Full ownership (dominium), under Roman civil law, constitutes three parts: Usus, fructus, and abusus. Usus is the right to use the thing. Fructus is the right to profit from the thing. And Abusus is the right to dispose of the thing.

I first came across this concept in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years in the context of slavery. For a slave master to have full ownership over their slave, they’d have to be able to murder them without any consequence.

A couple of days ago, Donald Trump called climate change a con job and a scam while addressing the UN general assembly.

“If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” he said.

But what does fail mean? Are we talking GDP? The total amount that a country can profit from in a year from its slice of the planet??

A thought that ran through my mind today is that if private property is the foundation of capitalism, and ownership is the mechanism by which the private nature of that property is established, then ownership is the foundation of capitalism.

There is something called a usufruct, which is a state where you have the legal right to use the thing and to profit from it, but under no circumstances can you abuse or destroy it. It’s a limited kind of ownership.

From a third-person perspective, there’s no difference between a usufructuary and a full owner. The only way to know for sure who has dominium, is to watch who can destroy and get off scott-free.

The United States is currently going through a crisis of dominance under Donald Trump. And denying climate change is one way to prove dominion over the world. To legitimise the abuse and destruction of the planet, so as to be able to get away with it.

So who has dominium over the planet?

There’s one ideology that asks us to see ourselves as being usufructuaries, and another that wants us to see ourselves having full ownership. One of those will end up with us feeling intellectually right but eventually homeless, and the other would require us to limit our rights, but at least we’d still have a planet to live on after.

No points for guessing which ideology the United States has been pushing for almost the entirety of its imperialist history.