ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how finance and climate change are entangled in ‘climate changed capitalism’. As a way of undermining the fossil fuel industry’s financial foundations, divestment is a blunt, largely ineffective instrument. The chapter suggests that we need a robust political response to the staggering inequities bound up in the conjunction of global warming and financialization. It discusses some of these climate policy experiments but, critically, this period coincided with what may come to be considered the high-water mark of neoliberalization. Jurisdictional markets are the sine qua non of neoliberal, financialized climate management, blending command-and-control environmental regulation with financial transactions whose efficiency turns on the rational behaviour of investors. Offset markets take this even further, with private or supranational organizations defining and regulating tradeable credits, and exchange occurring across different jurisdictions. The chapter examines the political economy of emissions markets and other ‘market-mechanisms’ ostensibly related to climate action.
