Emergency Capitalism as a Legitimation Regime

How does capitalism hold power in the climate emergency? Scholars have conventionally thought of capitalism's power as a function of its ability to leverage market structures, political institutions, social class composition, technology, and the modes of production that technology dictates. This paper argues that tackling this question also requires investigating the need for capital's power to be legitimate. It considers a synergistic nexus of financial rating agencies, asset managers, and big business that purport to invest in companies meeting certain environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sustainability standards. With a capacious vision to reorient modern capitalism from the maximisation of shareholder to stakeholder value, proponents of ESG seek to reward sustainable companies with trillions of dollars in cheap capital investments such that they grow faster, and incentivise all other companies to join in for an ever-compounding corporate resistance against climate change. In reality, ESG standards are engineered to have no discernible environmental impact and continue to reward the status quo of growth and profit. As a distinct regime, this insipient emergency capitalism effectively functions as an ideological tool to re-legitimise capitalism as the panacea for the climate emergency. Rather than saving the world from the ravages of climate change, the regime helps its proponents pre-empt political or regulatory backlash to their role as major polluters, and facilitate their position as 'too big to fail' when future climate disasters strike.