It seems like a self-evidently ridiculous question, borderline obscene—whales are majestic creatures whose worth transcends the human impulse to quantify, obviously! Yet it is one which has been seriously considered by economists in an effort to convince governments and corporations to value 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.”
The director of research for the London-based progressive think tank Common Wealth, Buller sees market-based corporate “green” initiatives as distracting at best—and, at worst, actively destructive. The Value of a Whale takes a bracing look at how corporate interests are using the superficial trappings of climate activism to reinforce their own power. As one might imagine, it’s not the most uplifting read in the world. But it’s a galvanizing, tough book, one that asks us to not accept a simulacrum of improvement for the real thing.
WIRED talked with Buller about whale pricing, evil economists, and reasons to find hope for the future.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
WIRED: Could you define “green capitalism” for those who haven’t read the book, or might not be familiar with the expression?
Adrienne Buller: The way I define it in the book is intentionally a working definition. It addresses a phenomenon we’re seeing in the US and in the UK where the corporate sector and financial firms have realized overt climate denialism and obstruction is not a viable strategy, so they’re slowly transitioning toward trying to shape and control climate policy.
There are two core tenets of green capitalism I identify. The first is that it’s an attempt to resolve the climate crisis in a way that minimizes disruption to our existing ways of organizing the economy, to existing distributions of 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. In contrast to, for instance, moving away from private car ownership to mass transit as a climate solution, the green capitalist framework is more about making sure we can transition to electric vehicles when we’re moving away from fossil-fuel-driven cars so that private companies can keep profiting.
What motivated you to critique green capitalism?
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 ultimately came out of that experience feeling very cynical about whether that type of approach will actually deliver any kind of 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. That’s what the book tries to do.
You titled the book after an especially striking example of how absurd green capitalism can be. The International Monetary Fund decided to place a price on whales: about $1 trillion for the whole species, or $2 million per individual whale. They arrived at this figure by calculating how much carbon whales sequestered and saw it as advocating for whale conservation as a way to fight climate change. What made you choose this particular example to open the book?
For me, it captures everything about green capitalism that is both seductive in an intuitive sense and then also deeply problematic in a practical sense. On the one hand, there’s this intuitive appeal to the idea that the reason that we destroy nature is because we don’t value it within our economic system, so we need to find a way to do that. It’s the idea that if we can just make governments or the corporate sector appreciate the role that elements of nature, like a whale, have in things they care about—money, a stable economy, etc.—then that can be a solution. Trying to make a whale compliant with market-based logic is how most governments are trying to approach the climate crisis, and I think it captures the absurd and brutal way that economics engages with nature. Plus, I just love whales.
Speaking of other absurd value assignments, later in the book you discuss a measurement called the “value of a statistical life” (VSL) which I did not know existed. It was developed during the Cold War to compare costs of military operations. You write that the VSL generally ranges from $8 to $11 million per life nowadays, and that the lives of those in lower income nations or lower income regions within a country are assigned lower VSL. This very starkly drives home how morally perverted these calculations are. Are there even ways for the field of economics to address climate change that aren’t blatantly ghoulish?
Yes, I think so. There are a lot of people working in the heterodox economic space, trying to overcome a barrier that the economics discipline has created for itself artificially. The barrier is the idea that economics is somehow not a social science, that it is not inherently political. Some economists like to pretend that it’s closer to a natural science, which is just obviously not the case. I think if we can reclaim the fundamentally social and political reality of the economic space, then we can reclaim it as a discipline.
Do you think that we will see climate reparations enacted in our lifetime?
The optimist in me wants to say yes. I think that it is not just necessary according to my own principles around justice but also purely pragmatically necessary as well. Even if you didn’t care about the justice aspect—the extreme levels of inequality in wealth and income that we see in the global economy, both within and between countries, the destructive histories upon which those inequalities are based—reparations still have to be enacted if we are going to deliver a global economy that does the two things that I think most, if not all, people would agree should happen. One is maintaining a habitable planet. The other is, with all the phenomenal wealth that we have in the world, to deliver a good standard of life for everyone on the planet.
I think if you believe in those principles, then there’s no getting around the fact that a reparations-based framework is necessary. There’s really interesting campaigning work happening around the climate finance targets that are part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is $100 billion per year in climate finance to poorer countries. Obviously, that hasn’t been delivered. A lot of it is currently in the form of what’s called non-concessional lending, loans that are at or above market rates or that might have punitive terms on repayment and default. In the long run, that’s not really a transfer of wealth to poorer countries. So there’s interesting campaigning happening around making all of that take the form of grants, and also hugely scaling it up. It’s not necessarily reparations by the framework of radical scholarship, or by any stretch, but it’s at least beginning to think about addressing inequalities through existing vehicles.
The pessimist in me thinks that things will have to get a lot worse before they get better, which is a slightly devastating position to take, and one that I would like to have disproven.
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I was really struck by some of the statistics you laid out about the sheer scale of industrial farming. I did not know that 60 percent of animals are livestock. Do you think moving away from meat and toward a plant-based diet is necessary on a global scale for climate justice?
I’m definitely not an agricultural expert, but I used those statistics to highlight how we’ve shaped the planet in such an extreme way. For inhabitants of comparatively wealthy countries, particularly the middle and upper echelons of those countries, absolutely there needs to be a massive change in the way that we consume. That includes diet.
People get really mad whenever you bring up consumption, and think it’s a way to absolve yourself of your role in driving this crisis, and that it penalizes the working class or the global poor for a crisis that they have very little role in. So I do try to be very careful about always connecting consumption to structural factors. Less important than the question of meat itself is the way that we have organized production of meat, the way the industry uses completely unsustainable methods devised to produce as much as possible to make as much profit as possible. That’s what I would focus on, rather than diet in and of itself.
Toward the end of the book, you write: “At best green capital solutions are a deadly distraction from the urgent task of actually slowing, reversing, and adapting to climate and ecological crises. At worst, they are actively undermining our ability to do so.” The Value of a Whale makes an incredibly persuasive case that this is true. It’s also a depressing case, to be honest, because it feels like we are very far away from a green socialism or a green anything else arriving. Are there any projects to fight climate change you see worth pursuing within the current global capitalist system?
It’s a dire conclusion now that you read it back to me! But the case that I try to make is that there are lots of ways to pursue really good policy within our existing system, policies that might prefigure a much more radical re-imagining of the future.
These might be reforms that operate within the current system and try to make it slightly better. The ones I find most encouraging are the ones that are linked to a much bigger shift in either perspective or in the way that we arrange things. So the Inflation Reduction Act is a good example of this. There are a lot of flaws with the IRA that we won’t unpack here, but one thing that I find really encouraging about it is that for the first time in American climate politics, it represents a shift away from a fixation on pricing and the price system as the way to resolve this crisis. There’s an entire chapter on that in the book, about the need to shift away from the magic of imagined prices and into an investment-based framework or a public investment-based framework. That’s a really interesting shift in mindset that speaks to a much bigger project for reimagining how we organize our economy.
Another thing: In the UK, the Labour Party announced a plan to build a public option clean energy company to compete with the big fossil fuel generators. I think, again, it’s an encouraging shift, and while it’s still operating within capitalism, it moves us away from a world in which everything has to be justified on the basis of profits.
Do you have hope that larger-scale, planned, state-led transitions of the global economy are possible?
Looking at the scale and complexity required to coordinate the transition off of fossil fuels, it demands the capacity of the state. Particularly within the kind of time horizons that we’re thinking about—a decade, two decades? So working with the state apparatus and pushing it as far as it possibly can be pushed is a valuable and necessary exercise. To turn back to the IRA, its ability to pass in the form that did—as watered down as it was—is a direct result of much more radical campaigning around the Green New Deal and much more radical kind of climate futures. Particularly in the US, there’s so much power divested on state and community levels that can be harnessed and is being harnessed.
The place I’m more skeptical of is how international coordination is working in groups with the UNFCCC and the COP negotiations. I don’t think I’m alone in taking the position that they’re really struggling to be fit for their purposes and to deliver what we need. I’m not sure how to resolve that, frankly, or what the best alternative would be.
Do you have any suggestions for direct actions readers can take to help galvanize a larger shift in the way that we approach climate change?
Having done climate activism for years, it often feels as though going to the protests is doing very little. The state often feels like an immovable beast. But I do think that having people turn up to protests and having people be part of those movements is incredibly valuable over a longer trajectory, even if in the near term, it might be disheartening. So I would encourage everyone to give it a try.
The other thing would be this: One of the most powerful forces that we’re going to need to not only drive a transition away from our fossil fuel and carbon addiction, but also to do so in a way that is just and fair, is to have the trade union movement, or labor as you call it in the US, on our side. And so I think anyone who is in a trade union or has thought about joining one should do so and try to bring pressure from the inside, so unions can be really vocal on the climate crisis. They’re often representing the workers that are going to be critical to the future. I think the joining up of the climate movement and the labor movement would be an incredibly powerful nexus, and it’s happening already.
Adrienne Buller | Wired
