What futures for climate capitalism?

Abstract

So where might all this be heading? In the introduction, we ended by suggesting that the issue is less whether we have climate capitalism or not, but rather what sort of climate capitalism we end up with. Capitalism of one form or another will provide the context in which near-term solutions to climate change have to be found. The governance questions we have just discussed, as well as the critiques of carbon markets we looked at in Chapter 8, suggest the issues climate capitalism will have to address if it is to be effective. The forces behind the development of carbon markets – those forces dominant under neoliberalism that we discussed in Chapter 2 – also provide clues as to the possible forms that climate capitalism might take as it develops. But how might we imagine the current ways that climate change is being managed developing into a more fully fledged, coherent system that could lead to decarbonisation of the economy? And what then might be done to make one or other scenario more likely? We sketch out here four possible scenarios. We should emphasise, they are scenarios, not predictions. They are, in effect, scenario-building exercises thinking through how the various elements of climate change politics we have explored throughout the book might play out in the coming decades.