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The increasing urgency of the current climate crisis has been accompanied by a growing desire for constructive answers on how to confront the situation effectively and meaningfully. Yet, the pace of global climate change (GCC) continues to accelerate more rapidly than societal, institutional, and individual responses can be formed. The gap between increasingly sophisticated knowledge of objective biophysical threat, on the one hand, and our ability to transform society in accordance with this awareness, on the other hand, highlights the importance of ideology. Ideological barriers have become a major stumbling block for climate change activists and researchers. Focusing on the recent U.S. House Resolution for a Green New Deal, this paper examines how the U.S. political establishment ignores the underlying dynamic of capital and its drive toward ecological devastation and the hollowing out of labor. Given the urgent political task posed by GCC, the paper considers the potential of work time reduction (WTR) as a strategy for overcoming capitalism. The paper concludes by discussing the importance of critical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecosystem service valuation (ESV) attempts to transform the opposition of human economic necessity and ecological conservation by valuing the latter in terms of the services rendered by the former. However, despite a number of ESV-inspired sustainability initiatives since the 1990s, global ecological degradation continues to accelerate. This suggests that ESV has fallen far short of its goals of sustainable social transformation—a failure which has generated considerable criticism. This paper reviews three prominent lines of ESV criticism: 1) the neo-Marxist criticism, which emphasizes the “fictitious” character of ecosystem commodities; 2) the liberal criticism through Friedrich Hayek's concept “scientistic objectivism”; and 3) the pragmatist criticism of “value monism”. Although each form of criticism provides insight into the limitations of ESV, all share ESV's inability to discern what kind of social transformation is possible . Unable to provide an account of their own immersion in social and historical context, these approaches operate in the hypothetical . In light of these shortcomings, this paper advances a critical theory approach, which we contend provides conceptual tools uniquely well-suited to more adequately address the question of social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]