática e os limites do desenvolvimento | Luciana Bauer

The thesis of extinction capitalism proposes an urgent analytical shift: planetary destruction has been integrated into the very model of global financial reproduction. The governance of sustainable development faces a structural impasse in the face of what the jurist and researcher Luciana Bauer conceptualizes as extinction capitalism. Far from being a flaw in the process, the contemporary climate collapse reveals itself as a systemic mechanism where the exhaustion of planetary limits and the massive loss of biodiversity—projected by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at between 60% and 80% of species—are incorporated into the late economic dynamic. The debate, which included contributions from Professor Márcia Carneiro Leão and was moderated by Professor Juliano Contento at the Institute of Economics at Unicamp, revisits the historical mapping of the Carbon Majors project, coordinated by researcher Rick Heede. Data from attribution science confirm that knowledge about the imminent collapse was already being discussed in the US Senate by scientists such as Carl Sagan and James Hansen since the transition of the 1970s and 1980s. However, instead of mitigating emissions, the responses from the global north and large transnational corporations focused on creating superficial solutions, such as carbon credits, loss and damage markets, and speculation on resource scarcity. This mechanism is advancing into new frontiers, such as the predatory mining of rare earth elements in the ocean subsoil and in sensitive regions like Poços de Caldas and Andradas, where mining companies like Viridis and Meteoric threaten vital water resources under the pretext of enabling the energy transition to electric cars. This is a rhetoric of postponement that camouflages clinical colonialism and the maintenance of global asymmetries. The political foundation of this arrangement rests on the consolidation of an indifferent democracy. Captured by the power of big tech and surveillance capitalism—whose platforms operate in a way that is intrinsically incompatible with popular sovereignty—society undergoes a process of dampening through algorithms. Recalling the methodological premises of Karl Polanyi in *The Great Transformation*, the seminar warns that the attempt to maintain a self-regulating market detached from social safeguards annihilates human and natural substance. Faced with the discouragement of public participation in the agora and the inertia of the oil and technology lobbies, institutional restoration demands a profound pedagogical response: the construction of a democratic and ecological paideia, inspired by national formulations by Celso Furtado, Paulo Freire, and Darcy Ribeiro, capable of re-educating present generations for engagement in the public sphere and for the local design of real economic alternatives. The guest speaker, Dr. Luciana Bauer, is a jurist, researcher, writer, and former federal judge. She holds a doctorate in Law from the universities of Delaware (USA) and Univale (Brazil), and is the founder of the climate collective Jusclima and author of the analytical works A Democracia Indiferente and *A Norma Climática*. The debate was commented on by Professor Dr. Márcia Carneiro Leão, a member of the visiting specialist researcher program at Unicamp, with completed training at the University of São Paulo (USP) and work at the Vicente Marotta Rangel Center for Studies in Maritime Law. The coordination and moderation were conducted by Professor Dr. Juliano Contento, professor and researcher at the Institute of Economics at Unicamp. 00:00 Institutional introduction and academic accreditation 12:24 The intergenerational genesis of climate law 19:59 The science of attribution and the genealogy of the Carbon Majors 25:14 The concept of extinction capitalism and the normalization of collapse 34:14 The systemic limits of governance for sustainable development 44:45 The financialization of disaster and the illusion of carbon credits 52:09 Surveillance capitalism and the bankruptcy of the democratic agora 01:05:31 The ecological contradiction of rare earth mining 01:16:34 The imperative of urban mobility versus technological illusion 📅 Date: July 7, 2026 #capitalism #environment #climatecrisis #sustainability