Eco-Capitalism: Carbon Money, Climate Finance, and Sustainable Development

Our planet faces a systemic threat from climate change, which the world community of nations is ill-prepared to address, and this book argues that a new form of ecologically conscious capitalism is needed in order to tackle this serious and rising threat. While the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 has finally implemented a global climate policy regime, its modest means belie its ambitious goals. Our institutional financial organizations are not equipped to deal with the problems that any credible commitment to a low-carbon economy will have to confront. We will have to go beyond cap-and-trade schemes and limited carbon taxes to cut greenhouse gas emissions substantially in due time. This book offers a way forward toward that goal, with a conceptual framework that brings environmental preservation back into our macro-economic growth and forecasting models. This framework obliges firms to consider other goals beyond shareholder value maximization, outlining the principal tenets of a climate-friendly finance and introducing a new type of money linked to climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.

About the Author

Robert Guttmann is Augustus B. Weller Chair in Economics at Hofstra University, USA, and he is also affiliated with the Centre d’Économie Paris Nord (CEPN) of the Université Paris XIII in France. He studied in Vienna and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, before obtaining his PhD at the University of Greenwich, UK. He won “Distinguished Teacher of the Year” awards at Hofstra in 1989, 2004, and 2012. Professor Guttmann teaches international economics, monetary economics, financial regulation, and economic integration in the European Union. An expert in money and banking, international finance, and monetary theory, he has published numerous books and journal articles, including his best-selling books How Credit-Money Shapes the Economy , Cybercash , and Finance-Led Capitalism .