Resources: Green economy, Power Point

The last decade's developments in computation are major topics of debate among business, policymakers, and social movements alike. Blockchain, Bitcoin, smart contracts, the Internet of Things, machine translation, image recognition, the Earth Bank of Codes, artificial intellligence – all are understood to be not only business opportunities but also political and environmental issues.

The rise of ecosystem services presents both the necessity and the opportunity to rethink issues of capital and nature. This presentation from a Cambridge University conference entitled “Rights to Nature: Tracing Alternative Political Ecologies against the Neoliberal Environmental Agenda”, organized by Elia Apostolopoulou and Jose Cortes-Vazquez, addresses two of these issues in particular. First, what, if any, role do the novel transactions in ecosystem services that have emerged since the 1970s play in capital accumulation, and why have they emerged now?

Social justice, political organising and alliance-building were among the themes raised by The Corner House at an academic conference on Resource Politics.

"Let's internalize the externalities" has become an important slogan of the new "green economy". Its logic is evident in the Kyoto Protocol, the UK's plans for an "ecosystem services economy", countless regulatory projects advised by environmental economists, and even in financial markets' efforts to commodify radical uncertainty. But is this a solution for the environmental and social problems thrown up by capital accumulation, or a perpetual motion machine that functions merely to create more problems and business opportunities?