The green transition in a hybrid totality Heterodox views on the zero-emission prospect

Abstract

The thesis takes as research objective the prospect of a pathway to a zero-emission economy in the climate transition literature, coined the Transition Question. It is posited that the prescriptive politics for the climate transition within the orthodox approaches is inadequate. Part I displays a historical survey of the fields Marxism and ecological economics that supports the notion that a heterodox alternative can be found in combination of these approaches. Taking on the heterodox counterpart to the literature that guides current policies, the thesis undertakes a systematic literature search which inquiries to the prospect of transitioning. Severe deficits in literature that try to ground the discrepancy between trajectory and destination are identified. Analytics that account for global dynamics are similarly missing. Most sampled literature rejects the project of green growth and tendentially defers to the alternative transition project of degrowth. Advancing from a width study to a depth study in Part II, the thesis analyses the sampled literature through the methods of immanent critique and systematic dialectic. This approach critiques and reconstructs the arguments in the literature in a double movement. It is found that heterodox literature fails to falsify green growth, but the current paradigm remains a low-confidence prospect. The Transition Question is then expressed in the theoretical hypothesis of a hybrid totality. The hybrid totality emerges as the conclusion of the systematic dialectic grounding the research objective and completing the literature analysis. The act of planting seeds for climate imaginations that compliments the present critique is lastly undertaken.