Climate change is inextricably linked to our economics. It is fuelled by our decisions, what we buy, what we value, how we price and how we construct meaning. But, do we need to move beyond capitalism in our solution to climate change? Or do we risk throwing out a highly innovative baby with the bathwater? At HowTheLightGetsIn Hay 2023, Rebecca Henderson, Troy Vettese and Helen Czerski debate where the true solution to climate change will be found.

Climate change is the greatest existential threat humanity has ever faced. Not solely for its scope and its complexity, but more fundamentally for its connection to the internal workings of our dominant economic paradigm. That of Capitalism. The world’s largest corporations emit 71% of greenhouse gas emissions, and all human activity is intimately connected to the value they provide. However, Capitalism has overcome its previous existential crises. From the original Dutch explorers inventing shareholder capitalism to fund the Dutch East India Company to expand their empire, to agricultural innovation overcoming Malthusian malaise, and consumerism defeating the Soviet challenge. Why would climate change prove intractable when compared to these capitalist victories? This question being the basis of HowTheLightGetsIn 2023’s debate Capitalism and the Climate.

The debate centred on a remark by Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England and current UN climate envoy that net zero is the ‘greatest commercial opportunity of our time’. Is climate change a technical problem with technical solutions? That the right assemblage of regulations, checks, incentives and prohibitions could mitigate. Or is climate change both a necessary result, and an intractable crisis, for a decentralised system that fetishises growth, individualism, and competition to the abandonment of all other social strata?

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Net zero is the ‘greatest commercial opportunity of our time’.

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To answer this question, Harvard Business School professor and author of Sustainable Capitalism on a World on Fire’s Rebecca Henderson debated Helen Czerski, noted Earth systems scientist and physicist of the everyday and Troy Vetesse, economic historian and author of Half Earth Socialism. The debate was hosted by Linda Yueh, noted Oxford Economist and renowned author of several economics books.

The debate opened with the central question, ‘Is there a necessary connection between capitalism and climate change’. Rebecca Henderson opened the debate with an emphatic yes, but that capitalism alone has the dynamism to get us out of this crisis. The current form of capitalism, with its relentless exploitation of externalities and pursuit of profit as an end in itself, are what has gotten us into this mess. Instead, a reformed capitalism, one with strict regulations, a politics that is not captured by capital and a multivariate value system beyond pure profit can be the spur to the innovation needed to overcome this crisis.

Troy Vetesse disagreed and instead argued that while it is unlikely that capitalism will solve the carbon emissions problem, this is only one of nine planetary boundaries that must be operated within to prevent climate collapse. The competitive logic of capitalist thought is incompatible with any limit on growth, and as a result, economic planning is required.