The promise and limits of anti-capitalism in climate politics

This paper engages the repoliticization of climate change in relation to capitalism. It argues that while rhetoric such as ‘system change not climate change’ has helped sharpen the focus on the sorts of political conflicts to challenge corporate power in particular that are indeed necessary to keep opening up space for more ambitious responses to climate change, it at the same time distracts and abstracts from the complex dynamics – cultural, socio-technical, and so on – of shifting away from high carbon systems. It argues that climate politics needs both an attention to broad power structures and strategies for undermining incumbent high carbon power, and more patient attention to the details of specific socio-technical systems and the social practices they sustain, and how they can be shifted to low or zero carbon ones.