After the green gold rush: the construction of climate change as a market transition

Abstract

This paper examines the emergence of a representation of climate change amongst business and political elites as an axiomatic frame of long-term economic strategy. In this representation, the rationale for action on climate change is liberated from the premise of an exogenous physical threat, and replaced by incentives endogenous to the market in the form of opportunities in the so-called carbon economy. The relationship between climate science and action upon climate change has in this process become markedly different from common assumptions whereby science is either ignored or obfuscated, or followed faithfully as the evidence base for policy. Strikingly, the abandoning of climate ontology as irrelevant to corporate decision-making has enabled a large-scale investment of capital into the policies nominally designed to tackle climate change.

Keywords:

• climate change
• science
• economic crisis
• green economy
• sustainability
• business

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sam Randalls, Mike Hulme, Erik Swyngedouw, Jonathan Harwood and James Fleming for reading earlier versions of this paper, as well as the participants at the Colby College conference on climate anxiety, The Royal Geographic Society Annual Conference, Manchester 2009, and Climate Change in Social Sciences, Athens 2012. We are grateful to two reviewers for their insightful feedback and suggestions.

Notes

1 As Newell and Paterson (1998, pp. 679–703) detail, the idea of carbon markets had been circulating since the late 1980s, dovetailing with by then hegemonic neo-liberal logic of efficient markets as the key deliverer of optimal social outcomes. It was, however, not until the run-up to Kyoto that they became a serious policy prospect, proposed initially by the US as an alternative to EU proposals which were more focused on direct emissions control.

2 International Energy Agency estimates prepared for the G8 in 2009 suggested that global investments in the ‘energy technology revolution’ required to meet the IPCC's emission reduction targets by 2050 would be US$14–15 trillion (IEA, 2009). In the UK, the energy regulator Ofgem estimated the investment in energy infrastructure required to meet carbon targets at £200 billion over the next two decades – a doubling of the rate of investment in the sector at the time of the report (2009).

3 Besides these interested parties, recent studies have remarked upon the more general mismatch between the UK government's strident climate change rhetoric and its limited success in reducing carbon emissions. See Ekins et al. (2011), Lovell et al. (2009).

4 A problem which goes some way to explaining the increased attention to risky, large-scale solutions such as geo-engineering, nuclear power and carbon capture and storage (Poumadère et al., 2011).

5 While we approach this issue at a high level of abstraction, it should still be pointed out that this situation does not apply evenly across all economic activities. Industries, sectors and markets possess peculiarities which shape their relation to climate science. So, whilst the actions of energy companies and manufacturers may be more closely shaped by anticipation of government regulation and competitive pressures than by attempts to ascertain the material impacts of climate change, for insurance companies a tightly coupled relationship with the best available science relating to the material impacts of climate change is of greater importance (Pinkse & Kolk, 2009, p. 196).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vladimir Janković

Vladimir Janković is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester. He is the author of Confronting the climate (2010) on the history of British environmental medicine and Reading the skies: A cultural history of English weather, 1650–1820 (2000). His current work is on urban climatology and the resilience of cities to climate change.

Andrew Bowman

Andrew Bowman has studied at the University of Manchester's Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and completed this paper while working as a Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at the University of Manchester.