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Climate Capitalism

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After Cancún

Abstract

Whether we like it or not, for the foreseeable future at least, responses to climate change will be developed in a context of global capitalism. What does this imply in political and strategic terms and how can we make sense of this theoretically? In this chapter we try to nuance eco-Marxist claims which might result from this more or less banal, if perhaps depressing, observation about capitalism’s hold over climate politics. There is now a substantial and rapidly growing such literature on climate politics, which has increasingly focused on the commodification of climate change, through the establishment of markets in emissions allowances or credits, and which is, reasonably enough, highly critical of such commodification processes (Prudham 2009; Castree 2003; Lohmann 2005). There are also a number of analyses rehearsing well-known ‚second contradiction of capitalism’ (O’Connor 1994; Kovell 2002; Benton 2000 Sandler 1994) or ‚treadmill of production‘ arguments (Roberts et al 2003; Gould et al 2008) in relation to climate change – suggesting that capitalism’s growth-addiction and fossil fuel dependence means that it cannot possibly decarbonise. We seek here to nuance the depressing conclusions that can be drawn from such analyses and ask under what conditions might we be able to imagine capitalism decarbonising?

This chapter is an elaboration, with significantly more theoretical engagement, of the main arguments of our book Climate capitalism: global warming and the transformation of the global economy (Newell and Paterson 2010). That book was written for a broad popular audience and thus contains little of the explicit theorisations we try to develop here.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Relations at the University of Sussex, Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, Sussex

    Peter Newell (Professor)

  2. Political Science at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa

    Matthew Paterson (Professor)

Authors
  1. Peter Newell
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  2. Matthew Paterson
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. emeritus for International Political Economy, Free University Berlin and a member of the Scientific Council of ATTAC, Germany

    Elmar Altvater (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Political Science at the Free University Berlin, Technische Universität Dresden, Chair for International Politics, Berlin

    Achim Brunnengräber (Visiting Professor, Associated Professor (Privatdoz-ent) (Visiting Professor, Associated Professor (Privatdoz-ent)

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© 2011 VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH

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Newell, P., Paterson, M. (2011). Climate Capitalism. In: Altvater, E., Brunnengräber, A. (eds) After Cancún. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-94018-2_2

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