Ecological Political Economy: Climate, Unequal Exchange and Environmental Justice

Graduate course outline (proposed)

Course description

The climate crisis is usually taught as a problem of external costs: a market failure to be corrected by putting the right price on carbon. This course teaches it instead as a question of who and where. Who appropriates the land, energy and materials that growth requires, who bears the costs of their use, and how the structure of the world economy moves those resources from periphery to core. We begin with the founders of ecological economics and the limits-to-growth debate, read the political economy of capital, energy and nature from Ricardo to Moore and Malm, and then follow the Latin American structuralist and dependency tradition into the theory and measurement of ecologically unequal exchange. The second half turns to distribution: environmental justice in the United States and the environmentalism of the poor in the global South, the inequality of carbon emissions by income and wealth, and the movements that contest them.

The last part of the course asks what can be done, and how we would know. We compare carbon pricing with green investment and industrial policy, and green growth with degrowth, and we use the tools economists use to measure and model the transition: multi-regional input–output tables, to trace embodied land, materials and emissions through world trade, and stock-flow-consistent models in the tradition of Wynne Godley, to follow its consequences for growth, employment, finance and distribution. Students will leave able to read these debates critically and to carry out an empirical or modelling exercise of their own on a question that matters to them.

Structure. Five parts, each building on the one before: foundations (what the economy is, physically) → capital and nature (why it grows the way it does) → centre and periphery (where the costs fall between countries) → distribution and justice (where they fall within them, and who resists) → policy and modelling (what can be done, and how to evaluate it). Each week is organised around one question.

Format. 14 weeks. Core readings of one book or two to three articles a week; further reading for the final paper. Assessment: weekly short response papers; one class presentation; a final paper that measures or models one flow of the student’s choice (a commodity chain, a country’s embodied trade balance, the distribution of a carbon tax, a transition scenario).

Part I — Foundations: the economy as a metabolic system

1. What is ecological economics? The economy as an open system inside a finite one; costs shifted onto third parties and nature. Core: K. William Kapp, The Social Costs of Private Enterprise (1950), selected chapters; Kenneth Boulding, “The economics of the coming spaceship Earth” (1966).

2. Entropy, scale and the stationary state. Is the limit physical, or social? Core: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), selections; Herman Daly, Steady-State Economics (1977), selections. Against both: my paper Ecology without class struggle is just gardening: Ricardo’s differential rent, not the entropy law, gives the mechanism of the limits to growth; the stationary state is a question of distribution.

3. The limits-to-growth debate. Core: Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens, The Limits to Growth (1972); William D. Nordhaus, “World dynamics: measurement without data”, Economic Journal 83(332), 1973; Graham M. Turner, “A comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30 years of reality”, Global Environmental Change 18(3), 2008.

Part II — Capital and nature

4. Metabolic rift, world-ecology and social reproduction. Does capitalism act on nature, or through it? Core: Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015); John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (2000), selections; Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism (2022), selections. Further: Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene (2023); Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (1986); Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017).

5. Fossil capital and energy. Why did capital turn to coal, and what did that do to labour and democracy? Core: Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital (2016); Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy (2011), selections. Further: Malm, The Progress of This Storm (2018), his critique of Moore; Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization (2017).

Part III — Centre and periphery

6. Open veins and the terms of trade. Why does the periphery export more and more to import the same? Core: Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1971; English: Open Veins of Latin America); Raúl Prebisch (1950) and Hans Singer (1950) on the secular decline of the primary-commodity terms of trade; the Singer hypothesis restated in physical terms: the periphery exports more land, energy and materials per unit of value it imports. Further: Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange (1972).

7. Ecologically unequal exchange: theory and measurement. Core: Alf Hornborg, “Towards an ecological theory of unequal exchange”, Ecological Economics 25(1), 1998; Dorninger et al., “Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange”, Ecological Economics 179 (2021); Hickel, Dorninger, Wieland and Suwandi, “Imperialist appropriation in the world economy”, Global Environmental Change 73 (2022). Further: Stephen Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon (1985); Hornborg, Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange (2011); Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism (2021); Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living (2021); Jason Hickel, The Divide (2017).

8. Land, extraction and food. Who controls land, and what does the transition need from it? Core: Michael Albertus, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (Basic Books, 2025); Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals (2020), on Ecuador. Further: Maristella Svampa, Neo-extractivism in Latin America (2019); Philip McMichael, Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions (Fernwood, 2013).

Part IV — Distribution and justice

9. Ecological distribution conflicts, South and North. Core: Joan Martínez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor (2002), with the Environmental Justice Atlas as data; Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie (1990); United Church of Christ, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States (1987); James K. Boyce, “Inequality as a cause of environmental degradation”, Ecological Economics 11(3), 1994.

10. Carbon inequality and climate debt. Who emits, by income and wealth, and what is owed? Core: Lucas Chancel, “Global carbon inequality over 1990–2019”, Nature Sustainability 5 (2022); Oxfam, Climate Equality: A Planet for the 99% (2023), based on research with the Stockholm Environment Institute; Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations (2022), selections.

11. Movements, labour and strategy. Core: Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021); Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future (2019), on Standing Rock; Matthew Huber, Climate Change as Class War (2022), selections. Further: Dimitris Stevis and Romain Felli, “Global labour unions and just transition to a green economy”, International Environmental Agreements 15(1), 2015.

Part V — Policy and modelling

12. Carbon pricing and its critics. Is a price on carbon enough? Core: William D. Nordhaus, “Optimal greenhouse-gas reductions and tax policy in the ‘DICE’ model”, American Economic Review 83(2), 1993; Jessica F. Green, “Does carbon pricing reduce emissions? A review of ex-post analyses”, Environmental Research Letters 16(4), 2021; Rosenbloom, Markard, Geels and Fuenfschilling, “Why carbon pricing is not sufficient to mitigate climate change”, PNAS 117(16), 2020; Stern, Stiglitz and Taylor, “The economics of immense risk, urgent action and radical change”, Journal of Economic Methodology 29(3), 2022. The progressive case for it: James K. Boyce, The Case for Carbon Dividends (2019). Against these: Brett Christophers, The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet (Verso, 2024), selections: what governs investment in renewables is not the price of carbon or the cost of clean power but expected profitability, and electricity markets make renewables cheap but unprofitable, which is the case for public ownership and planning; my paper with Willi Semmler, “Time scales of the low-carbon transition”, Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 244(3), 2024: in a multi-sector model, carbon pricing alone cannot phase out the carbon sector in time; green investment has to do most of the work. Further: Lilliestam, Patt and Bersalli, “The effect of carbon pricing on technological change for full energy decarbonization”, WIREs Climate Change 12(1), 2021; Steve Keen, “The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change”, Globalizations (2020).

13. Green growth, degrowth and green industrial policy. Who manufactures the transition, who mines for it, and who pays for it? Core: Jason Hickel, Less is More (2020); Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis, “Is green growth possible?”, New Political Economy 25(4), 2020; Daniela Gabor, “The Wall Street Consensus”, Development and Change 52(3), 2021; Allan, Lewis and Oatley, “Green industrial policy and the global transformation of climate politics”, Global Environmental Politics 21(4), 2021. Further: Giorgos Kallis, Degrowth (2018); Mariana Mazzucato on mission-oriented policy; Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, Overshoot (2024); Adrienne Buller, The Value of a Whale (2022); Bolton et al., The Green Swan (BIS, 2020); sovereign debt, the cost of capital and the Bridgetown Initiative.

14. Modelling the transition, and student presentations. Measuring and modelling the flows. Core: Wynne Godley and Marc Lavoie, Monetary Economics (2007), selected chapters; Dafermos, Nikolaidi and Galanis, “A stock-flow-fund ecological macroeconomic model”, Ecological Economics 131 (2017); Taylor, Rezai and Foley, “An integrated approach to climate change, income distribution, employment, and economic growth”, Ecological Economics 121 (2016); my paper on the macroeconomic consequences of ecologically unequal exchange (two regions, 54 industries each, under revision at Ecological Economics). Further: Tim Jackson and Peter Victor’s LowGrow stock-flow-consistent model for Canada, Ecological Economics (2020); footprints and embodied trade in EXIOBASE or GLORIA.