We live on a fragile planet, yet we’ve built an economic system that rewards extraction over restoration. Every pound invested, every pension contribution, every trade – all of it shapes the world we’ll leave behind. The question is whether the system that brought us here can also help us out again.
That’s the challenge explored by Jonathon Porritt, Mike Berners-Lee and Joanne Etherton’s discussion about capitalism and the climate crisis hosted by the Global Returns Project. Their views differ in tone but share one clear message: we can’t afford to waste time arguing about whether to scrap capitalism or save it. We need to make it work for the planet, and we need to do it now.
The uncomfortable truth with the current model
Mike Berners-Lee opens with a blunt truth. Capitalism, as it’s currently designed, fails to look after the whole system it depends on. It’s brilliant at rewarding short-term gain, but terrible at safeguarding the shared resources, including the atmosphere, the oceans, and the soil.
He points to GDP, the go-to measure of economic progress, as a symptom of the problem. GDP counts the total market value of goods and services, but it ignores whether those activities improve lives or destroy ecosystems. You can level a forest and GDP goes up. You can restore one and GDP barely notices. When profit becomes the only prize, inequality rises and the planet picks up the bill.
Joanne Etherton adds a legal perspective, leading the climate finance work at ClientEarth. Her team’s research into hundreds of corporate reports found that only a handful even mentioned climate risk in their audited accounts. Without honest disclosure, investors can’t see where their money is fuelling harm. The result is a system that looks sophisticated on paper but continues to fund destruction by default.
Capitalism’s five building blocks
Jonathon Porritt, co-founder of Forum for the Future, suggests looking at capitalism piece by piece. Strip it down and you find five pillars: markets, profit, private property, accumulation and economic growth. Markets can be shaped for good. Profit can be constrained by fair rules. Property can be managed more equitably. But the last two pillars, endless accumulation and perpetual growth, are harder to reconcile with a finite planet. Capitalism without growth, Porritt says, is something no one has yet managed to design.
Still, he argues, reform beats revolution. Overthrowing the entire system isn’t realistic in the time we have left. “If we have to overthrow capitalism before we can get on with saving the planet,” he warns, “you can forget it.” The more pragmatic path is to transform capitalism from within by making it fairer, bounded by planetary limits, and responsive to the long term rather than the next quarter’s returns.
From voluntary pledges to binding rules
Voluntary action won’t deliver change at the speed or scale required. Companies publish glossy ESG reports and distant net-zero targets, yet too often their underlying business models remain untouched. As Joanne Etherton puts it, “There’s a lot of narrative, but not enough behaviour change.”
Both Etherton and Jonathon Porritt argue that the rules of the game must change. Transparency is a starting point, not a solution. What’s needed are clear, enforced standards, mandatory climate disclosure, credible transition plans and regulators with the authority to act. Without consistent government policy, even companies that want to move faster are held back by a tilted playing field.
Mike Berners-Lee points to one particularly powerful lever: pricing carbon at the point of extraction. If fossil fuels carry their true cost as they leave the ground, that signal flows through every product and decision downstream. Climate responsibility becomes a basic cost of doing business, not an optional extra.
But rules alone won’t do the job. Culture matters too. We don’t avoid harm only because it’s illegal, but because we understand it’s wrong. That same norm needs to apply to environmental damage, which is reinforced by education, social expectations and everyday choices. Pension holders asking where their money is invested. Employees and consumers are backing businesses that repair rather than exploit.
Where markets fall short & why value needs redefining
Some parts of the transition will never be fully delivered by markets alone. Public health, education, community resilience and the long-term stewardship of shared resources all require strong public institutions and non-profits. Porritt warns against the relentless “marketisation” of everything, pointing to COVID-19 as a reminder of what happens when essential systems are outsourced to profit-driven models.
Legal NGOs like ClientEarth play a vital role in this landscape, holding governments and companies to account when environmental law is ignored or greenwashing takes over. Without them, citizens would have little recourse to challenge failure or delay. This raises a deeper question about how we define value. Economists often argue that what isn’t priced gets destroyed, hence efforts to value nature as “natural capital.” Porritt is conflicted. Better accounting can correct blind spots but reducing ecosystems to balance-sheet entries risks losing sight of their intrinsic worth. Valuation should be a tool, not a truth.
The same tension runs through finance. Asset managers cannot maximise short-term returns and credibly claim to protect the planet. Protecting long-term value means redefining value itself to include climate risk, ecosystem collapse and social stability. Some investors are beginning to move in this direction, but progress remains uneven. ESG was meant to bring clarity, but too often it has delivered box-ticking instead. Companies with radically different impacts can score similarly, while the most important emissions, those embedded in supply chains and product use, are frequently sidelined.
The answer isn’t to abandon ESG, but to strengthen it. Assessments must distinguish between how a company operates and what it sells, properly account for Scope 3 emissions, and ask a simple qualitative question: Does this business model move us closer to, or further from, a 1.5°C world? Investor pressure can help close the gap between rhetoric and reality, but only at scale. Pension savers asking questions, trustees broadening their understanding of fiduciary duty, and asset owners demanding credible transition plans all matter.
Pressure, politics and the possibility of change
The pandemic showed that societies can change rapidly when they choose to. It also revealed how easily old systems reassert themselves. Much of the recovery money flowed back into the status quo, despite talk of “building back better.” The gap between words and action remains stark.
Still, none of the speakers end in despair. Young activists are forcing honesty into the conversation, refusing to accept delay disguised as realism. The technology to decarbonise already exists. The key levers of regulation, finance, culture, and civic pressure are already well understood.
Capitalism isn’t going away. But it can be re-engineered. Profit doesn’t have to come at the expense of life. Fixing the engine while we’re still driving it means hard rules, honest accounting and a broader definition of success; one that puts planetary stability and human wellbeing at the centre.
To learn more about what you can do to tackle climate change, watch this clip from Mike Berners-Lee here.