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Paper short abstract

With reference to the role of discounting in IAMs promoting NETs the paper will argue that capital’s return is bound to return as ecological debt. It asks what happens when “natural capital” turns from asset into liability.

Paper long abstract

Scholars in STS and political economy showed that capitalist return expectations systematically obstruct effective climate protection by privileging fossil over green investments. This talk will show how hegemonic climate economics often reinforces this problem. By calibrating the discount rate used in climate models according to the observed rates of return on capital, they respond to market failure with an orientation on the failing market. Rather than offering a merely normative critique of this move, the talk analyzes its structural effects. It will argue that capital’s return is bound to return as ecological destruction. Global heating is the eternal return of capitalist return as collective ecological debt. I will elucidate this point with reference to the way Negative Emissions Technologies are cast in Integrated Assesment Modells and the role that discounting plays in creating their appeal. In addition, I will show that in a time of carbon and temperature overshoot much of what ecological economists have called and calculated as “natural capital” turns from asset into liability.