Over the last two decades, the mainstream discourse has been permeated by concerns for the planet’s wellbeing as we gain increasing awareness of the dangers of climate change.
With this, comes a global push calling for sustainability and wider efforts to combat the effects of a changing climate. Government initiatives and companies make an effort to brand themselves as ‘sustainable’ or ‘eco-friendly’, in a bid to live up to the standards set by scientists and climate activists. Yet these attempts seem to lack any substance, largely because their fulfilment is not compatible with our current economic model.
This is the paradox of ‘green capitalism’ – which is generally regarded to be 'the use of capitalism and free-market forces to mitigate the effects of climate change'. Its supporters suggest that scientific and technological innovation, fostered by capitalism, will give rise to a host of potential solutions for the issues that the planet faces. Yet as long as green capitalism is profit-driven, planet conservation will remain secondary.
Take the Paris Agreement, which was adopted in 2015 and brought into force in 2016, has been described as a 'landmark’ in the multilateral climate change process. For the first time, a legally binding international treaty on climate change was brought into effect. However, its primary goal – to ‘hold the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’ and attempt ‘to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels’ –struggles to be met.
2024 marked the first single year in which global average surface temperature rose more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. As Professor Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), stated in a report published in 2025: ‘While a single year above 1.5°C of warming does not indicate that the long-term temperature goals of the Paris Agreement are out of reach, it is a wake-up call that we are increasing the risks to our lives, economies and the planet’.
The issue here is that the Paris Agreement, whilst groundbreaking on paper, holds very little tangible value in a world where states and corporations continue to pursue economic gain above all else.
In order to meet the goals set by the Paris Agreement, actors would have to accept that their economic growth may have to be somewhat restrained. Yet under modern capitalism, this is not considered as a viable option. International climate action treaties made under its dominance are thus reduced to little more than symbolic gestures to placate growing concerns from world populations.
Nevertheless, the effort to appear progressive in combatting the crisis remains important to many (perhaps more important than making actual progress) – not just to governments and policymakers, but to corporations who see an opportunity for profit.
When green policy becomes a profitable opportunity, we lose sight of what it actually means to work for a ‘greener’ future. Metal water bottles and bamboo toothbrushes may well be the more sustainable option, but consumerism itself is not sustainable in the long run. Modern capitalism is constantly chasing profit and relying heavily on consumption, even as we consume more than we can sustainably produce.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), global material use has more than tripled since 1970, increasing from 27 billion tons to over 100 billion tons annually. This points to a concerning trend, in which our rate of consumption is not slowing, or even maintaining a stable rate, but is rapidly increasing – when it urgently needs to be reduced.
In an interview with Sentient Media, Laura Fox, environmental lawyer and research scholar at Yale Law School, highlighted that both our economic model and recent technological developments contribute massively to a culture of overconsumption. So ultimately green capitalism is still capitalism and cannot be wholly compatible with combatting the climate crisis.
This does not mean that we, as individuals and consumers, cannot limit our consumption or adopt more ‘eco-friendly’ spending habits – nor that it should be labelled a futile effort. But we should remain sceptical of brands that use greenwashing tactics; greenwashing is the practice of making misleading claims to consumers about the environmental benefits of products, services or a company. Arguably, this is a symptom of green capitalism.
Saving the planet will not be done via consumption, regardless of how ‘eco-friendly’ a product claims to be on the packaging. It is difficult to escape consumerism altogether, and there is a risk of putting too much responsibility on the individual to solve problems created largely by governments and powerful companies. However, a stand against excessive consumerism and an awareness that the majority of corporations do not have the environment’s interests at heart is a good start in combatting the myth of green capitalism.