Three years after its signing, the Paris Climate Agreement is already under threat. In support of the actions to be taken to stem climate change, La Vie des Idées is publishing, in partnership with Public Books, a series of articles devoted to the relationship between capitalism and global warming.
Three years ago today, a historic climate agreement, the Paris Agreement, was adopted by 195 countries (now 197) to combat global warming. In June 2017, the newly elected US President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from this agreement, out of indifference to climate change and rejection of multilateralism.
In light of this situation, one may wonder what the future holds for the fight against climate change if decisive states fail. Should we look elsewhere to develop new strategies and responses? Should the solution be found, for example, in market forces, or is the market itself the problem? Can capitalism provide answers to the climate crisis or is it rather an obstacle?
On this anniversary of the Paris Agreement, the journals Public Books And The Life of Ideas/Books&Ideas have chosen to devote their third collaboration to this question of climate change and capitalism.
This issue is also an opportunity to recall that international cooperation does not only concern States, but also individuals and communities. Coming from diverse disciplines and intellectual backgrounds, the contributions to this issue share this desire to put the fruit of their research at the service of public debate, in a style that is at once rigorous, critical and accessible.
Each journal commissioned three essays. The authors approached by Public Books have chosen to tackle the problem from a “macro” perspective and in a rather critical vein. Geographers Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright (December 10) thus question the capacity and willingness of national governments – whether the United States or other states – to be leaders in the fight against climate change. States, they argue, have so far shown themselves to be both incapable and unwilling to mitigate the devastating consequences of climate change and to address the issue of climate justice. It would be potentially catastrophic to pretend otherwise.
In a similar vein, political theory specialist Claire Sagan will return (in January) to commonplaces of contemporary environmentalist discourse and subject them to a “merciless critique”. She insists in particular on the need to go beyond a capital-centric conception of the environment and the future, which requires that we rethink not only the climate focus but also the notions of crisis and that of the Anthropocene.
Finally, mathematician Nicolas Bouleau (Le prix de la planète, December 12) chose to focus his reflection on the phenomenon of volatility on financial markets, and its consequences for the ecological transition. Like a storm on a warming planet, market volatility makes the pitfalls that await us invisible: by erasing the price signal that Friedrich Hayek once celebrated, it encourages rational actors to make choices that are disastrous for the environment.
The three texts proposed by The Life of Ideas/Books&Ideas have favoured an intermediate level of analysis of the links between climate change and capitalism: that of the company and entrepreneurs.
Political scientists Swann Bommier and Cécile Renouard (January) will address this issue by analyzing the different facets of corporate responsibility: political, economic and financial, social, but also societal and environmental. Skeptical about the effectiveness of the systems CSR So far, they claim that the expected changes in environmental matters cannot come about without a redefinition of the company as a “commons”.
Similarly, political scientist Edouard Morena (Do Philanthropists Love the Planet?, December 11) deconstructs the expectations placed on philanthropic foundations to finance the ecological transition. While marginal, “philanthro-capitalism” is a very real phenomenon, which, in the United States in particular, is reinforced by the opposition of many entrepreneurs to Donald Trump’s isolationist and climate-sceptic positions. However, Edouard Morena questions the transformative capacity of such a movement.
Finally, linguist Olivier Dorlin (January) will address the complex links between the environment and the film industry. In particular, he contrasts Hollywood cinema, which conveys a predominantly catastrophic and sensationalist representation of climate change, with the emergence of a new type of cinema that is more authentically ecological and which takes the issue of sustainability into account in both its themes and its film production methods.
Will this file further fuel the ambient pessimism about the possibility of remedying the political, economic and social challenges posed by climate change? If the texts all echo a critical vision of the current situation, it is also to put it into perspective with what could change it.