Some economists like to pretend that it’s closer to a natural science, which is just obviously not the case. The barrier is the idea that economics is somehow not a social science, that it is not inherently political. There are a lot of people working in the heterodox economic space, trying to overcome a barrier that the economics discipline has created for itself artificially. Are there even ways for the field of economics to address climate change that aren’t blatantly ghoulish? This very starkly drives home how morally perverted these calculations are. You write that the VSL generally ranges from $8 to $11 million per life nowadays, and that the lives of those in lower income nations or lower income regions within a country are assigned lower VSL. It was developed during the Cold War to compare costs of military operations. Speaking of other absurd value assignments, later in the book you discuss a measurement called the “value of a statistical life” (VSL) which I did not know existed. Trying to make a whale compliant with market-based logic is how most governments are trying to approach the climate crisis, and I think it captures the absurd and brutal way that economics engages with nature. It’s the idea that if we can just make governments or the corporate sector appreciate the role that elements of nature, like a whale, have in things they care about-money, a stable economy, etc.-then that can be a solution. On the one hand, there’s this intuitive appeal to the idea that the reason that we destroy nature is because we don’t value it within our economic system, so we need to find a way to do that. What made you choose this particular example to open the book?įor me, it captures everything about green capitalism that is both seductive in an intuitive sense and then also deeply problematic in a practical sense. They arrived at this figure by calculating how much carbon whales sequestered and saw it as advocating for whale conservation as a way to fight climate change. The International Monetary Fund decided to place a price on whales: about $1 trillion for the whole species, or $2 million per individual whale. You titled the book after an especially striking example of how absurd green capitalism can be. But I found the experience really interesting in terms of crawling inside the heads of people working in finance and getting to grapple with how they understand this problem. I ultimately came out of that experience feeling very cynical about whether that type of approach will actually deliver any kind of material change. I’d been working in the climate and finance civil society space for several years, and I started out at a totally nonpolitical watchdog company that helps financial firms understand how they should align their portfolios with the goals of the Paris Agreement. What motivated you to critique green capitalism? In contrast to, for instance, moving away from private car ownership to mass transit as a climate solution, the green capitalist framework is more about making sure we can transition to electric vehicles when we’re moving away from fossil-fuel-driven cars so that private companies can keep profiting. The second tenet is pursuing decarbonization in a way that makes sure that there are still opportunities for profit-making and rent extraction in that decarbonized future. The first is that it’s an attempt to resolve the climate crisis in a way that minimizes disruption to our existing ways of organizing the economy, to existing distributions of wealth and power. There are two core tenets of green capitalism I identify. But it’s a galvanizing, tough book, one that asks us to not accept a simulacrum of improvement for the real thing. As one might imagine, it’s not the most uplifting read in the world. The Value of a Whale takes a bracing look at how corporate interests are using the superficial trappings of climate activism to reinforce their own power. The director of research for the London-based progressive think tank Common Wealth, Buller sees market-based corporate “green” initiatives as distracting at best-and, at worst, actively destructive. In her new book, The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism, Adrienne Buller dissects the asinine logic of “green” capitalist thinking, from putting a dollar value on cetaceans to carbon offsets to financial products like “sustainability-linked bonds.” It seems like a self-evidently ridiculous question, borderline obscene-whales are majestic creatures whose worth transcends the human impulse to quantify, obviously! Yet it is one which has been seriously considered by economists in an effort to convince governments and corporations to value wildlife.
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