In a nutshell, the climate negotiations “are predicated on a contradiction: the task of agreeing a programme of radical global economic transformation is allocated to those – including, this year, a record 2,500 fossil fuel industry representatives – who stand to lose the most from disrupting the current economic model.
For the most influential in these negotiations – the titans of finance, energy giants, and the wealthy states who protect their interests – the solution to this dilemma is to find a way to transform the foundations of global capitalism, from energy to agriculture and from transport to industry, while preserving everything else about its social relations and overarching dynamics. Theirs is necessarily a future in which the transition to a decarbonised and ecologically sustainable economy implies no trade-off with continued growth, profit maximisation, private ownership or accumulation: in short, from fossil capitalism to a green capitalism.
For some, green capitalism is a contradiction in terms. That capitalism has unleashed ever-rising emissions and environmental exploitation is not a controversial point: the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has risen by 50 per cent since the Industrial Revolution, accelerating with exponential fervour in the postwar ‘golden age’ of capitalism. This period of ‘great acceleration’ from approximately 1950 has seen a quintupling of primary energy use and the razing of half of global forest cover. Some 70 per cent of all wildlife has been lost since 1970. An astonishing half of all fossil fuel consumption has occurred since 1990.
But key splits emerge between those who see this destruction as intrinsic to capitalism, which is therefore incompatible with a sustainable future, and those who argue that through reform of its market failures and worst tendencies – single-minded shareholder primacy, for example – capitalism can, or indeed is uniquely able, to tackle climate and ecological crisis. The urgent question then is not, ‘Have capitalist dynamics contributed to this environmental damage?’ But rather: ‘Can these dynamics be reconciled with a sustainable future?’. Is a genuinely ‘green capitalism’ possible?”
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