The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism, by Adrienne Buller, on the Call for Solutions to the Climate Crisis
It seems like a self-evidently ridiculous question, borderline obscene—whales are majestic creatures whose worth transcends the human impulse to quantify, obviously! It is one that has been considered seriously by economists in order to convince governments and corporations of the value of wildlife. In her new book, The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism, Adrienne Buller dissects the asinine logic of “green” capitalist thinking, from putting a dollar value on cetaceans to carbon offsets to financial products like “sustainability-linked bonds.”
In the book, I define it as a working definition. Climate denialism is not viable for the corporate sector or financial firms in the US and the UK as they begin to try to shape and control climate policy.
There are two core tenets of green capitalism I identify. It is an attempt to find a solution to the climate crisis that does not disrupt our existing ways of organizing the economy, wealth and power. The second tenet is pursuing decarbonization in a way that makes sure that there are still opportunities for profit-making and rent extraction in that decarbonized future. The green capitalist framework focuses on making sure we transition away from fossil-fuel driven cars so that private companies can keep making money when we move away from mass transit.
I’d been working in the climate and finance civil society space for several years, and I started out at a totally nonpolitical watchdog company that helps financial firms understand how they should align their portfolios with the goals of the Paris Agreement. I came out of the experience feeling very cynical about whether or not that approach will deliver material change. But I found the experience really interesting in terms of crawling inside the heads of people working in finance and getting to grapple with how they understand this problem. The book tries to do that.
Sometimes, these “greenwashing” tactics happen by accident. Lubomila Jordanova, the founder and CEO of Berlin-based carbon reporting firm Plan A, does not think all greenwashing is intended. During her visit to Spain in 2015, Jordanova became aware of how much humans harmed nature. She spent a week picking up litter at the beach instead of surfing. Back home, she educated herself about climate change and pollution and realized that businesses are the key to combating these issues on a large scale. “Because they have capital, they have people, they have visibility and also a lot of influence,” she says.
But she quickly learned that even companies that wanted to tackle climate change, and specifically their own greenhouse gas emissions, weren’t always going about it the right way.
Take BMW, for example. Since 2020, the German carmaker has been using Plan A’s platform to calculate monthly emissions from sources it owns or controls. According to Jordanova the platform starts with data mapping. Companies make their existing data available. Plan A uses proxy metrics when there are gaps. “It gives us a really good opportunity to understand the data maturity of the company, but also enables them to see the sustainability picture from all these different sources in a single place,” she says.
The math doesn’t look pretty one year later. The margin of error? The next stop on the annual carousel of global climate talks is expected to be between 1.0 and 1.3 degrees C, according to a UN report that was released shortly before COP 27. Taryn Fransen, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute and one of the lead authors of the report, says that the overshoot is disappointing. Since Glasgow, there’s been a year of haggling. In Sharm el Sheikh this year, the negotiators should be even more ambitious in their promises than before, as they may have found a new way to trim methane emissions or save a carbon-sucked forest. And yet, despite promises to the contrary, only a handful of countries have pledged more cuts, which together represent only 0.5 out of the 13 gigatons of CO2 scientists say must be slashed by 2030 to meet the Paris goal.
There is a raging debate at the conference. “As it is, The COPs are not really working,” youth climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was a media sensation at last year’s conference, said during an event in London this week after announcing that she will not attend COP27 this year. The COPs are mostly used as an opportunity for leaders and people in power to get attention using many different kinds of greenwashing.
“It’s clear that the window for 1.5 is closing fast,” says Chukwumerije Okereke, who studies climate governance at the Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike, in Nigeria. According to some, it might not be possible to keep to this goal “unless there is massive carbon dioxide removal on an unprecedented scale”, he adds.
The money is supposed to go toward new and improved infrastructure that might help keep people safe in a warming world. It may be that cities were made to be better at defeating the heat or less likely to be wiped out in a wildfire. Or it could mean expanded early warning systems that can warn people about a flood or storm headed their way. There is a push to get more funding for adaptation projects, since it has been estimated that the costs of adapting to climate change in the next decade will be $300 billion per year. There are advocates who want to push for more local solutions to the issue of climate change since the people most in need of assistance are not always included at planning tables.
There’s also growing outrage this year about the lack of support for communities that have already suffered irreparable damage from climate disasters. Small island nations, for instance, have already had to evacuate entire populations from disappearing islands. They’ve had to shoulder those costs even though they’ve contributed very little to the pollution causing climate change.
In a first for a climate COP, the final document also backs reform of giant lenders such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which are lynchpins of the global economy. The IMF has $1 trillion available to lend to countries in financial distress, but only a small fraction of this is for climate finance. This endorsement of reform is significant, says Sarah Colenbrander, who studies climate finance at the Overseas Development Institute, a think tank in London. Change can happen from countries that are also shareholders in these institutions.
There have been some bright spots. Australia, led by a newly progressive government, doubled its planned cut to 43 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030. Some of the countries that are trying to get the rights of nature into their constitution have already promised more cuts. But most of those updates are from smaller polluters, or from those, like Australia, that are playing catch-up after previously submitting goals that were egregiously lacking in detail or ambition. A lot of the fruit has already been picked.
Other wins have simply put emitters on the path to making good on last year’s promises. Fransen points to the United States, where the recent Inflation Reduction Act represented a massive step toward meeting its pledge of a 50 percent emissions reduction from 2005 levels. The US is still not on track to meet that commitment. Further upping the ante on its goals this year would “strain credibility,” she says, given the nation’s political gridlock.
Fransen is one of the people in the business of keeping track of all those emissions plans and whether countries are sticking to them. It’s tricky to take stock. It means measuring how much carbon nations emit. The effects those emissions will have on the climate will be shown in 10, 20, or 100 years.
It is hard to know how much CO2 humanity is producing or if nations are holding to their pledges. That’s because the gas is all over the atmosphere, muddying the origin of each signal. Natural processes also release carbon, like decaying vegetation and thawing permafrost, further complicating matters. Think of it like trying to find a water leak in a swimming pool. Researchers have tried pointing satellites at the Earth to track CO2 emissions, but “if you see CO2 from space, it is not always guaranteed that it came from the nearest human emissions,” says Gavin McCormick, cofounder of Climate Trace, which tracks greenhouse gas emissions. “That’s why we need more sophisticated methods.” For instance, Climate Trace can train algorithms to use steam billowing from power plants as a visible proxy for the emissions they’re belching. Other scientists have been making some progress using weather stations to monitor local emissions.
Early signs of the clean-energy transition are emerging. The power sector in many countries is becoming cleaner because of a shift from coal to natural gas as well as an expansion in wind and solar resources. The rise of emissions from coal in Europe this year is likely to be “a short-term blip”, Newell says. “Over the long-term, the energy crisis has accelerated the transition toward clean energy.”
The energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine loomed large during the discussions. High natural-gas prices have reshaped global energy markets and pushed some wealthy European countries to fall back on coal temporarily while looking abroad for new sources of natural gas.
The core purpose of the meeting was to push world leaders tocommit to stronger action and hold them accountable, but she doesn’t think it has been done anymore. “I have never seen anything like this. We’ve reduced the whole thing into a grand spectacle,” she says.
For the first time in the talks, researchers and activists described disbelief that government negotiators spent days going back and forth over a single word.
“I am just, quite simply shocked about the [negotiating] process I have seen,” says Blutus Mbambi, program coordinator at the Centre for Climate Change Action and Advocacy in Lusaka, Zambia. “But we will keep on advocating. We will keep on pushing.”
The heads of LMICs and China were quietly confident that the creation of a new climate fund would be added to the agenda at the start of the conference.
New funding from governments for food systems wasn’t part of the COP 27. The Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, pledges to spend over $1 billion to help small farmers with the impacts of climate change. “Every moment the world delays action, more people suffer, and the solutions become more complex and costly,” the foundation’s chief executive Mark Suzman said in a statement.
The European Union was skeptical initially but changed its position and put pressure on the US to do the same. The fine print — including how much will go into the fund and who will contribute — will have to be discussed at next year’s conference.
The European rush for natural gas was the main reason for the attention at COP26, even though a deal was announced at the G20 summit in Indonesia to help Indonesia wean itself off coal.
Germany has signed a deal with Egypt to advance green hydrogen as well as exports of liquified natural gas and other governments and companies are courting projects in countries such as Senegal, Tanzania and Algeria.
Narain says that the European leaders insist that the measures are only short term fixes that won’t detract from their long term commitments. Before the crisis, the rhetoric from the higher-income countries was that nobody was going to fund fossil-fuel projects in lower-income countries, she says. “But now everybody is asking us to increase supply.”
The failure to rein in fossil-fuel interests could also undermine the success of loss-and-damage negotiations, says Joab Okanda, senior Africa adviser for the advocacy organization Christian Aid, based in Nairobi. “More fossil fuels means more loss and damage.”
Mohamed Salem Nashwan, who studies construction engineering at the Arab Academy of Science, Technology and Maritime Transport in Cairo, is not confident that there will be much progress on fossil fuels at COP28, which is due to be held in Dubai next year. “The host is heavily linked to the fossil-fuel industries,” he says.
The deal that was made at COP 27 states that security of food and ending hunger is a priority and that water systems can be protected from climate effects. By contrast, last year’s Glasgow Climate Pact made no mention of agriculture, food or water.
The new additions are welcome, says Claudia Sadoff, executive director of CGIAR, a global network of agricultural research centres, but she adds that “the text on the food crisis is not supported by actions that need to be taken”.
Emissions-Avoidance Offsets: The Journey of a Clean Cookstove, Energy, and Forest Protection to Responsible Business
For too long businesses have poured investment into emissions-avoidance offsets in order to compensate for their own emissions. Emissions-avoidance offsets include clean cookstove projects, investment in renewable energy, and forestry protection.