Abstract
The grand scale of GGR deployment now necessary to avoid dangerous climate change warrants the use of grand interpretive theories of how the global economy operates. We argue that critical social science should be able to name the global economy as “capitalism”; and instead of speaking about “transforming the global economy” as a necessary precondition for limiting climate change, instead speak about transforming, or even transcending,capitalism. We propose three principles are helpful for critical social science researchers willing to name and analyse the structural features of capitalism and their relation to greenhouse gas removal technology, policy, and governance. These principles are: (1)Greenhouse Gas Removal technologies are likely to emerge within capitalism, which is crisis prone, growth dependent, market expanding, We use a broad Marxist corpus to justify this principle. (2)There are different varieties of capitalism and this will affect the feasibility of different GGR policies and supports in different nations. We draw on varieties of capitalism and comparative political economy literature to justify this principle. (3)Capitalism is more than an economic system, it is ideologically and culturally maintained. Globally-significant issues such as fundamentalism, institutional mistrust, precarity, and populism, cannot be divorced from our thinking about globally significant deployment of greenhouse gas removal technologies. We use a broad Critical Theory body of work to explore the ideational project of maintaining capitalism and its relation to GGR governance and policy.
Highlights
We agree that greenhouse gas emissions mitigation and emissions removals of the scale required to limit climate change to 1.5◦C requires a “transformation of the global economy,” but we find a substantial lack of critical engagement from the humanities and social sciences (HASS) in what this “global economy” is, what assumptions we are making when we engage with more “instrumental” GGR research (Castree et al, 2014; Markusson et al, 2020), and how “we” as critical scholars can both maintain a healthy critical appraisal of the development of GGR in this global economy, while not disappearing from the debate because we question some of its founding
We began with establishing a dividing line between contributions which name and contend with “capitalism” explicitly and those which gesture toward an unnamed “global economy.”
We set out the difficult space one is invited to inhabit when capitalism is named, which begins a journey toward ŽiŽeks “ultimatum” to either endorse capitalism’s naturalization by endeavoring to make it more just, or conclude that its contradictions and tensions are too great for it to be sustained
Summary
In a recent analysis of limiting global mean temperature increase below 1.5◦C, Rogelj et al (2018) find that all scenarios “achieving pronounced emission reductions require a transformation of the global economy.” We agree that greenhouse gas emissions mitigation and emissions removals of the scale required to limit climate change to 1.5◦C requires a “transformation of the global economy,” but we find a substantial lack of critical engagement from the humanities and social sciences (HASS) in what this “global economy” is, what assumptions we are making when we engage with more “instrumental” GGR research (Castree et al, 2014; Markusson et al, 2020), and how “we” as critical scholars can both maintain a healthy critical appraisal of the development of GGR in this global economy, while not disappearing from the debate because we question some of its founding. Markusson et al (2018) predominant concern, is the legitimization of mitigation deterrence at a policy level They argue that moving to a cultural political economy register allows us to see and to critique how carbon capture and storage and greenhouse gas removal technologies can “fix” the problems climate change poses for capitalism by resolving the conflict between economic growth and emissions from hard to decarbonize sectors. The divorce of power from politics—such a repeated argument in the latter part of Bauman’s career, understood as the emancipation of capital from the territorially-fixed controls of states—means that national politicians are no longer able to fulfill their traditional functions amidst the stupefying pace of (technologically-enabled) change This political impotence creates a new legitimation crisis (Habermas, 1988), which sees that same modern impulse to perfect society directed toward the only “imagined community” (Anderson, 2006) left available to it— “the past.”. Principle 3: Capitalism is more than an economic system, it is ideologically and culturally maintained
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