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The Review of Radical Political Economics is calling for papers for a special issue on climate change and capitalism. The journal is seeking manuscripts that provide a range of critical political economic perspectives on the topic, as well as a variety of methods, approaches, and geographic focuses. They particularly encourage submissions from climate activists, scholars in the Global South, early career researchers, and scholars from historically excluded groups. The journal provides a list of possible subjects for the special issue, including theoretical and empirical interventions, historical or contemporary analyses, critiques of economic analysis, and models of climate justice and anti-capitalist struggles. Submissions must adhere to the journal's guidelines and will undergo peer review. [Extracted from the article]

When asked what "type" of manuscript you are submitting, please check the box that says, "Climate Change and Capitalism." All submissions will undergo I RRPE i 's regular peer review procedures and must not be under review with any other publication. [Extracted from the article]

Neoliberal capitalism has extended the use of markets to address climate and energy issues. Carbon trading characteristically exemplifies the neoliberalization of climate policy. This paper discusses the workings of the European Union's Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) in the European Union (EU) with a focus on its application in crisis-ridden Greece. Beyond environmental effectiveness and distributional effects, the paper explores the interactions of the EU ETS with crisis, austerity programs, energy poverty, and uneven development. Despite adjustments and changes, the EU ETS continues to indicate limited environmental effectiveness and unjust distributional effects. Moreover, by forging a centralized neoliberal transition to a low-carbon economy without consideration of the issues faced by unevenly developed and crisis-stricken EU members such as Greece, the EU ETS leads to additional disturbances and problems for the Greek economy as a whole, its pauperized working people, and its energy and climate options to reduce emissions on its own potential, needs, and priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces papers published within the issue which were presented at the 6th Annual Forum of the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE) in Amherst, Massachusetts in May 2011, including one on state-owned enterprises (SOE) in China, another on the implications of the need to prevent major climate change for the developmental strategies of China and India and a paper on the influence of neoliberalism on the reform of emergency services in Great Britain.

This paper discusses the interplay between the rise of China and India in the world economy and the global climate emergency. It considers alternative growth scenarios for China and India. The results show that, to meet their respective global climate obligations, both China and India need to accept much slower economic growth rates and possibly economic stagnation in the coming decades. This clearly indicates that both China and India need to revise their growth-oriented model of development. Only a new development strategy focused on social and environmental progress, rather than economic growth, can be compatible with climate stabilization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Kyoto Protocol entered into force on February 16, 2005. Emissions reductions targets established by the protocol will be met by domestic policies and by three international flexible mechanisms: clean development, joint implementation, and emissions trading. Following a value-theoretic and class-based approach, the purpose of this paper is to analyze these flexible mechanisms. In particular, the paper investigates the nature and adoption of flexible mechanisms, and their class and environmental links and implications. Carbon-intensive capitalist firms and developed economies are found to be exerting great influence on the shaping and implementation of flexible mechanisms. Environmental effectiveness and justice, and equal sustainable development raised and claimed by worker-citizens, social movements, local communities, and developing countries have not been secured. Thus flexible mechanisms do not present a real challenge to current institutions and practices for sustainable climate conditions for the workers-citizen of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crises of 1997–98, 2008, and the pandemic accelerated contradictory changes in global financial governance. Taken together, the change and stasis propelled by these crises is coalescing around a fragmented "post-American financial order." The war in Ukraine represents another inflection point. The war has facilitated the reassertion of American financial power and cooperation among rich nations. However, like previous crises, the war is creating fissures in financial governance. The landscape offers risks and opportunities against a backdrop of heightened financial fragilities, authoritarianism and fascism, inequalities, devastation associated with the pandemic and war, and climate crisis. In such moments, Hirschman's "possibilism" is both elusive and necessary. In this context, we might aspire to "permissive multilateralism s " rather than nostalgia for a new Bretton Woods. JEL Classification: F02, F51 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “green economy” is fast becoming the new alpha and omega for many policy makers, corporations, political actors, and NGOs who want to tackle both the environmental and economic crisis at once. Or would it be better to speak about “green capitalism?” Going green is not only important in the fight against environmental destruction, it also makes a country “stronger, healthier, safer, more innovative, competitive and respected,” argues Thomas Friedman, the well-known New York Times columnist. “Is there anything that is more patriotic, capitalist, and geostrategic than this?” Indeed, the rationale underlying the nascent project of the green economy is that if the market could become the instrument for tackling the environmental crisis, the fight against this crisis could be the royal road to solving the problems of the market. Focusing in particular on the green economy’s impact on climate change, this paper analyzes the green economy as a hegemonic project that tries to retranslate environmental concerns into a new jargon, and to turn environmental conflict into a new motor for economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human-induced climate crisis is destroying the capacity of our planet to support our species and other life at an unprecedented rate. The most urgent of climate crisis tipping points is Arctic warming and sea ice loss. It is estimated that Arctic summer sea ice loss, that could—based on current trends—occur in one or two decades, would cause an abrupt 0.5 Watts per square meter increase in global warming above preindustrial levels that would be roughly equivalent to the effect of more than seventeen years of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions if it occurred today. A Global Green New Deal (GGND) will require at least three phases and three funding sources. The three overlapping phases are (a) short-run climate restoration or triage, (b) medium-term soil carbon sponge and water cycle adaptation or regeneration, and (c) long-run GHG drawdown or mitigation. The three funding sources are (a) utilizing the sovereign of the US government and Federal Reserve to create dollars, (b) taxing GHG emissions, and (c) taxing wealthy and high-income individuals with a particular focus on rentiers. The ex-nihilo financial support offered by the Fed to bail out the global financial system from 2008 to 2011 would have been almost sufficient to fund a 2020–2050 comprehensive GGND that includes all of the components above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Green Deal (EGD), launched by the European Commission in December 2019, is a major policy package addressing climate change and aiming at a "just and inclusive" transition. Several shortcomings can be identified in the EGD: it lacks a vision of a just, post-carbon economy for Europe; available resources are inadequate to reach stated objectives; and implementation tools are limited. We argue that making Europe's production systems carbon neutral would require a broader range of "green" industrial policies that need to jointly address environmental sustainability, structural change, and fairness of economic outcomes in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are facing both a short-term emergency cooling crisis and a long-term greenhouse gas (GHG) draw down planetary ecological crisis. We must address both. The first requires emergency direct cooling, or temporary "triage" or a "tourniquet, for our bleeding planet." The second requires rapid GHG emissions reductions and draw down and natural planetary regeneration that realistically will take at least a few decades and may take a century or more. Conflating the challenge and opportunity of the second crisis with a response to the first crisis will not produce a rapid and credible global response to the second crisis because of structural economic inequity and fossil fuel dependency that is deeply embedded in the current global economy. Realistically, we need emergency direct climate cooling to address the first crisis and a long-term binding global cap and trade emissions trading system to address the second. The Florin proposal that conditions Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) direct climate cooling on credible GHG emissions and draw down is a step in the right direction, but omits other direct climate cooling methods and effectively makes the deployment of SAI contingent on a global emissions trading system (ETS) that may not be possible before the deployment of SAI becomes necessary. Rather than conflating our two climate crises, or conditioning the solution of the first on a solution to the second, we need to address both on an emergency basis by putting all options on the table as called for in the Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) proposal. JEL Classification : Q54, Q55, Q56, Q57, Q58 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Global Green New Deal (GGND)—that includes Arctic sea ice climate triage and carbon cycle climate restoration, and that, following Eisenberger (2020), would move us toward a renewable energy and materials economy (REME)—is necessary to turn our current civilization and species-threatening climate crises into an opportunity to stabilize our planet's climate and advance to a new, more equitable and prosperous stage of human development. Imminent, potentially catastrophic, global climate impacts of Arctic sea ice loss, the first global climate "tipping point," are reviewed, and practical and efficient potential climate triage methods for avoiding this are summarized. Longer-term carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and carbon capture, sequestration, and use (CCSU) methods, that would move us toward long-term carbon cycle climate restoration, are presented. A general reframing of climate policy and specific GGND policy proposals—that include Arctic sea ice climate triage and carbon cycle climate restoration that would rapidly move us toward a REME and avoid increasingly catastrophic climate impacts—are proposed. JEL Classification : Q53, Q54, Q55, Q56, Q58 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The planet is on a path to catastrophic warming which calls for structural changes in the operation of Global North economies, not merely a transformation of energy sources, the core of "green growth" approaches. Our research on inequality and working time shows that these are powerful drivers of carbon emissions that can be the center of a progressive agenda supplementing energy transition. Our work also shows that disproportionality in emissions sources presents a policy opportunity. We challenge Pollin's view that only growth-centric approaches are politically viable, and argue that progressive politics has moved from growth-centricity to needs- and people-centered policies. In our response, we argue that the recent rise of the Green New Deal is a strong piece of evidence for our position. JEL Classification: Q5, Q54, Q56 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans are on the precipice of dangerous climate change. In this lecture, I discuss the importance of inequality in climate solutions and the ways in which the framing of climate change has impeded action to mitigate emissions. I critique the standard formulation of a tradeoff between well-being and environmental protection. I argue for the need to reframe climate action as a positive good and discuss the impact of the Great Recession on climate discourse in the United States. I review recent history on de-coupling and argue for new approaches to climate policy, such as cap-and-dividend and the use of productivity growth to reduce hours of work and by extension emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The RRPE article, “Left Clouds Over Climate Policy Change” (Hahnel 2012a: 83-89), includes stringent and radical proposals to solve two additionality problems in project-level carbon offsets. Its failure suggests carbon offsets are irreparably broken. National penalties for non-additionality, intended to shift regulatory incentives, fail to solve the principal/agent problems addressed. Modifying standards for emission cap measurements in order to solve additionality problems in land use change and forestry (LUCF) overlooks technical obstacles and political consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that economic globalization may be undermined by predicted impacts of global warming and peak oil (depletion). They are projected to cause significant damage to transportation infrastructure and increase transportation costs. They may also increase business risk, food prices, and general prices. As a result, the long distance exploitation of cheap labor may lose much of its economic profitability in coming decades, and supply chains may contract to regional and local lengths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]