Dear participants,
This is a reminder that we will have Andreas Folkers (Marie Curie Fellow Columbia and ISR) presenting his talk “The Return of Return. Capitalist Revenue and Carbon Removal” on Tuesday March 10th at Barnard’s Campus in Milstein 912 at 6 p.m. with dinner to follow off campus. If you would like to attend the talk or the dinner, please contact Sara Wexler (sara.wexler@columbia.edu) as soon as possible.
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Andreas Folkers (Columbia), March 10
The return of return. Capitalist revenue and carbon removal
The rate is too damn high! Capitalist return expectations systematically obstruct effective climate protection by privileging fossil over green investments. Hegemonic climate economics often reinforces this problem. By calibrating the discount rate used in climate models according to the observed market rates of return, 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. With reference to projects to remove carbon from the atmosphere, the talk shows a) how what environmental economists call “natural capital” turns from asset into liability b) that carbon removal is not, as it is often cast, a return to the climatic status quo ante. Instead, it inaugurates an open-ended, potentially infinite project of planetary repair without redemption and return.
