Search results
Nature is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. Despite countless pledges and summits, we remain on course for a catastrophic 3 degrees Celsius of warming. In a world of immense wealth, billions still live below the poverty line and on the frontlines of environmental breakdown. Increasingly, the world is waking up to this reality, but are the ‘solutions’ being proposed really solutions? In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the escalating plunder of the natural world under financial capitalism, and exposes the fatal biases that have shaped climate and environmental policymaking. Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, vested interests and environmental governance, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish. The book explains what is wrong with carbon pricing, off-setting and asset management’s recent interest in all things environmental. Both honest and optimistic, The value of a whale asks us – in the face of crisis – what we really value.
Between equal rights, force decides. –Marx, Capital Vol. I 1 Perhaps more than any other policy proposal for grappling with climate breakdown, the carbon price has enjoyed the constant attention and endorsement of policymakers, academics and the media. There is also, arguably, no other policy proposal which better encapsulates the twin imperatives of an emergent green capitalism: the search for means of addressing ecological crisis which prescribe minimal, if any
corporations are effectively free to make any claim they wish; naturally, a situation that suits them. A green image is highly lucrative because consumers really do want green products, so without having to worry about the veracity of their claims, global corporations are able to devote their attention to publicising them. This is the illusion of green capitalism. 36 On the high streets of the rich world, there is barely a product on sale today that does not make green claims of some sort. Yet, in the absence of verification
The fourth chapter delves into the increasingly central role of the asset management industry in policymaking and in practice, namely within an essential new site of green capitalist effort: the booming ‘sustainable finance’ industry. If the focus of the book is skewed toward actors in the Global North, it is because, unjust as this reality is, the sites of power shaping green capitalism remain primarily within Northern governments, firms, non-governmental organisations, and Northern-dominated international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization. Moreover, most international finance and exchange is governed by the legal systems of just two jurisdictions, New York State and England, whose respective capitols play host to most of the world’s powerful financial and legal firms. It is, therefore, to a large extent within these two sites that the programme of green capitalism is being defined and legally encoded, and where efforts to contest it should, at least for the time being, be directed.
trouble with green capitalism. This book began with a question: how is it that we remain so off course for meeting even the outer limits of safety when it comes to the climate and nature crises? Throughout the chapters that followed, I have tried to sketch an answer, the details of which fell broadly into one of two categories: the systems, ideas and political-legal architectures that facilitate deepening inequality and, as a consequence, ecological harm; and the false or maladaptive solutions that stem from them. However, in
for thought. This book is about ‘green capitalism’, which I argue is the project guiding much of the global response to ecological crisis and the unprecedented threat to capitalist systems it presents. It is an imperfect term, but I use it to describe the union of two defining pillars: first, the effort to preserve existing capitalist systems and relations in response to this unprecedented threat, and second, ensuring new domains for accumulation in the transition to a decarbonised and ecologically sustainable economy
inequity. This chapter explores the increasing prominence with which ‘nature’ – from mineral resources to biodiversity – features at the core of green capitalism. 13 Having side-lined nature for decades, treating it as simply an input to the discrete and bounded unit of ‘the economy’, market-centric economics is now confronting the profound physical consequences of that neglect. The extent to which unabated consumption and exploitation of resources in service of the enormous economic growth that defined the twentieth and
of this chapter. Instead, I argue that today, the most significant impact of economists and economic thought on our approach to the climate and nature emergencies is their invocation, with varying levels of good faith, in service and in support of action on these crises. The more potent and widespread threat to action comes not from obstruction so much as the pursuit of false ‘solutions’ – the solutions of what throughout this book I identify as an emergent ‘green capitalism’. From the commodification of nature to carving
influence over the crystal ball of financial risk analysis, prediction and allocation wield substantial economic power. And, as the preceding chapters argued, it is power, in the end, rather than neutral market forces that will determine the contours of our confrontation with deepening ecological crisis. This chapter is dedicated to understanding the sites and forms of power shaping the contours of green capitalism. Namely, it identifies within an increasingly finance-dominated global economy a critical and historically recent
lines of class, gender and race. This is an essential challenge for the first pillar of green capitalism – the effort to minimise disruption of the structures and distributions of wealth and power that presently define the global economy. Indeed, the green capitalist programmes emanating from the US, UK and EU are increasingly confronted with the dilemma of ensuring the base consumption and comfort of enough of their populations in the face of an unprecedented threat to growth and advancing constraints on resources, particularly as