Financialisation of Climate Futures: An Environmental Justice Analysis of Market Mechanisms in New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

This article examines the intersection of global finance and ecological collapse in Kim Stanley Robinson’s speculative novel New York 2140. The novel takes place in a future Manhattan, significantly transformed by two enormous “pulses” in sea-level rise. The outcome is a “Super-Venice” in which the machinery of neoliberal capitalism has not only survived but adapted to profit from the destruction. This paper examines, from an environmental justice perspective, the ways in which the financialisation of climate change,
through the development of the Intertidal Property Pricing Index, intensifies existing social inequalities.
The city’s elites escape to the “sky-villages” of the dry north or the inland security of Denver, while the
dispossessed majority inhabit the precarious, half-submerged buildings of the intertidal zone. The novel
suggests that the market’s attempt to commodify the flood is a form of “enclosure” of the commons, where
the fundamental human right to housing is squandered to the caprices of speculative capital. The article
tracks the narrative threads of characters like quant-trader Franklin Garr and the residents of the MetLife
tower and shows how the residents eventually manipulate the instability of the financial system to their
advantage to stage a “householders’ strike”. This revolutionary act contests the hegemony of finance over
the capitalist world ecology and proposes that climate justice is only achievable through the reclamation
of the commons and a fundamental repudiation of market-led adaptation strategies.