Green New Deal —or Globalisation Lite?

In response to global climate crisis and the breakdown of international financial institutions, green new deals are being discussed in local,

national, regional and international settings. But the word ‘deal’ gives the lie to new, for these are mostly trade-off packages designed to hold together the narrow political arena of business-as-usual. The Transatlantic Green New Deal, the Global Green New Deal, as well as British and Australian versions, look rather like a revved-up Hobbesian social contract, drafted in the realisation that life under global capitalism is more ‘nasty, brutish and short’ than ever before. The outline of the contract is on the

table, but only one voice is represented in the text.

Class difference appears only as an employment statistic and the systematic exploitations of race and gender that underpin the global economy are

ignored. The neocolonial South, the domestic North, and material nature at large, remain sites of subsumption in green new deal discourse.