Explore how Global Political Economy (GPE) perspectives reveal the deep connections between climate change and the global economy, highlighting the challenges and possibilities of the energy transition.
This post is by Dr Roberto Roccu, Programme Director for the online Global Political Economy MA at King's.
The reasons why as humans we should care about the wide-ranging environmental transformations we typically call ‘climate change’ are hopefully clear. In essence, to survive as a species we need an inhabitable environment, and transformations from global warming to the increased likelihood of severe weather events are considered by the scientific community to risk putting this bottom line in question.
But why should a programme such as the King's online Global Political Economy (GPE) MA concern itself with climate change? This is because all the main areas GPE is interested in, from production to trade to development to finance and more, are implicated in and affected by climate change:
In sum, it has become increasingly impossible to look at the global economy without asking questions about climate change. Indeed, transformations on the latter front are such that even the United Nations has started using a language geared towards communicating the urgency and scale of the issue at hand, speaking of ‘climate crisis’ as opposed to climate change. In 2020, more than 11,000 scientists published a letter on BioScience stating ‘clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency’.
If GPE should care about the climate crisis, how can we learn more about the climate crisis, and what can be done to address it, by engaging with GPE literature and debates? I will provide here a short illustration below with reference to the energy transition as a solution to the climate crisis, which enables us to identify three ways GPE debates can shed light on the potential and limits of the energy transition:
Private investments have played a major role in the rise in the share of energy produced via renewable sources, from wind to solar to hydroelectric power and beyond. This undoubtedly provides a glimmer of hope in the face of the accelerated worsening of key climate indicators. One element worth bearing in mind, however, is that market incentives on their own are not enough for this to occur. This is a central concern for GPE scholarship, insofar as it looks at how public and private sector interact.
In fact, state intervention has been a central ingredient to scaling up investment in renewables. One key way through which this has happened is through strategies of ‘de-risking’. This indicates attempt to reduce risks for private investors by having public financial institutions shouldering some of that risk (see this short article on varieties of de-risking by the World Resources Institute).
If sustained political will and institutional commitment are just as important as private investments to ensuring the energy transition continues apace, a crucial question then becomes which states and institutions appear as the most committed to promoting renewable energy sources, and what are the perceived distributional implications.
For instance, China has now become the leading manufacturer in the field of renewable energy technologies, or ‘clean tech’ as they are often referred to. This development has been perceived in most of the so-called ‘West’ as a geopolitical threat, especially in light of other frictions and conflicts GPE scholars pay attention to, such as for instance the ongoing US-China tariff war.
In such a fractious and tense moment, then, approaching the development of green technologies as a zero-sum competition, like many Western policymakers currently seem to do, can be hugely counterproductive. Indeed, it narrows significantly the common ground we need to have international cooperation agreements of the scale required to address the climate crisis. This is another element that a GPE vantage point can help us see more clearly.
Much of the conversation around the energy transition has revolved around the declining prices of producing renewable energy at scale. This is certainly something to be celebrated, but it does not guarantee – in and of itself – that investment will keep pouring into renewable energy sources.
Indeed, the bottom line of business is not price but profits. Hence, for companies to keep investing into renewable energy it is essential that their profitability prospects are healthy enough to justify continuing investments today. This relationship between prices and profits on the one hand, and between the decisions we take today and their impact in the future, are central concerns of GPE scholarship, which also builds on the work of prominent geographers such as Brett Christophers (see this short review of his latest book, The Price Is Wrong, to get a sense of how price and investment affect decisions in renewables).
Hence, in light of its interdisciplinary orientation combined with a keen eye on contemporary transformations and our ability to affect them, the MA in Global Political Economy at King’s College London provides an ideal environment for you to explore the intersections between the climate crisis and the global economy.
As Adam Tooze put it, we are currently facing a ‘polycrisis’ that must be addressed by understanding the political, economic, and social forces shaping climate crisis as well as measures seeking to address it.
The MA in Global Political Economy at King’s College London equips students with the theoretical and analytical tools required to critically engage with these and other urgent issues, helping us not only understand these issues better but also find novel pathways to address them: