Upstream - The Value of a Whale with Adrienne Buller

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Awareness of climate change has never been higher — outright climate denialism seems to be a thing of the past. Business leaders and the corporate media no longer shy away from terms like global warming or climate change like they used to, and policymakers from all sides of the political spectrum are claiming to be climate leaders.  So why, then, do things seem to be getting even worse? Why are the actions of those in power so out of line with what scientists and experts at the IPCC are urgently calling for? Why does COP after COP continue to accomplish close to nothing? Why are we still on track for catastrophic levels of warming? Well, there are a lot of explanations for this, but they can all be distilled into one overarching reason: green capitalism.  In this episode, we explore how the idea of green capitalism has hijacked any real possibility for climate solutions — and why the logic of mainstream economic reasoning has consigned us to a future where the continued habitability of our planet is up for question.  Adrienne Buller is a Senior Research Fellow at Common Wealth and author of The Value of a Whale: On The Illusions of Green Capitalism, published by Manchester University Press. In this Conversation we explore how powerful financial interests shape the contours and curtail the possibilities of our response to climate change, how the flawed logic of dominant economic thinking sets dangerous parameters for policymakers, and why, if we’re hoping to survive climate change and ensure a just, livable future for all, we must move beyond capitalism and embrace ecological, social, and economic principles designed to put people and the planet over profit.  Thank you to Jenny Hval for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. Related Conversations / Further listening: The Green Transition Part 1 & 2 This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

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And so that's, you know, I think a very genuine question, which I use throughout the book, which is, you know, is this something that we should accept, even if we consider it subpar to what we would ideally want. And, you know, the answer that I fundamentally arrive at is no. My answer very clearly is that green capitalism is not just something that will be kind of insufficient, but slowly kind of get us going. It's something that could be actively destructive at worst, you know, at best, a distraction for which we don't have time. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.

I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Awareness of climate change has never been higher. Outright denialism seems to be a thing of the past. Business leaders and the corporate media no longer shy away from terms like global warming or climate change like they used to. And policymakers from all sides of the political spectrum are claiming to be climate leaders. So why then do things seem to be getting even worse? Why are the actions of those in power so out of line with what experts like the IPCC are urgently calling for? Why are we still on track for catastrophic levels of warming? Well, there's a lot of explanations for this, but they can all be distilled into one overarching reason, capitalism. In this episode, we're going to explore how the idea of

green capitalism has hijacked any real possibility for a climate solution, and why the logic of mainstream economic reasoning has consigned us to a future where the continued habitability of our planet is up for question. Adrian Buller is a senior research fellow at Commonwealth and author of The Value of a Whale on the Illusions of Green Capitalism, published by Manchester University Press. In this conversation with her, we explore how powerful financial interests shape the contours and curtail the possibilities of our response to climate change, how the flawed logic of dominant economic thinking sets dangerous parameters for policymakers, and why, if we're hoping to survive climate change and ensure a just and livable future for all, we must move

beyond capitalism and embrace ecological, social, and economic principles designed to put people and the planet over profit. Here's Robert in conversation with Adrian Buller. So welcome to Upstream, Adrienne. It's great to have you on. And I'm wondering to start if you could just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. So I'm Adrienne Buller. Nice to meet you all. I work at a think tank in the UK called Commonwealth. It's got a space in the middle, critically, because it is a think tank kind of focused on building a democratic economy and looking at our kind of shared wealth and assets that we all produce and how we could kind of share those better, rather than, you know, the Commonwealth associated with the kind of

imperial enterprise. So if you're trying to find us definitely put a space in the middle think think after it but yeah so we do work on designing kind of new models of ownership kind of financial forms for a more kind of sustainable and democratic economy and i guess we're here today to talk about my most recent book which is called the value of a whale on the illusions of green capitalism and that is basically exactly what it kind of sounds like it's a book most recent book, which is called The Value of a Whale on the Illusions of Green Capitalism. And that is basically exactly what it kind of sounds like. It's a book exploring what I think green capitalism is as kind of an emerging framework with which we have to contend and how to understand it and how we might kind of move beyond it.

Awesome. Thanks for that. And yeah, I guess you just mentioned the title of your latest book. Thanks for that. And yeah, I guess you just mentioned the title of your latest book. I'm wondering if we can sort of unpack that a little bit and focus a little bit on this idea of value, because the question of value is very much a central thread that weaves its way throughout your book. And just thinking about that question, like what is the value of the whale, infused me with the sort of queasy reminder of how we ascribe value in capitalism. And it brought up a lot of discussions that both Della and I have had on this podcast about the hegemony of economic thinking particularly. And so, yeah, I'm wondering if you could just tell us about this idea of the value of a whale and why it's an important question to

ask. Yeah, absolutely. So the book kind of came out of reading a study that was published, I guess, a few years ago now by a couple of researchers at the IMF, so the International Monetary Fund. And they basically tried to make the case for why we should try to conserve global whale populations based on kind of an economic justification in their mind. So they arrived at the single value for a whale of around 2 million US dollars at the time with inflation. Who knows what that is now? And that was basically based on their contributions to ecotourism, so whale watching tours, and the role that they play critically in sort of carbon sequestration so they're actually incredibly good at sort of sequestering carbon over their lifetimes

so based on that they decided you know two million dollars and interestingly this past week that's come back around because Kristalina Georgieva who's the managing director of the IMF she's been giving talks this week and she mentioned it again. Someone asked her whether the IMF thinks about biodiversity and she very proudly proclaimed that, yes, I have some very smart economists who are able to tell us the value of a whale and the value of an elephant. And so that's, you know, the work that the IMF is doing on biodiversity. And it just seemed to me such a kind of naked embodiment of the way that capitalism conceives of sort of value particularly with respect to the natural world and to sort of our rapidly deteriorating climate and so yeah I kind of started from that position to basically prompt us to have a fundamental rethink about not only

the critical difference between value and sort of the price signal and sort of price mechanism, but also basically to very much call into question, as you said there, the complete dominance of very narrow economic thinking over policymaking and over the way that we understand how to grapple with advancing kind of climate and ecological crisis. Yeah, and we'll definitely get into that a little bit more. I want to explore that for sure. I want to read just a brief quote from your book that sort of encapsulates this idea that you were just explaining a little bit. You write, rather than appraise our economy from the perspective of supporting life, recognizing the ways in which our economic institutions and systems currently drive social and ecological crisis. Instead, we appraise life and any action taken to protect it

in economic terms. The primacy of market mechanisms, property rights, and financial imperatives have changed the boundaries within which ecological crisis is debated and understood. within which ecological crisis is debated and understood. And I really appreciated that quote. And so I just, I'm probably going to throw a bunch of your own quotes at you throughout this. But yeah, I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about William Nordhaus and his dynamic integrated climate economy model, which just saying those words makes me feel a little seasick, honestly. If you could maybe just, yeah, let us know who he is, what that is, what his dynamic integrated

climate economy model is. Yeah, so if the book has some kind of main characters or villains, maybe it's William Nordhaus and someone else that I'm sure we'll get to, Larry Fink, Nordhaus and someone else that I'm sure we'll get to, Larry Fink, my two great loves. So William Nordhaus is probably the most famous climate economist. He won the kind of Nobel adjacent economics prize a few years back for his work related to DICE, so the dynamic integrated climate economic economy model, rather. God, I can never get the acronyms right um and basically what the dice model sets out to do is to understand how a changing climate will impact the economy specifically understood broadly through its impact on sort of gdp and gdp growth and so it's one of kind of three iams acronyms are everywhere in climate. So those are integrated assessment models, which are exactly what they sound like, basically

collating loads of studies and available knowledge to try and arrive at estimates of how incremental changes in global surface temperatures, for example, might impact the economy. And through that prism, we should supposedly be able to understand kind of how we should be responding to the climate crisis, how quickly and at what kind of scale and ambition and so in the kind of acceptance speech for his quasi-nobel nordhaus describes how his dice model prescribes an optimal and i use that in scare quotes degree of sort of global temperature change within the realm of like three and a half to four degrees celsius And that supposedly, according to this model, is economically ideal. It perfectly balances, you know, benefits to the economy with costs of sort of acting on climate change.

And that tidy little figure, therefore, kind of prescribes how we should be responding to climate change. And that does, you know, inform policy, these kind of models do inform, you know, the IPCC, right, which is just a huge amalgamation of best available knowledge. So the economics section really does engage with these and respond to these ideas. So they're not just kind of at the fringes. And obviously, from a sort of scientific perspective, three and a half to four degrees Celsius warmed world is, you know, completely catastrophic, even kind of mainstream publications, like The Economist have talked about how three degrees is completely catastrophic. And, you know, Kevin Anderson, who is sort of a favorite climate scientist of mine, I think has the best way of putting it, which is the three degrees is probably incompatible with an organized

global society, which is probably true. And I think for me that's why I dice I start out the book with it it's such a kind of excellent encapsulation of the outrageous way that economics understands the sort of nature of climate change and ecological crisis and why it's incredibly dangerous that we kind of rely on these models. And, you know, there's lots of assumptions that go into them that I unpack in the book. But I think the thing about it that's so dangerous, and that is so kind of archetypal of how economics is used in policymaking more broadly, is that there's this kind of idea that these are inherently kind of objective models, that this is a truly objective science, and that, you know, there's absolutely no subjective input here. And that means that these should be kind of heralded as untouchable models and claims

and that we just need to take them for what they are and inform policy with them. But there are loads of very contestable, to say the least, assumptions that kind of play into all sorts of economic models, whether that's, you know, Nordhaus in his really early work, assuming that because the vast majority of the American economy takes place inside, it'll be unaffected by climate change, because, you know, we've got air conditioning, an actual thing that happens, or whether it's the use of the discount rate, which is basically how economists try and understand, you know, how worthwhile is someone's well-being 100 years from now versus today. And these kinds of discretionary choices can end up having, you know, huge impacts on the way that we approach this problem in a way that is often, you know, in my opinion, completely detached from the very kind of tragic and brutal

and urgent realities of what we're facing. Yeah, absolutely. I want to explore a little bit too, like this subtitle of your book, which I think most of our listeners are fairly familiar at this point with the idea of green capitalism. We just wrapped up a two-part audio documentary examining and critiquing green capitalism pretty deeply. But yeah, so the subtitle of your book is on theiquing green capitalism pretty deeply. But yeah, so the subtitle of your book is On the Illusions of Green Capitalism. And I was particularly drawn to your book because the failures and dangers of green capitalism have been on my mind lately. And I'm wondering if you could just sketch a picture of green capitalism for us and how it represents, as you put it in the book, the sort of the collapse of possibility. Kate Aronoff's book, Overheated, a few others around this very palpable shift from sort of mainstream policymakers, kind of across the political spectrum, but also from, you know,

the corporate and financial sectors, all these kind of traditional sites of power who hitherto have kind of often taken the path of broadly, you know, denying or downplaying the existence of, you know, now made climate crisis, or kind of obstructing policy very directly that would that would act on it. And this kind of shift towards setting that aside, recognizing that as an increasingly kind of untenable position to hold, and a kind of unfruitful position for them, you know, you have even like ExxonMobil being like, ah, we have algae fuels, you know, like, even they are kind of posturing around pretending to be engaged in this issue. And I thought that was a really interesting shift. And instead, we're now looking at, you know,

corporate power or policymakers on the right of the political spectrum, for example, instead engaging with climate crisis in a way that would allow them to control this narrative and control the way that we respond to these crises and kind of shape the contours of the sort of future economy that we need to build in response. And so I tried to identify, I guess, some kind of basic pillars of what I was seeing emerge. And so I broadly kind of defined green capitalism as an effort to basically respond to the climate and ecological crisis in a way that does, you know, everything within our power to minimize disruption to the way that we currently organize our economies and societies, right? Because for those currently in positions of power, you know, sites of capital,

etc., it's working pretty well. And so green capitalism is a way to kind of confront this unprecedented threat in a way that minimizes any chance of kind of overhauling major institutions, engaging in kind of major programs of redistribution of wealth and power and kind of changing who's in the driving seat. So that's kind of pillar one. And the second is, you know, confronted with what could be an unprecedented kind of threat to profitability or to financial returns and stability. an unprecedented kind of threat to profitability or to you know financial returns and stability how can we create and ensure new domains for profit making and private investors in the future so the kind of example that i love and i'm sure we'll come back to this is you know rather than responding to this in a way that says what if we did free at the point of use like mass transit for everybody that was decarbonized and got everyone around without relying on private cars. You know, the green capitalist response would say, hang on, that sounds pretty unprofitable for me as a private company or institution or investor.

How can we, you know, respond to that in a different way? E.g. everyone gets an EV and we just continue to have cities and societies, you know, organized around private car ownership. and we just continue to have cities and societies, you know, organized around private car ownership. That's just kind of one example of how I think that that change in kind of mindset plays out. And so that's kind of how I think about it. But the collapse of possibility question, I think, is even bigger than that. It's kind of above that, which is some of the questions that we've opened this up with, which is understanding the entirety of the world around us and completely viewing these crises through the prism of sort of economics and a very kind of narrow set of economic thought, and needing to justify every policy decision that we make every action we might take through cost benefit analyses and through the lens of a very narrow economic

viewpoint. And that I think really informs green capitalism. And again, a lot of the kind of policies that we're seeing emerge, whether that's, you know, the European Union's Green Deal, or green Conservative Party policies in the UK, or indeed, many policies kind of present in the US. Yeah. And I mean, we spoke to folks in our documentary thinking of Max Eil, who talks about how even AOC and Markey's Green New Deal have so many elements of like growth ism and just a lot of green capitalism within it as well, despite the fact that they're actually very robust, like sort of New Deal esque programs. But I want to quote again

from your book here, you write green capitalist solutions seek to transfer the complex, ethically and socially fraught and inherently political questions presented by ecological crisis from democratically contestable terrain to the private authority of markets with outcomes ultimately driven by the self-interest of rational actors motivated by profit. And so, yeah, I'm wondering what does green capitalism look like more specifically in climate policy? Like you mentioned a couple of policies in your last response. I'm wondering, like, would you call the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, a form of green capitalism? And yeah, just maybe if you could give us a little bit of an overview of the policy

landscape when it comes to this idea of green capitalism. Yeah, I'll start with the European Green Deal, because I think it is, yeah, a very, very outstanding distillation of the kind of green capitalist ideas I talk about. So the Green Deal is touted as this sort of flagship massive kind of program of investment in decarbonization and it was sort of championed by a lot of people as this like huge public undertaking in decarbonization. But in practice a lot of the kind of figures that are touted around and I won't try and cite them because I have a terrible brain for numbers but are touted around and I won't try and cite them because I have a terrible brain for numbers but I think it was like I won't even try but basically you

know a huge amount of what was promised as investment was actually about kind of crowding in the private sector and sort of mobilizing and I'm using that in quotes private finance through using public instruments like investment but but also, you know, loan guarantees and other kinds of mechanisms that basically try to do what's called de-risking. And the academic Daniela Gabor does incredible kind of work on this. She calls it the kind of Wall Street consensus, which is basically a policy approach that says, you know, we need to keep these kind of investments off of our balance sheets because of kind of austerity mindsets and the way that that's dominated politics. And so instead of

having public led investment, a buildup of public and democratically accountable kind of capacity, let's just find ways to mobilize the private sector to invest in these things and guarantee their profitability by kind of socializing their risks and their losses and kind of undergirding their profits. And the Green Deal is very much oriented around that. And I think there are elements of that that are sort of present in American climate politics as well. And again, you captured there, de-risking is fundamentally about sort of moving the inherently kind of messy politics around, you know, how we should be responding to this crisis, whose interests need to be listened to, who is kind of most vulnerable,

and moves them toward a much more kind of technocratic perception of this issue and saying, you know, the right thing to do is just leave it to the wisdom of markets who will find the most kind of cost effective and innovative ways to respond to this. And we should not have kind of an end goal in mind, but rather just say, you know, we'll, we'll give them incentives and kind of prompt them to do their thing in the marketplace. And American politics is definitely not immune to this. And I think, you know, in the Inflation Reduction Act, but also in the kind of earlier infrastructure bill, there are a lot of mechanisms such as, yeah, loan guarantees, but also kind of infrastructure bill, there are a lot of mechanisms such as

loan guarantees, but also kind of asset recycling, which is a kind of complex mechanism, again, to basically sort of enable public assets to enter kind of private investors' hands. All of these are ways of crowding in private investment through kind of de-risking mechanisms in order to deliver climate investment. And so that's very much at the heart of the IRA. What I will say, though, is that I found the Inflation Reduction Act very, very interesting as a moment in American climate politics, because it was a fundamental break with one of the policy approaches that I take a lot of aim at, I guess, in the book, which is carbon pricing. And so for a long time, American climate politics

was completely dominated by the kind of ghost of the Waxman-Markey bill, and the kind of failed attempts to get kind of carbon trading policies in the US and carbon pricing and sort of cap and trade or carbon taxes, whichever approach you take to basically both of those put a price on carbon. That's the kind of wet dream, if I can use that phrase, of mainstream economists everywhere in terms of climate policy. And for many reasons, which maybe we don't have time to unpack here, but which are definitely unpacked at length in the book, you know, I think it's a kind of dead in the water approach. And for me, the IRA was very encouragingly a total break with that very dominant mindset around carbon pricing

as the ideal kind of market-based mechanism to respond to the climate crisis and towards a kind of nascent industrial strategy and kind of public investment-based approach. And there were other kind of small silver linings in it, like enabling public and community-based projects to access some of the bill's financing and the kind of tax breaks which weren't previously available to them so that's encouraging but ultimately yeah I think I would agree with with Max Al's interpretation of the Green New Deal itself right which is that there's nothing about the IRA nor was there really anything about the Green New Deal that would be problematic to to the private sector and to capital, right? It's just ways of finding and guaranteeing new domains of investment

and sort of new kind of avenues for financial returns through decarbonization. And it doesn't engage necessarily with very urgent questions around redistribution, around growth, around inequality, and around, frankly, you know, what kind of things do we actually want and need in our societies? And what are we kind of doing right now that is superfluous or harmful, and kind of engaging with questions around a more democratic way to kind of allocate our resources and organize our societies. So some encouraging moments, but broadly, I think the kind of green capitalist approaches is still alive and well in it. And not to mention that it does nothing to shift global North global South relations and

imperialistic and colonial relationships, which I'm going to ask you about in a little bit. Maybe we could get into that a little bit more. But I do want to switch a little bit now to focusing on like you spend quite a bit of time on what you consider to be one of the primary entities shaping the green capitalist project, which is the asset management industry. And so I'm wondering if you can explain what this industry is and how it shapes the contours of green capitalism. Yeah, so asset management, the industry might be a bit of a pet project of mine. And this is where our villain number two, Larry Fink, comes in.

He's the CEO of BlackRock, which is the biggest asset management firm in the world. So asset management kind of does what it says on the tin. It is an industry that manages assets on behalf of those who have them. So whether you are a pension fund or a sort of individual with some savings, university endowment, any of these things, broadly, you know, you entrust the investment of those assets to someone you perceive as an expert who will kind of optimize your risk return profiles for you and do all that work for you and that's exactly what the asset management industry does is they'll take the assets of

others they don't really hold that many themselves overwhelmingly they're investing on behalf of other parties and they decide where to put those assets they decide how to invest them and they also use the kind of benefits that come with owning those assets. So for example, even though it's maybe a pension fund's money that is being invested, it's the asset manager who's going to buy shares in a company. And that gives the asset manager the entitlement to kind of vote using those shares at a corporation's AGM, their annual general meeting, where lots of decisions are made, for example, about future business plans or climate targets or whether or not to reappoint your board of directors. And so asset managers get equipped with kind of those those rights and privileges through being the ones who buy up stocks or bonds

or other kind of assets, even though they're investing on behalf of other people using other people's money. And so that's kind of what they do. That maybe sounds a bit kind of irrelevant to climate politics, but my kind of focus for the past few years has been on the kind of explosive growth of this industry in absolute terms. So it's now kind of upwards of a hundred trillion dollar industry worldwide in terms of the scale of assets that are under management. But more importantly, there's been this kind of phenomenal trajectory of concentration within the industry itself. So the three biggest asset management firms, that's BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, all of whom are based in the United States, out of Wall Street, they now control close to 20 trillion in assets. And, you know, again,

that's a full kind of fifth of global assets under management black rock itself i mean it did hit 10 trillion at one point financial market prices have kind of deflated a bit so it's a bit lower now but it'll get back there it's still number one in the world and you know 10 trillion is bigger than the combined gdp of like germany and japan so i should give you an idea of just how vast the sort of scale of the asset pool that this company is investing is. And they basically have started buying up every kind of asset in every kind of industry and every part of the world, making them what's called a universal investor. And there are lots of firms that now kind of are big enough to take that approach. And BlackRock will often hold between, you know, five and fifteen percent of a given company in

the S&P 500 which is the kind of list of the 500 biggest U.S. corporations for example so that's everything from Facebook to Exxon to Amazon, Pfizer, all the good stuff and that gives them often in combination with Vanguard and State Street and a couple of others borderline kind of veto power over what these corporations do, which I guess is quite interesting from the perspective of, you know, decisions that oil companies make, for example, around their investment plans, around who is on their kind of board of directors, all sorts of things. But at a much more macro level, there are two things I think that are really important to sort of pay attention to with asset management. One of which is that, you know, they

have a huge influence now over kind of global flows of finance. And that includes not just kind of buying up equities, but also through the bond markets, which is kind of a form of debt, you know, direct financing for companies. So coal companies now, for example, are accessing way more finance through the bond markets than they are through conventional bank loans. And broadly, that's because, you know, banks have much more stringent regulations on them. There've been this kind of toxification of bank lending of sort of the dirtiest kind of coal companies, but the bond markets kind of fly under the radar. They're much less regulated as a form of debt financing. And so a huge amount of

financing activity is shifting into those spaces, which are dominated not by the banks, who we often they're much less regulated as a form of debt financing. And so a huge amount of financing activity is shifting into those spaces, which are dominated not by the banks, who we often think of as traditional villains, but by asset management firms and investors. And I think that's an important shift. Asset managers are also now increasingly present in the ownership of the sort of sovereign debt of countries rather all over the world particularly in the global south or what people call you know emerging markets and that can often have you know make or break consequences for those countries abilities to access capital and on which terms or finance I should say and on which terms and that you know has really devastating often impacts for those

countries and for you know know, the citizens within them. And so again, from the perspective of climate policy, I think that's really important. The last thing is just that, you know, BlackRock in particular is really good at this. But there are other firms kind of following suit is that they're so big now, they're so unimaginably vast, that inevitably, they've come to have quite a significant role in shaping climate policy and policy more broadly, but particularly climate policy. And BlackRock is very, very interested in how climate policy is designed and how it's played out. They're very interested in ensuring that climate policy creates new investable opportunities for them. And so, you know, the fingerprints of

that kind of asset management mindset are very obvious in the kind of Wall Street consensus that I described before. So designing climate policy so that we're kind of de-risking new opportunities for investors. And yeah, I mean, that's not just kind of a speculative idea. You know, the Biden administration, for example, has several very prominent BlackRock alumni within it. Brian Deese is on the National Economic Council and, you know, was former head of sustainability at BlackRock. And before that, he worked for Obama. And so there's this kind of revolving door of senior BlackRock politicians and the Biden administration. There's also imprints in the EU. So BlackRock was tasked

with helping to design their sustainable finance agenda. And there's, yeah, there's kind of all sorts of examples where BlackRock is kind of directly influencing policy. I mean, even in response to COVID, when the Federal Reserve undertook a massive kind of bond buying program to kind of stabilize financial markets, they didn't do that themselves. They gave the task to BlackRock, who ended up buying up loads of their own kind of funds in the process, funnily enough. And so yeah, they're becoming kind of increasingly imbricated with direct kind of governance and policymaking. And they have a very acute interest in how climate politics kind of advances that I think is worth paying attention to. You're listening to an upstream

conversation with Adrian Buller, author of The Value of a Whale on the Illusions of Green Capitalism. We'll be right back. I like a silver fox, then light as feathers from a phoenix wing That falls to the ground that I run on with quick force Snowy It's snowing, you want my back as I turn to leave this town behind There are fox fur and feathers all over the suburbs And a fabric of voices on my mind The vows are curved along your back And consonants were glazed along the wet line of the white line

I took off and my mouth and run into the sky, into the sky. That was A Silver Fox by Jenny Ball. Now back to our conversation with Adrienne Buller, author of The Value of a Whale, on the illusions of green capitalism. You write in your book, quote, the urgent need to transition to a carbon-free, ecologically sustainable economy has been recognized and seized upon as a potentially vast new frontier of profit and, on the other side of the coin, an enormous resource of financial risk. Nowhere is this about-face more visible than in the financial sector, whose role in determining which initiatives and industries receive the financing they require

to operate and expand gives them truly world-shaping power. Perceiving both the specific threats posed by ecological crisis and the opportunity to reorient our response to this threat toward new domains of profit-making, the finance industry, and in particular asset management, have dedicated enormous amounts of energy towards the prospects for and design of sustainable financing. towards the prospects for and design of sustainable financing. And so, yeah, that is a quote from your book. And I'm bringing it up because I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about your past work in the sustainable financing space, what it is, and how you became sort of disillusioned with that world and the influence that it has over policymaking regarding the topics we've been discussing. Yeah, absolutely. So much like asset management in general, sustainable finance, or what's called

ESG, which is shorthand for environmental social governance investing, a bit of a pet product of mine, but I think very, very important to the way that policymakers are thinking about how we respond to these crises. I used to work for an organization that was kind of a sort of a not-for-profit watchdog called Influence Map and broadly what they do is track sort of corporate lobbying over climate change and climate policy. Their work is really great and important. Go check it out. But I ran for a little bit their finance project which basically tried to engage with the financial sector on how they understand and are sort of responding to accelerating climate crisis and as part of that

I kind of did this analysis where I would look at you know how closely aligned were investors kind of portfolios with different kind of climate scenarios and trajectories and try to ask them how they were thinking about optimizing their portfolios to adjust to that risk and how they were going to engage with companies to change their behavior and blah, blah, blah. And I became very quickly kind of disillusioned with the sort of prospects of that approach for really doing anything materially to drive any kind of change in the real world, if I can use that phrase, when it came to carbon emissions or sustainability. And broadly, that comes down to the kind of core logic of the sort of booming sustainable finance industry. So I'll zoom out

a little bit just to talk about the scale of it. So ESG, you know, it's estimated now that we're getting close to, you know, a third of all assets invested according to some kind of ESG criteria, the pandemic, you know, ESG had its greatest every year, it was booming, you know, people really were suddenly thinking, oh, wow, you know, we can do well by doing good. And, you know, ESG assets were outperforming their mainstream kind of counterparts. and everyone was kind of feeling really good about the prospects for closing the financing gap to use the terms of you know the UN and those kind of bodies which is this idea that all we need to do again is to kind of find ways to prompt and incentivize and prod private finance and private investors to kind of

deliver the financing that we need to hit net zero by 2050 or whatever kind of target mainstream policymakers are thinking of that day. And there's kind of been a lot of triumphalism around how much this is a booming industry and how basically, you know, we're going to get there and just look at how much money is now being like funneled into sustainable forms of investing. Problem is that, you know, very little of it actually does anything whatsoever. And that's not really so much a case of kind of just rampant greenwashing, although greenwash kind of is a problem. And there are some particularly kind of just a feature rather than a bug of the sustainable finance logic, which broadly goes according to this idea that the main concern is that we should be

minimizing the risks to your portfolio or to financial firms of a deteriorating climate or biosphere, rather than thinking about how your portfolio or your sort of lending activity is contributing to the creation of those risks so in other words kind of ask not what you can do for the climate but what climate change will do to you and that is the absolute kind of core approach and there's this kind of idea that somehow minimizing your portfolio's exposure to climate risks is the same as actually investing in sustainable alternatives, which is very much not the case, you know, that may not be the case at all, it very much often isn't. And I'll, you know, give one of my favorite examples of that is there was this really excellent study that I cite in the book, it looked at the difference between,

I think, a couple 1000 funds that were invested according to the Russell, one of the Russell indices, which is basically a list of, you know, 2000 midsize corporations. And it looked at the sustainable version of the funds or the ESG version versus the kind of mainstream version of funds that are tracking that index. And I found that the single biggest difference between the two batches was that the ESG funds selected for companies that had few or no employees and the reason that makes sense from the perspective of those funds is that you know if you don't have any employees then you've reduced your portfolio's exposure to social risks because you can't have labor disputes or human rights abuses. Obviously that has very little to do with

like actually improving workers rights and employment conditions in those companies. But from the finance perspective, it makes total sense. And that's directly applicable to climate. So some of the biggest kind of ESG and sustainable funds available, you know, they don't invest in the things we might expect, like renewable energy firms, or all sorts of things that you might anticipate would be necessary to deliver a decarbonized economy. Instead, they tend to just take, you know, a mainstream batch of companies, maybe take out some of the fossil fuel companies, and they end up just massively invested in like big tech and pharma and other financial firms. And again, that's kind of standard practice in the industry. And I think for me, that raises this very significant concern about the extent to which a lot of policymakers and a lot of institutions, including the kind of UNFCCC process around climate negotiations, are really kind of championing the sort of interest in sustainable finance as something that's actually delivering change and that that risks creating kind of huge complacency I think around what's actually happening and and how far

we've come or more accurately kind of not come and it's interesting too because um you have critiques sort of from the left on sort of the ESG investing, ESG movement. I just saw just last week, I don't know if you follow Emily Atkins. She has a newsletter called Heated and there's apparently a huge backlash against the ESG movement or what they call woke investing. And it's like an anti-woke.

Yeah, woke capital. Yeah. Woke capital. Elon Musk and like Peter Thiel and a bunch of other ghouls are sort of part of this Woke capital. Yeah. which are obviously very important to think about. But there's also just, you know, the right and people like Elon Musk and other people who are just continuing to put any kinds of things that could potentially have, you know, positives in terms of finance, like just really railing against them on principle in general. So I just thought I'd bring that up too, because I just remember seeing that newsletter from Emily Atkins in my inbox, and I thought it was an interesting parallel. Yeah, it's been interesting to watch, particularly because, yeah, I think, you know, people on the left, or at least kind of those who are like campaigning to end kind of banks, fossil fuel financing, etc. I don't think they really ever saw, and I would include myself in this camp, ever kind of saw that

that coming because it just seemed like oh this is the market doing its thing and if you are sort of someone who champions like market-based approaches to things if you're on the kind of economic or political right then this would be something that you'd welcome obviously you know there's a total lack of kind of ideological coherence on the right a lot of the time and so maybe it makes total sense that now that you know the market is doing something that they don't like they'll uh respond to it critically i think the risk is that you know as you said it's becoming quite a prominent strand of critique i think like tucker carlson did a whole segment i think on woke capital and they're responding to

it right so blackrock has been rolling back a bit. It's angling to be this global climate leader and talking about, you know, we're not just here to, you know, espouse political principles. Ultimately, what we're doing is just like doing what we think is the best from an investment perspective. And I think that is one of the kind of inherent limitations of what I think is very, very valuable campaigning, which has been done from climate activists to kind of target specific investors or specific banks and to try and demand that they change their behavior. I think, ultimately, if we're focusing on individual firms, or on, you know, rooting out greenwashing, etc, it kind of opens us up to this critique from the right, which is that this shouldn't exist at all. I think the key needs to be a critique around, you know, the fact that we are allowing, you know, private investors to

be the like bulwark of climate action, right? It shouldn't be the investment industry that is kind of make or break for whether or not we're sort of seen to be progressing on these issues. Instead, we should be kind of questioning their role in kind of determining this agenda altogether. I want to go back now to something that we sort of planted the seed around. So we've been talking a lot about institutions and processes in the imperial cores, the global north. But I'd like to bring back the lens a little bit and talk about the global implications of all of this. We talked a bit in our Green Transition audio documentary about the stranglehold that foreign debt has, and you brought that up as well earlier. Just as an example,

you know, a lot of countries in the periphery, it makes it close to impossible for them to actually implement popular policies around climate and social services. So I'm just wondering if you can talk a bit broadly about how addressing global inequalities in wealth and power is crucial to appropriately addressing climate change. kind of sustainable finance and de-risking policies and all these clever designs is that you know there's this very large elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about which is that you know fundamentally climate and ecological crisis are you know rooted in profound inequalities and indefensible inequalities not only within countries but definitely between them and that is both with respect to kind of present inequalities but also kind of historical legacies of sort of violence and extraction and imperialism and colonialism that have created those inequalities by design and that's something that people are very reticent

to talk about particularly within green capitalist spaces because it does confront the fact that you know we need to have broadly mass redistribution of sort of wealth and consumption and power and waste, frankly, at a global scale. And it also opens up this question, which you've alluded to there around monetary sovereignty as a question. So that's broadly in very simplistic terms, like the ability for sovereign governments to exercise monetary and fiscal power. So, you know, are they actually able to sort of pay for the policies they want, or will the kind of global bond markets hold them hostage and say, you know, we don't want you to do that? Or will the IMF broadly hold them hostage, as has often been the case, and say, you know, you can't exercise sovereign authority over the way you want to run your society and your economy.

But instead, you know, if you do something we dislike or if we suddenly consider you too risky, you know, we'll just pull all of our investment out and you will be left absolutely devastated by the fallout of that. And that is, you know, a global system of finance that is incredibly predatory and harmful and also sort of directly counter to our ability to respond to these crises, not least because it creates these kind of pro cyclical outcomes, if I can use that term, where, you know, COVID is a really good example at the start of the pandemic at a time when governments in the global south, for example, like desperately needed finance and sort of fiscal space to be able to enact policies to sort of protect the health of their people instead you know a ton of private investors who had flooded into these economies since 2008 for various reasons it's not necessary to unpack here but

there's a ton of kind of private capital that had flooded to lower income economies investors got spooked and kind of pulled all of it out and pulled out loads of investment and really sent currencies spiraling downwards and sent the cost of borrowing for these governments spiraling upwards. And all of that is directly kind of devastating, obviously, for the people living in those countries and also has direct parallels to the kinds of acute shocks, whether that's extreme weather events or drought or other kind of impacts of the climate crisis that we're going to see increasingly over the coming years. You know, the fact is that climate crisis is making investing in those economies from the kind of crude financial perspective more risky in a way that is going to raise the costs of borrowing and, you know, make the terms of borrowing much more stricter for those countries at a time when the exact opposite is needed. And so we have this kind of global financial system set up, tailored to the interests of private investors, that is sort of acting in a way that

directly compromises not only sovereignty in the abstract sense, but crucially, you know, the ability of these economies to these countries to respond to and adapt to accelerating kind of climate and ecological crisis. And another thing I wanted to ask you about too is like sort of what your thoughts are on growth, like economic growth. And I think our listeners are probably sick and tired of us talking about this so much because we've been really exploring this question of growth. But I think it's interesting because just in our documentary, there are folks that we've had on as guests who are both growth agnostic, to quote Kate Reitworth, I believe she's sort of used that term, or

anti-growth or totally fine with growth and thinking that if working people decide that we want to continue on a path of continuing to grow the economy, then that's what we should do. So I'm wondering, yeah, I mean, you open your final chapter of your book with a really like incredible quote from Elon Musk, which we actually used in our documentary after reading your book and seeing it. And I had just like, I texted Della, like when I was reviewing your book And I had just like, I texted Della like when I was reviewing your book and I was just like, ah, damn it.

Like, I wish I'd read this earlier so we could have had Adrienne on for the green transition episode. But yeah, I mean, we spent a lot of time exploring growth and particularly like exploring lithium and copper extraction and this idea of painting capitalism green. And I'd like to hear your thoughts as well.

Like, can you talk broadly about your thoughts on degrowth and this idea of decoupled growth? And yeah, just any thoughts you have around that that you'd like to share? Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, as you said, very much an open debate, including, you know, among the thinkers on the left. I think the approach that I take in the book very purposefully is that, you know among the thinkers on the left um i think the approach that i take in the book very purposefully is that you know i'm definitely not an expert in sort of principles of degrowth or the kind of how they would degrowth scholars would you know articulate visions of the future i kind of start from as i do throughout this book the mindset of a green capitalist so kind of the whole point of this book was to try and sort of like crawl inside the mind of great capitalists understand how they see the world and kind of try to unpick on their own terms

why their kind of solutions and what they're pursuing are sort of incompatible with uh sort of just sustainable desirable future and growth is definitely something that can't be left out of that questioning right so whether it's the europe Green Deal, or I don't know if anyone's paying attention to what's happening in the UK, but the sort of catastrophic current Liz Truss government, you know, all of these kinds of parties are just obsessed with growth. And, you know, the European Union is obsessed with green growth. They can't get enough about talking about it. You know, Biden's been really keen on it. And Liz Truss is just obsessed with growth for a reason that she can't really justify or name. She just loves to say it. Just a quick update. Since we recorded this interview,

Liz Truss resigned as the UK's prime minister after tanking the economy and holding office for just 44 days, the shortest tenure as prime minister in UK history. Rishi Sunak, former chancellor of the Exchequer and multimillionaire worth £730 million, is Britain's current prime minister. And I think that is kind of this received wisdom in a lot of mainstream policy circles that growth is somehow neutral and or good and sort of necessary. and it's often cast

as something that is required to sort of lift people out of poverty to kind of elevate the living standards of the working class etc the whole kind of like grow the pie narrative and I think you know what I try to do in the book is just engage with purely from a sort of ecological and emissions-based perspective, whether or not continuing rates of growth that these kind of people deem desirable or sort of necessary for economic stability under capitalism, you know, whether or not that is even possible. And, you know, all I could do was review, you know, the best available evidence. So I looked at, you know, quite a few studies and meta-analyses trying to evaluate whether you can sort of decouple carbon emissions from economic growth or whether you can decouple resource kind of throughput,

so that's use and then waste from economic growth. And broadly, you know, there's just a sort of paucity of evidence to support that at the kind of scale and pace necessary, that's viable, right? So there are some examples of sort of what's called absolute decoupling of carbon emissions from growth. The UK is an example of that, where economic growth can continue and emissions either kind of don't continue to grow, so they kind of flatline or even, you know, fall. Unfortunately, applied at a global level, and particularly when considering the pace of GDP growth versus the pace of kind of decoupling, it's just nowhere near fast and robust enough for us to kind of stay within sort of safe, and I'll use that in scare quotes, kind of climate targets. And for things like resource use,

whether that's kind of extraction or waste that we produce or kind of deforestation, etc. You know, there's just no robust evidence that you can decouple those phenomena at all from growth. And so I kind of leave that as just like a provocation because I'm trying to engage with the imagined mindset of a green capitalist. And, you know, to just propose that, you know, there is no evidence yet that this is possible. And so fundamentally, this seems like something we should be engaging with. And then, you know, second, I just raise what a lot of kind of degrowth scholars, but even sort of growth agnostic people like Kate Raworth would suggest, which is just a question, you know, not just the viability of growth, but also its desirability, right? So what is it actually delivering for us? GDP growth tells us very little about how people are faring, how the environment is faring, how the climate is faring.

And so basically, this like cleavage to the idea that it cannot be sort of touched as we look at sort of decarbonizing and building this future economy, I think is something that we should fundamentally question. And I would probably put myself in the camp, which I would say, based on my reading, like broadly aligns, I guess, with a degrowth perspective, which is just that I think that there are lots of parts of the economy, both at a domestic and a global level that absolutely need to grow and be scaled up. I think there are lots of things that should be actively kind of scaled down. And because I'm not a macro economist, I don't know whether or not that

translates to sort of a macro level of growth or declining growth or stagnation from the perspective of a GDP calculation, which I just think is not really thatation from the perspective of a GDP calculation, which I just think is not really that interesting from the perspective of, you know, are we delivering on what we need to be doing to produce a kind of thriving future? And so that's broadly where I fall. And I think that just comes from engaging from kind of the first principles of like, is this scientifically viable? Then is it desirable? and kind of arriving at the answer that, you know, it's, I think, should be secondary to our thoughts around, you know, what do we need to do to eliminate carbon emissions? What do we need to do to kind of stabilize the biosphere? What do we

need to do to make sure that everyone has their, you know, fundamental needs met, without compromising, you know, the stability of our planet, etc, you know, to make sure everyone has thriving, happy lives. All of these are things that are doable with the kind of resource and climatic limitations that we have very much. So inequality here again, comes in, right. We're so irrational in the way that we sort of allocate the bounty of resources that we have available to us. And yeah, so that's kind of where I land on it is just that like, it should maybe not be the core thing that we're thinking about. And instead, we should be thinking about, you know, what are we actually trying to do? If that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, thank you so much for that really nuanced take on it. And

yeah, so I guess to close out my last question here for you, you open your closing chapter with two quotes. The first is from BCA Global Investments Solutions, and it reads, The risk of Armageddon has risen dramatically. Stay bullish on stocks over the next 12 months. over the next 12 months, which, okay, there's that one. And then the second is from Octavia Butler's parable of talents, I believe. And it reads, the child in each of us knows paradise. And yeah, so you end your book sort of unapologetically emphasizing that the green capitalist approach is not only not a solution, it's not even a step in the right direction, not even a good enough for now strategy. And so that being said, and I mean, I absolutely agree with you. And I'd love it if we could close out by just really hammering that point home and

answering this question of why the only solution to the climate catastrophe needs to return the sphere of economics. And I'm sort of injecting this in here, but as the poet Gary Snyder wonderfully put, returning the sphere of economics to a subset of ecology. Yeah, I end the book, I guess, with exactly what you said there, which is this honest questioning of, you know, based on what I've explored in the preceding kind of chapters and all the kind of proposals and principles that green capitalism is kind of setting out even with all of its flaws and you know if it's you know not fully delivering is it something that is still kind of worth pursuing or or engaging with i guess

given that we're in such a desperate state of affairs. You know, if you're someone who has sort of been active on the climate and ecological crisis, or, you know, just think about it regularly, we're pretty desperate for anything, you know, any kind of action, just like give us crumbs, you know, and we will rejoice. And so that's, you know, I think a very genuine question, which I use throughout the book, is you know is this something that we should accept even if we consider it subpar to what we would ideally want and you know the answer that I fundamentally arrive at is no based on very basic idea of will any of these policies or ideas even pass the first hurdle which is will they be effective at curbing emissions or biodiversity

loss, etc? Broadly, the answer is no. And secondly, you know, will they contribute to a world in which we have radically reduced kind of inequality and much greater economic justice? And that's something that I would consider not just a nice to have, but a need to have, based around the relationship between inequality and injustice and climate crisis and ecological crisis. And given that all of these kinds of failures and approaches broadly fail to deliver on either of those, my answer very clearly is that green capitalism is not just something that will be kind of insufficient, but slowly kind of get us going. It's something that could be actively destructive at worst, you know, at best

a distraction for which we don't have time. And so, yeah, I think for me, the sounds almost like excessively simplistic, but I think it is something that we don't do. Or when I say we, you know, policymakers, people in power, blah, blah, blah. What we don't do, which is actually just return to those first principles about what is it that we're trying to do? Are we trying to, you know, just barely achieve a kind of habitable world that broadly resembles the current one in which we kind of have huge swaths of the population as kind of sacrifice zones, but maybe some people in the global north have, you know, a relatively decent standard of life, blah, blah. Probably no, is the answer to that. I think,

you know, most people would claim at least that they're trying to create a future that's not just like vaguely habitable, but is one that is actually kind of worth living in. And is, you know, ideally better than the one we have now. And so I think, you know, what we need to do is start from those kind of first principles. What is it in life that we value? What is it that we want in a future society? How would we like it to look? How do we want people to relate to each other? You know, what kind of basic standard of living do we want for everyone in the world? What are the values that we all share? And start there and then let sort of economics be completely second fiddle to those objectives, rather than what I think we often do, which is start from this idea that we have to use

the market or the price mechanism, and that things in the economy have to work in certain ways. And all of those kind of outcomes come second, and maybe we'll achieve them, maybe we won't. But what we can't do is break out of the economic system we currently have, because it's somehow natural and immutable. And I think that is the fundamental problem at the heart of why we're so catastrophically off track for kind of a stable future. And so for me, that's the ultimate question. I think the Gary Snyder quote captures it for sure, which is that economics definitely needs to be kind of subjugated to the much more important questions around sort of global justice and ecological stability and achieving the kind of values around democracy

or freedom or justice that I think, you know, most of us probably share. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Adrienne Buller, author of The Value of a Whale on the Illusions of Green Capitalism, published by Manchester University Press. For more on green capitalism and climate change, be sure to check out our two-part audio documentary series, The Green Transition Part One, The Problem with Green Capitalism, as well as Part Two, A Green Deal for the People, both available at UpstreamPodcast.org. Thank you to Jenny Voll for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert.

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