To Freeze the Thames

Geo-Science, Social Risk and Climate Struggles

Is advanced-industrial capitalism capable of finding solutions for the environmental devastation it causes? Or are the logics of capitalism and environmental sustainability inherently and irreconcilably at odds?

This session of the Capitalism Workshop explores the economics and politics surrounding natural geo-engineering – re-wilding agricultural land, freed up by compulsory veganism – to replicate the hemispheric cooling of the Little Ice Age. It features Troy Vettese, whose article “To Freeze the Thames” was recently published in New Left Review (Debating Green Strategy).

Introduced by Greg Albo. Presentations by:

• Troy Vettese is an environmental historian at New York University, whose dissertation is on the relationship between the tar sands industry and market-based environmental regulation.
• Gordon Laxer is the founding Director and former head of Parkland Institute (1996-2011) at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, a Political Economist and professor emeritus at the University of Alberta. He is author of After the Sands: Energy and Ecological Security for Canadians and several reports including “Act or Be Acted Upon: The Case for Phasing out Alberta’s Sands.”
• Umair Muhammad is a PhD student at York University, whose research focuses on the political economy of the environment. Umair is the author of Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism, and he has been a community organizer for nine years.

Recorded in Toronto, 9 January 2019.