I began our conversation by asking what motivated him to write his book.

I started writing the book after I'd published the previous book, Carbon Democracy, about the politics of oil and energy, and it was partly the things I hadn't managed to say in that book, including thinking about the power of the corporation at a time when the powers of corporations seem to be expanding continuously and wanting to understand the relationship of that, on the one hand, to energy politics and on the other, to climate politics.

And I realized I'd written a whole book about oil politics really saying nothing systematic about the history of the corporation and how it operated the way it did.

And there's a lot of studies of that, but none that took the line that seemed to me important, which is to see the corporation not just as a sort of powerful economic and political institution, but operating in terms of particular relationship to the future.

And the book evolved as thinking about the nature of this relationship to the future, beginning with corporations, but expanding to many other areas of economic and collective life.

And what I realized was that the modern shareholder corporation, its wealth, and from that its power, was based on promising the future.

The share is a claim on the future, and it sells those claims on the future.

It'd be great to know a little bit more.

Mm-hmm

... governments and other advocacy bodies, helping to sort of frame what, um, green space, what it might look like, or develop things like canopy cover targets for, for cities, you know, really big picture thinking things.

And then a lot of commercial practices like Oculus, where I worked at, like really goal of the projects that we worked on at Oculus was creating public spaces or at least creating some kind of public benefit.

So it was a re- it was really like the, the public spaces were the prize spaces, and they weren't always, you know, a, a, a state-owned or government-delivered park.

Often, it would be, um, well, what, what was known as privately owned public space, space like Wesley Place, one of the great projects I worked on at Oculus, was delivered by a developer on land that was owned by the church, but had a lease, so it's essentially private land.

Mm.

And then, um, in winter it gets really wet, 'cause it's cla- like you, where we're, like basically beneath the concrete is compacted clay.

The, like all of the topsoil was taken away, and the soil was, like compacted, road base put down, compacted, and then concrete on top.

So perhaps you could explain to the listeners how that logic emerged and why it proved so persuasive and possibly so pervasive over such a long period of time.

Right.

So the book has several lines of argument here.

On the one hand, there's nothing new about associating the history of capitalism with ecological destruction.

And the worse the climate crisis becomes, the more we realize the connection between a particular mode of organizing collective life and the process of making the planet more and more unlivable, not only for humans, but for other forms of life as well.

So that relationship between capitalism and ecological change Destruction is not in itself anything new, but the book does try and explain that relationship in slightly different terms.

And there's a couple of aspects to that.

So why do you think, it's a very broad question, a very ambitious one, why do you think recovering these histories is so important for understanding our present?

So perhaps you could explain to the listeners how that logic emerged and why has it proved so persuasive and possibly so pervasive over such a long period of time.

Right.

Um, so the book has several, um, lines of argument here.

I mean, on the one hand, um, uh, there's nothing new about associating the history of capitalism with ecological destruction.

And the worse, um, the climate crisis becam- becomes, the more we realize the, the connection, um, between, um, a particular mode of organizing collective life and the, the process of making the planet more and more unlivable, not only for humans, but for other forms of life as well.

So that relationship between, um, between capitalism and ecological destruction is not in itself anything new.

But the book does, um, try and, uh, uh, explain that relationship in slightly different terms.

Uh, so why do you think, it's a very broad question, a very ambitious one, uh, why do you think recovering these histories is so important for understanding our present?

take a

slightly different view there because as I've already suggested, I see capitalism actually based very directly on a set of attitudes towards the future and indeed on a set of very specific technologies for valuing the future.

de laquelle j'ai commencé par calculer la valeur d'un partenaire dans une entreprise et comment cette valeur changera au cours des dernières années ou décennies, a été centrale dans ce que nous appelons le capitalisme.

Je ne pense pas qu'il suffit de dire que nous ne calculons pas le futur, que nous ne valorisons pas le futur.

Et je pense que ce que le livre essaie de montrer est que nous le faisons, mais nous le faisons d'une manière très particulière.

selon un ensemble très spécifique de méthodes pour calculer ces valeurs, et spécifiquement des méthodes qui restent sur cette pratique dont le livre parle à longue durée et qui est difficile à résumer, de la discounting, de dire que vous pouvez avoir le futur, at a cheap rate because you are prepared to pay something for your claim on the future and again sharing a company is one example but anything that involves what is usually thought of in terms of interest of money gaining value over time but can also be thought of as it were through the other end of the telescope as that future value being made available more cheaply in the present all those Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada sort of driven simply by technological improvement again not an idea that I think we vastly overrate and not simply by some sort of fundamental rapaciousness of capital or capitalists or anything of that sort but by this very specific and strange way of extracting from the future and living at its expense that we've come to live with so that I think one can améliorer la compréhension de la destructivité écologique du capitalisme, en pensant plus profondément à ce sujet.

Ce n'est pas, comme ils le disent, un disdain général pour le futur, ou une mauvaise façon de le valoriser, mais des façons spécifiques et très effrayantes d'organiser son valeur.

It is present, but yes.

So perhaps you could explain to the listeners how that logic emerged and why has it proved so persuasive and possibly so pervasive over such a long period of time.

Right.

Um, so the book has several, um, lines of argument here.

I mean, on the one hand, um, uh, there's nothing new about associating the history of capitalism with ecological destruction.

And the worse, um, the climate crisis becam- becomes, the more we realize the, the connection, um, between, um, a particular mode of organizing collective life and the, the process of making the planet more and more unlivable, not only for humans but for other forms of life as well.

So that relationship between, um, between capitalism and ecological destruction is not in itself anything new.

But the book does, um, try and, uh, uh, explain that relationship in slightly different terms.

Uh, so why do you think, it's a very broad question, a very ambitious one, uh, why do you think recovering these histories is so important for understanding our present?

So perhaps you could explain to the listeners how that logic emerged and why has it proved so persuasive and possibly so pervasive over such a long period of time.

Right.

Um, so the book has several, um, lines of argument here.

I mean, on the one hand, um, uh, there's nothing new about associating the history of capitalism with ecological destruction.

And the worse, um, the climate crisis becam- becomes, the more we realize the, the connection, um, between, um, a particular mode of organizing collective life and the, the process of making the planet more and more unlivable, not only for humans, but for other forms of life as well.

So that relationship between, um, between capitalism and ecological destruction is not in itself anything new.

But the book does, um, try and, uh, uh, explain that relationship in slightly different terms.

Uh, so why do you think, it's a very broad question, a very ambitious one, uh, why do you think recovering these histories is so important for understanding our present?

And could you talk a little bit about maybe the juxtaposition or the compatibility between durability and delay, either in terms of, of finance and capital or perhaps infrastructure and colonial lines of logic?

Yeah, thanks.

I mean, obviously it's a huge question.

I mean, I think the most common ways we think about our relationship to the future under modernity, and certainly under the period of the last 150 years, is under perhaps two, two terms.

One would be of acceleration, the speeding up of time, and the other would be of the degree of sort of fragility or uncertainty that that speeding up of, of time gives us or leads us to.

So old sort of certainties that the future would be like the past disappear, uh, under that process of acceleration, and we become more and more uncertain, open to instability, open to risk.

And, um, those can be useful ways of thinking, but I think they include two other things that are going on, and I think the two words you mentioned, uh, durability and delay would be helpful.

So I want to give you a platform on which to, to say your piece, Tim, and [laughs] let us know, let us know what your thoughts are.