'They teach us': how whales can help dispel the myth of green capitalism

In her new book, Adrienne Buller argues the desire to eke profit out of climate policy is wilfully naiveA few years ago, a group of my students told me they thought capitalism would fix the climate crisis. It was the end of term and we had spent weeks debating world politics; they were not uncritical or naive. But as fires ripped through homes and flood water lapped at people's stairs, with extreme weather driven by the climate crisis hitting countries around the world, they looked at the global scale of the economic and political forces driving capitalism and asked if that may be our best chance. If the system would have no other option but to course correct when faced with planetary collapse. Adrienne Buller's recent book, The Value of a Whale, dashes whatever hopes they might have had. Green capitalism will not save us, she argues - if anything, it is making the climate crisis worse.Green capitalism may not be what you think it is. With much discussion about the danger of climate denial and the criticism of oil and gas companies' climate-conscious ads, Buller's book points to a shift that we risk missing. In the past decade, some capitalists have embraced green politics and not just for the sake of optics. Seeing the climate crisis as an unprecedented threat to capitalism, they don't want to disprove its existence but solve it. As an example, read the annual letter from the BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink. Their approaches - "prices, markets and clever financial products", Buller writes - are now "guiding much of the global response to the ecological crisis". In Buller's reading, then, my students' optimism was at least partially founded: capitalists have woken up to the problem. But what to make of their solutions? Continue reading...