ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 seeks then to explore the ways that there may be important contemporary transformations to global capitalism as it responds to the challenge of sustainability, and the distinct limits to those transformations. It starts by analyzing the way that responses to the financial crisis and global recession from 2007 onwards were rather different to previous such crises, in that a considerable amount of the state-led responses explicitly sought to use environmental reforms as a means to get out of the crisis. It builds on this by exploring some of the positive environmental transformations that appear to be taking shape around the world today, specifically highlighting developments and gains made in the development of ‘clean energy’ technologies over the last decade, and the political-economic drivers of those transformations. But then it turns to the limits of these transformations, and to the ways that many responses serve to marginalize and/or co-opt environmental movements, specifically through: greenwashing, problem displacement, re-fixing, and what we call the ‘dangerous bet’ that growth and sustainability can be made compatible with each other. These co-optations occur in part because of the specifically neoliberal contexts within which responses to environmental degradation are contemporarily structured, but they have deeper roots in the socio-ecological contradictions of global capitalism as a whole. Through this analysis, we return to the basic questions opened up at the beginning of the book.
