The Wrath of Capital - Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics (Electronic book text)

While climate change has become the dominant concern of the twenty-first century, global powers refuse to implement the changes required to reverse these trends. Rather, they have neoliberalized nature and climate change politics and discourse, indicating a more virulent strain of capital accumulation on the horizon. Adrian Parr calls attention to the problematic socioeconomic condition of neoliberal capitalism underpinning the world's environmental challenges, and she argues that, until we grasp the implications of neoliberalism's interference in climate change talks and policy, humanity is on track to an irreversible crisis.

Parr not only exposes the global failure to produce equitable political options for environmental regulation, but she also breaks down the dominant political paradigms hindering the discovery of a viable alternative. She highlights the neoliberalization of nature in the development of green technologies, land use, dietary habits, reproductive practices, consumption patterns, design strategies, and media. She dismisses the notion that the free market can solve debilitating environmental degradation and climate change as nothing more than a political ghost emptied of its collective aspirations. Parr decries what she perceives as a failure of the human imagination and an impoverishment of political institutions, and she ruminates on the nature of change and existence in the absence of a future. The sustainability movement, she argues, must engage more aggressively with the logic and cultural manifestations of consumer economics to take hold of a more transformative politics. If the economically powerful continue to monopolize the meaning of environmental change, she warns, new, more promising collective solutions to our problems will fail to take root.