Page 106 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

92 J. BATES

“turbulence…is assumed” (p. 184). She argues that, as US strategists have
attempted to understand what these deepening uncertainties mean for US
geopolitical power in the context of shifting economic power, they have
turned to “turbulence” as a form of “productivity” (p. 170) to be lever-
aged in order to achieve the key strategic aim of sustaining US geopolitical
power. One critical objective of US strategists aiming to navigate through
these uncertain waters, she observes, is “to dominate… the securitized risk
markets, in which weather turbulence plays an increasingly significant role
[and which]…offer one possible exit strategy from the liabilities of the
dollar-oil nexus” (p. 170).
To turn to the anthropogenic (human-generated) turbulence and
uncertainty that is the outcome of the last few hundred years of economic
development as a source of new economic opportunity and growth betrays
a rigidity in thinking about how societies might move beyond the chal-
lenges posed by carbon capitalism. While the development of new data
analytics techniques aimed at exploiting turbulence may buy time in the
short-medium term, climate risk and similar markets do not address the
fundamental problem of economic growth and ecological sustainability in
the long term. Drawing upon the analysis of Rockström et al. (2009b),
political economists Hay and Payne (2013) argue that many of the earth’s
ecosystems are already in the ‘red zone’ and further degradation is directly
related to “aggregate global [economic] growth rates”. This leads them to
conclude that “we face not just a crisis of growth, but, much more sig-
nificantly, a crisis for growth…we will need to wean ourselves off growth if
we are to do anything that takes us out of the ‘red zone’” (p. 6).
Their argument that economies must move beyond growth in order to
shift towards a sustainable form of development is not new, and has been
approached from a number of perspectives. The Club of Rome’s 1972
report on the Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), for example, was
the first analysis of the problematic relationship between economic growth
and environmental sustainability, and these ideas have been taken up across
a range of fields including sustainable development and ecological eco-
nomics. Further, as Harvey (2011) argues, continued economic growth is
not only environmentally unsustainable, but is implausible in the long-term
given that the rate of profitable investments to be found each year in order
to maintain the compound growth that capitalism is dependent upon will
at some point become impossible to maintain.