Brian Elliott persuasively argues that climate change is not a natural
phenomenon but a political phenomenon: a symptom of neoliberal
governance. This helps us to understand how, across wealthy liberal
democracies, environmental concern has increasingly been framed as a
consumer responsibility issue rather than as a matter of structural
social-political transformation.
Thinking of a world truly beyond climate change requires us to reimagine
the state beyond its current neoliberal configuration. Elliott argues
that, in order to achieve this, environmental politics in the west needs
to renew the Marxist challenge to the global market's benign production
of social utility and construct a new non-apocalyptic politics of
nature.