Climate Capitalism and its Discontents

Can capitalism become sustainable? Are green management policies and institutions capable of taming global markets for sustainable ends? If not, what forms of social agency can arrest the global climate crisis? These questions are not new in the social science literature on environmental change. But they are more and more pressing as we move further into the twenty-first century.

We are in an unprecedented period of global environmental change. Action to avoid runaway climate change is most urgent. The backdrop is the failure of climate policy to produce emissions reductions in line with the scale of the task. “Market mechanisms” such as carbon taxes, energy efficiency measures, and technological innovation are the main political responses to climate change. Modest streams of climate finance have started flowing, and in the last decade public and private actors have created a complex architecture of transnational carbon trading markets.

Will these current and potential market reforms contribute to what Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson called “climate capitalism,”¹ a situation where capital accumulation becomes aligned with low-carbon development? There is great need for social scientists to engage creatively with the task of theorizing the ecological and political impacts of market approaches to climate change and more broadly the prospects for sustainability vis-à-vis the dynamics of fossil fuel capitalism. The three books reviewed here are welcome additions to the critical literature taking up this task. This common thread in each book brings to light complementary aspects of debates over the prospects for a green (capitalist) economy.

Daniel Miller’s Consumption and its Consequences is an entertaining and provocative read. Contrary to the neoclassical economic construction of the consumer as hedonist and individual utility maximiser, Miller’s work presents consumption as an active process of appropriation embedded in local moral and cultural practices.

The book runs for a swift six chapters. The first and final chapters are a three-way conversation among three fictitious characters Miller uses to represent different political perspectives. They are all academics and experts in consumption, who meet to discuss classical texts they use in teaching. Mike is a middle-aged professor in environmental studies who gives voice to the “green” perspective. Grace, a Filipina expatriate working in the UK who lectures in anthropology, represents a “Southern” perspective. Her partner Chris, the sociologist, rounds out the three-way debate from a “red” perspective. Miller uses what is at times fierce debate among the three to illuminate common formulations of consumer culture. In the first chapter the three-way battle airs issues relating the morality of consumption and the right to development versus naïve green anti-consumerism arguably common amongst Northern environmentalists. The characters conclude their discussion by committing to talk again in a more focused way about how understanding consumption can assist us in dealing with one of its major consequences: climate change.

The middle chapters of the book are summaries of Miller’s earlier ethnographic studies looking at the arrival of consumer capitalism in Trinidad and shopping in London. For those unfamiliar with Miller’s work, the book serves as a good introduction. Condensing a number of monographs into chapter-sized discussions does mean the text is quite crowded with ideas, however. His work also tends to undervalue or omit other social theories addressing consumption, from the classics of Thorstein Veblen, George Bataille, and Jean Baudrillard, to more recent economic sociology of Michel Callon.² Nonetheless, Miller’s rich portraits of consumerism illustrate the paucity of neoclassical models of consumer behavior.

Peter Newell’s Globalization and the Environment is a neat survey text covering ground common to international political economy (IPE) and environmental governance scholars. Newell starts by outlining his concern to account for how “(global) ecologies and economies interrelate, [and] how that relationship is mediated by politics, including institutions, but more importantly at the broader relations of power of which they are a part...