Neoliberal Bio-Economies?

The Co-Construction of Markets and Natures

Kean Birch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319914237
• eBook ISBN: 9783319914244
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

In this book, Kean Birch analyses the co-construction of markets and natures in the emerging bio-economy as a policy response to global environmental change. The bio-economy is an economic system characterized by the use of plants and other biological materials rather than fossil fuels to produce energy, chemicals, and societal goods. Over the last decade or so, numerous countries around the world have developed bio-economy strategies as a potential transition pathway to a low-carbon future. Whether this is achievable or not remains an open question, one which this book seeks to answer. In addressing this question, Kean Birch draws on over ten years of research on the bio-economy around the world, but especially in North America. He examines what kinds of markets and natures are being imagined and constructed in the pursuit of the bio-economy, and problematizes the idea that this is being driven by neoliberalism and the neoliberalization of nature(s).

© The Author(s) 2019

Kean BirchNeoliberal Bio-Economies?https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91424-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Kean Birch¹

(1)

York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

“We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives”.

Tyler Durden, Fight Club (1999)

End Abstract

Introduction

Tyler Durden is wrong. We might expect as much from the imaginary alter ego of the main character ‘Jack’ in the 1999 film Fight Club, but it’s worth emphasizing right off the bat. Our purpose, at its base, is to solve the self-annihilation of humankind, and to do so sometime in the next 20–30 years. Without action now, anthropogenic climate change will erase and erode our world as we know it, turning societies upside down, leading countries to war, disrupting economies and markets , and destroying lives and livelihoods. And, we most definitely have a fight on our hands to stop it. Numerous businesspeople, politicians, commentators, and thinkers stare humanity’s possible extinction in the face with nary a blink; examples abound and range from politicians like the US President Donald Trump through the now infamous Koch brothers and other corporate managers all the way to ‘Global Thinkers’ like Bjorn Lomborg. None of this is new or news, it must be stressed, in that turning a blind eye to climate change has a long, if not distinguished, history (Oreskes and Conway 2010).

Fortunately, we have options—many of them. Our fate is not set, our history is not made—at least, not yet—but time is fast running out for all of us on this planet to find ways to ameliorate the worst effects of climate change and adapt to the others. My aim in this book is to consider one such option or pathway to a low-carbon future, namely, the ‘bio-economy’. Generally, the term bio-economy is used to describe an economy underpinned by the use of biological material like plants, residues, and waste as the input into the production of energy (e.g. biofuels), consumer goods (e.g. bioplastics), and manufacturing inputs (e.g. biochemicals), thereby replacing or substituting fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal (Matthews 2009; Kircher 2012; El-Chichakli et al. 2016). As with most things in life, it is more complex than this short definition suggests, but I’ll come back to the complicating factors in the following chapters. For now, it’s easiest to think of the bio-economy as a wholesale shift in the way our economies—and necessarily our societies and polities—are organized and coordinated such that they are no longer based (primarily) on fossil fuels.

At present, the bio-economy is a rather high-level policy or expert concept that most publics have simply never heard about. Even though both the European Union (EU) and The White House produced bio-economy policy strategies in 2012 (CEC 2012; White House 2012), it is unlikely these were even mentioned in the mainstream media at the time. This lack of public awareness might be changing as more and more policy and social actors get behind the bio-economy—see, for example, these recent posters by the Ontario Farmers Association and Canadian Renewable Fuels Association (see Fig. 1.1)—or as activist groups criticize it (e.g. TNI 2015). However, these examples aside, it’s likely that the bio-economy will remain a high-level policy vision and framework for the foreseeable future. That doesn’t mean that the bio-economy is not influential; increasingly, it is emerging as a key policy vision and framework around the world as more and more countries develop their own policy strategies (Staffas et al. 2013; German Bioeconomy Council 2015; Birch 2016a).

Fig. 1.1

Posters by the Ontario Farmers Association (left) and Canadian Renewable Fuels Association (right). (Credit: Pictures taken by author)

Hopefully this book will contribute to creating greater awareness and understanding about the bio-economy, not only its potential as a solution to climate change but also its limits and how we might resolve those limits in the pursuit of a low-carbon and sustainable future. In this introduction to the book, I start by outlining the threats posed by climate change and the need to transition to a low-carbon future, before I briefly outline the analytical approach I take in understanding the bio-economy and its positive and negative implications. In particular, I stress the need to analyse the ‘political-economic materialities’ of the bio-economy, something I’ve written about elsewhere (Birch and Calvert 2015; Birch 2017), in order to understand how the co-construction of markets and natures underpinning the bio-economy affects policy strategies and industrial sectors.

Our Global Climate Challenge

I started my research for this book in 2013 in order to understand the potential of different social and technical—or socio-technical—pathways as ways to ameliorate the worst, impending effects of climate change. The year before that I had read an article by the environmental campaigner Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone magazine. He highlighted three ‘scary’ numbers relevant to our current climate context:

• 2 °C
• 565 gigatons
• 2795 gigatons

McKibben points out that if we want to limit global temperature rises to 2 °C by the year 2100—the generally accepted and doable target agreed upon by diverse governments, agencies, and organizations around the world (e.g. HM Treasury 2006; Stern 2010)—then we cannot put more than 565 gigatons of CO₂ into the atmosphere. However, two major problems face us with this limit. First, at current rates, we will reach that limit by 2030. Second, and where the largest number comes in, the current fossil fuel reserves of companies (e.g. Exxon, Shell, Aramco) and governments (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Norway, Canada) around the world represent 2795 gigatons of CO₂. The real difficulty is that while:

…this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil…it’s already economically aboveground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. (McKibben 2012)

This means that these fossil fuels are already effectively spent; we’re already going to release five times the limit necessary to meet the 2 °C target as the result of current political-economic decisions and choices. The only way to stop this happening is to write off $20 trillion worth of assets that provide the resources for jobs, government spending, pensions and savings, and so on (also see Berners-Lee and Clark 2013; McKibben 2016). It is, therefore, vital to find alternative ways to not only organize and coordinate our economies but also to provide outlets for the massive capital investments currently sitting in coal beds, oil wells, and natural gas reservoirs. I’ll come back to this energy-finance transition issue at several points later in this book.

Obviously, numerous academics, activists, environmental organizations, policy-makers, politicians, and others had been concerned with climate change well before my own interest in the topic. There have been many policy responses over the last three decades, stretching back at least to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit organized by the United Nations (UN). The Rio Summit involved the signing of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was finally ratified in 1994, wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Neoliberal Bio-Economies?
• 3. Background to Emerging Bio-Economies
• 4. Bio-Economy Policy Visions
• 5. Legitimating Bio-Economies
• 6. Material Limits to Bio-Economies
• 7. Co-Constructing Markets and Natures in Bio-Economies
• 8. Conclusions: Alternative Bio-Economies
• Back Matter