"The Green New Deal": A talk with Melinda Cooper April 14, 2009

In the wake of the financial crisis, the question of a global insurer of last resort has once again moved centre stage. If brought into effect, such an authority would not only be responsible for underwriting accidents, both meteorological and financial, but also for ensuring the credibility of investments in the earth's future. At the same time, the project of a Global Green New Deal, espoused by the United Nations and the incoming Obama administration, aspires both to reregulate the volatilities of the weather and to launch a new regime of accumulation founded on natural capital, ecosystems' services and green jobs. As suggested by the return to Keynes, the Green New Deal comprises not only a political/legislative regime of labour regulation and "labour rights" but also a properly genealogical/sexual project of social welfare.

Melinda Cooper graduated from the University of Paris VIII in 2001. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Sydney, Australia, and is also an Honorary Lecturer at the Centre for Biomedicine and Society, Kings College, London. She is the author of Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Washington University Press, 2008) and is currently working on two new book ideas - one on the project of the green new deal or green economy, the second (in collaboration with Catherine Waldby) called "Clinical Labour: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy," which reconfigures tissue donation and human subject experimentation as forms of labour.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu