Climate Change
Economic delusions cannot save us from the climate crisis and societal decay
“Never forget that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature”.
Global Boiling – Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay
Image: Paul Walker/Flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 License
Many of us have grown up with the story of an arrogant ruler King Cnut, who placed his throne on the banks of the Thames, waiting for the tide to come in. As it did so he held out his hand and demanded that it recede. Predictably, it didn’t. What most of us don’t know, however, is rather than telling of a King’s hubris, it celebrates something quite different. An acknowledgement from Cnut that ‘All the inhabitants of the world should know that the power of kings is vain and trivial’. Whilst Cnut recognises a holy power, we might in these very different times acknowledge that far from humans controlling their environment, as we have the arrogance to imagine, it is instead the power of nature that dictates responses to our behaviour.
This arrogance is displayed daily by our politicians who seem to think they can put off action on climate change, citing economic credibility over scientific facts or putting the profits of the oil and gas producers above those of the health of the planet.
On the one hand, we have Sunak granting permits for more oil and gas drilling (whilst the industry continues to rake in huge profits), on the crazy basis that home-grown is better for the environment, which actually is not the case, as discussed in this Channel 4 Fact Check.
And on the other, Keir Starmer, fixated on household budget economics, reportedly thinks that ‘the hard grind of rebuilding economic credibility must come first, as opposed to Labour spending “vast sums of money”’. ‘Growth, investment and wealth creation will be, he said ‘the only show in town’ if Labour is to build a prosperous country with strong public services for the long term.”
At the same time, Rachel Reeves has postponed Labour’s green plan, and a few weeks ago also rejected the call to ditch the Tory imposed two-child benefit cap because, apparently, the ‘dire public finances’ means there will not be enough money to go around. Not only is the shadow chancellor intent on denying some of the poorest in our society the means to live decent lives, but also putting on hold urgent action on climate change. Here we have yet again, the eternal circus of blame which politicians indulge in (remember Liam Byrne) but which has nothing to do with monetary reality.
This is a neoliberal, monetarist pile of crock at a time of existential climate crisis and societal decay. Both the consequences of a destructive economic system which treats people and the planet as objects to exploit for profit.
We have a party opposition leader (and his shadow chancellor) dedicated not only to further economic decline, decay of public infrastructure and harm to citizens, who clearly thinks he can hold back the tide of ecological overshoot and climate change until the public finances are in good order.
Predictably King Cnut failed to hold back the tide, and now our own politicians seem to think that they can put off action because heaven forbid that we interfere with the profit streams of polluting industries or the god-like market. They talk about the economy as if it were separate from the sphere of people’s existence or the planet’s ability to sustain human activity. And with astonishing arrogance imagine that the great arrow of human progress will provide the solutions in the form of technology that is scarcely off the drawing board, or growing millions of trees (important though that is) and will save the day at some unspecified time in the future. Both questionable propositions and time is not on our side.
It surely is disturbing to be a witness to the fact that the emperor has no clothes and yet the entire political establishment fauns daily over a toxic economic system which has created vast poverty and inequity across the planet and is bringing an end to the world as we know it, to keep the consumption truck running and the profits flowing.
Then, at the same time as the media reports on the scientific evidence for climate change, and as we are witnessing the increasing incidence of damaging weather events from heat domes to drought, fire and floods which affect humans, destroy vital natural habitats and impact on food production, in the next breath is allowing politicians, government institutions, think tanks and its own journalists to reinforce the household budget narratives of how government spends.
We need a frank, public conversation about the future. As an article published in The Conversation makes clear, ‘The only way to keep humanity safe is immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse emissions in a socially just way.’ The last part is key, not just from a domestic point of view but also how we address the vast western created inequity that exists in the Global South, and the ecological destruction and pillage of real resources that has occurred to serve Western consumption and reinforce the power politics of empire.
As it also points out, ‘Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5C because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business not the climate’. In those few words, today’s reality is confirmed through government’s political priorities. It is time to see through the game and challenge those ideologically driven preferences.
As Jason Hickel, author of ‘The Divide; A Brief Guide to Inequality and its Solutions’ tweeted recently, ‘As climate-related damages hit, remember that this crisis is not due to generic “human activity”. Excess emissions are due overwhelmingly to the core states of the global North, and the ruling classes that control the systems of production, energy and national legislation.’
The time is now to deal with ecological overshoot and climate change in a socially just way. As GIMMS emphasises endlessly, the only way we can do that is to reject an economic system built on growth and endless consumption which benefits fewer and fewer people and destroys life, not to mention being at the heart of exceeding the planet’s ecological boundaries.
While politicians continue to count the pennies as in Labour’s abandonment of its commitment to a timeframe for spending the promised £28bn on a green transition, citing as it does the worsening financial situation, we are closing our eyes to the urgent nature of the challenge.
The question is not how we pay for it. The real challenge is to decide what our priorities are, draw up a strategic plan for achieving them and using the dual supports of legislation and tax policy to free up the real resources it will need to carry out those plans. Money in itself is never the consideration but politicians on both sides want us to believe it is. Truth is that we pay for it by spending the money. The only constraints to spending are real resources and decisions about how and to whom they are distributed.
We pay for it by spending the money - By Alan Hutchison
We need to start altering the discourse and the first candidates for change should be the phrases ‘taxpayers’ money’ and ‘government borrowing’. Taxpayers are not and never have been the source of currency. Similarly, government doesn’t borrow when it issues bonds; instead, it provides a safe place for us to store our savings.
The flat earthers need a lesson in monetary reality, to stop putting people’s lives on the line for a lie. In short, the government is the currency issuer. It spends the money into existence first, then taxes and plays the smoke and mirrors game it calls ‘borrowing’. Up until now, it has been the failsafe mechanism to keep the troops compliant and under control.
Whatever the future holds, it should be about our values which include respect for a life-giving planet and its inhabitants. Instead, and in reality, we have psychopaths in charge, prosecuting endless wars, advocating growth at any cost and, at the same time, proposing austerity (but not for the richest).
What we need now in these uncertain and unstable times is global cooperation, not a myopic focus on keeping the status quo in place for a lie, or to maintain the reins of global power.
Whilst what we face is a global challenge, we also can’t ignore what is happening at home to our own citizens as a result of short-sighted, market-driven solutions and the household budget economics that drives spending and policy.
Two articles in the Guardian in recent months report on the shocking exploitation of foreign care workers brought to the UK to plug the gaps caused by decades of government neglect, outsourcing and privatisation, and austerity in the form of public sector spending cuts. Shockingly, in the past year, the number of modern slavery cases reported within the UK care industry had more than doubled. Failures in duty of care has facilitated organised crime to exploit unfortunate victims who were desperate to find a better life but instead found slave-like conditions, long hours and below subsistence wages.
The solution is not to steal the valuable resources of poorer countries, but to bring social care back into public hands, invest more in social care provision and training, along with secure employment rights and fair terms and conditions and wages. The solution is for the nation to decide what its priorities are – more of the same contempt for citizens by its leaders, or something better.
Here, predictably we see again an economic ideology that puts private over public provision, all justified by the claim that we can’t afford better public services, or quality care for those who need it. An economic system which has taken precedence and is not fit for purpose, unless we mean the enrichment of those who benefit from government spending policy. All the government is actually doing is papering over the cracks it has caused, and the victims are both those using social care services and those persuaded that the good life awaits if they sign on the dotted line.
Again, the only constraints faced by government are related to how real resources are distributed and who benefits from that distribution. A stable and healthy society relies on government laying the foundations. However, successive governments have abdicated their responsibility and have increasingly shifted it to the corporate estate, along with public money. Whether it is the NHS, social care or indeed the many other vital public services which support citizens, all have been subjected to this false belief that there is no money, and that the private sector is more efficient.
Last week, the health minister Maria Caulfield defended Steven Barclay’s plans to use the private healthcare sector to deal with the long post-covid waiting lists, on the basis that it would provide good value for money for the taxpayer. If there are long waiting lists, this is not a new phenomenon. Prior to the pandemic in February 2020, there were 4.43 million people on a waiting list for care. The latest figures for May 2023 show that around 7.47 million people were waiting for treatment.
The fact is that the private sector is already operating in the NHS, taking public money to run health services with profit in mind. We now have a fragmented service where the word national is in name only and the NHS logo hides a myriad of private healthcare companies. From a publicly paid-for, managed, and delivered service to one that is now serving the needs of the corporate estate, where publicly paid-for means corporate welfare. If the NHS is broken, it broke as a result of the decades of reshaping it through the pursuit of an ideology that serves the neoliberal tenets of faith in markets and privatisation. When Blair said last month that ‘there should be complete cooperation between the public and private sector’, and Starmer in the Observer that we need to prioritise ‘radical reform of public services over reckless spending promises,’ the only thing to note is that they are all in it together. Blair and Thatcher’s legacy lives on.
MMT Verify: How We Can Staff the NHS Without Tax Rises - Neil WilsonSpending only happens if there was something to buy. If that spending is then deficit spending it has a lower inflationary impact than spending that is tax-matched.
Then as the Prime Minister seeks to blame striking NHS staff for record-high long waiting lists, this must surely be the final insult to a workforce that has been unfairly treated as a result of government policy and like many, struggling to manage the cost-of-living crisis on top of previous public sector pay squeezes. One minute we are being exhorted to clap for our dedicated nurses and doctors, and the next, government ministers are demonising them.
Neither health nor social care should be viewed as a business, and it certainly doesn’t involve being good value for the taxpayer, since taxes do not fund government spending. Let’s instead put the blame where it really lies. At the government’s door, resulting from a decade of cuts in real terms to spending (austerity), failure to train sufficient healthcare professionals, private sector for-profit involvement (which predates the Tories), and closure of hospitals, beds and even treatment options, all of which has been justified on the false premise of public sector unaffordability, and to push an ideological preference for private sector involvement. We can translate this as absolutely nothing to do with the state of the public finances, but rather as a political choice. The false narrative of monetary affordability constantly trumps delivery of public purpose, and when it comes to ethics, as in stealing the resources of poorer countries, as long as things can be done on the cheap, then it’s acceptable.
If we want better public services, health, and social care, it can only come through government which holds the power of the public purse. This is what we could have in a sane world where people matter more than a cruel ideology and profit. Instead, what we have is a shameless manipulation of a hapless public to justify what will be in effect more austerity, more ‘difficult decisions’ that can only cause more human distress and hardship, damage the life chances of our youngest citizens, and cause further decay of our public infrastructure.
And then, while the life-giving planet overheats because of human activity and the distribution of wealth becomes ever more unequal, last month the number crunchers at the OBR were ‘preparing to sound the alarm’ over the impact of rising interest rates on the public finances which, according to the Guardian, would ‘deliver a serious blow to the government’s scope for pre-election tax cuts.’ In its ‘Fiscal risks and sustainability report,’ it set out the impact of higher interest rates for the public purse. This would, it suggested, make it less likely that [the Chancellor] would meet one of its five key pledges – tackling Britain’s public debt. And no doubt such thinking will drive more damaging austerity thinking on both sides of the political spectrum.
Let’s be clear first, interest rates don’t hurt the public finances. Government as the currency issuer can always meet its liabilities. There are, instead, winners and losers in the private, non-government sector. The winners are savers, banks and holders of Treasury gilts, while the losers are those who will suffer the economic effects of higher interest rates which can filter through in higher unemployment and cause more pain for people struggling to pay higher rates on debt and mortgages.
Then in the same household budget vein, Chancellor Hunt, after checking thoroughly down the back of the sofa for a few stray quid, ordered his ministers to find £2bn savings for public sector pay rises. Not content with the nonsense claim that there is a threat of public sector wage spirals driving inflation, he then acts as if the government is short of money and must rob Peter’s pot to pay Paul’s.
What a choice! Taking steps to mitigate the human-induced existential threat of climate change, ecological overshoot, and growing poverty and inequality, or balancing the public accounts. While they tell the public about the hard choices and sacrifices to be made, there has been no problem finding the money for military support in Ukraine, £2.3bn in 2022 and the same for 2023, totalling an eyewatering £4.6bn.
There is no money for serving public purpose, helping people through these difficult times, feeding children or rebuilding our ailing public infrastructure, but there is an inexhaustible amount for waging war and killing people, bailing out banks, or contracts for dodgy PPE. Surely these contradictions must be hitting home by now, and the extraordinary con that is being practiced on citizens of this country with huge social and environmental costs.
The key to better public services, infrastructure, social security provision and a green transition is not growth, contrary to what politicians on both sides of the political spectrum would have you believe. It is, rather, something much simpler and direct, a political choice to deliver them.
Aside from the fact that taxes do not fund government spending (implicit in the belief in growth as the solution), faith in growth as a tool is misplaced in an uncertain, unstable and changing world in which we are currently in uncharted territory. We need action now. While politicians clearly have all had the ‘public finances are like a household budget’ briefing, and all sing from the same cruel hymnbook without question, aside from the human misery this narrative causes, it makes no economic or environmental sense.
Author Jason Hickle asked in 2021, ‘If our economic system actively destroys the biosphere *and* fails to meet most people’s basic needs, then what is actually the point?’
Time for the public to ask those same questions of the political class.
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The post Economic delusions cannot save us from the climate crisis and societal decay appeared first on The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies.
How does climate crisis change the curriculum?
A Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences event. Shifting the question from ‘how should climate change be put into the curriculum?’ to ‘how does it transform the curriculum?’ opens up the subject in new ways across the world. How does it change the way in which each subject (including humanities) is conceptualised, taught and related to other subject areas? What education do students need to equip them with the information, critical abilities and practical adaptability to build liveable futures? How can they develop the skills and vocabularies to deal with emotions around instability, uncertainty and loss? In the coming decades, what will employers want from their employees? What will drive sustainability and innovation in the world of work? What effects will choices embedded in curricula have on the capacity of societies to adapt to change and to manage it in ways that are just and productive? Educators and makers of education policy need a clear picture of the purpose of education in these contexts as well as a nuanced sense of what roles educators can and should play. Countries like the UK have been slow to introduce these issues into education systems, so what can be learned from educators in countries and regions that have been at the forefront of this thinking?
Participants: Rahul Chopra (IISER, Pune; TROP ICSU project) Kim Polgreen (Wytham Woods/Oxford teachers) Amanda Power (History, Oxford) Steve Puttick (Education, Oxford) James Robson (SKOPE, Oxford) Arjen Wals (Wageningen, NL; UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable Development) Chair: William Finnegan (OUCE, Oxford)
Learn more about the Climate Crisis Thinking i the Humanities and Social Science here: torch.ox.ac.uk/climate-crisis-thinking-in-the-humanities-and-social-sciences
Stay in the doughnut, not the hole: how to get out of the crisis with both our economy and environment intact
pxfuel, CC BY
Warwick Smith, University of Melbourne
Before the recession we were on a collision course with environmental disaster.
The recovery provides a rare opportunity to do things differently; to rebuild a better economy that can support living standards without irretrievably damaging the environment.
The closer we get to irreversible climate change, the harder that will become.
Doughnut economics, a concept principally developed by UK economist Kate Raworth, provides an intuitive way of thinking about it.
The ideas outlined in her book, subtitled Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, are increasingly being used around the world, including by a new collaboration Regen Melbourne, that’s looking at ways to making Melbourne a better, more socially-just and environmentally-responsible city.
The image to keep in mind is that of a doughnut, on the inside of which is economic and social freefall.
We need a certain amount of economic and social/political development to ensure everybody can live a good, healthy life with full social and political participation.
On the outside of the doughnut is an unsustainable impact on the environment.
The sweet spot, the “safe and just space for humanity” is, of course, in the doughnut itself. Mmm… doughnuts.
Conceptually it’s pretty straightforward. Practically, it is challenging.
Economics is traditionally defined as the study of the way societies allocate scarce resources. But in the modern world the reality is that, for rich countries such as Australia, there is no overall scarcity.
The challenge is to remain within the doughnut
Such countries have homeless and hungry people, for sure. But the also have enough resources, homes and food to provide for them. That they don’t is a question of distribution rather than scarcity.
In terms of the diagram, we already use enough resources to ensure nobody need be left in the hole on the inside of the doughnut. The danger is that we use too many resources and move beyond the outer edge of the doughnut into climate and ecological breakdown.
Here’s another diagram.
For quite some time amongst economists there’s been faith in what’s called the Environmental Kuznets Curve, where increasing consumption is said to lead to increased environmental degradation up to a point.
Beyond that point, as a society becomes post-industrial, extra consumption is said to lead to less environmental degradation as people become more environmentally conscious and use their wealth to buy different things – more services (such as yoga classes) and fewer goods (such as hamburgers).
While the Environmental Kuznets Curve does indeed appear to be real, there is every indication that the global peak in environmental impact is far higher than the biosphere can withstand, which means a diagram like this:
We will need to bring the peak down, and that will be difficult for precisely the same reasons that people remain poor amid extraordinary wealth.
One is the capacity of deep-pocketed interests to influence regulators and governments to maximise profits. The other is the extent to which neoliberal economic thinking permeates social and political structures.
The modern neoliberal thinking tells us the best outcomes are achieved when markets are “free” without government “interference”.
Government attempts to tax, fine or charge for environmental damage are portrayed as interference, rather than protecting the environment.
This is easy because each individual hectare of vegetation that’s cleared doesn’t, by itself, do much damage to the environment, just as each tonne of carbon dioxide that’s released doesn’t do much damage to the climate.
It’s possible to introduce a carbon price or a carbon tax, but its easy to lobby against. Australia’s lasted two years, and governments are frightened to have another go.
The pandemic has expanded what’s possible
The pandemic has shown us that it’s possible to overcome that fear.
Environmental campaigner George Monbiot points out that for 10 years the number of people living – and dying – on Britain’s streets had climbed year by year. There wasn’t enough money to house them.
Then suddenly when the pandemic hit, and they were seen as potential carriers, the money could be found.
He says for decades government and industry had claimed that people would never give up international holidays and business flights. When humanity’s future was seen to be on the line, they did.
It now feels possible to embrace a shift to what Monbiot calls “private sufficiency and public luxury”.
Double Down News.
This is a challenge not only to economics but also to individual economists.
For better or worse, our discipline has a lot of power in the modern world and our views carry disproportionate weight.
We need the best of our economic minds helping us to build frameworks that will keep us in the doughnut. The future of our species depends on it.
Warwick Smith, Research economist, University of Melbourne
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The article was also republished by ABC News.
Cyclone Amphan: Living through the Climate Crisis
In May 2020 a deadly tropical cyclone struck Eastern India and Bangladesh. Named ‘Amphan’ and classified as a ‘Super Cyclone’ this was almost certainly a climate change induced extreme event. This event was organised by the Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences Network https://torch.ox.ac.uk/climate-crisis-thinking-in-the-humanities-and-soc... . The full scale of destruction caused by cyclone Amphan in India (the states of Odisha and West Bengal) and Bangladesh remains to be yet fully understood and tabulated. We bring together a panel of historians, geographers, and anthropologists who have longstanding research in the effected region of South Asia on related topics of ecology, climate change, human-animal relations, conservation, and the Anthropocene. This session is interested in probing the relationship between the climate crisis and the very specific history, politics, sociology, and ethnography of South Asia. As such it has two broad aims.
Firstly, we try to shine light on the devastating effect of the climate crisis in South Asia. This is particularly important given the poor coverage the cyclone – its causes and the trail of devastation it has left in its wake – got globally and, even, regionally. As is the case with so much of the climate crisis there is a collective forgetting of its effects, especially when they take place in lands considered ‘Other’ or distant. This panel is but one small attempt to resist such collective forgetting.
Secondly and Relatedly, as we note in the aims of our network, the academy is oftentimes too slow in responding to the climate crisis or does so in somewhat inaccessible forms. Through this discussion we get academics from across the Humanities and Social Sciences working on the environment and climate change to present their analyses to a global public. As such it constituted a demonstration of the ways in which careful Humanities and Social Science knowledge can contribute in a timely and engaged manner with what it means to live through the climate crisis.
Panel
Debjani Bhattacharyya (Drexel University)
Jason Cons (UT Austin)
Annu Jalais (National University of Singapore)
Megnaa Mehtta (Sheffield University)
Kasia Paprocki (The London School of Economics)
Corporations and climate change
Global businesses, many of them now larger and more powerful than nation states, exhibit enormous sway on humanity’s response to the climate crisis. Indeed, during the Paris climate talks in December last year, growing media focus centred on business “leadership” on climate change. For instance, Royal Dutch Shell, General Electric, BHP Billiton and management consultancy McKinsey & Co. announced the establishment of a committee to advise governments on how to combat global warming while strengthening economic growth. This follows other announcements such as Unilever’s chief executive officer, Paul Polman, emphasising the need for private sector mobilisation to close the shortfall in emission commitments made by governments, as well as Virgin’s CEO Richard Branson who has argued that “our only hope to stop climate change is for industry to make money from it.”
These proclamations need to be viewed in the broader context of business opposition to the fundamental economic change necessary to avoid dangerous climate change. A good example of the duality of this corporate engagement has been the revelation that oil-giant Exxon, for decades a leading opponent of carbon regulation and funder of climate change denial, has since the early-1980s been well aware of the disastrous implications of fossil fuel use for the Earth’s climate. This self-serving logic parallels other well-known examples of business obfuscation such as BP’s infamous ‘Beyond Petroleum’ greenwashing in the early 2000s, and more recently Peabody Energy’s marketing of coal as a response to “energy poverty” in the developing world.
How then to make sense of the mixed messages from corporations on climate change?
In our new book, Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction, Daniel Nyberg and I explore the role of corporations and corporate capitalism within the climate crisis. We argue that while many global businesses promote a message of “action” and “leadership”, this ignores the deeper problem 0f how corporate capitalism is locked into a cycle of promoting ever more creative ways of exploiting nature and destroying a habitable climate.
While the last two centuries of industrialisation and capitalist expansion have promoted a mythology that economic development leads to environmental improvement (the so-called ecological modernisation thesis), climate change fundamentally challenges these beliefs. Despite the growing uptake of the language and practices of “sustainability”, “corporate environmentalism” and “green growth”, humanity’s degradation of the environment has in fact accelerated. We can see this not only in the physical manifestations of climate change – the melting Arctic, record-breaking droughts and floods, rising sea levels and ocean acidification – but also in the destruction of habitat and declining biodiversity.
Humans have become a force of nature and scientists argue we are now entering a new geological epoch, the so-called “Anthropocene”. One of the defining features of this new age of humans is the loss of vast numbers of animal and plant species – what writer Elizabeth Kolbert has termed the “Sixth Great Extinction”. As a result, in a relatively short period of time, global capitalism, powered by fossil fuel-based energy, has changed the very chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans with devastating consequences.
In our book we argue that global capitalism is now locked into a process of what we term “creative self-destruction”. By this we mean our economies are now reliant upon ever-more ingenious ways of exploiting the Earth’s fossil fuel reserves and consuming the very life-support systems we rely on for our survival. This is evident in the rush by the world’s largest companies to develop new sources of fossil fuels such as deep-water and Arctic oil drilling, tar-sands processing, new mega-coalmines, and the “fracking” of shale and coal-seam gas. This is occurring at the same time as crucial carbon sinks such as the world’s forests and oceans are being ever further denuded (witness for example the massive forest fires that recently raged across Indonesia aimed at converting rainforest into plantations for palm oil and paper).
We argue that as the folly of our fossil fuel path has become ever more evident, so the corporate response has reinforced the grip of creative self-destruction. A great example of this fossil fuel lock-in was the significant portion of funding provided to last year’s Paris climate talks by major fossil fuel companies and carbon emitters. This was a situation that French climate officials admitted was unfortunate but financially unavoidable if the talks were to proceed!
Indeed, Plan B for climate response has involved growing discussion by businesses and technocrats of “geoengineering”. This includes proposals such as the dispersal of sulphate particles in the atmosphere to dim incoming solar radiation, increasing the reflectivity of clouds or even “fertilising” the oceans through encouraging algal blooms. Despite the likely catastrophic side effects (these plans have after all been compared to chemotherapy for a dying planet!), money and resources are being swiftly mobilised around these technocratic “innovations”.
These examples highlight both the inventive genius of corporate capitalism, and the blindness of industry and government to the ecological catastrophe they are fashioning. We argue this is how we have arrived at a political discourse whereby blocking out the sun or seeding the oceans are somehow seen as sensible options in responding to climate change. This framing allows us to accept that corporate capitalism is able not only to solve the climate crisis it has created, but to actually engineer a new climate.
Of course, a key question is how large corporations are able to continue engaging in increasingly environmentally destructive behaviour despite the disastrous consequences for human society and a habitable climate? In our book we argue that corporations and their spokespeople are able to achieve this by incorporating criticism and reinventing the daily ritual of “business as usual” as a perfectly normal and ecologically sound process.
For instance, through the narrative of “green” capitalism, corporations and markets are portrayed as the best means of responding to the climate crisis. Underpinning this view is the, as yet unproven, claim that new technologies and markets can decouple economic growth from environmental impacts. So as we document at length in the book, many large companies have established new roles and practices aimed at improving their eco-efficiency, greening their supply chains, producing new green products and services, marketing and branding their environmental worthiness, and reporting on their “sustainability” upon a range of industry metrics.
This sparkling image of corporate environmentalism and business sustainability falsely promises no conflicts and no trade-offs. Here, it is seen as possible to address climate change while continuing the current global expansion of consumption. In contrast to the blinding evidence of ever-escalating greenhouse gas emissions, this comforting political myth promises no contradiction between material affluence and environmental well-being. We can have it all and, according to the myth of corporate environmentalism, avoid climate catastrophe!
Moreover, we point out that citizens are increasingly called upon to enrol in this mythology as active constituents in corporate campaigns against improved emissions standards or carbon taxes, as well as consumers and “ecopreneurs” in the quest for “green consumption”. We have thus become the brands we wear, the cars we drive, the products we buy; and we are comforted to find the future portrayed as “safely” in the hands of the market.
The supremacy of “business as usual” thus exacts a powerful grip on our daily thinking and actions. It is a grip strengthened by the promotion of every new “green” product, a grip tightened through the establishment of sustainability functions in business and government, and a grip defended with every “offset” we purchase for a flight to a holiday destination.
Of course, this is also a vision that fits well within the dominant economic ideology of our time; neoliberalism. Alternatives, such as state regulation and mandatory restrictions on fossil fuel use, are viewed as counterproductive and even harmful. For instance, in response to a call to ban new coal mines, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull invoked the so-called “drug-dealer’s defence” in rejecting calls for restrictions on our massive coal exports. That is, if we don’t sell it someone else will! In this view, there is no alternative to the market. And so echoing Fredric Jameson, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.
Taken together these discourses and practices conceal the environmental destruction that is built into our economic system. Actually dealing with climate change as perhaps the ultimate contradiction of capitalism would require material trade-offs that challenge basic identities and interests.
This is why the alternative to “business as usual” is much harder to imagine and easier to dismiss as the enemy of social well-being – what critics so often characterise as going back to living in caves or a return to the “dark ages”. Indeed, those environmentally aware citizens who argue that we need to leave the vast majority of fossil fuels “in the ground” are demonised as extremists, green terrorists, and a threat to national prosperity. As we saw last year in the Federal Government’s much satirised “radicalisation awareness program” (#Freekaren), ordinary citizens that question our economic madness are now subversives of the highest order!
Ultimately the “success” or otherwise of the Paris Agreement is unlikely to threaten the fundamental dynamics underlying the climate crisis. Dramatic decarbonisation based around mandatory limits upon consumption, economic growth, and corporate influence are not on the agenda nor open for discussion. Rather, global elites have framed the response to climate change around an accentuation of the very causes of the crisis.
In essence, the prevailing corporate view is that capitalism should be seen not as a cause of climate change but as an answer to it. Thus a problem brought about by overconsumption, the logic goes, should be addressed through more consumption.
This capitalist imaginary of unending growth, prosperity and mastery over the natural world is central to our undoing. Unfortunately, until this changes, the dominance of corporate capitalism will ensure the continued and rapid decline of our once-bountiful and habitable planet. As we conclude in our book, changing this world-view is perhaps the most profound challenge we face in responding to the existential crisis that is climate change.
The post Corporations and climate change appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).