Video Abstract - Climate rentierism after coal: forests, carbon offsets, and post-coal politics in the Appalachian coalfields by Gabe Schwartzman

Image credit to Mining.com

30 May 2024

The Krishna Bharadwaj and Eric Wolf Prize winner (2 of 2) of 2021-2022 Gabe Schwartzman takes readers through his award winning paper, Climate rentierism after coal: forests, carbon offsets, and post-coal politics in the Appalachian coalfields. The paper examines the drivers and consequences of carbon forestry offsets in Central Appalachia. In the wake of coal industry decline and resultant economic devastation, Schwartzman shows how investments in degraded forest land spurred by California’s carbon market reproduce longstanding forms of natural resource enclosure and exclusion and amount to a form of neo-rentierism. While these dynamics generate grievances that could be articulated by the Left, so far they have only strengthened the right-wing populism that has become entrenched in the region over the past decade. In this way, Schwartzman deploys an agrarian political economy lens to demonstrate the contradictions of green capitalist solutions to the climate crisis.

Find full article at the Journal of Peasant Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2022.2078710