94. Climate Finance

Jamie Peck talks with Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber about their new book Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures. Responding to climate change is commonly understood as a financial challenge: What are the expected costs of the impacts of climate change? How much money is needed to reduce emissions to a safe level and to help people live in a changing climate? Who should pay? While these questions reflect the big issues of climate politics - about historical responsibility, unequal exposure and the terms of possible futures - they do not tell us a lot about the relationships between and contestations over climate change and finance capitalism. This book develops an expansive definition of climate finance and a critical framework for analysing its political economy. Drawing from a wide-range of case studies, the authors highlight the diversity, scale and contradictions of climate finance entanglements - from funding renewable energy, putting a price on carbon, responsible investing and financialising resilience. Sophie is an ARC DECRA Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Geography in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Gareth Bryant is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the University of Sydney. He works as a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Economy and as economist-in-residence with the Sydney Policy Lab. This interview is a part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism Book Club Podcast series