climate change

Somehow, in the midst of ruins, we must maintain enough curiosity to notice the strange and wonderful as well as the terrible and terrifying. (Tsing et al., 2017: M3)

Introduction

Concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are growing, ice caps are melting, and the climate is changing. Members of the scientific community increasingly agree on the course these developments will take and the role humans have played in causing them (IPCC, 2018). Responses to this scientific consensus and the related questions of sustainability widely vary.

Context

Man-made climate change is a reality. Droughts, floods and typhoons caused by global warming have been experienced around the globe. In Climate change, capitalism, and corporations, Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg explore corporate responses to the changing climate. Importantly they look at how multinational corporations adapt, affirm and reinvent their role in relation to the threats of climate change.

Why I draw comics in general and comics on Pelagia noctiluca in particular

I draw comics, also known as graphic storytelling, also known as sequential art, also known as the ninth art,[1] also known as low culture. The English-speaking world came a fair bit later to the party than the Francophones, but today this genre is being taken seriously as never before.[2]

Entrepreneurship studies is advancing with the increased belief in the possibility of improving society and the environment via a reformation of entrepreneurship. The handbook of entrepreneurship and sustainable development follows up on this quest of merging the economic, the social and the environmental into one all-embracing unit of positive outcomes.

I hear babies cry, I watch them grow

They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know

And I think to myself what a wonderful world. (Weiss and Thiele, 1967)

 

What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing? [437]

Prologue

Most of the article below was written a year and a half ago, almost immediately after the end of the event described therein – the Global Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth – that was held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in April of 2010, some four months after the disastrous failure of the ‘COP15’-climate summit in Copenhagen.

Introduction

The establishment of global carbon markets by regulatory fiat would mark the triumph of financial hegemony over the politics of climate change risk. Climate finance practitioners have first multiplied in numbers in the speculative lead-up to Copenhagen’s COP15 and then spectacularly retreated to the wings to wait again for the signs of easy short-term profit, an ebb and flow marking new high tide for what Christian Marazzi (2010) has called the ‘violence of financial capitalism’.

Introduction

In this article, I suggest that the growing effort to address anthropogenic climate change through carbon markets and other financial mechanisms constitutes a form of ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein, 2007) whereby neoliberal policies seek to harness crises to which they themselves contribute as opportunities for continued economic expansion. This thesis stands in stark contrast to much of the critical commentary on climate policy circulating within the public sphere at present.