Some lament the Trump administration’s animosity toward young people and scientists who speak common sense about a massive threat that we should confront through global cooperation. But Trump and his cabal appear to understand something that their liberal detractors do not: Their politics is the only authentic defense of contemporary capitalism.

Steven Mnuchin, US President Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, outraged liberal commentators at this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos with a snide remark directed at teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg. Responding to Thunberg’s call for an immediate exit from fossil fuel investments, Mnuchin said that she should go to college “to study economics” before “she can come back and explain that to us.” Two days earlier, Trump had referred to climate scientists as “the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers.”

The Trump administration’s attitude to climate change, and those campaigning for drastic measures to contain it, is ugly, nasty, and wrong. But behind the crassness and toxicity of Trump, Mnuchin, et al. is cold logic and brutal honesty: Their politics is the only authentic defense of contemporary capitalism. And, judging by Mnuchin’s patronizing advice to Thunberg, they understand that mainstream economics, unlike climate science, is their friend.

I, too, could not contain myself after Mnuchin’s Davos remark. “Mnuchin, sadly, makes sense,” I tweeted. “If Greta were to study mainstream economics, she would spend several semesters studying models of markets in which neither a climate disaster nor an economic crisis is possible. Time to transform both economic policy and economics!”

Many fellow economists were unhappy with my tweet. One tweeted back: “Not sure which undergrad programs you’re looking at but all the Econ 101 courses that I know of involve market failures, where climate change is the main example.” Quite right. But it is, I fear, beside the point. While many examples and concepts in economics courses would no doubt strengthen Thunberg’s resolve and arm her with powerful arguments against the likes of Mnuchin and Trump, she would also feel frustrated and ultimately undermined by economics and its effect on her fellow students.

One reason is the discipline’s framing and default settings. We all know the power of the default or baseline. In societies where organ donation is the default setting – automatic without a signed opt-out – the supply of transplant organs is substantially larger than in countries where people must carry donor cards. Framing is crucial in every setting where the human mind and heart must be energized against some ill.

Economics is no exception. The economic textbooks Thunberg would have to read begin with models of markets where the unfettered private profit drive is shown mathematically to serve the public interest. Only after she has learned these theorems, and has practiced the mental gymnastics needed to derive their mathematical proofs, will she be exposed to “exceptions” – for example, “externalities” of the production process, like climate-change-inducing pollution, which imposes costs not fully borne by the polluter. The very framing of market failures as an “exception,” perhaps caused by some “externality,” is an immense propaganda victory for the Trumps and Mnuchins of this world.

Worse, unlike organ donation, for which any society can decide to reverse the framing by making donation the default, college economics professors cannot simply reverse the framing by teaching externalities and market failure as the general case and presenting perfectly competitive markets as exceptions. The iconic theorems of economics cannot be proven in the presence of externalities. Alas, it is these proofs that impress students and the rest of society, especially those in power, and give economics professors their discursive hegemony within the social sciences, not to mention the lion’s share of public and private funding.

Viewed from this perspective, Mnuchin knowingly (or instinctively) delivered more than a sneering put down. Were Thunberg to take his advice, she would be weakened. A degree in economics, rather than in science, politics, or history, would either crush her spirit or divert her from endeavors that could make her even more dangerous than she already is to the economic interests Trump represents.

Some lament the Trump administration’s animosity toward young people and scientists who speak common sense about a massive threat that we should confront through global cooperation. But Trump and his cabal appear to understand something that their liberal detractors do not: One cannot acknowledge the perils of climate change, commit to doing whatever it takes to reverse it, and continue to think of capitalism as a natural system that can be tweaked to deliver shared, green prosperity.

Trump gets it: climate change is capitalism’s Waterloo. There is simply no feasible path toward the re-stabilization of the climate that is consistent with the maintenance of capitalism’s main pillars. The system we live in, unlike the one implied by college economics textbooks, turns on a pathological dynamic recycling mechanism: Oligopolies extract exhaustible value from humans and nature at breakneck speed, financed by debt-turbocharged financialization, which in turn fuels the extractive oligopolies.

This “technostructure,” as John Kenneth Galbraith christened this mechanism in his 1967 book The New Industrial State, will never willingly accept the limits on physical growth and extraction necessary for containing climate change, because it could not survive. With the political class utterly dependent on it for campaign financing, any cap, quota, or emissions trading scheme imposed by the government will prove cosmetic and, ultimately, impotent. In the same way that economics students study market failures as exceptions to an otherwise well-functioning market system, centrist reformers undergo the Sisyphean task of imagining a reformed, green capitalism.

Uncouth and disagreeable, Trumpism is nonetheless an honest manifestation of the historic moment when late capitalism pushed humanity past the point of no return. Trump urges us to carry on, while Mnuchin suggests that Thunberg numb her soul with the opium of mainstream economics. The only alternative to their policy of accelerated climate change, to the oil and finance curses that drive capitalism, is the wholesale disintegration of today’s technostructure. Do we have the stomach for it?

If you asked us why a dozen people sat on the floor next to the A.T.M. in a Chase Bank branch on Friday, waiting for the police to arrest us for this small act of civil disobedience, we would come up with the same answer as the famous robber Willie Sutton: “Because that’s where the money is.”

We don’t want to empty the vaults. Instead, we want people to understand that the money inside the vaults of banks like Chase is driving the climate crisis. Cutting off that flow of cash may be the single quickest step we can take to rein in the fossil fuel industry and slow the rapid warming of the earth.

JPMorgan Chase isn’t the only offender, but it is among the worst. In the last three years, according to data compiled in a recently released “fossil fuel finance report card” by a group of environmental organizations, JPMorgan Chase lent over $195 billion to gas and oil companies.

For comparison, Wells Fargo lent over $151 billion, Citibank lent over $129 billion and Bank of America lent over $106 billion. Since the Paris climate accord, which 195 countries agreed to in 2015, JPMorgan Chase has been the world’s largest investor in fossil fuels by a 29 percent margin.

This investment sends a message that’s as clear as President Trump’s shameful decision to pull America out of that pact: Short-term profits are more important than the long-term health of the planet.

There are few financial institutions untouched by these climate change-causing investments. Amalgamated Bank, Aspiration and Beneficial State Bank are notable exceptions. Local credit unions rarely have major investments in fossil fuels.

JPMorgan Chase, in contrast, has funded the very worst projects — projects that expand the reach of fossil fuel infrastructure and lock in our dependence on fossil fuels for decades to come.

In Minnesota, for example, the Line 3 pipeline replacement project, financed in part by JPMorgan Chase, adds 337 miles of crude-oil-carrying pipeline across Minnesota.

If approved this year, the pipeline will carry 760,000 barrels of crude oil every day from Canada to terminals on the edge of Lake Superior. This project reroutes and expands existing pipelines so that more crude oil can flow to refineries in Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Ontario.

Tara Houska, a tribal attorney and member of the Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe, has demonstrated the impacts on the ground. If built, the Line 3 replacement route will endanger the wild rice crops harvested for at least 500 years by the people native to the upper Midwest. Many Ojibwe nations in the region have opposed the project.

But it’s just as damaging if the oil doesn’t spill. Refined and burned as gasoline or jet fuel, it will spew carbon into the air, raising the temperature of the planet.

The victims of climate change are primarily people who have done little to cause the crisis. A World Health Organization senior scientist, Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, said in December that climate change is emerging as “potentially the greatest risk to human health in the 21st century.” In the same month, Oxfam reported that cyclones, floods and fires are now displacing three times as many people as wars.

Not all the victims of climate change are humans. An estimated 800 million animals have been killed in the Australian blazes, which came after record heat and drought. Neither of us have met a long-nosed potoroo; the news that Australia’s bush fires have likely driven it and other species to extinction makes the world seem poorer.

There’s nothing abstract about climate change any more. Slowing the pace of climate change is humanity’s great task.

One center of power in our world is political — that’s why young people have been demonstrating outside of parliaments, writing a Green New Deal and registering new voters: in the United States, 2020 will be a fateful year for changing the politics of climate.

But even if the most environmental candidates win, it’s hard to imagine that they’ll be able to move our country at the pace science requires. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that if we want to limit global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial temperatures, we will have to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, cutting them to net zero by around 2050 — and Washington is only one capitol.

It makes sense to go after the other center of power, too: the vast financial empire centered in our country. Insurance companies like Liberty Mutual and asset managers like BlackRock have also, through their investments in fossil fuels, enabled climate chaos.

These titans may be too big to pressure. Yet if we could get just one offending bank to move toward divesting from fossil fuels, the ripple effects would be both swift and global.

Imagine an announcement from JPMorgan Chase that it was immediately ending funding for new fossil fuel projects. It would echo around the world in hours, and there would be nothing the Trumps or Putins or Bolsonaros of the world could do to stop it.

We sat in and were arrested at Chase Bank on Friday for nothing smaller than the future of our planet. If you care about the climate, it’s worth moving your accounts away from these offenders. Cut up your credit cards.

If you want to stop climate change, follow the money.