It is now widely accepted, apart from by a few conservative fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists such as Lord Monckton, that the average global climate is warming and that one of the primary causes for this situation is human activities, which are producing more GHGs than the earth’s carbon sinks can absorb. Industrialization and a rampant culture of consumption have resulted in the warming of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans.1 And it is no longer just the scientists who are worried; the general public has started to sit up and take note of climate warming. So why all this concern over a few changes in degrees?
A few snippets clearly bring the climate situation into focus. If the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets collapse, the sea level will rise several meters, causing entire islands and coastline communities to disappear. The IPCC has estimated that the global average sea-level rise might be anywhere from 0.18 to 0.59 meters.2 In 2009, at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, it was reported that “the upper range of sea level rise by 2100 could be in the range of about one meter.”3 In addition, desertification and drought may cause agriculture yields to drop. And, as noted in the Stern Review, the food crisis alone may very well lead to a rise in conflict.4 In addition, there will be ongoing species extinction, and the incidence of extreme weather events will increase.
In an effort to stave off the catastrophic effects climate change will have for life on earth, one proposed and rather popular solution has been to try to keep the increase in global temperatures to 2°C above late preindustrial levels. Meanwhile, small island states have been demanding this target be revised to an increase that does not exceed 1.5°C.5 Small island states insist that GHG emissions need to be reduced by more than 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.6 As the science of climate change continues to influence the spheres of law, policy, economic development, and cultural production, a new debate over how to lower global GHG emissions ethically is gathering momentum. For many, when it comes to answering the difficult question concerning who should bear the burdens associated with lowering GHG emissions and the subsequent problem of how to reconcile the conflicting ethical issues this topic raises, the principle of socioeconomic justice is often invoked: the solutions need to be fair and equitable.
The issue of socioeconomic inequality has come to animate recent discussions concerning the ethics of climate change. First, the socioeconomic disparity thesis appears in arguments used against global compliance for constraints on emissions. The position of nonglobal compliance on emissions argues that because some countries—namely, high-income ones such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and other European Union (EU) countries—are better positioned in terms of economic wealth, economic strength, and technological know-how, they will incur far less hardship if they cut back on their emissions than will low- or middle-income countries.7 This view is called the “ability-to-pay principle,” and it claims that the privileged position that high-income countries enjoy constitutes a moral responsibility to support nonglobal compliance. As the argument goes, poorer countries would incur a disproportionate hardship if they slowed their economies.
Henry Shue maintains that not reducing GHG emissions amounts to a violation of a duty to not harm future generations.8 He supports a ratio system of measurement for how much GHGs a country ought to be allowed to emit. We ought, he says, consider a country’s available resources when deciding who should pay what. The principle of equity espoused by Shue is also one that appears in the Kyoto agreement. It basically responds to the problem of responsibility by invoking a concept of redistribution. Egalitarian redistribution in the context of climate change ethics both demands that wealthier nations foot more of the bill because they have the resources to do so and appeals to the principle of historical responsibility.
Another line of reasoning that is structured by the principle of historical responsibility is the call to make polluters pay. Advocates of this approach argue that those who produce pollution are responsible for the costs incurred by the damage. As a follow-on from the “polluter pays” principle is the argument that because the poverty encountered by many middle- and low-income countries is largely a by-product of past wrongs inflicted on them by high-income countries, such as the United States and former colonial powers including the United Kingdom, which have been profiting from years of industrial activity, this history alleviates poor countries’ moral responsibility to comply with global constraints on emissions and places the ball of responsibility squarely in the court of wealthy countries. In particular, it is strongly argued that the United States should take on more of the burdens associated with climate change.9
Peter Singer has suggested that the developing world turn a blind eye to the developed world’s historical responsibility. He recognizes that there is a limit to the amount of GHGs that the planet can absorb and suggests that one way to solve the problem of GHG buildup is to reach a consensus over what subsistence levels of emissions are. From this consensus, we would be able to allocate the amount of carbon each individual can safely emit. Using 2002 as his benchmark, he proposes that every person can emit one metric ton of carbon per year.10 However, Singer’s dismissal of historical contingency is grounded in his analytic approach to problem solving, a way of reasoning that frames problems in isolation from the vicissitudes of economic, social, political, and cultural life. His position is basically contradictory. Normative arguments of justice aside, it is inconsistent to argue in favor of erasing historical responsibility in order to achieve historical responsibility—the responsibility for future lives. This is like having your cake and eating it too.
Another version of the “polluter pays” principle is the position advanced by Robin Attfield and George Monbiot. They maintain that we need to introduce a system of carbon rationing calculated by using population figures.11 This system would enable a fairer distribution of the economic burdens incurred. For instance, the United States and the United Kingdom would have to reduce their carbon emissions dramatically, but lower-income countries would not. According to Monbiot, the target for 2030 would entail that high-income countries cut their GHG emissions by 90 percent.12
Similar to Singer’s stabilization thesis and also in support of those who advocate emissions-trading schemes, the Global Commons Institute advances a contraction-and-convergence approach to the problem of global climate change. It, too, leans upon a historically constituted principle of social equity insofar as it aspires to narrow the gap between the wealthy and the poor. The theory aims to produce equal per capita emissions and favors emissions trading to get there. First, a figure for a safe level of global GHG emissions needs to be set. Second, these emissions would converge to form the basis of per capita quotas. The principle of socioeconomic distribution would come into effect in that wealthy countries would need to contract their emissions more than poorer countries. In addition, poor countries might initially be allowed to increase their emissions. From here, total global emissions would begin to contract.13
These arguments might not be perfect, but they do offer up a road map to cutting carbon emissions across the globe. Why, then, cannot the leaders of the world reach a consensus? The question is almost a naive one to ask because the answer is so obvious. Cutting carbon emissions will hurt the economy—that is, unless the economy can be tweaked in such a way that it capitalizes from climate change. Interestingly enough, the latter argument is gaining traction in the form of “climate capitalism.” My use of the term climate capitalism is intended to be tongue in cheek. I am fully aware of how it is gaining popularity among scholars and policymakers who hope to put the mechanisms of capitalism to work in the service of decarbonizing the economy,14 but I disagree with them. As I say often in this book, capitalism appropriates limits to capital by placing them in the service of capital; in the process, it obscures the inequities, socioeconomic distortions, and violence that these limits expose, thereby continuing the cycle of endless economic growth that is achieved at the expense of more vulnerable entities and groups.
On December 1, 2008, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri explained the connection between environmental well-being and human well-being, outlining the ways in which the current global economic system is implicated in furthering climate change. Preempting his critics, who exclaim that serious reductions would cripple the global economy, Pachauri has argued that the costs associated with reducing GHG emissions will be less than 3 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2030. However, this estimate does not factor into the equation savings incurred as a result of stabilizing the earth’s global temperature. If we consider these savings, we may be surprised to find that economic output and welfare increase overall.15 Pachauri argues that we can slow or even perhaps reverse climate change through green technologies and by the transformation of dirty industries into green ones. In turn, these changes can provide the basis for new wealth production.
Other leading figures from the sustainability movement also view climate change as a terrific opportunity to open up the market to new sources of growth by using the climate crisis as another instrument through which neoliberal economic policies can be bolstered. William McDonough and Michael Braungart offer a new design framework that the corporate sector can adopt to produce commodities that are biological nutrients and that are manufactured without the use of toxic materials.16 They provide practical ways to achieve this goal, and the model they describe is rich with possibilities to transform the life cycle of everyday commodities. Their vision of industry in the future is one that is smart, effective, harmless, and inspiring. They provide a hopeful picture of a new green production process that no longer produces waste and instead produces nutrients for life on earth. However, the fundamental principles of neoliberal economics—privatization, competition, deregulation—remain intact.
As strong supporters of climate capitalism, L. Hunter Lovins and Boyd Cohen advocate that market mechanisms be put to use to solve the climate crisis. In support of their idea, they cite evidence from the British Carbon Disclosure Project, which in 2007 reported that the world’s “major companies are increasingly focused on climate change and … see it as an opportunity for profit.” They cover a wide range of very helpful practical options to respond to the climate crisis, such as producing clean technologies, sustainable manufacturing processes, energy-efficient buildings, a carbon-offset market that individuals can voluntarily participate in—all of which they stipulate can be promoted under the rubric of an “honest free market” that has learned the hard lesson of market humility. Much like Alan Greenspan was forced to concede during the peak of the global financial crisis that markets need some regulation, so, too, Lovins and Cohen explain that “markets make very good servants, but they’re not good masters, and they’re a lousy religion.”17 Despite this admission, they keep the neoliberal emphasis on the privatization and entrepreneurial self-interest that characterize capitalism and that have also produced widespread inequity the world over. As such, their notion of climate capitalism leaves unchallenged the violence embedded in capital accumulation.
If we broach the myriad problems associated with climate and environmental change through the lens of capitalism and market growth, aren’t we coming at the problem from the wrong vantage point? If economic prosperity is viewed in terms of geopolitical power and within the neoliberal economic paradigm of privatization, competitive markets, and deregulation in the way advocated by Thomas Friedman, whom Lovins and Cohen lean on extensively to help make their point, then there is really nothing new being proposed. The problem of climate change, GHG emissions, fossil fuel energy, pollution, deforestation, species extinction, and ecosystem degradation is being situated in a capitalist context, leaving the axiomatic of capital unchallenged and along with it the inequities that such a system produces. Climate change and environmental degradation, however, are ultimately problems of equality. All people (including future generations), other-than-human species, and ecosystems share a common future.
To argue that climate change offers opportunities for new markets and wealth production ironically reproduces the normative neoliberal value in commodity culture. For this reason, detaching inequitable socioeconomic arrangements from an analysis of how power dynamically operates throughout the domain of commodity culture and the consumer credit economy is misleading. Regardless of how robust the new “green free market” is, changes in climate will cause serious societal disruption, and it will be the poor (regardless of what country they live in) who will bear the greater burden in this regard.18
We must recognize that global heating will not affect everyone equally. It will irreversibly change environments, which will also threaten people’s livelihoods. As a consequence, conflict will almost certainly increase. Some glaciers, such as those in the Andean region, are now under threat if current rates of warming persist. This situation may result in decreased river flows that will affect 500 million people in South Asia and around 250 million in China.19 As I argued in Hijacking Sustainability,20 all in all, the poor of the world are especially vulnerable in the face of these changes. Global heating is not indiscriminate; its effects will more severely impact already marginalized and exploited groups. The point in all this is that the average change in global climate concerns the material conditions of life, which in turn cannot be understood without consideration of how the political economy shapes climate change politics; in other words, the production of green technologies, green energy, green jobs, and social arrangements are intertwined phenomena.
What is missing in the analyses outlined thus far is a return to Marx’s Capital and the simple idea that the so-called opportunities in question are not isolated empirical incidents; their very existence has come into being by virtue of the political economy. How the value of these new opportunities in the context of climate change is assessed is not just in terms of their having a use-value (through the redistribution of wealth), but also in terms of their surplus-value (the production of profit). The surplus-value of the opportunities in question cannot be defined in isolation from other opportunities (green jobs, a growing consumer market in natural and green products, and new green technologies). The value of a surplus emerges through a system of exchange, and it is the comparative aspect of this Marxist idea of exchange that demands a more critical evaluation of how the political economy in the era of climate change operates.21
In 2004, the twenty-five countries with the largest GHG emissions accounted for 83 percent of global emissions, the United States producing 20.6 percent of those emissions. At that time, the United States, along with the twenty-five-member state body of the EU, also enjoyed generating 21.9 percent of global GDP. Although in 2005 China’s emissions were 2 percent lower than those of the United States, by 2006 China surpassed the United States by 8 percent, and in 2007 two-thirds of the world’s 3.1 percent increase in CO2 was a result of China’s emissions.22 China’s increasing GHG emissions obviously pose a serious problem for the goal of reducing global GHG emissions.
U.S. carbon emissions are largely the result of the energy (combustion of fossil fuels) required to power the world’s largest economy, and the production processes attributed to a great deal of these energy-related CO2 emissions have been outsourced to China, so there is good reason to suggest that the figures describing China’s increase in emissions unfairly point the finger of blame at China and divert attention away from the United States (as well as from other countries such as Australia, Japan, and the wealthy Arab nations). In other words, the increase in China’s emissions are most likely the result of high-income countries such as the United States outsourcing their own dirty manufacturing to China. In support of this claim, it is useful to compare the two countries’ per capita CO2 emissions. In 2007, the United States ranked highest in emissions in the world, emitting 19.4 metric tons of CO2 per capita, whereas China emitted 5.1 metric tons of CO2 per capita despite the fact that China’s output includes the GHGs emitted as a result of wealthier nations outsourcing their production to China. The thesis of carbon rationing according to population size attempts to address this discrepancy. It alerts us to the importance of incorporating an analysis of political economy into the discourse of climate change. It prompts us to probe a little more the connection between the division of money, labor, and value driving the global consumer economy.
In an effort to save costs, more and more U.S. corporations are offshoring and outsourcing manufacturing and services to middle-income countries such as India and China where labor is cheap. For example, in 2005 manufacturing employment in the United States was 19 percent lower than in 1998 regardless of a 10 percent increase in manufacturing output.23 And although outsourcing and offshoring results in the dispersal of productivity and GHG emissions across the globe, there is a concomitant centralization of capital accumulation occurring in the epicenters of global corporate power.
A rising powerful transnational industry is emerging around the research and development of new technologies that are designed to offset and even save the human race from global heating. Solar thermal power, electricity generated from wind, and, more recently, advances in geoengineering (one such initiative reflects solar heat away from the earth) are just a few examples of new green products entering the market, some of which I critically evaluate in chapter 2 on the voluntary carbon-offset economy. I am modestly optimistic about these technologies and hope we will continue to put the power of human imagination and problem solving to work in ways that might help mitigate climate change and even make life on a heating planet worth bearing. That said, as we work to build a green free-market economy, where is the incentive to question the economic framework that is used as the basis for green technological advancement? It is important to ask the following questions: Who will “own” the patents on new green technologies? Who will have access to them, and how much will access cost?
A few preliminary questions should be raised around the problem of the political economy in the context of solar power technologies. If solar energy is part of our common wealth, are the technologies used to access this resource also part of the global commons? Or are these technologies part of the free-market economy? If they are, then solar power is just another commodity to be bought and sold on the free market. Solar technologies are more effective in certain contexts, such as the United States, southern Europe, and Australia. Given that solar efficiency decreases the farther you go from the equator, where does this leave countries such as Russia and Norway? How do you offset the cost of solar panel installation? Does this mean poor countries with an abundance of solar power will attract solar power investment? And what are the terms and conditions of such investment? There is the great potential for solar power to be generated in the developing countries of the African continent, but such a project would require enormous financial and political investment. Who will bear the burden of this investment, and how are the benefits to be calculated and distributed? In addition, how can Africans be assured that such investment in their countries will not end up as a distorted form of colonization? In chapter 8, I raise concerns over the geopolitics of U.S. HIV/AIDS programs for Africans, looking at the ways in which such humanitarianism is implicated in the geopolitics of oil capitalism. These questions invite consideration of the political economy and its neoliberal manifestation in particular.
Neoliberalism has its roots in the political philosophy of Adam Smith, who argued in favor of curbing government restrictions and removing the barriers to economic growth. As an economic system, liberalism really kicked in throughout the 1900s, suffering only a brief setback during the Great Depression of the 1930s. With the laissez-faire policies of U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) and the fortieth U.S. president Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), a more virulent strain of liberalism emerged during the 1980s, hence the neo in neoliberalism. By and large, neoliberalism has bastardized the fundamentals of liberalism—namely, freedom, rights, and individual choice. In the name of celebrating individual responsibility and choice, neoliberal policies have resulted in cutbacks on government spending, mass privatization, trickle-down economics, deregulation, open competition, and the gradual deterioration of the commons.24
A green free market cannot be presented as the solution that will automatically—pardon the analogy here—kill two birds with one stone (new opportunities for market growth and cuts in emissions). The green free market favors the current system of privatization at the expense of exploring new economic alternatives; for this reason, it is mere cronyism. It panders to neoliberal forces by commercializing global heating. In so doing, it reinforces the structural distortions of economic neoliberalism. There is no direct correlation between global green economic output and socioeconomic equity, which will happen only if there are mechanisms in place that can recognize that a green economy has to be fine-tuned in a way that allows it to become a transformative force that can prompt the development of economic opportunities for the poor, be a means for wealth redistribution, and shift the dominant cultural value away from privileging competition, private-property ownership, and wealth accumulation.
An economy is not just a mode of production; it is also a productive force. It has the potential to change the current material conditions of life that constitute neoliberalism as the dominant mode of social, political, economic, and cultural life. This potential calls for a reconsideration of capital as a transformative mode of social organization, whereby the definition of society is expanded to include the flourishing of nonhuman species, ecological cycles, and future lives.
Although concerns for socioeconomic injustice are a welcome contribution to the discourse on how to lower global GHG emissions, and I certainly embrace their inclusion in the agreement reached at the climate change talks held in Bali in December 2007, the variations of the “polluter pays” principle and the projected figures for increases in economic output and wealth as a result of opening up new markets in green products, services, industries, technologies, and energy still do not effectively address the underlying power relations produced by the neoliberal economy and the cultural norms reinforcing these relations. It was in opposition to the asymmetric power relations endemic to the global economy that representatives from low-income countries boycotted the Copenhagen climate talks in protest that their interests were being marginalized.
Neoliberalism can be described as a cultural mode of production that in turn defines the political economy. In this respect, I would go so far as to say that the principle of equity espoused by Shue and the introduction of carbon limits based on population size that Monbiot and Attfield propose sideline the power relations driving commodity culture and the consumer-credit economy because they invite a linear connection to be drawn between GHG emissions and the resources available to lower these emissions, all the while ignoring how capital accumulation is centralized.
Mass markets and aggressive moves toward commodity differentiation are what characterize today’s economies of scope (which have gradually replaced economies of scale). Along with the rise in economies of scope, there has been a concomitant rise in carving out niche markets, one of which is the market in green commodities. A green commodity market includes recyclable or degradable materials, products that have a small ecological footprint, products whose ingredients have not been tested on animals, products that support socioeconomic development initiatives, and products that are produced with renewable resources. Such products range from clothing made from organic cotton to reusable organic cotton shopping bags, the hybrid car, recycled paper, biodegradable cleaning products, “natural” apparel (usually made out of hemp, organic cotton, or bamboo), “natural” cosmetic lines, and so on.
When green artifacts first appeared on the market in the latter part of the twentieth century, they offered an alternative to the excesses of the consumer global market and the individualism of commodity culture. This oppositional position made them popular, but it has also ironically increased the clout of the green commodity within the market, resulting in the seamless promotion of those selfsame relations of production (equating the liberal’s goal for social justice with economic growth, understood as private enterprise freed of government interference) originally argued against. From here, the artifacts have been incorporated into the system of commodity production—hence, the slogan/title for Tamsin Blanchard’s book Green Is the New Black!25
The commodification of the environmental and social justice movements in green artifacts celebrates principles of sustainability by placing the energetic power of moral feeling that social and environmental responsibility gives rise to in the service of the free market. The will to do good characterizing the socially and environmentally conscious consumer that has enabled, for instance, the backlash against bottled water among consumers stems from the same energies that a corporation such as BP (which changed its name to “Beyond Petroleum”) seeks to profit from with its new green brand image. And we didn’t need to hold our breath for long to see how BP revitalized its brand after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. If its advertising expenditure after the spill is any indication, its strategy was to turn the crisis into a branding opportunity. Between April 2010 and July 2010, BP spent in excess of $93 million on corporate advertising—three times its advertising budget for the same period the previous year.26
Among the initiatives the corporate oil giant uses to target and gain the support of this new socially and environmentally responsible consumer is investment in new green technologies and climate research. The corporation’s sustainability mission statement emphasizes such initiatives:
BP wants to be recognized as a great organization—competitively successful and a force for progress. We have a fundamental belief that we can make a difference in the world.
We help the world meet its growing need for heat, light and mobility. We strive to do that by producing energy that is affordable, secure and doesn’t damage the environment.
BP is progressive, responsible, innovative and performance driven.27
We need to remain alert, however, to the reality that the connection between socially and environmentally responsible consumption patterns and corporate activities is not linear.
The idea of a green commodity market is an oxymoron because it treats climate change as another opportunity for neoliberal economic growth, placing the solutions to climate change once more in the service of the free market, privatization, and competition. A few natural- and green-product logical fallacies have popped up in the process: If there are currently no industry standards in the United States for “natural” cleaning products, what standard are companies such as Clorox using for their new Green Works product line? What if a company, such as Clorox, has a “natural” product line along with many other products that are incredibly toxic (such as bleach, which poisons the environment) or that contain ingredients tested on animals? Does that organic apple you are eating come from a farm that respects the rights of its workers or not? The point is that two wrongs do not make a right. What is needed is a much more nuanced approach to how wage labor, environmental care, capital production, and the political concepts of justice and equality connect.
Introducing a new breed of commodities into the market as a way to solve the climate crisis is just a displacement activity. To suggest that revolutionary subjectivity can be produced as a fashion statement—“Green is the new black!”—is abhorrent for the simple reason that it turns the collectivist impulse at the core of political action into mere narcissism and lands us squarely back in the logic of individualism again. Worse still, the squeaky clean image of green commodities masks the exploitative conditions of their production.
For a long time, the sustainability movement, as Paul Hawken has so lucidly described, occupied a marginalized sociocultural position in respect to commodity culture and the global free-market economy.28 Today, however, the popular catchphrase and slogan sustainability is being seamlessly integrated into dominant modes of economic production and normative forms of political and civic life. The three levels of commitment defining the sustainability movement—social equality, indigenous rights, and environmental justice—have now entered a system of exchange that participates in the institutionalization of commodity culture and the free-market economy. This participation is co-opting the politics of the sustainability movement because it implicates the movement in the very system of relations that the movement struggles against, unleashing some unlikely marriages between hippies and the corporate suits. For example, in 2006 Colgate-Palmolive bought Tom of Maine’s for $100 million, and in 2007 Burt’s Bees was bought by Clorox for $913 million.29
A sticky conundrum is emerging here: sustainability needs to become popular in order to be ecologically useful, but the moment it does so, the more susceptible the movement’s theories and practices are to being abused by those very entities that are ecologically harmful. If the popularization of the theories and practices of sustainability are predicated upon popular culture, then they also presuppose the selfsame neoliberal economic structures and cultural values that inform dominant relations of production—consumption and commodification. The popularization and concomitant commodification of the sustainability movement mark the institutionalization of sustainability discourse and, as the case of the corporate greenwash attests to, posit the moment when the principles and practices of sustainability are diluted.
My concern throughout this book is that the more green commodities and the image of a green lifestyle are turned into a fashion statement (basically a narcissistic gesture), the more the complex and dynamic political and ethical dimensions informing the politics of climate change are eclipsed. In this context, climate change, environmental degradation, and the inequities they produce are reduced to a self-referential fashion statement because they become raw material for the production of surplus-value. It is for this reason that the corporate sector sees the new ecochic movement as a marvelous opportunity to maintain a competitive edge in the global economy. Likewise, the more leaders of the sustainability movement proclaim that the only realistic way forward is to hop into bed with the free market, the more the formal structure of opposition constituting the movement is compromised.30
This brings us back to the problem of capitalizing from climate change. Green commodities have entered the market at a time when the struggle over the resources driving the free-market economy—water, food, land, energy—are being depleted. Although I remain suspicious over whether a new kind of commodity or the greening of neoliberal economics can effectively counter the unsustainable aspects of a commodity-driven culture, I am more concerned with the reification of material life that climate capitalism advances. Climate capitalism neutralizes the politics of climate and environmental change because it advances, reproduces, and reinforces the oppressive material economic conditions and structures endemic to commodity culture and the free-market economy—the selfsame system that has produced climate warming. And as I outline in the next chapter, politics as consumption (taking on a green lifestyle or buying green commodities) does not sufficiently challenge this system.