Climate Change and the Polanyian Counter-movement: Carbon Markets or Degrowth?

Stuart, Diana; Gunderson, Ryan; Petersen, Brian

doi:10.1080/13563467.2017.1417364

Cited by 43 publications

(36 citation statements)

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“…A political‐economic theory of relevance offers a neglected, yet critical, perspective in understanding climate change inaction and ineffective action. While much attention has focused on macro‐level phenomena, such as well‐funded denialist campaigns, weak international agreements, and the ineffectiveness of carbon markets (McCright & Dunlap, ; Beck, 2010; Klein, ; Stuart et al,), others have focused on psychological factors regarding how individuals perceive and process information about climate change (e.g., Dietz et al, ; Feygina, et al, ; Shwom et al, ; McCright, Dunlap, & Xiao, ). A political economy of relevance illustrates how these two realms intersect and specifically how social‐structural context shapes what receives attention, what seems rational, and what seems possible in response to climate change.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reducing greenhouse gas emissions through market‐based reforms has remained the most popular and widely implemented approach with more countries, states and regions participating in carbon markets over time. However, a market‐based solution to climate change overlooks how the commodification of nature – fossil fuels – has created the climate problem in the first place and how further marketization fails to address the negative impacts (Stuart et al, ) while increasing profits for dominant financial entities (Lohmann, ; Klein, ).…”

Section: Applying the Political Economy Of Relevance To Climate Changmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A political‐economic theory of relevance: Explaining climate change inaction

2019

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Why have societies failed to effectively respond to climate change? We address the question of climate change inaction by (1) examining how an unambiguously ominous report about climate change (IPCC 2018) was made palatable by news media and (2) explaining why climate change is typically unthematized in everyday life. Drawing on Adorno and Schutz, we develop a political‐economic theory of relevance. The imperative to accumulate capital is not only a social‐structural reality but also shapes why particular facts are regarded as relevant in experience (topical relevance) as well as how relevant material is interpreted (interpretative relevance) and acted toward (motivational relevance). Applying this framework, we (1) argue that media popularizations of the IPCC's dire Global Warming of 1.5°C (2018) are constituted by relevance systems conditioned by a capitalist social context and (2) strengthen Ollinaho's (2016) Schutzian explanation for climate change inaction by examining how productive relations and the culture industry perpetuate climate change irrelevance in everyday life. Schutz's framework helps conceptualize the intricacies of ideology and, when revised with Adorno's sociology, shines new light on an old question: the relations between social conditions and knowledge.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Applying the Political Economy Of Relevance To Climate Changmentioning

confidence: 99%

A political‐economic theory of relevance: Explaining climate change inaction

2019

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“…Increasingly, economists and other scholars suggest that it is no longer possible to both stabilize the climate and pursue growth of any kind, even green, particularly in the global north (Hay and Payne 2013;Raworth 2017). Consequently, some argue that the strategic focus of climate politics should not be on fossil fuels at all, but instead on growth (Hickel 2016;Stuart et al 2017). Degrowth advocates propose selective and incremental downscaling in the US, Australia, Japan and Europe, with some sectors growing and others declining, while other parts of the world would grow (Gough 2017).…”

Section: A Demand For Public Social Consumption and De-growth Againstmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate Politics and Race in the Pacific Northwest

Slocum

2018

Social Sciences

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The collective politics of climate justice makes the important claim that lowering emissions is not enough; society must also undertake radical transformation to address both the climate and inequality crises. Owing to its roots in the environmental justice movement, addressing systemic racism is central to climate justice praxis in the United States, which is a necessary intervention in typically technocratic climate politics. What emerges from US climate justice is a moral appeal to ‘relationship’ as politics, the procedural demand that communities of color (the ‘frontline’) lead the movement, and a distributive claim on carbon pricing revenue. However, this praxis precludes a critique of racial capitalism, the process that relies on structural racism to enhance accumulation, alienating, exploiting, and immiserating black, brown, and white, while carrying out ecocide. The lack of an analysis of how class and race produce the crises climate justice confronts prevents the movement from demanding that global north fossil fuel abolition occur in tandem with the reassertion of the public over the private and de-growth. Drawing on research conducted primarily in Oregon and Washington, I argue that race works to both create and limit the transformative possibilities of climate politics.

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“…The increasingly popular climate policy frame of "green growth" [115,116]-alternatively, the "green economy" [117] or the "green transition" [118]-combines the greening of technology and markets in a coherent and appealing narrative and approaches climate mitigation as a capital accumulation strategy, highlighting the economic benefits of environmental protection and the supposed "synergies" between environmental protection and economic growth (for sympathetic overview, see [116]; for critical accounts, see [119]). However, carbon markets (e.g., [120,121]), improved efficiency (e.g., [122]), and renewable energy expansion (e.g., [123,124]) have all been shown to have limited success and unintended impacts (for overview, see [102]). Attempts to surmount the capital-climate contradiction that do not address the drive to accumulate capital will probably fail to significantly reduce emissions and, as Marcuse's critical theory of capitalism would predict, will conceal, rather than address, the contradiction [102,125].…”

Section: Geoengineering Is the Economically Rational Choicementioning

confidence: 99%

A Critical Examination of Geoengineering: Economic and Technological Rationality in Social Context

2018

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Geoengineering-specifically stratospheric aerosol injection-is not only risky, but supports powerful economic interests, protects an inherently ecologically harmful social formation, relegates the fundamental social-structural changes needed to address climate change, and is rooted in a vision of a nature as a set of passive resources that can be fully controlled in line with the demands of capital. The case for geoengineering is incomprehensible without analyzing the social context that gave birth to it: capitalism's inability to overcome a contradiction between the need to accumulate capital, on the one hand, and the need to maintain a stable climate system on the other. Substantial emissions reductions, unlike geoengineering, are costly, rely more on social-structural than technical changes, and are at odds with the current social order. Because of this, geoengineering will increasingly be considered a core response to climate change. In light of Herbert Marcuse's critical theory, the promotion of geoengineering as a market-friendly and high-tech strategy is shown to reflect a society that cannot set substantive aims through reason and transforms what should be considered means (technology and economic production) into ends themselves. Such a condition echoes the first-generation Frankfurt School's central thesis: instrumental rationality remains irrational.

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Climate Change and the Polanyian Counter-movement: Carbon Markets or Degrowth?

Cited by 43 publications

References 52 publications

A political‐economic theory of relevance: Explaining climate change inaction

A political‐economic theory of relevance: Explaining climate change inaction

Climate Politics and Race in the Pacific Northwest

A Critical Examination of Geoengineering: Economic and Technological Rationality in Social Context

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