Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

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Climate Crisis and the Misconception of Growth

Timothy Mitchell

William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University

March 5, 2026, 5:00pm-7:00pm
Emerson Hall, Room 105, 25 Quincy Street

Abstract

In the face of climate catastrophe, why have existing conceptions of collective life appeared so impervious to critique? One concept stands out: the idea of the economy and our preoccupation with its continued growth. For most people, including its critics, economic growth appears as the inevitable movement of capitalist society, driven by a process of technological improvement or an endless accumulation of capital. It is almost never connected to capitalization, or the capitalist modes of indebting and extracting payment from the future. Growth is better understood as a device for securing the repayment of debt. This does not make it any less damaging to collective well-being. But it does allow growth to be grasped not as the inevitable movement of capitalist development but as a more recent arrangement that arises from—rather than simply causing—a mode of living at the expense of the future.

Panel

Christine A. Desan

Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Quinn Slobodian

Professor of International History, Boston University

Moderated by

Sheila Jasanoff

Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School

About the speaker

Timothy Mitchell is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. A political theorist and historian, his areas of research include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. He is the author and editor of several books, including Colonising Egypt (University of California Press, 1991), Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (University of California Press, 2002), and Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2012), and the forthcoming The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow (Verso, 2026).

Co-sponsored by Harvard University Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University Center for the Environment (A Center of the Salata Institute), and the McQuillan Institute.

Poster art by Alex Wellerstein, combining James Gillray’s “A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion” (1792) and “The Plumb-pudding in Danger” (1805).