Since the publication of the Stern Review, economists have started to ask more normative questions about climate change. Should we act now or tomorrow? What is the best theoretical carbon price to reach long-term abatement targets? How do we discount the long-term costs and benefits of climate change? This provocative book argues that these are the wrong sorts of questions to ask because they don't take into account the policies that have already been implemented. Instead, it urges us to concentrate on existing policies and tools by showing how the development of carbon markets could dramatically reduce world greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, triggering policies to build a new low-carbon energy system while restructuring the way agriculture interacts with forests. This provides an innovative perspective on how a post-Kyoto international climate regime could emerge from agreements between the main GHG emitters capping their emissions and building an international carbon market.

Process engineering emerged at the beginning of the 20th Century and has become an essential scientific discipline for the matter and energy processing industries. Its success is incontrovertible, with the exponential increase in techniques and innovations. Rapid advances in new technologies such as artificial intelligence, as well as current societal needs sustainable development, climate change, renewable energy, the environment are developments that must be taken into account in industrial renewal. Process Engineering Renewal 2 focuses on research in process engineering, which is partly overshadowed by the sciences that contribute to its development. The external constraints of this interface science must be seen in relation to conservation, sustainable development, global warming, etc., which are linked to current success and the difficulty of taking risks in research.

Many believe economic growth is incompatible with ecological preservation. Green Capital challenges this argument by shifting our focus away from the scarcity of raw materials and toward the deterioration of the great natural regulatory functions (such as the climate system, the water cycle, and biodiversity). Although we can find substitutes for scarce natural resources, we cannot replace a natural regulatory system, which is incredibly complex. It is therefore critical that we introduce a new price into the economy that measures the costs of damage to these regulatory functions. This change in perspective justifies such innovations as the carbon tax, which addresses not the scarcity of carbon but the inability of the atmosphere to absorb large amounts of carbon without upsetting the climate system. Brokering a sustainable peace between ecology and the economy, Green Capital describes a range of valuation schemes and their contribution to the goals of green capitalism, proposing a new approach to natural resources that benefits both businesses and the environment.

The solutions and tools generally offered to policymakers on environmental issues – such as carbon pricing and environmental taxation – most often emanate from neoclassical economists. This book shows that the tools of these economists are ineffective for the job and must be replaced by methods from the sphere of ecological accounting. The work has four main themes: First, the book provides a presentation and criticism of the tools traditionally proposed by neoclassical economists. Adopting a historical perspective, this section shows how these tools have evolved over time and explores some of the theoretical criticisms which have been leveled at them. Second, the book shows how mainstream economists have moved away from more pragmatic and efficient solutions because of their ignorance of the realities of management, in particular, corporate accounting, and their ideologically driven desire to avoid attacking the capitalist model. Third, a toolkit of anti-capitalist ecological accounting is outlined, showcasing the distinct advantages of this approach for the environmental crises. And finally the book considers the concrete possibilities of a rapid application of these new tools to combat the immediate threats we are facing. The book will interest all readers who want to understand how anti-capitalist ecological accounting can contribute to cooling and saving the planet, in particular readers in ecological economics and accounting.