Climate Change and the Crisis of Capitalism; A Chance to Reclaim Self, Society and Nature

This book explores some of the fundamental concepts and responses to climate change. Its orientation is captured in its title, which suggests that any attempt to address the challenges of climate change cannot merely respond by amending our current economic model of production and consumption, by finding lower carbon ways to secure goods and services, and modifying settlement patterns and other aspects of modern living to adjust for rising temperatures, more extreme and volatile weather patterns and rising sea levels. Indeed, the crisis that we are experiencing goes well beyond global environmental challenges and events, since the publication of this volume reinforces rather than reduces the need to recognize the multi-faceted nature of current challenges. Key issues include those of structural inequality, speculative and myopic markets, political disengagement and substantive multi-faceted insecurities. Hence the problem is not simply one of responding to climate change, but rather of having to make a more systemic change to improve the chances of securing well-being at scale and across dimensions of nature, society and individuals. The authors in this volume engage with a number of possible ways both to think about progress and to move forward.

The book is divided into four sections. The first begins with the theme of sustainable development and environmental sustainability (Michael Redclift) and the differing ways in which the challenge has been considered, to offer a conceptual framework to appreciate better the ways in which debates are being framed today and policy solutions across the market and regulation are being considered. A following chapter by Katrina Brown considers the multiple ways in which resilience has been defined and understood and how it has been used as a popular frame in which to represent appropriate responses to current challenges. The final chapter in this section, by Mark Pelling, elaborates the potential for more progressive development using a distinction between resilience, transition and transformation.

The following three sections look at some critical groups of action. Section II focuses on the knowledge power interface, with an examination of climate change policy responses in the United States and the ways in which they are being formed and influence broader structural political processes; also the possible nature of a de-growth process and a new politics of climate change; and new governance alternatives in the Global South that are based around co-production between organized citizens and the state to produce more equitable and effective urban development. Further contributions examine the potential transition processes in addressing the need to reorganize carbon intensive economics in selected sites in the UK, and an analysis of the value of the concept of ecological modernization, which aids our understanding of what can be done and how what needs to be done can be understood.

Section III begins by exploring the need to rethink the economics used at present and argues that there is a need to take on (rather than avoid) some of the contradictions between capitalism, equality and a viable future. The discussion covers a range of both implicit and explicit factors that are framing our conceptualizations of both the problem and the solution, and ends with a chapter that illustrates the problems in the context of a region of Mexico. The final substantive section is entitled “The politics of climate change”, and chapters suggest the need to be more visionary (utopian) in framing responses to climate change and to engage with the particular interests that are resulting in relatively short-term unambitious and minimalist responses. A concluding chapter argues the case for substantive radical change.