Book review: The Value of a Whale by Adrienne Buller

In her book, “The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism,” Adrienne Buller explains how green capitalism not only fails to address the climate crisis, but actually allows the extractivism and destruction to continue under a green label.

Buller argues that the fossil fuel industry has shifted from climate science denial towards green capitalism. There is no doubt that many Big Polluters jumped on the natural climate solutions bandwagon.

The book came out in 2022 and was written before the war in Ukraine, as a result of which support for expanding fossil fuel use has grown. And Donald Trump’s policy of “Drill, Baby, Drill” has given the fossil fuel industry a massive boost.

Nevertheless, the Big Tech corporations are increasingly relying on carbon offsets to maintain the illusion of being green.

“Nature’s solution to climate change”

The title of Buller’s book comes from a short report put out by the International Monetary Fund in December 2019. The IMF proposed estimating the monetary value of a whale based on the amount of carbon sequestered by a whale over its lifetime.

The IMF calls whales “Nature’s solution to climate change”.

The IMF team bases its strategy for saving the whales on REDD. “When it comes to saving the planet, one whale is worth thousands of trees,” they write.

They suggest a value of “more than US$2 million” for the average great whale. The whole species is worth US$1 trillion. And for US$13 per person a year, according to the IMF team, we could return the global number of whales to the population before commercial whaling started.

Buller points out that putting a price on whales is far from the exception. “World leaders and financiers gather with growing frequency at elite conferences,” she writes, “to earnestly debate how best to monetise and trade ‘ecosystem services’ — that is, the clean water or breathable air a healthy environment provides us.”

Buller writes that market-based initiatives are distracting and are often destructive:

Green capitalist solutions are predicated on the continuation of the destructive processes, systems and economic relations that have both delivered us into this state of crisis and severely delayed action to stymie it.

Carbon offsets: “doomed to continue failing”

In a chapter on carbon markets, Buller explains why carbon pricing and carbon offsets have failed to address the deepening climate crisis, and “are doomed to continue failing”.

Buller writes that,

For as long as the climate and nature crises have featured on the political agenda, a fixation with markets and narrow economic priorities has shaped not only how those in positions of power — governments, policy makers, even prominent non-governmental organisations (NGOs) — respond to them, but the very way they (and many of us) engage with and conceive of them. In doing so, this tunnel vision has diminished our collective ability to imagine alternatives.

Buller refers to a 2021 paper published in Environmental Research Letters by Jessica Green of the University of Toronto. Titled “Does carbon pricing reduce emissions?”, the paper reviews ex-post analyses of the effects of carbon pricing. Green found that “there are surprisingly few works that conduct an ex-post analysis, examining how carbon pricing has actually performed”. Most of these focus on Europe.

The majority of studies suggest emissions reductions are “limited” — between 0% and 2% per year. Carbon taxes perform better than emission trading schemes. “Overall, the evidence indicates that carbon pricing has a limited impact on emissions,” Green writes.

But it’s not just a question of whether carbon markets reduce emissions. In her book, Buller notes that, “The essential fault in the market-based approach to ecological crisis is its virtual guarantee of delivering injustice, both domestically and globally.”

“Carbon neutral” fossil gas

Buller highlights the case of Total selling what it called “carbon neutral” fossil gas based in part on buying carbon offsets from the Kariba REDD project in Zimbabwe. She quotes Renat Heuberger, then-CEO of South Pole, the company that developed the Kariba REDD project, who describes the claim of “carbon neutral” fossil fuels as “such obvious nonsense”.

In 2023, things went downhill fast for the Kariba REDD project. A series of investigative reports into the Kariba REDD project found that the number of carbon credits generated by the project was massively exaggerated. Little of the money from the sale of carbon credits was going to the communities living in the project area. The company running the project, Carbon Green Investments (incorporated in the tax haven of Guernsey), kept “no paper trail” of where the money went.

Verra suspended the project. South Pole pulled out. Heuberger resigned as CEO of South Pole.

ESG and the Wall Street Consensus

Buller writes about the funds labelled “ESG” (Environmental, Social, and Governance). “The ‘sustainable finance’ industry has grown so vast,” she writes, “that both the for-profit private sector and civil society now have entire sub-sectors devoted to shaping the industry’s agenda, from eco-bond certifiers to non-profits offering free transition risk analysis on investors’ portfolios, to firms entirely dedicated to providing investors with data on companies’ sustainability practices.”

Buller refers to what political economist Daniela Gabor calls “The Wall Street Consensus” (WSC). Gabor describes this as “an elaborate effort to reorganize development interventions around partnerships with global finance”. As Buller notes, public policy is increasingly focussed on the interests of the private sector and ensuring its continued profit, rather than on reducing emissions or on improving public health.

“Ultimately,” Buller writes, “the WSC is a project for socialising the risk of losses while allowing private capital to privatise the returns.”

The mindset of the WSC can be found throughout the financial sector’s emergent approach to thriving amidst deepening nature and climate crises, namely the twin tasks of generating new assets for investment and using the power of the state to ‘de-risk’ those investments.

This is a great book. It is thoroughly researched, detailed, and entertainingly written. It is well worth a read. And if you want more of Buller’s work, she runs a podcast and website called The Break Down which “explores the political economy of the climate and ecological crises”.