Sydney Environment Institute

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LUNCHTIME SEMINAR SERIES
Creative self-destruction: Corporate responses to climate change as political myths

Christopher Wright
Professor of Organisational Studies,
The University of Sydney Business School

Despite the dire implications of climate change, governments and societies have failed to take comprehensive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This paper argues that a major reason for the lack of social and political engagement with climate change is the way in which political myths reinforce the dominance of a capitalist imaginary of endless economic growth. We outline how the myths of corporate environmentalism, corporate citizenship and corporate omnipotence absorb and adapt the critique of corporate capitalism, while enabling ever more imaginative ways of exploiting nature; a process of ‘creative self-destruction’. Rather than seeking to falsify these myths, we explore how they are supported and what they seek to achieve. Revealing the nature of current political myths in relation to climate change is, we argue, a necessary first step to constructing alternative imaginaries.