If you think about it long enough, the Climate Pledge Arena stops looking like a sports/concert venue and starts looking like an existential threat. I mean, if we peel back the layers and look at the pledge in the background the Climate Pledge—a smarmy, hyper-corporate response to the climate crisis that tries to legitimize itself through hockey games and Coldplay concerts—then we see that the beliefs that underlie the arena’s name will eventually kill us.
Co-launched and co-named by Amazon, the Climate Pledge revolves around “green” investments and net-zero pledges by some of the world’s largest businesses. Projects like this, where Fortune 500 companies pinky promise to do better and stop destroying the planet, have serious movement in the halls of power as a way to prevent ecological collapse and civilization. Seattleites are never ~*fazed*~ by the projects Amazon is building; so what about the Climate Pledge, and green capitalism writ large, giving it legs and muscles, not to mention a sports complex?
researchers Adrienne Buller diagnoses and criticizes the intricate web of technocrat initiatives that make up “green capitalism” in his recent book, The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism. Green capitalism is an umbrella term that encompasses a patchwork of market-based responses to climate change — think cap-and-trade schemes, carbon offsets, carbon taxes, and “sustainable ” investment portfolios. The supporters of these strategies present themselves as “the adults in the room.” They promote a conscious capitalism where environmental damages are written into the value of goods and services. Part of this logic submits that once the real The cost of climate loss is literally factored into our economic systems, so businesses and consumers alike have an apolitical incentive to choose things that are more environmentally friendly—for example, solar power over power. of coal—or less consumption.
But as an aggregate, Buller argues, green capitalism “is an effort to address the environmental crisis through new paths to accumulation while minimizing disruption to our existing economic systems and ways of life. ,” regardless of whether these efforts actually live up to their expectations or, worse, create more damage in the process. And, more importantly, these measures will not save us from the destruction of time: They will distract us from more rapid and centralized strategies that could decarbonize our economies before it is too late. Effectiveness will suffer.
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The greater Seattle area is full of bad green-capitalist initiatives that reinforce Buller’s core theses. Heading east brings us into the territory of a recently abandoned green-capitalist scheme in the Snoqualmie Tribe Ancestral Forest. In late September, the Tribe pulled out of an agreement with Forterra, a land-conservation nonprofit, claiming that Forterra tokenized them to secure USDA grant money and bankroll a bad ” sustainable timber” project that, in fact, should have been. five times more timber on the Ancestral Forest land than is ecologically responsible. A schlep in Medina, on the other hand, brings us to the pulpit of the local oligarch Bill Gates, who invests in new technologies such as eco-friendly concrete production as a way to prevent the apocalypse, and playing the long game of climate change writing. law of his image. (It’s worth noting, Buller says, that Gates’ latest book mentions the word “innovation” 90 times but doesn’t mention “inequality” once.)
Buller pointedly names prominent PNW areas as canaries in the coal mine, such as the vast swath of Klamath East forest in Oregon that burned in last year’s Bootleg Fire. Much of the destroyed landscape is privately managed and allocated as fixed carbon offsets for Microsoft and BP. Despite the company’s keen interest in boosting fossil-fuel production through cloud computing, Microsoft can, like other corporations, buy pieces of nature to bill itself as carbon neutral and environmentally friendly while doing little to mitigate the long-term effects of their core operations.
“Not content to try and unpick the dubious assumptions and, often, practices underlying the schemes, Bootleg Fire instead sends these claims of carbon neutrality literally up in smoke, ” wrote Bueller. “I fell in love with that.”
On the one hand, however, carbon offsets are useful PR and political fodder with of dubious assumptions at their core. The carbon-offset industry is largely unregulated and unstandardized, allowing the companies that buy them to increase the stated effects of their token measures. Part of the French gas giant’s Total $600,000 “offset” for 17 million dollars worth of natural gas, for example, did not go to planting new trees, but instead went to volunteers in Zimbabwe clearing the underbrush. ; Total then values the carbon offset according to a far-fetched scenario where underbrush-clearing saves an entire forest from a wildfire. That’s not how math works! The US-based Nature Conservancy has even gotten away with “doing nothing” as a carbon offset and profit-making method, selling offset credits for land it already manages, and where it does not introduce any new protection. steps.
These examples may encourage us to think of green capitalism as just a fraudulent business. That Amazon spent an estimated $300 million to $400 million branding a stadium in honor of the Climate Pledge instead of throwing that money toward ecological efforts sure feels like a Herbalife redux! Poor accounting work and legal troubles plaguing the space further fueled the framing as well.
But it might be more helpful to approach green capitalism as an ideology—or, putting on a little Protestant hat, to think about green capitalism in religious terms. Throughout The Price of the Whale, Buller refers to the “beliefs,” “commandments,” and “myths” that underpin green capitalism. To name one: A neoliberal belief in the inherent complexity and limitlessness of the global economy, which makes it impossible for governments to effectively control. Match that with neoliberalism’s approach to the environment, which is said to be ecological systems potential and must effectively measured and quantified, gave birth to a confusing tautology. This line of thinking sees market-based regulation for the environment as better than direct political regulation, despite the former’s reliance on a large ecosystem of businesses and services and arbitrators to regulate. the self. Requires, in other words, more regulation than direct regulation. A world-building nebula of cognitive dissonance that is helping to destroy our current world.
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Which brings us to the eponymous whale. Buller describes how researchers at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) hope to encourage whale conservation efforts by giving a monetary value to all the great whales living on Earth. Their tabulations value each whale at $2 million due to their role as a carbon-sequestering device (they capture 33 tons of CO2 in their lifetime) and their use as cash cows for eco-tourism. The researchers concluded that pouring money into whale conservation could be more productive for humanity than doing so for other carbon capture strategies: All the great whales combined are worth at least $1 trillion, and they can offer a promising and efficient return on investment.
What does this calculus do? Do we really believe that the 73 orcas, the lowest count in 46 years, gracing the coasts of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia specifically cost $146 million—just a fraction, supposedly, of the estimated Climate Pledge Arena. branding value? And what happened to that apples-to-apples farce? Instead of evangelizing the sanctity of life, or considering the deadly effects of colonialism and capitalism, these researchers and the worldview they support give a low dollar to every living thing as, supposedly, a ways to keep ecological systems swinging for our benefit. “Plugging variables into a spreadsheet to evaluate the cost-benefit of saving a species like a bad acquisition is a difficult equation to take seriously,” concludes Buller.
Knee reduction is easy The Price of the Whale as a useless treatise lacking concrete solutions. Buller, anticipating such a call for “constructive criticism,” accepts that his work does not hope to stop global destruction by creating its own regulatory mechanisms. But recognizing the lack is a valuable first step. Green capitalism hopes to shock the public into a catastrophic decline, presenting the market as the best balm for our ecological ills. Accepting that businesses can do little more than submit marketing copy that supports the corporation’s right to release is encouraging a pivot away from their bells and whistles. Looking elsewhere tells us to raise red flags when dam removals are thought of in monetary terms or when important climate change policy secures Joe Manchin’s approval because of the its deflationary effect. Shirking the “adults in the room” nonsense and asserting political will in the image of people without MBAs will set us on a less damaging course.
