Green Devaluation: Disruption, Divestment, and Decommodification for a Green Economy

Abstract

This paper argues that taking up questions of value can help political ecologists and economists develop a more powerful analysis of the green economy, as it introduces new urban, industrial, and technological dimensions into a self-identified green capitalism. More specifically, I maintain that processes of green devaluation, decommodification, and techno-industrial replacement are as important in understanding green economic development as new value enclosure and green growth. Twenty-first-century green economic politics have been marked by Schumpeterian ambitions and zero-sum intra-capitalist struggles, alongside a more general hardening of anti-fossil fuel industry politics from both grassroots climate justice activists and, increasingly, mainstream investors. I explore three interrelated initiatives-disruptive innovation in Silicon Valley cleantech, the US fossil fuel divestment movement, and the global financial industry's stranded assets organizing-as windows into these struggles. Themes of devaluation, obsolescence (both technological and "moral"), and (more or less absolute) decommodification carry through this discussion as activists struggle to translate quantitative advances against fossil fuels into a more profound qualitative break. Understanding these fights is essential to developing more effective engaged scholarship on climate change and a just energy transition. Keywords: green devaluation; fossil fuel divestment; green economy; decommodification; obsolescence The economic crisis of the late 2000s provoked a major shift within neoliberal capitalism and, centrally, neoliberal environmentalism. Alongside its unleashing of global finance and attacks on Keynesian and Developmentalist welfare states, neoliberalism had pioneered new forms of accumulation by dispossession at the periphery; notably, "green" value enclosures and land/resource grabs. Nevertheless, the 2008 collapse demonstrated to many the neoliberal turn's failure to secure capitalism. As more radical voices called for breaks from a system in crisis, heterodox economists fought back from the margins to gain the ear of powerful governments. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and other national recovery programs adopted neo-Keynesian rhetoric, advocating technological rejuvenation, the creation of quality manufacturing jobs, and a return to "real" economic development. Critically, many looked to a "green economy" as the driver of this economic transformation (Block 2011; UNEP 2011; Bailey and Caprotti 2014). Green economic development programs reframed neoliberalism's environmental project as industrial and innovation policy-the dream of ecological modernization (Mol and Spaargaaren 2000) prioritized and funded to an unprecedented degree in countries like the United States and China. Programs pledged support for rising "cleantech" industries, particularly ones developing renewable and alternative energy. At the same time, by moving to wean their economies off fossil fuels, they sought to mitigate the longer-term crisis of climate ...

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