Tech Won't Save Us - Why Green Capitalism Won’t Fix Climate Change w/ Adrienne Buller

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Adrienne Buller to discuss how the tech and finance industries are selling us false solutions to the climate crisis that are designed for their own benefit.Adrienne Buller is the Director of Research at Common Wealth and the author of The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism. Follow Adrienne on Twitter at @adribuller.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Adrienne originally wrote about the problem with the finance industry’s approach to climate change for Novara Media. She recently wrote about the failure of green capitalism for the Guardian and the power BlackRock wields for Jacobin.Common Wealth recently produced a report on Asset Management Capitalism.Elon Musk called ESG a scam after Tesla was booted from the S&P 500’s ESG fund.Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen wrote The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism.Support the show

We just don't have the capacity to replace every single car in the global fleet, you know, one for one with an EV. And we don't have the capacity to just offset all the emissions of the global north as it currently stand and in the distributions Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Adrian Buller. Adrian is the author of The Value of a Whale on the Illusions of Green Capitalism and the Director of Research at Commonwealth, a left-wing think tank in the UK. You might remember my previous episodes with Sabrina Fernandez and Molly Taft looking at climate change, looking at ideas of net zero, and how technologies are being deployed in order to try to incentivize or give cover to this notion that all we need is green capitalism and that will solve the problem of climate change. Well, in this episode, we dig even deeper into that topic, look at how the finance industry, how the asset management industry is trying to position itself as the solution to climate change, even as many of the solutions that it supposedly provides

are mainly smoke and mirrors that don't deliver the benefits that we would expect and won't actually make the difference that we need to make in order to reduce emissions to keep warming below two degrees or even better 1.5 degrees. I will note that early on in this conversation for about the first half of it probably we talk a lot about finance and green capitalism and you, you know, I guess it's a broader level conversation that doesn't get so much to the tech aspects of this. But then the latter half of the conversation really digs into those aspects of it, the way that the tech industry is involved in this, and how a lot of what they are proposing

is not enough to really solve the existential crisis that we face with climate change. I really enjoyed Adrian's book, and I think that you're really going to enjoy this conversation. And of course, we start by discussing the title of the book, The Value of the Whale, and where that actually comes from, which I think is really fascinating. If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening and enjoy this week's conversation.

Adrienne, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to chat with you. You have a fantastic new book out, or it comes out in the United States and Canada, I believe, in October, and it's already out in the UK. Is that right? Yes, that is correct. Good knowledge. Good knowledge. Remembering my dates, you know, called The Value of the Whale on the Illusions of Reign Capitalism. And this is something that I think that we've touched on in the show in the past in interviews with Sabrina Fernandez and Molly Taft, you know, what, you know, capitalism wants to do for climate change and how it seeks to profit from it and not really address, you know, the core issues

that we need to be dealing with. And so I think that your book gives us a really interesting way to dig into this and to explore it further and some new topics that we haven't discussed before on the show that I think the listeners will really enjoy. But I was kind of struck by the title of the book when I started it, you know, the value of the whale. You know, whales are very, you know, beautiful and majestic creatures, I think. So, you know, to get us started, how should we understand the value of a whale? Not the title of the book, but lowercase words? And why use a whale to illustrate the concept of the book? Yeah, really good question. So the idea for the book itself,

I mean, it's a long time coming as all books, I guess, are, but the specific impetus came from this very niche kind of study that was published, I think, two years ago now, I've lost all track of time, but published by the IMF, the International Monetary Fund. And it was a few researchers who I think maybe were well-intentioned enough who were trying to make the case that we should invest in whale conservation

because they make contributions to the economy through ecotourism, so whale watching trips, and through their role in kind of sequestering carbon. And they somehow arrived through some fancy sums at $2 million per whale, or about a trillion for the entire global stock, as they described it. And sort of we're making the case that because of those contributions directly to the economy, we should be investing in whales. And I think it, for me, captured what is, I think, at the heart of my kind of critique that I explore in the book of green capitalism, which is this kind of forcing of the questions of climate and ecological crisis through the kind of impossibly narrow frame of the market and sort of solutions that revolve entirely around markets and the price mechanism. And I think, as you said, you know, whales in particular, because they're so kind of majestic and kind of alien.

And for me, maybe this is my like softer liberal side coming out, but for me, they capture kind of the like mystery and kind of wonder of the natural world in quite an evocative way. I thought it was, you know, a good starting point for just kind of how ridiculous or at least kind of intuitively strange and kind of icky, I guess, some of these approaches are. And then, you know, it obviously opens up into a much broader discussion of the problems with, you know, market-based solutions to these questions. I love that. And so I guess we should understand all the slaughtering of the whales in centuries

past, not as a problem because, you know, all those whales died and, you know, we killed all these majestic beings, but because we destroyed a lot of potential value that could be existing. Trillions in value. Just. Ah, damn. How could they not have thought ahead to this? But, you know, as you're describing there, the key concept, I guess, that the book revolves around is this idea of green capitalism, right? The way that we're going to respond to climate change is through these market mechanisms, as you're describing. So can you give us a bit more detail on what green capitalism actually is and what, you know, the systems of capital seek to present as the solution to climate change? Yeah, so I mean, there are probably so many ways that you could define green capitalism. And indeed, a lot of people have different definitions than I do. But the one that I just go from in the book as a starting point, came from kind of two, I think, quite clear trends in the way that sort of capital is responding to climate crisis.

One of which is to confront it in a way that does as much as possible to sort of prevent disturbing existing sort of economic systems, institutions, distributions kind of wealth and power, in large part because obviously those are systems and distributions that are serving a particular cohort of people in power very well already. So logically, you want to find a way to kind of decarbonize the system as it is with minimal kind of disruption. Whether that's possible is a different question, but that's kind of the sort of approach. And the second is, as you touched on before, you know, finding new kind of domains for sort of investment and speculation and profit in the transition to a kind of

decarbonized future. And in part, you know, that's a response to what is, you know, I think a lot of corporations and financial firms recognize is it a genuinely unprecedented kind of threat to a lot of conventional domains of profit and return. So kind of a response to that. And again, you know, a lot of those are filtered through the prism of the market as, you know, the kinds of solutions that adhere to both of those kind of drives that I identified there. So the book kind of just explores what are some of the totemic solutions, if you will, of that kind of approach, whether that's carbon pricing or sustainable finance. And I'm sure we'll kind of get into unpacking those. But that's sort of how I understand it from a bird's eye view, I guess. Absolutely. You know, one of the things I found interesting in your kind of writing about green capitalism was this notion of looking at policies through the lens of efficiency versus effectiveness versus justice. And when we see these green capitalist solutions, the argument is often that these are the efficient

way that we respond to the climate crisis. You know, we use this pricing, these market mechanisms instead of the so-called command and control response of like regulatory measures and actual government intervention. And so how should we understand that kind of framing of the policy responses and how that really kind of serves to try to justify these market responses over other ways to address the crisis. Yeah, efficiency is, I'm going to borrow from one of the sort of mainstream climate economists that I talk about a lot in the book, his name's William Nordhaus. I'm sure many people are saying, well, a part of him. And he has this great line, something along the lines of, you know,

economists eat efficiency for breakfast, lunch and dinner kind of thing. And it's their sort of quintessential focus of conventional economic models and is the kind of presumed outcome of market exchange. And so far as, you know, when you have rational actors operating in this imagined market, you're going to have kind of an optimal distribution of resources of costs and benefits to solving a solution. And that is one of the major justifications often used, even just assumed about carbon markets and carbon pricing without necessarily sort of backing that up with the evidence. And I think, you know, that is the idea that efficiency should be prioritized is almost just this received common sense within mainstream economic circles, particularly in the climate space. And, you know, it's very rarely questioned as a priority, even though, you know, it may have nothing to do

with like achieving the outcome that we actually need, which is curbing carbon emissions or biodiversity loss as quickly as possible at a global scale and in a way that is kind of not punitively unjust and unagreable. And, you know, you can have an outcome that is technically efficient in economic terms, but doesn't really achieve any of those actual outcomes, which I think most of us would be concerned with. But, you know, it's used as this kind of justification and this sort of positive assumed benefit of taking a market-based approach. And that, I guess, is because climate from the get-go, from the day that sort of economists have been engaged in the climate question, have sort of framed it very famously as like the greatest market failure the world

has ever seen. It's a current failure of the market because we have failed to price carbon emissions or we failed to price environmental damage. And so it's, you know, an externality that is priced and we need to internalize it to the market. And you scare folks there by putting a price on it. And so all these kinds of things have just come out of decades in which that's just been the only way that people have kind of spoken about this problem. But it's now just kind of this received common sense in a lot of mainstream policy circles. Yeah. To illustrate the issue with relying on economists to kind of shape the response to climate change, one of the things that you mention in the book is that there was a 1994 study that Nordhaus put together where he showed that natural scientists see a 20 to 30 times greater impact on

GDP as a result of climate change than mainstream economists did. I guess like, you know, illustrating that these people probably don't have the best grasp of what's actually going to happen here. And maybe we shouldn't be relying on their solutions for the response that we should take. Yeah, the book spends a lot of time kind of picking apart the like assumptions and methods of a lot of kind of mainstream is the term I use just for simplicity, kind of economic models of climate crisis. And again, to come back to Nordhaus, I guess I like to pick on him. Sorry.

He's kind of credited with being the first person to propose two degree warming target. But since then, you know, the kind of model for which he won the sort of Nobel adjacent prize in economics, his DICE model basically looks at the economic impacts of various kind of degrees of global heating and actually suggests based on kind of efficiency and an optimal kind of cost benefit tradeoff that we should have a future that ideally would be three to four degrees Celsius of kind of baseline temperatures, which although the model suggests is optimal is you know described by most scientists as sort of catastrophic or to borrow from kevin anderson who's a sort of well-known uk climate scientist incompatible with an organized global community to put it lightly so yeah i think you

know economics just kind of has the wrong priorities when it comes to climate crisis but also just isn't equipped to deal with the kind of phenomenal complexity and uncertainty inherent in sort of natural systems. But we act as though it is equipped to deal with those, which I think is kind of the fatal flaw there. Yeah, optimal for who, I guess, is a key question there. There are many different aspects of this green capitalist response to climate change that you outline in the book. One of them that I wanted to pick up on before we get into larger kind of industries that are focused on this is this effort to price carbon, right? As you're saying that there's this idea that climate change is a market failure and you need to price the

externalities and the externality is carbon and the emissions that are going into the atmosphere. Where does this idea that we should be pricing emissions come from? Oh, God. Well, yeah, I mean, that's kind of not the origins of the very first approach or the very first kind of engagement of economics with the climate crisis. I don't know that I can pin down the actual first time that was proposed. But it's very much always just kind of the received common sense of mainstream economic consensus, which the probably the time that was cemented in the public consciousness was the Stern Review, which was 2006, 2007. Nicholas Stern gave a very famous kind of major landmark review on the economics of climate change and was the first to kind of really hammer home the idea

that we should understand it in that way although that had kind of been within the economic common sense for quite a while and that's because that's the only way with which a market system can engage with this problem if something doesn't have a price then it can't sort of be an element within a market system and therefore you can't have, you know, markets address and resolve it. So in order to render, you know, the climate crisis or increasingly sort of questions about ecological crisis and biodiversity loss, in order to render them compliant with market mechanisms, they first need to have a price. Otherwise, there's no currency of exchange for actors within that market system.

Yeah, as I said, it's an absolutely kind of necessary condition for doing that, even though it's kind of wildly inappropriate, often from sort of a climatic or an ecological perspective. And, you know, the whale is a really good example of that, right? So the only way that you can have the market engage with the value of whales is to put a price tag on that. And that sounds like kind of an extreme or fringe example, but whether it's carbon emissions or whether it's what they're now calling kind of natural capital and ecosystem services, which are kind of what it sounds like, the kind of services like clean air or water or disease resistance that ecosystems kind of provide to us freely, sort of parceling

those out and finding kind of prices for them is now sort of a major project. And yeah, it's again, sort of the necessary condition for market solutions. And without doing that, then you have to acknowledge that markets aren't equipped to address this problem. And so that's, I think, where the kind of cementing of that common sense has come from. Yeah, I appreciate you outlining that. And, you know, I think that there are multiple moments that we can look at where this attempt to entrench this idea of carbon pricing gets, I guess, put into climate policy and made something that all of these governments, whether it's in Europe or Canada or wherever else, is looking to as the way to address the problem. And where I think there

are real questions, as you outline in the book, as to whether it's really delivering the results that we would expect or that we were told would come of it. One of the industries that you mention in the book and that you spend a lot of time talking about is the asset management industry. And people might notably know the name of BlackRock from, you know, the small number of companies that really occupy this space or dominate it at least. How should we think about the way that the asset management industry is responding to climate change? And what effects does that have on the way that we actually respond to this problem? Oh God, how much time do you have? So yeah, I think some people might, you know, find it a bit odd that I spend so much time focusing on asset management in the book,

given they are just kind of one part of the financial system and sort of wider corporate sector. But I focus on them because I think they offer this kind of like perfect distillation of the sort of green capitalist logic and mindset. And also because they actually have quite like an impressive degree of direct political influence. BlackRock in particular is very effective at that. So the asset management industry, I mean, presumably lots of people listening to the show will know, but maybe some don't, is an industry that, as it suggests, manages assets on behalf of clients for a fee. So whether you're someone who has a pension or whether it's a university endowment or you're just a rich person with savings to invest, they will sort of invest those on your behalf and make those investment decisions. The industry has become both enormous and hugely concentrated over the past couple of decades. So BlackRock itself manages about 10 trillion US dollars in assets, and its closest competitor Vanguard was around seven last time I checked. And so they're nearing kind of the 20 trillion mark, which is a full fifth of the entire global industry. So which is just over about 100 trillion in assets sloshing around. And that's just two firms that have that kind of enormous amount of power, both over kind of

allocation. So, you know, where are we putting investment, as well as, you know, when you buy shares in a company, you get the entitlement to sort of vote at corporate AGMs, you get entitlement to sort of engage directly with corporate executives, tell them what you want them to do. And finally, you know, because they're now these kind of universal systemic type investment firms, they've been given, you know, substantially more political access than they may have had in the past. And so the combination of those factors has given them a lot of sort of power in shaping the way that we respond to the climate crisis. And they have, you know, huge sway over lots of the companies they're invested in, you know, they get kind of almost effective veto power at most major corporations, definitely in the US, often in the UK and Europe,

and often around the rest of the world as well, you know, together BlackRock, Vanguard, and one other firm called State Street own about 20 to 25% of the average S&P 500 company which may not sound enormous but is very much almost an effective veto their level of influence is huge and when you sort of consider that that is their scale kind of around the entire global economy you kind of start to get a picture of of their influence and the way they think about it is quite interesting, because if you are a universally exposed investor, like a BlackRock, then you are particularly conscious of the fact that you are universally exposed to climate change, which is a sort of global and systemic issue. And so I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that BlackRock isn't actually very concerned about the climate crisis and about decarbonisation.

It's just the way that they sort of channel that concern is not necessarily towards, you know, actually doing anything to try and of the climate crisis to their portfolios, as well as ensuring that, you know, there's constantly new investable opportunities for them, ideally kind of relatively low risk investable opportunities. And that's, I think, what you start to see in their kind of policy imprint and, you know, the way that they engage with policymakers. You know, as you're describing there, you're saying how, okay, BlackRock and these companies are certainly interested in climate change. And you would think that if it is this kind of asset management industry, they're holding so much of the market that they would be thinking longer term, right?

This is something that you talk about in the book. You know, you would assume that they're making longer term decisions and really thinking about what these things are going to mean, you know, far down the line in a way that maybe more of a short term investor wouldn't. But you say that in practice, that's not actually the way that it works. Can you expand on that? Yeah, I mean, in practice, they they kind of fall victim to the same kind of demands as any kind of corporation, which is sort of short term obligations to shareholders or to the investors, these assets that you are investing. And what's interesting to me about BlackRock in particular is that they focus from an investment perspective,

yeah, on kind of near term. I think their long term vision comes in their interest in kind of political sphere and influencing the overall kind of shape that decarbonization takes, particularly in the US. That is very nebulous thing to say, and I'll try and unpack that a bit. So, you know, one thing that both kind of 2008 and financial crisis and kind of COVID demonstrated is this willingness on the parts of states to use their kind of monetary power to backstop the financial markets. And BlackRock is a huge kind of monetary power to backstop the financial markets. And BlackRock is a huge kind of advocate of those kinds of policies. And indeed, they were given the task of carrying out the Federal Reserve's asset purchase program in response to COVID-19.

They bought up a ton of their own funds in the process. And that, to me, is quite interesting from a climate perspective, because if you are lobbying for that kind of support from the states using their kind of monetary firepower, it provides this kind of implicit backstop against the kind of small shocks that will sort of increasingly punctuate the much longer trajectory of the climate crisis. So if you kind of know that you have this kind of backstop that will keep asset prices afloat, if not rising, then that is your primary concern as BlackRock rather than necessarily trying to, you know, mitigate those shocks to the best of

your power. And I think that's quite an interesting way to consider how they think about this. And the other is that, you know, they're interested in the near term, not really in net zero by 2050, or any of those kinds of things that they that they pretend to be, there's much more concerned with ensuring that the transition is kind of smooth, and that there isn't this sort of like mass loss of all the asset value of, you know, their fossil fuel investments, for example, and that that is a gradual transition that minimizes their regulatory risk over time. Or that, you example, and that that is a gradual transition that minimizes their regulatory risk over time. Or that, again, in this process, that governments are using their capacities to create new investable opportunities in this imagined kind of decarbonized future.

And again, for BlackRock, because their sort of reason to exist and the way that they make all their money is a fee that is based off of the scale and the value and the way that they make all their money is, you know, a fee that is based off of the scale and the value of the assets that they manage. That's kind of all that matters is those asset prices. So you can see these hypothetical futures that they're imagining in which, you know, maybe there are significant swathes of the globe that are kind of just relegated as sacrifice zones or, you know know we sort of hugely amplify extractive industry in conditions that massively exploits the poor workers in the global south but

provided that those are supporting the share prices of companies like tesla or other kinds of manufacturers in the global north and that's not necessarily a problem for black rock so there are futures in which we kind of decarbonize and scare quotes to a certain degree, but that are profoundly unjust. And that, again, is not something that is a concern to them. And so when you have them kind of at the helm of helping to shape and influence this agenda, then I think, you know, that's where my concern really starts to deepen. Yeah, I appreciate that. And we'll come back to that injustice, I think, a little bit later in our conversation. One of the other pieces of this that stood out to me as I was reading it was that BlackRock also has this platform called Aladdin that it uses to, you know, shape its investment. And this platform is also used by major tech companies as well in order to, you know, they have a ton of money sitting around, you know, this is quite well known to also kind of figure out how they are going to invest their enormous amounts of capital. Can you talk to us a bit about that platform and what is

significant about it? Yeah. So, you know, if I described before the fact that the asset management industry itself is concentrated because, you know, BlackRock controls 10 trillion assets, then Aladdin is even more kind of interesting and or concerning as a platform. And Aladdin is shorthand for the very kind of unsexy asset liability and debt and derivative investment network. It's basically sort of a portfolio management program that is a bit of kit that provides investors all over the world with sort of risk analysis and sort of portfolio management analysis that they then use to kind of make their own investment decisions. And it's interesting because those are all sort of models that are based off

of people employed by BlackRock, which, you know, while Aladdin isn't managing the, I think, you know, last time I checked, it was 21 trillion in assets around the world that sit on that platform and use it to make investment decisions. You know, BlackRock isn't technically making those decisions, but its models and instances and assumptions are very much informing how those financial decisions are made. So it's a huge kind of degree of power through this kind of tech platform that I should say, you know, 21 trillion was the last estimate that we had, but BlackRock actually stopped publishing estimates of how much is using that platform because it garnered such negative press that there could potentially be

this risk of the reason that people kind of defend financial markets is they're meant to be, again, efficient and they're meant to sort of make decisions that reflect the kind of aggregation of all best known information that's available. But if you have sort of one entity, one kind of tech platform that is effectively like providing the same information to trillions and trillions of people worldwide, then you could end up with this like very risky kind of groupthink. And that's a criticism that's been raised, even though Aladdin tends to kind of fall by the wayside. And as you said, you know, it's not just financial firms that are using this. Loads of corporations use it to make their decisions, including Apple. And it's very catchily named Braeburn Capital, which is quite funny. It's Braeburn's type of Apple, if anyone doesn't know that. But, you know, Microsoft as well, Google, and everyone's kind

of using this platform to decide how to spend their corporate cash and they've recently moved into specifically aladdin has specifically moved into sort of climate portfolio risk analysis whereas before it was just kind of generalized and again for me you know that's yet another mechanism through which they're kind of shaping the kind of future of how we engage with the climate crisis. Yet another channel. I think you've outlined that really well. And when we're thinking about, you know, finance and the tech industry and how these major companies are shaping our response to climate change, but also so many other issues. There's also this metric that has emerged.

Maybe that's the wrong way to put it, you can correct me on the terminology, within the finance industry of ESG, which is, you know, supposed to provide investors with this idea that these are kind of ethical companies that you can invest in that are solving social problems or are good for the planet or what have you. What is that metric or that index or however you would describe it? And I guess, what is the problem with thinking that this is the way that we solve these problems through these specific kind of investments and ranking them in this way? Yeah, ESG is maybe a passion product of mine. Again, maybe dedicate a bit too much time to it in the book. That's fine. So ESG stands for

environmental, social and governance. And it is a framework, I guess, is what I would say for investing that tries to take criteria related to those three issues. So environmental issues, social issues, labor and human rights questions, and then governance, which is governance within the corporation, and try to take those into account in how you allocate your capital as an investor. And it's become hugely popular for you know lots of reasons some of it I think does genuinely kind of reflect this kind of interest in the part of the masses in at least feeling like you are investing sustainably you know we we talk a lot about kind of like woke capitalism these days and I think there are a lot of woke capitalists who have you know a genuine interest in looking like they're profiting

by you know doing well by doing good as the whole thing it's become hugely trendy within the industry there are loads of estimates of how much is actually invested in this way but you know people suggest it's trillions and you know will become an increasingly sort of mainstream element of the financial system as a whole in terms of assets invested this way. But there are all sorts of criticisms, interestingly, from across the political spectrum. So, you know, I make kind of a left critique of it. But again, you know, the woke capital critique comes from kind of like the reactionary right and Fox News and The Economist have been running kind of stories on why ESG is now bad. And I think a lot of those critiques come from the fact that there's maybe

what's called greenwash, which is sort of false advertising. So funds that are marketed as green, but they've got fossil fuel companies in them and those kinds of things. To me, that's not really the fundamental issue with it. Although that's kind of, there are some particularly egregious examples. I remember, you know, my own pension, I'm in the sort of climate aware version, and ExxonMobil for a long time was one of the top three holdings in my climate aware pension. But, but Adrian, they're, you know, investing in renewable energy now. I know. So they do quite well in ESG rankings. And this comes down to some of the critical questions with ESG is that fundamentally, it is an approach that is based on sort of financial risk rather than material risk. And what I mean by that is the question is, you know,

what are social issues or what is the climate crisis or what is poor governance going to mean for my portfolio and the risks of that to my portfolio rather than, you know, what are the risks that my portfolio is creating in a material kind of real world sense. So that sounds like sort of maybe pedantic difference, but it makes a huge difference in terms of what you actually end up investing in. So the example I like to give is Vanguard, which is I mentioned before, the second biggest asset manager, they have this kind of flagship US-based esg fund and it's basically just like a slight tweak of the s&p 500 so the companies you end up with you know the top holdings are you know amazon facebook microsoft apple google all those kinds of things and you know in some senses maybe that's kind of fine but obviously for most people listening you'd understand

that you know one that is doing very, very little to contribute to addressing the climate crisis or any of these issues, because, you know, most people I think would think the climate themed or sustainable fund would be investing in, you know, renewable energy or green tech of the future or whatever. That's the assumption that most people would have. And that's clearly not the case when you're just loading up on big tech and big pharma and financial firms, let alone kind of their role in contributing to massive human rights violations or questions of exploitation in the labor market and all sorts of very nasty stuff that we know many of these firms to be involved in. And again, it's because those

probably under the matrix aren't deemed kind of risky enough to be cancelable in the ESG universe. And the other thing is a lot of this comes down to questions of like disclosure. And so Exxon does well because now it kind of discloses how it thinks about its scope one and two emissions, which is just the emissions associated with like its business operations, not its end use products. Or it talks about how much algae, fucking biofuel it's going to produce. But because it's disclosing that information, that's deemed less financially risky because you're providing investors with a clear kind of sense of your plans. And that comes down again to this idea that markets are efficient and given the best information, they all make the correct and best and optimal decisions. And so firms that disclose a lot tend to do quite well in ESG

frameworks, even though that might not correspond to their actual kind of impact on the real world. And, you know, Tesla, we talked about this a little bit before getting on the podcast today, Tesla is an interesting example in this respect because they were booted off the S&P 500 index I think in May of this year and I think for a lot of people that was a fundamental shock right because Tesla is one of the only kind of companies in a lot of these baskets that people would conventionally think of as at least being kind of engaged in the climate crisis and talking to kind of not your listeners but to the wider public. And, you know, they were dinged for all sorts of questions related to some, you know, accusations

very rightly so, like terrible kind of workplace harassment and or discrimination and those kinds of questions. But also because, you know, they didn't publish a low carbon emissions plan. And that kind of plan would relate to, you know, how they think about emissions from their plants, which again, is like very minimally material to the climate crisis, but was enough to get them kind of taken off the index. And I think that kind of, yeah, speaks to the heart of what ESG does, which is it just considers how to sort of reduce risks to your portfolio rather than to try and actually like bring about a decarbonized future. It's much better thought of just like betting on

it. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think the Tesla example really shows us like, you know, gives us an insight into what ESG actually is and the problems with it, even as much as I would, you know, hate to agree with Elon Musk on a particular point. But, you know, I think it's really interesting because you talked about how during the pandemic, there was this kind of idea that ESG funds were doing much better than conventional funds. And it was kind of presented as, look, see, if you invest ethically, then that means that, you know, you're going to make more money in the long run, ignoring that these ESG funds were kind of overrepresented in tech, which had this real boom during the pandemic that is now

kind of coming down. And so because it's invested in these conventional firms that aren't necessarily like really environmentally conscious or, you know, even oil companies like Exxon, it doesn't really give you a real picture that that is what's going on here. No, it doesn't. And, you know, one of my favorite ESG examples that kind of links to that is that, you know, there was this fantastic study that looked at ESG funds that were based off of the Russell 3000 index. So that's an index of like 3000 mid-sized US corporations. And it found that the biggest difference, you know, by orders of magnitude between the sort of ESG funds and the mainstream funds based on index was that the ESG funds selected for companies with like few or no employees. And that's because, you know, again, by this financial risk metric, if you have no employees, then you have no labor disputes. So

from the kind of logic ESG is completely sort of coherent disputes. So from the kind of logic of ESG is completely sort of coherent, but obviously from the logic of most people would think of and what ESG advertises itself as, which is, you know, contributing to a better kind of social world, obviously that's a complete nonsense. And it's those kinds of factors that like, you know, by this kind of silly chance over the course of the pandemic in a lot of cases helped esg funds outperform right because obviously labor became a huge question and problem for companies during the pandemic so if you've got kind of no employees much less strain there you know oil had this kind of major price crash early on and that was kind of reflected again in their

outperformance because they kind of tended to move fossil fuels away and invest more in tech, as you said, which had a boom. And all of this was kind of quite arbitrary. And again, it just is because it comes down to, you know, what are the financial risks at any given time in the global economy? And in some ways, you know, that's almost fine. I have this thing with financial markets where I'm kind of like go away and play in your casino but what concerns me about ESG in particular is just that it's become that the sense of that kind of doing well by doing good has become really kind of powerfully ingrained common sense in a lot of governments in the global north the UK where I live you know as one example they're really obsessed with like greening the financial system as their post-Brexit kind of policy and I think it's creating a

distraction from you know actual kind of policies. And I think it's creating a distraction from, you know, actual kind of policies that would address this crisis and make people's lives better. And so it's kind of just creating this veneer of action where there really is none. And that, I think, is one of the big concerns for me. Yeah, I definitely echo that concern. And I feel like, you know, you're talking about the financial industry aspect of it. But another thing that comes up in your book is how figures like Bill Gates, in particular, are pushing these really green capitalist solutions that focus around using technology to solve the problem, rather than, you know, having these really structural changes, right? Thinking that all we need is these techno fixes, rather than changing consumption patterns or more structural factors for how we live. And that's how we solve the problem. How do figures like Gates and these kind of technofixes

fit into the larger kind of framework of green capitalism? And how do they benefit the finance industry as well when we're thinking about the kind of transition that they want to see? Yeah, I mean, that's a brilliant question and a complicated one i mean bill gates is an interesting figure because yes his book that came out is quite interesting because it is yeah as you said all about this kind of imagined innovation and kind of tech solutions i think i when i was looking at the book it was like 90 mentions of the word innovation and not one of the word you know inequality which i think tells you everything you need to know about how we think about this problem. And yeah, tech solutions are the kind of ideal way for advocates of a green capitalist approach to sort of achieve that first pillar that I outlined,

which is, you know, find a way to decarbonize, which does as little as possible to disrupt the kind of existing systems and sort of ways of organizing our economies that we currently have and which, you know, suit you quite well. new kind of tech solutions that will move us away from carbon intensive energy sources and ways of producing and consuming, even though there's not really much compelling evidence to support that. And I think, you know, we'll probably come to talk about this, but EVs are, again, a great example of that. There are lots of kind of equivalent innovations that are focused on just replacing the kind of systems that we have now one for one, rather than doing anything to address the inherent and kind of inescapable questions of kind of inequality and injustice that are at the heart of these problems. And, you know, I talk about this in the book,

some people might, you know, roll their eyes and say, it's all very, very nice to talk about, you know, wanting to address inequality, but this is a climate crisis and this is a solution that will be solved through science. But, you know, the evidence continues to pile up to suggest the reverse. You know, there is simply no escaping the question of profoundly unequal and indefensible distributions of wealth and production and consumption and emissions in the global economy. And tech is a great way to avoid kind of having those conversations because it allows us to have this kind of imagined present and future in which we've solved the problem without any of those kind of messier political issues. Yeah, it's the escape from the political question, right? Use your technologies that will solve climate change.

Then we don't need to talk about how, you know, Bill Gates or Elon Musk are still flying in their private jets and living in their big mansions and things like that. But also how just more fundamentally, the kind of way that much of society, especially in North America, but you know, the global North more generally is set up in a way that, you know, is really extractive toward the rest of the world, and depends on them to kind of do the production and things like that, that emit aive toward the rest of the world and depends on them to kind of do the production and things like that, that emit a lot of the emissions that enable the consumption for the global north. And so I wanted to talk a bit more about that because you introduced it in your

answer there. You know, you talk about an imperial mode of living in the book, you know, this way of living that depends on this kind of entrenched global inequality that has existed for a long time and is imagined to continue far into the future in a green capitalist future. And electric cars fit into this very well. And certainly listeners of the show will be very familiar with my critique of electric cars. And certainly Theo Riofrancos has been on as well, you know, to talk about how there's this idea that electric cars are going to solve the problem, that they are a silver bullet, and then you kind of dismiss the mining that happens often in the global south in order to enable this transition.

So what is this imperial mode of living? And how do you see it as being key to, you know, green capitalism, and obviously that being a problem? Yeah, so I should start by saying that the phrase the imperial mode of living is not mine i have borrowed it from the very brilliant german academics or a friend and marcus vissen they have a book called the imperial mode of living which i highly recommend is published by verso and basically what it describes is they specifically avoid using the phrase kind of lifestyles to avoid kind of that individualizing frame and to focus on the kind of way in which societies are organized in the global north and our sort of base livelihoods are organized as you said you know it's reliant on a lot of exploitation

of resources and land and labor in the global south but also in sort of invisible communities within countries in the global north themselves so it's kind of this framework to talk about the ways in which even really kind of mundane middle-class things that we do every day often involve this kind of invisibilized exploitation whether that's of undocumented workers in slaughterhouses in you know texas or in, you know, Alberta, or Canadians, or whether that's exploited kind of miners or land grabs from subsistence farmers in the global south to kind of service the carbon offsets that support the demands for emissions of the global north. And so it's just a really helpful framework for me that kind of allows us to grapple with the question.

We talk about the like north-south divide a lot, and that remains incredibly important, but there is also a really important kind of distribution of inequality and exploitation within Northern and Southern countries themselves. So while most of the world's globally affluent are going to be in the UK and the US and Europe, that's not exclusive.

And it's a reminder that there are also kind of exploited populations domestically as well. And the last thing that it describes, and this speaks to the kind of tech question, is the imperial mode of living. You know, they kind of use frameworks around kind of hegemony and those kind of questions from Gramsci. And it's basically this kind of implicit contract between those at the kind of top of the income spectrum and those who are kind of lower and lower middle class kind of laborers in global north countries which is that you can have these kind of specific kind of comforts or conveniences and these are a lot of things that kind of tech solutions provide or the evs provide as a compromise for again kind of solidifying this

existing kind of set of distributions so we'll make your life more comfortable and convenient in specific ways in order to prevent kind of this reckoning with much more fundamental injustices in distribution that need to happen and to make that contract work you know we'll make sure that there are aspects of the global economy that that remain invisible and for me you know evs are sort of emblematic of that and the kind of invisible labor and environmental kind of damage that goes into of that and the kind of invisible labor and environmental kind of damage that goes into lithium mining and that kind of extractive process, which since you've had Thea on and she's the kind of all-star in that space, I don't need to reiterate. But I think they capture that kind of that question really, really well. I appreciate you outlining that. You know, I think

it's such a key thing for us to recognize, especially as we're in this moment where we recognize that a transition needs to happen, that things need to change about our society. And we have this opportunity to say, which path are we going to take? Are we going to address these really fundamental inequalities? Or are we just going to allow these problems to continue and allow them to be greenwashed and to say, this is how it is, this is how things need to remain? One of the things that come up in the book book time and time again, I guess, is this focus on growth. And, you know, you were talking about how our use of technology allows us to ignore these more fundamental issues and just, I guess, the politics of what is actually going on and just

assume that because there's new technology that things are going to be solved. And I feel like, you know, when it comes to growth, there's this kind of assertion that growth needs to continue and that we need to ignore what actual benefits growth provides or whether it's actually providing benefits and not thinking about the bigger picture of how the economy works and what needs to happen in order to drive that growth and how we measure growth and how that doesn't necessarily result in the kind of changes in the kind of society that we would want to see. So how do you think about this question of growth and why is this important to the larger framework of green capitalism and taking that on? Yeah, so the growth question for

me comes in in the last chapter of the book where I try to grapple with what some people kind of describe as, you know, carbon reductionism. This question of just focusing on carbon emissions when we talk about global climate and ecological crisis. sort of disembodied kind of space that doesn't involve intensely physical components, whether that's, you know, huge internet servers or, you know, crypto mining or any of these kinds of things. There's this huge kind of embodied and very resource intensive elements to tech, even though it's often displayed as this kind of ephemeral thing. The same thing kind of happens in the climate space and in green capitalism, which is this idea of carbon being the be-all and end-all question. And as this kind of abstracted kind of issue where it's just kind of carbon emissions exist on a spreadsheet and we can increase or decrease them without considering

the very kind of embodied reality that goes into decreasing them. And that I think for me is where the growth question enters because there is some evidence and the UK again is the example that's often used here where carbon emissions can be absolutely decoupled from economic growth expressed in terms of GDP to a certain extent but it's nowhere near the kind of pace that we would need to be anywhere close to kind of safe and I'll use that as a quote kind of climate targets but when it comes to the question of resource use and consumption, you know, there just isn't evidence that that can be decoupled from economic growth. And so that is kind of this scientific reality that I think is uncomfortable and that we

need to engage with. And again, as we have tech solutions really come into this, and EVs are one of them, you know, we just don't have the capacity to replace every single car in the global fleet you know one for one with an EV and we don't have the capacity to just offset all the emissions of the global north as they currently stand and in the distributions that they currently have because there simply just isn't enough land to do that, even though, you know, Shell will publish scenarios about, you know, requiring land the size of, you know, the Netherlands to offset their company's emissions. In the kind of physical embodied realm is where we really come apart against the question of sort of indefinite economic growth. And it's

one that I leave a little bit open ended in the book. But I think it's one think it's one that's not talked about enough because of this kind of carbon reductionism. And yeah, I think they're really interesting. Not only is that related to techno solutions, but also kind of has an interesting parallel, I always think, to the way that people think about tech and its sort of lack of footprint, which is obviously not the case. I appreciate you making that connection on, you know, what is a tech podcast? You know, to close up our conversation, I have really enjoyed this, right? And we started by talking about the value of a whale and how the finance industry has pegged that at around $2 million. And in the book, you talk about how at least there's one report

that pegs a human life at around $8 to $11 million. So everything needs to have a price in this kind of future, right? In this green capitalist future, in the continuation of capitalism and its desire to continue expanding into more areas to price new things, to bring it within the system so it can continue growing, right? And so, you know, obviously, as we've discussed, this is not the way that we're going to address the climate crisis, at least in any way that is going to like result in a fight this vision for a green capitalism that ultimately maybe serves the finance industry if they're thinking quite short term and not thinking about the broader effects of climate change rather than the rest of us? Yeah, I think the kind of fundamental problem with the green capitalist approach for me, and again, I'll draw a parallel

here to tech for you. A lot of the kind of impetus for doing it is that it supposedly kind of gets around kind of messiness of politics. And we treat sort of green capitalist solutions like carbon pricing as if they are somehow apolitical. It's often the same in tech. You know, people imagine that tech isn't in and of itself political or that, you know, more tech is inherently good. You know, considering the kind of quality of the solutions. And green capitalism suffers a similar fate, right, which is this idea that any solution, you know, we're all so desperate to not have catastrophic climate change. I think it's really easy to say, you know, any kind of solution or change is better than nothing and to be drawn towards these. The issue for me is that green capitalist solutions, you know, often don't even, you know, pass the basic hurdle of curbing emissions or environmental

degradation that they claim to. But beyond that, they necessarily don't engage with the messiness of politics where they try to evade them. And they also don't kind of contribute to the other questions that I mentioned before, which is a world that is radically less unequal and kind of radically more democratic and just. So I think, you know, that is the approach that we need to be taking, not just because, you know, for many people listening that justice and equality, democracy, these are things that we might consider, you know, good in and of themselves, but because they are pragmatically,

even if you didn't care about them, they are pragmatically kind of necessary to resolving this question of climate and ecological catastrophe. So that would be kind of the framework which I evaluate kind of any solution or proposal to addressing these crises. And a similar framework could easily be deployed to think about technologies and what technologies are serving us and not. Adrienne, it's been fantastic to speak with you, to dig into your book, to learn more about, you know, the finance industry and how it shapes our approach to climate change in a way that doesn't really serve us. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Adrienne Buller is the author of The Value of a Whale on the illusions of green capitalism

and the director of research at Commonwealth. You can follow Adrian on Twitter at ADRI Buller. You can follow me at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. If you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.