Syndicate
| Capital and Climate Change |
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| Written by Larry Lohmann | |||
| Tuesday, 29 November 2011 17:37 | |||
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The review, published in the March 2011 issue of the journal Development and Change, reminds readers from the beginning that oil and coal have been crucial to capital accumulation and to corporate control over workers and the land for at least 150 years, indicating that addressing climate change is primarily a political issue rather than a technical one.
Three of the books, by Nicholas Stern, Anthony Giddens, and Peter Newell & Matthew Paterson, advocate various business-friendly climate change strategies; while the fourth, by Mike Hulme, questions the premise that climate change is a "problem" waiting for an economic (or technical, scientical, political or ethical) "solution".
The fifth, a collected edited by Kolya Abramsky, looks at issues of ownership, labour, land and livelihood in its analysis of a transition to a decentralised, equitable and ecologically-sensitive energy system oriented toward the commons rather than toward capital accumulation. It is attentive to the nuances and unexpected shifts of contemporary power conflicts, keeping within the same vision rather than separate ones the "low politics" of struggles over commons and commodification with the "high politics" of finance, war, diplomacy and catastrophe.
The essay concludes that this fifth volume, Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution, addresses the substantial questions of climate change politics in a more focused and responsible way than the "amateurishly conceived" first three books. The book by Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, also contains many indispensible insights.
Source : http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/capital-and-climate-change Like it? Share it!
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