Save Planet Earth with a Clean Energy Global Commons

Governments everywhere are failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to ward off dangerous increases in average annual temperature.  We are already too late to avoid a 1 degree Celsius increase, will have to be very lucky to head off a 1.5 increase, and corporations and governments are already doing studies to estimate the effects of of a 4.0 increase as ‘realistic’ scenarios.  Researchers agree that the effects of such increases will be disastrous for people, especially in poorer countries and in the global South, but some studies indicate that corporate profits may not be hurt much at all (Economist May 23, 2020). 

But many of us may feel reassured by the news stories we read and the ads we see about the plans of private corporations, indeed major oil and gas companies, to invest in solar and wind ‘clean energy’.  There are multiple reports that both solar and wind have already become ‘price competitive’ with coal, oil and gas.  And both conservative private entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and social-democratic progressives in the US and elsewhere are confidently promoting their own versions of a ‘Green New Deal’ -- government programmes to coordinate and subsidize (their own country’s) private corporations to capture market share in a new clean energy industry, that can produce millions of ‘green jobs’ for their citizens, to compensate for losses due to big reductions in ‘dirty’ energy (oil, gas or coal fossil-based) jobs. Win-win, or so we are told.

Conservatives and Progressives Promote their own Versions of a Green New Deal to Reduce Fossil Fuel Use by Increasing Solar and Wind

The only real thing that appears to be preventing the relatively painless or at least quick and deliberate replacement of dirty energy production with clean energy are the ‘climate change deniers’ -- the oil, gas and coal producers, and the politicians who try to protect them from having to reduce their production and emissions, by denying that fossil combustion emissions are the overwhelming direct cause of global warming.  They are certainly singled out by environmentalists and protesters as the fundamental obstacle.   Barrack Obama’s vice-president Joe Biden is closely allied with former US vice-president Al Gore, maker of the influential 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth.  If he can beat Trump in November 2020, a president who ‘listens to the scientists’, and who supports the ideas of Gates and others for a made-in-America clean energy industry, can accelerate the progress already being made in replacing dirty with clean energy. 

It is certainly theoretically and practically possible for all of this to happen.  But the simple fact is that it is not happening.  [See The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (Tim Duggan Books, 2019) for a reality check grounded in dozens of up to date facts.]  And the main obstacles are not anywhere near reducible to the crude climate change deniers.  In fact, as Swedish Human Ecology professor Andreas Malm notes in his tightly argued and documented book, Fossil Capital (Verso, 2016),  the past 15 to 20 years have seen the biggest expansion in the production and use of fossil fuels in human history (p328).  In the US, it was Barrack Obama, closely allied in this thinking with both Gates and Gore and of course his vice-president Biden, who presided over and promoted the massive expansion of oil and natural gas extraction through shale fracking, in order to ‘end US dependence on Middle Eastern oil’. 

Greenhouse gas emissions have not always been with us.  They only started to increase significantly as the result of the ‘Industrial Revolution’ in Britain from 1750 to 1850 and beyond, that established the first country with a hegemonic capitalist economy.  The biggest cause was the burning of coal by cotton mills and other industrial plants to fuel the steam engines pioneered in the 1770s by Robert Watt.  Coal-fueled factories in the big cities replaced water-fueled ones in the river valleys of northern England, dirty replaced clean, as the main energy source.

In School We Learned the Myth that the Industrial Revolution was the Instant Triumph of Science and New Technology instead of the Victory of an Elite of Owners Over Working People

But not right away, not at all, as the myth that we learned in school about the industrial revolution being the instant result of the invention of breakthrough technology told us.  The massive shift from water to coal was delayed by about 80 years to around 1850, and, as Malm documents in detail, it did not take place because coal all of a sudden became (or ever was) either cheaper or technically superior to water.  It took place because all of a sudden capitalists could no longer maximize profit using what Marx called the ‘absolute surplus value’ extraction business model, and had to switch to the one we still have in relatively rich countries today, what he called the ‘relative surplus value’ extraction model.  It took place because decades of working class resistance to the factory system, culminating in the world’s first and biggest 1842 general strike, resulted in government-legislated limits on the number of hours employers could make workers work each day and on the use of child labour to do much of the labour.

Then as now, industrial pollution of all kinds had many immediate noticeable negative effects (‘satanic mills’) and others, such as health effects on workers and people living near the plants, that took longer to become clearly visible.  The impact of the narrower subset of pollution caused by industries that specifically increases emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has taken humankind much longer to recognize.  Global warming has been building up since 1750, but scientists only began to sound the alarm loudly in the 1980s.

While delayed in the visible effect on average global temperature, the constant increase in fossil fuel emissions, and the destruction it wreaks on planet earth, is also cumulative and irreversible.  It is now understood that, like Covid-19 infections,  global warming is following a geometric expansion curve upwards.  Hence the sooner the actions to suppress emissions, the greater the effect.  Later actions have lesser impact, and are literally too late to change a lot of irreversible damage.  It is a ticking time bomb going off slowly and imperceptibly, and then in very visible explosive impacts that cannot be avoided or reversed. 

Ecomodernists Try to Explain the Post-Industrial Revolution that gave us Accelerated Global Warming as a Problem of Out-Dated Technology rather than a Problem with our Economic Model

Fossil fuels are estimated to account for over 90 percent of current carbon dioxide emissions (p11).  Yet fully 50 percent of all the carbon dioxide emissions due to the combustion of fossil fuels from 1751 to 2010 have occurred since 1986, and the rate of growth since the year 2000 has been triple that of the 1990s (p328).  This exposes a second big myth about the causes of high emissions, what Malm refers to as the Ecomodernism theory, that emissions go down as we move into  a post-industrial and more highly automated AI and digital driven world economy, and that it is only the poorer countries like China that are still in the old ‘industrial capitalism stage’ who are the cause of the continuation of high warming-causing emissions. 

Clean energy may be becoming more widely available and price competitive, and it may be beginning to get some market share in some countries, but fossil fuel production and use continues its sharp increase.  The rise in one is not causing a decline in the other.  It is extremely unlikely that it ever will.  Other things will have to change to produce that result.  I will argue below for what I call a Global Commons based solution.  I will propose how the left should change the ways it is framing the problem and start focussing its critique and its demands, slogans and proposals on the false wishful thinking Consumer Market solution of Gore, Gates, Biden and even the progressive advocates of national-level Green New Deals.  The climate change deniers have already lost the argument.  We need to put them out of governmental power, and intensify the sharpness of our attacks on the denialist position, but the real debate now is between a nation-state level and private sector solution that is very unlikely to ever work, and a realistic left-wing one that will face enormous vested interest obstacles but can work.

And there’s the rub. The Green New Deal solutions, and the analysis of the causes of global warming that it is based on, assume that a rise in clean will produce a decline in dirty through the operation of market forces, by innovating technologically and getting the price of clean relative to dirty energy down so that consumers, businesses and individual consumers, will readily make the switch.  There are three main features of what I will sometimes call the Consumer Market (or just Market) solution.  First, massive taxpayer subsidies to ‘our country’s’ entrepreneurs to build clean energy (above all solar but also wind and some other) plants, and to fund the infrastructure for transmission and storage of the electrical energy those clean plants would produce.  This is the core of the Green New Deal component.  Second, some variety of a carbon tax on greenhouse emissions imposed on both business and individual consumers, to make dirty relatively more expensive so they will switch to a clean energy supplier.  Third, support for various ‘geoengineering’ technological fixes for emissions after they are allowed to be produced, either various forms of blocking some of the rays from the sun, or carbon capture and burial.  Even many progressive scientists rely on this with the argument that it will at least buy us some time by slowing down the rate of increase in warming (if not in pollution and poisoning).

Green New Deal Thinking Assumes that Boosting Clean Energy Production Will Reduce Dirty Energy Production -- but It Is Not and It Will Not

There is a lot to unpack here and I will of necessity leave a lot of the facts and arguments and subarguments out.  My goal is to provide you with enough facts and argument to ground a set of proposals about how the left needs to make a basic shift in the way most of us have been framing the issue of global warming, its causes and the solutions.  I urge you to read Malm’s Fossil Capital and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything and Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth and follow their bibliographies and notes to get a fuller story.  Also go to https://www.monbiot.com to read Guardian columnist and author George Monbiot.

The argument is in three parts, followed by a set of conclusions about what progressives might do differently given the analysis of the obstacles to change.  There is also a postscript about non-progressive ideologies posing as progressive ones, like post-industrial/post-materialist theory and the Anthropocene thesis, that Malm critiques under the general heading of Ecomodernism. 

First, I will present Malm’s account of what really happened in Britain’s Industrial Revolution, why dirty did not replace clean until capitalist employers were forced to change their business model for maximizing profit.  This discussion will identify multiple factors or variables that are still decisive in explaining why we are not changing from dirty back to clean today, not if we rely on magical new technologies and market mechanisms to produce the change.  Section two argues that policies like the Green New Deal that presume that an increase in clean energy will result in a significant decline in dirty energy, let alone ground policies to actually replace it, are misguided.  Section three presents facts and figures to document the distinct set of factors that are preventing any decline in dirty production, that is quick enough or big enough in amount, to ward off disastrous global warming.  Section four puts forward ideas about how progressives could learn from Malm and Klein and so many others, and change the focus of our critiques as well as the demands and slogans that we foreground.  Then there is the postscript on Ecomodernist myths.

(1) WHY THE CHANGE FROM CLEAN TO DIRTY WAS DELAYED IN BRITAIN’S INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Contrary to what we learn in school, the Industrial Revolution began with wind and water powered mills adjacent to rivers.  It did not begin with the coal-fired steam engine production made possible by the James Watts inventions of the 1770s until many decades later, becoming especially widespread after 1848.  Why did industrialists begin with this version of clean energy?  Put simply, water power was both cheaper and more efficient, and hence it enabled mill owners to make more profit than if they used coal.

Why did they wait so long to switch to coal and then switch over massively?  (Malm documents conclusively that the marginal utility neo-Ricardian argument that there would be a shift because of a decline in the availability and price and quality of the old fuel relative to the new one was not supported by any facts – there was no change in that between 1750 and 1850).  The main reason is that the first generations of people who were forced to leave their home-based craft shops to work in factories fought like hell against ‘wage slavery’.  They did so with various forms of individual resistance, the working class Chartist movement political agitation for democratic rights, and workplace strikes culminating in the massive and sustained 1842 national general strike.  They fought what they experienced as a form of enslavement and submission to an employer-dictator, imposing ‘factory discipline’ that nearly doubled the working day of previous generations.  Those struggles eventually resulted in partial victories by the end of the 1840s – legislation limiting the work day to ten hours and the beginnings of expansion of the right to vote to include males who were not property owners. 

Mill Owners only Switched to Coal after Working Class Movements Waged Strikes and Political Protests and Won the Ten Hour Day and the Promise of Votes for (Male) Workers

Mill owners could no longer maximize profit by extracting what Marx refers to as ‘absolute surplus value’ (working workers harder and longer to the limits of human tolerance).  They had to switch to extracting ‘relative surplus value’, by replacing human labour with machines as much as possible (automation), and by constantly reorganizing the work to maximize the intensity and productivity of the labourers (more micro-management).  But workers did not make the switch voluntarily.  They had to be coerced by two sets of expropriations by the upper classes (and two other related commodifications) that had begun generations earlier, but were now speeded up. 

First, people were denied access to the free resources of the historic Commons (for water, wood, plants and minerals, grazing, vegetable gardens etc) that were indispensable to home-based crafts production.  They were deprived of independent means of subsistence, and had to move to the towns and cities, where their only option was to sell their labour to an owner of means of production.  Crucially this created an oversupply of potential wage labourers, pools of surplus labour, a ‘reserve army of labour’, that allowed the employer to dictate terms.

Second, Nature itself had to be marketized and privatized (i.e. become a buyable and sellable commodity).  This process even more directly expelled peasants and craftspeople from the land.  To maximize profit, it was not enough for employers to own and control labour during each working day, and to keep wages as low as possible with the threat of a worker being readily replaceable with someone from the surplus labour pool.  They also had to make sure that there was no limit on the availability of raw materials to be used in any production process they might want to set up.  Not just people, but Nature too, had to have a price, had to be ‘free’ for unlimited use to make a profit for the capitalist with money to buy it. 

This creation of a market in Nature was driven by the need to gain a competitive advantage, not just or even mainly in relation to workers but relative to other owners.  By the 1840s, that meant expropriations to create a coal mining industry.  Fossil fuels are the ultimate raw material, because a source of energy is the indispensable first mover of all production.  Possession and control of fossil fuel energy sources for one’s own country and one’s own country’s businesses, and guaranteed stable supply at a manageable price, has been the object of rivalry and sometimes war.  It was true then for coal, and it is still true today for all fossil fuels, that there is a constant tendency to overproduction, to ensure supply that can confer a ‘competitive advantage’ relative to competing capitals and nation-states.

People and Nature and Technology and Ownership had to be Forcibly made into Commodities – Something that Could Always be Bought and Sold at Some Price by Those with Money to Invest

Two other commodifications that are less central to our story here also had to take place for the ‘relative surplus value’ labour productivity maximizing model to prevail.  First, Capital itself had to become freed from any constraints on its mobility.  People with ‘money to invest in producing and selling goods and services for private profit’ (this is the very definition of what is meant by Capital)  had to be maximally free to invest and disinvest, and to invest elsewhere, with no outstanding obligations or penalties to pay for doing so.  Capital had to be treated in law and practice as more and more of a fictitious, absolutely atomized and free Individual.  It had to be a pure abstraction, a completely financialized form of value that was not tied to any place or any specific business and production process, and hence any specific set of workers or raw materials or machines/technology used in any specific factory (as Marx wrote, ‘all that is solid melts in air’).  It had to be purified Money to Invest and that is all.  How this is still being intensified as a process in the era of neoliberalism is beyond the scope of this article to explain.  The bottom line is that there have to be markets for everything and all human activity must be subject to the dictates of buying and selling in markets.

Second, the form that Capital takes place in the actual production process includes not just the labour and Nature that have been bought but also the machines and technology, the physical capital.  With home-based craft production, the tools (technology, machines) necessary to ‘market entry’ were more or less affordable for anyone.  Capitalist production relied on more complex, and expensive, machines.  Increasingly the technology necessary for production was the product of specialized production itself, and it came to be the case that you had to already have capital, or access to it, to afford that technology.  This was the mostly positive outcome of technological innovation, not a conspiracy, but it meant that you now had to have at least four things to go into business that only significant amounts of capital could buy – workers, Nature, (borrowed or your own) money to invest and technology.  And later inventions like patenting of technology only added to the barriers to market entry for non-capitalists. 

Another reason for the long delay in the switch away from water to coal by 19th century British mill owners was that water was and is a free resource, part of the historically recognized Commons that was accessible for use by everyone.  Coal was never a free resource (except for that found at or near the surface, which wasn’t much).  It had to be mined through an industrial process.  Ditto oil and gas.  Britain was blessed with plenty of water from rainfall and rivers in the areas where water-powered mills were set up.  In the early days there was a more or less equally good spot for every mill to have its own water wheel.   

Nevertheless soon a private arrangement between competitors to share out stored and distributed running water was required.  Pre-industrial societies everywhere have succeeded in working out elaborate systems for cooperating to share access to the resource by all agricultural and crafts producers that needed it.  But the capitalist era mill owners could never agree on a system to share the running water power source.  This was for a reason that remains a very important reason why a market-driven change from dirty to clean today is unlikely.  There was no shortage of the free resource of river water capable of producing the horsepower for the mills.  But all river locations are not equal.  Some locations can produce considerably more power than others.  To achieve advantages of scale, a limited set of locations had to be the source of most of the power, and that meant it had to be shared among factories at varying distances from the prime water power sources.

Mill Owners Could Not Share Water Power because Locations Vary Immensely in the Amount of Power Delivered and Seizing Control of Top Locations gave Companies a Comparative Advantage

They could not make it work.  There was no technical or price reason why they could not make it work.  It was because all forms of capitalism dictate a market logic of competition, with winners and losers at the level of the individual company, or companies owned by the same capital.  All forms of capitalism from the beginning to now operate according to a logic of anarchy (or ‘free market competition’) at the level of a whole industry of competing companies, or the level of an overall national economy, or the level of the global economy.  Capitalist markets are ultimately a zero-sum game where capitals do the opposite of planning, cooperating and sharing to serve their collective or mid and long term interest.  There are lots of cartels and trusts and various attempts at private truces to fix prices etc (e.g. among oil and gas producers) but it inevitably breaks down.  Cooperation, sharing and planning only take place somewhat sustainably when the state intervenes to coordinate and significantly subsidize and enforce it.

So, in addition to the main reason of needing to shift to a relative surplus value extraction model (where huge pools of un(der)employed labour and commodified Nature and technology could be concentrated in a few large cities), those mill owners without a prime river water power location had another reason to make the switch from clean to dirty.  Coal was more expensive and presented some technical challenges, but it had one major advantage – it did not require cooperation or planning to serve a common interest of all owners (let alone to serve a public interest).  Above all, the fuel could be mined in one place and then transported to the large city somewhere else where your factory was.  If you decided to withdraw your capital from one plant or even region or country and put it somewhere else, you could simply get the coal to be transported to your new location.  It could serve a single goal, the maximization of your private profit at the level of the individual enterprise, or set of enterprises with the same owner.  Coal maximized the freedom and mobility of individual capitals to compete anarchically with other capitals (and related nation-states) in various loosely linked market games for competitive advantage. 

The Special Sauce of Capitalism is Coerced Cooperation and ‘Rational’ Profit Maximization at the Level of the Individual Capitalist and Antagonistic and Anarchistic Competition at the Level of the Overall Economy

Finally, fossil fuel enabled Capital to become maximally free of any ongoing reciprocal obligation to its employees and community, to the preservation of Nature and to the sharing of improvements in technology and products.  The long delay and then relatively abrupt shift of the main factories from the river valleys to coal-fired plants in a few large cities in Britain’s Industrial Revolution (a pattern that was replicated in the USA in the latter part of the 19th century after the Civil War, Malm p   ) was an instance of what has been repeated over and over ever since, what David Harvey calls “the spatial fix” for profit maximization.  When the relative strength of labour versus capital and/or citizen versus state starts to change significantly in ways that weaken capital’s maximum profit and freedom, capital just disinvests and invests in another place where labour and democratic citizen power are weaker. 

As we will argue next, this has been central to the shift, beginning with Thatcher/Reagan in 1979-80, to the currently dominant business model for profit maximization, ‘free’ trade and market fundamentalist (neoliberal) policies that are aggressively enforced by private capital, nation states and international bodies in rich and poor countries alike.  After the 1973 energy crisis, global free trade policies permitted increased direct transfer of advanced production to poor countries and poorer areas within rich countries, although it took almost three decades to fully accomplish, and was only really a success after the 1989-91 Fall of Communism.  Within rich countries, this lead to the decimation of unions and the self-liquidation of socialist parties that chose to accommodate neoliberalism in order to win some elections.

The History of Capitalism is the History of ‘Spatial Fixes’ where Capital Relocates Whenever Labour Gains More Power Relative to Employers and/or Citizens Gain More Democratic Power Relative to States

Most important for our argument here, neoliberalism has removed many of the constraints on capital’s use of the ‘spatial fix’ of relocating production elsewhere, especially in the form of foreign direct investment.  This is somewhat masked by the fact that the main feature of the new spatial fix is the Global Factory, or production through a series of production processes spread across both rich and poor countries.  It is the acceleration of both neoliberal policies within and between states and globalized supply chain production, that have combined to produce the resultant of a geometric increase in dirty production and global warming, that became suddenly worse and visible in the 1980s, and has become even more so since 2001.  The entire model of neoliberalism and globalization will have to be seriously rejected to reverse the out of control upward surge in emissions and warming.  It is this inconvenient truth that is ignored by the private Market solution advocates, who fantasize that we will go back from dirty to clean spontaneously whenever clean becomes technically superior and cheaper.

(2) WHY CLEAN ENERGY IS NOT REPLACING DIRTY PRODUCTION TODAY

Why then are greenhouse emissions from fossil fuels rocketing up, despite the fact that some forms of lower emissions fuel (solar, wind, but also nuclear, hydroelectric) are going up?  Why isn’t clean energy replacing dirty energy?  Why are market forces failing to produce the desired change despite significant investment by governments in subsidizing private sector-led clean energy replacement, notably under Obama in the USA and in the EU in the same period and since? It turns out that the factors that explain the delayed shift from water to coal in the industrial phase of capitalism are central to the explanation of why we are unable to reverse course and actually have clean replace dirty.  To answer these questions, I will rely both on Malm and on articles in two recent issues of the Economist (May 23rd and June 20th 2020). 

The explanation is in two parts to get across a fundamental point.  Clean and dirty energy are not a seesaw.  The factors to make one go up are not the factors to make the other go down.  There are distinct obstacles to each, although the obstacles share a common root.  They should be examined separately before figuring out a two-part plan that might lead to two separate changes happening in complementary ways.  First, what is it about the very nature of clean energy that helps explain why it is not going up more and faster?  Second, what is it about the very nature of fossil fuels and dirty production that explains why it is not going down?

Why is Clean Energy Production Nowhere Near the Level Needed to Replace Dirty?  Why is Fossil Production Still Increasing?  The Answers to These Two Questions Involve Different Variables

The two main sources of clean energy are solar and wind, especially solar, and that is what I shall mean when I refer to clean energy sources.  A very important thing to recognize from the outset is that everyone but the climate change deniers recognize that, to save the planet from excessive warming, it will require the near total replacement of dirty by clean.  This is crucial because the biggest obstacles to expanding clean energy production only emerge in full form when producing it at scale (we are nowhere near that now).  Green New Deal solutions are blind to how the fuel market changes in character when we jump to the level necessary to actually replace dirty.  The Economist says that to keep warming below 2 degrees centigrade over the next 30 to 50 years (many would say the deadline to avert disaster is decades shorter than this), “90% of the share of the world’s energy now being produced will need to be produced by renewable energy sources, nuclear power or fossil-fuel plants that bury their waste rather than exhaling it” (May p49).  (Elsewhere they concede that a 2018 study estimated “the cost of carbon capture [to be] between $94 and $232” per metric tonne, which is “many times the carbon price in most places” (May p58).)

There are two main reasons why clean is not increasing enough to replace dirty.  Both have to do with the fact that sun and wind are free resources, part of the Commons.  First, as long as solar and wind energy are free resources, and thereby accessible for use by anyone, they are not sufficiently profitable to get produced, unless the taxpayer subsidizes almost everything and leaves all the profit to the private owner of the plants.  Second, even with massive public subsidies and guarantees, today’s capitalists are no more capable of sharing a free resource than they were in sharing water power to plants downstream from the location of the power source in Britain’s Industrial Revolution.  And sharing is what they will have to do once we are talking about clean energy production at the scale required to actually replace 90 percent of fossil fuel production.

Counter-intuitively perhaps, solar and wind energy are not a sufficient source of profit to investors because they will soon be both cheaper to produce than coal or oil or gas and require less complicated machinery and labour to produce them (this is a somewhat less true for wind, especially in the best open sea locations that would prevail at scale).  Fossil requires risky investment to discover and develop mines or wells.  It requires lots of machinery and labour to produce and refine the resource.  It costs quite a bit to transport to the end user.  Clean energy shares the high costs of transport and distribution but not production.  The cost of production of the resource itself, unlike fossil, is near zero.  As long as the scale of production is nowhere near replacement of fossil levels (as is the case now), the locations for the plants are not exclusive.  Plenty of others can find their own sites, so the effective exchange value of the resource itself remains very low.  This means that competing companies can only differentiate their product based on the quality of their technology for converting sun or win to electricity and storing it, and it does not appear that the difference will amount to much. Above all, the price for clean energy is likely to go in one direction over time, down.

Investors Cannot Make Enough Profit from Clean Energy if there are Few Barriers to Market Entry.  They Can Only Remedy this by Seizing the Best Locations and Making Sun and Wind into Privately Owned Commodities.

You will have read and seen ads and news stories about how major oil and gas companies are investing in ’the next generation’ of energy (clean), but those stories are at best extremely misleading.  BP and Shell did invest in solar in the early 2000s, but started to divest as early as 2008.  “[B]oth corporations attributed their pullouts from sun to the plummeting prices on panels…  the only thing amenable to self-expanding value would be manufacturing the technology; the margins were squeezed year after year...  A former strategist at BP Alternate Energy [explained that]… for someone who is in it to make a profit, a high and stable price is better than a low and falling one. ‘In the oil market the prices are going up and down in cycles. The solar price is just going one way – it’s going down” (370).  “From a peak in 2011 to the year 2013, global investments in renewable energy fell by 23 percent. Had it not been for government spending… the fall would have been even steeper” (371).  The Economist admits that whatever increases there have been in clean production are not due to private investment and market forces.  “The growth… has largely been driven by government policy” (May 23rd, p49).  They also note that there was a lot of media asserting that Obama’s government subsidies for clean energy was responsible for the drop in the use of coal.  In fact, “it had more to do with cheap natural gas from the fracking boom providing a profitable alternative to coal-fired electricity” (May 23rd, p15).

A second set of features of clean energy emerge as very significant when we are talking about having generating plants that create enough electrical energy to actually replace 90% the fossil fuels we have now, and to continue expanding the volume after that.  I do not know the numbers, but we are likely looking at expanding current clean production by a factor of somewhere between 20 to 30 times current levels, maybe more.  When producing at scale, two features of solar and wind energy become very important.  First, there is a considerable difference between the amount of power that can be generated from the relatively limited number of prime locations versus the kind we mostly see now that are fairly close to the developed country business and government user.  “The total technical potential of solar energy in the Middle East and North Africa is twelve times that in Western Europe and seventy-two times that in Central and Eastern Europe.  Some of the most powerful winds blow over the top of the Sothern Cone, the island of Tasmania and the coasts of the North Sea, while much of Asia is comparatively poor in such endowments” (371).

The Other Option is for Clean Energy Production at Premium Sites to be Global Public Utilities that Share the Power at Low Cost with All Downstream Users

Second, unlike fossil, there can be significant fluctuation in the sun’s rays or level of wind from hour to hour and season to season.   The Economist notes that “Germany’s solar-power installations produce five times more electricity in the summer than they do in the winter” (May p50).  Malm reports that “[p]rivately owned, profit-oriented utilities in the U.S. abstain from renewables in fear of weather variability, currently causing interannual variations in revenues by 15 to 20 percent for wind farms and 5 percent for solar projects (not to speak of the swings from one month or week to another” (375). 

The enormous differences in power output of the relatively few prime locations for solar and wind, combined with the differences in fluctuation, create a situation that is exactly analogous to what happened in Britain’s Industrial Revolution when the number of factories requiring water power exceeded the number of prime river valley sites where factories could be located.  When clean energy is produced at scale it will have to be produced at relatively few choice locations, and then stored in massive lithium ion batteries, and then transported long distances by very high voltage lines.  If the sun and wind are to remain part of the Commons, free resources, they will have to be shared, and at a global level with a system of storage,  transport and distribution to end users that is negotiated and agreed to by private capitals and nation-states. 

The fundamental laws of market competition made sharing between Britain’s water mill owners next to impossible.  This is almost certainly still the case today for sharing between private capitals with solar and wind.  Both Malm and the Economist provide multiple examples of where private business deals to share clean energy have collapsed in short order due to private disinvestment in production and withdrawal of business consumers, leaving governments holding the can.  The only basis for hope that a system of sharing could be achieved is that nation states have greater capacity today than they did in 1780, and they could negotiate and enforce a strictly equal global sharing arrangement. 

What is far more likely to happen however is that solar and wind will not remain free resources, part of the Commons.  They will be made into de facto privately owned commodities.  The prime locations will be seized by the wealthiest corporations and most powerful states.  This is the inescapable outcome of any private Market solution, and it is in fact the hidden basis of all the Green New Deal plans currently being advanced in the USA, Britain and endless other countries.  All of them are nationalistic (and imperialistic) plans to grab market share for their national businesses, and to create ‘hundreds of thousands of green jobs’ for their citizens.

All Versions of Green New Deal are Nationalistic Plans to Grab Market Share in Clean Energy Production for ‘Our Businesses’ and ‘Our Workers’

The Economist reports that Joe Biden’s green energy plan and “[b]oth the carbon-pricing bills recently tabled in Congress” included versions of a BCA or ‘border carbon adjustment plan’ tax on carbon.  A BCA grants “an exemption for exporters and a carbon tariff on imports”.  The Economist notes that if the EU applied BCA tariffs like Biden’s, it could cause trade conflicts because “a BCA of 30 euros per tonne levied on all goods coming in to Europe would amount to 10 billion euros on imports from China and 3 to 10 billion euros on imports from the United States, equivalent to tariffs of 2.8% and 1.2% respectively.  On imports from India the price would be 2 billion, equivalent to a 5.1% tariff.  In all three cases, it is roughly equivalent to doubling existing average tariffs” (May 23rd pp58-9).  The key point here is that the green energy plans are nationalistic, and they reproduce the existing inequalities between rich and poor nation-states.  They are policies directed at maintaining and winning still more unequal competitive advantage, not equitable sharing.  

The wealthiest concentrations of private capital and the most powerful nation states will try to maintain and increase their unequal economic positions, that have been attained in part by unequal access to fossil fuels.  One of the biggest causes of economic and political and military rivalries and wars has always been competition to monopolize stable relatively exclusive access to natural resources of all kinds, not just oil and gas and coal but also land for agriculture and mining etc.  You do not need my help to come up with a list of hot civil wars and big country invasions driven by the desire to own and control particularly valuable natural resources today -- in the Middle East, Africa and really everywhere.  In all these conflicts, the prize is private or state ownership of, and guaranteed privileged access to, the resources in question.

Getting to a system where clean energy production expands massively to replace at least 90 percent of emissions faces major obstacles.  Most of them relate to the inability of private capitals and nation states to invest for the public good, or even the longer term good of their overall capitalist system.  Market forces will not get us there.  Producing clean energy from free resources is not profitable enough.  Sharing a free resource is diametrically opposed to the fundamental principle of markets, where private capitals seek a competitive advantage in buying and selling private capital owned commodities.  Only researching and doing public education, and mobilizing a popular movement that exposes the near impossibility of a market solution to even do the much easier first part of our two-part job of raising clean and eliminating dirty, will get us there.  Only left-wing popular mobilizing will get us to a solution that can actually work, one where we cooperate to expand low cost production of clean energy from free resources, and make that energy available equally to everyone who needs it.

States have Always Fought Economic and Military Wars to Seize Control of Natural Resources and Nationalistic Green New Deals will only Stimulate New Ones

The much more difficult challenge is to remove the obstacles to getting the economic and political elites to systematically bring the dirty production level down.  That involves demanding that the biggest of the big players in every corner of the world economy give up some of their vested interests in dirty production and dirty products.

(3) WHY FOSSIL EMISSIONS AND DIRTY PRODUCTION KEEP GOING UP

It is rather easier to explain why fossil fuel production and emissions keep going up.  Dirty production and products are being done disproportionately by the wealthiest banks and corporations and states who benefit the most from the status quo.  Any moves to reduce dirty are direct threats to vested interests that give them their current (they would say ‘earned’) unequal position at the top of the world economy.  Even analyses by sympathetic pro-market researchers make clear that reducing dirty means significantly reduced profits for every capital and state, relatively weak and relatively strong alike, but likely the most for those who are currently enjoying the most profits.  The costs cannot be transferred 100 percent to their workers and tax-paying citizens, as is their usual condition for making any change benefitting others than just themselves.  They will have to actually reduce ‘economic growth’ and opportunities for expanding profit, and do so systematically every year over the next 30 years (and more and faster if they actually ‘listen to the science’).  Even the most facile Hayekian market fundamentalist cannot spin that there are market forces and Invisible Hands that will lead the most powerful market actors to eliminate dirty fuels, production and products.

Dirty Energy is Owned and Controlled by the Biggest Banks and Corporations and Replacing It is Impossible Without a Decades Long Plan that Reduces Economic Growth and Their Profits

Let us get more specific about five main reasons why dirty production is not going down, and never will do so as much as it needs to do or as quickly, if we rely on any variety of private sector Market solution:

(1)  The biggest causers of fossil emissions are not just the biggest capitals but also the biggest contributors of growth and profit to the overall private economy – the dirtiest industries are among the most profitable (e.g. agrobusiness; the air travel and vacations industry and resulting commercialization; the cost-plus defence industry and arms trade; supplying relatively rich customers with globally sourced, dirtily produced and delivered goods; building segregated residential and shopping suburbs and exurbs with detached housing).  The biggest polluters are thereby also the ones with the most to lose when an entire system of production and distribution that is dirty from beginning to end has to be replaced brick by brick with a new one in which they might not hold their position.  Enormous vested interests are at stake.

(2)  There is no ‘economically rational’ reason, hence no basis for a blind market force,  to eliminate most dirty production.  If global warming were not the existential threat that it is, there would be absolutely no advantage to getting rid of fossil (there is no shortage of fossil and will not be for a long time; and profit on fossil fuel production will always be greater than profit on clean energy plants) and no advantage inherent to clean energy replacing dirty (far from offering new opportunities to produce a wider set of new products with new technologies, it is restricted to productions and products that can run on electricity).

(3) All of the market-based ‘putting a price on carbon’ schemes are not working, and will never work to move us to under 10% of current emissions, because the targets are set far too low, and then the taxes set to allegedly achieve those targets are set too low, because governments are unwilling to cause any real and lasting reduction in profitable economic activity on their patch.

(4)  If carbon taxes, or a strict quota scheme for every producer and consumer to reduce emissions by so much every year, were set high enough, and enforced enough, to actually work, it would significantly reduce growth and profits, and would do so more in rich countries than in poor ones, and businesses would not be able to pass all the costs on to their employees or fellow tax-paying citizens.

Dirty Energy is Technologically Superior and More Profitable and Even Extreme Global Warming (Over 4 degrees centigrade) May Not Hurt General Profits for the Biggest Corporations

(5) The biggest capitals and states that are the source of the greatest emissions will not be hurt that much in terms of their profits, if nothing is done and huge increases in global warming occur.  Their only motivation for eliminating emissions are personal ones of wanting clean air, water etc for themselves as individuals.  The relatively rich in the relatively rich countries will be the least impacted by climate change, and best able to isolate themselves from its worst effects.  So why shouldn’t the relatively rich with so much to lose from restricting emissions, and nothing much to gain from replacing dirty with clean, promote what amounts to sophisticated snake oil technological fixes (like blocking the sun and carbon capture) and let’s pretend ‘zero emissions’ targets and laughably low carbon taxes and nationalist/imperialist Green New Deals that allow them to continue to pollute?

In short, all of the economic arrows (ones based on the logic of a capitalist economy in a world economy with rival empires and a hierarchy of unequal nation states) point in one direction.  Getting rid of fossil fuels, dirty production and dirty products is all costs and no benefits from the vantage point of the biggest polluters who are the biggest capitals and states.  Any decision to support and help enact a shift away from dirty to clean(er) production will have to be made on different grounds.

Here are a few facts to illustrate these five reasons why dirty is not going down just because clean is going up: 

-- The International Renewable Energy Agency “estimates that 800 billion dollars of investment in renewables is needed each year until 2050 for the world to be on course for less than 2 degrees centigrade of warming,  with more than twice that needed [hence over $1600 billion a year] for electric infrastructure and efficiency.  In 2019, investment in renewables was 250 billion dollars.  The big oil and gas firms invested twice as much in fossil-fuel extraction” (Economist, May 23rd p50).  Malm reports that banks doubled their investment in coal from 2005 to 2010 (360).  On average government subsidies to the fossil industry in 2013 were six times greater than subsidies to clean energy producers (Malm p369).

The IMF Estimates that if Carbon Taxes were High Enough to Force Corporations to Switch Away from Dirty then Pre-Tax Profits Would Plummet and Stock Markets Would Decline

-- There are two main types of scheme to change the price of clean relative to dirty by taxing businesses that pollute and individual consumers that buy gas and use vehicles that pollute.  ‘Cap and trade’ schemes assign permits to businesses based on the amount of their emissions.  They allow the market to decide who gets to pollute and who not as much, by letting businesses who want to pollute buy permits from other businesses who will do something to reduce their emissions.  Cap and trade in theory involves the government specifying a total amount of emissions that will be allowed in the entire economy.   Carbon tax schemes involve the government specifying a price on carbon emissions of so much a metric tonne, and there is no avoiding the tax.  But there is also no requirement to reduce emissions.  Taxes on individuals are always of the second kind.

Nicholas Stern and Joseph Stiglitz estimate that it “would require a price in the range of 40 to 80 dollars [per metric tonne] to be levied on all the world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions (as well as some other interventions)” to reduce emissions enough to keep under a 2 degree centigrade warming.  The average price in those schemes that currently exist at all  is “only 15 dollars.  Nowhere is there a carbon price that is both above 40 dollars and applies to more than half a country’s greenhouse gas emissions” (Economist, May 23rd p56).  Worse still, both types of scheme are usually designed to be ‘revenue neutral’.  This means that instead of using the increased revenue from taxes paid by polluting businesses and individuals to invest in programmes to reduce dirty production in other ways, carbon taxes become a pretext for slashing social spending and/or other taxes on businesses and (richer) individuals.

-- The IMF says the tax needs to be at least 75 dollars a tonne.  “If you applied such a price to companies’ zone one emissions [i.e. directly generated by them and not their suppliers or related businesses], pre-tax profit in the S&P 500 would fall by 8 percent, and in the Euro Stoxx 600 firms by 12 percent” (Economist, June 20th p60).  In other words, if the tax were high enough to actually induce companies to switch away from dirty, it would cause significant reductions in profit and would depress the stock market.

Emissions Must Be Sharply Reduced Every Year for 30 Years and Richer Countries Must Reduce their Emissions by More than Poor Countries Without Relocating Dirty Production to Poor Countries

-- Malm exposes the outright deceptiveness of most Green New Deals that are typically sold as seeking a target of ‘zero net emissions’.  This suggests that it is enough for a country to use ‘cap and trade’ and other measures to reduce emissions by one set of companies in order to allow another set of companies to maintain or increase emissions, netting out to zero increase.  But this is false on two counts.  First, zero increase in emissions in each year is nowhere near enough.  There have to be absolute decreases in the overall economy, and quite significant ones, and this will have to be the case for several decades if it is to be gradual.  Second, the normal state of a capitalist economy is to be constantly expanding and most new economic growth (at least for the first decade or more) would be accompanied by increased emissions.  As long as this is the case then the absolute amount of decrease in emissions required each year would keep going up, although the gradually rising proportion of production that is clean will counterbalance this.  The point is that governments and companies will not be able to avoid making complicated choices about what businesses can expand (and at what rate) and which must slow down their expansion or actually retract. 

“If global emissions are to contract by 3 percent a year, those of rich nations might have to shrink by 5 or 10 percent or even more to give developing countries some space”.  Emissions reduction is not the same thing as growth reduction but the two are closely related, especially in the period of transition where we are gradually replacing a fossil-based production system with a clean energy based one.  Malm cites Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows as arguing that what will be required is a “planned economic recession”, i.e shutting down more old production than we are able to replace with new production for a several decades long transition period (Malm p384).  The planned economic recession that governments around the world have been forced to implement to combat COVID 19 shows us that this is possible.  It will almost certainly be necessary.

--  Seven of the top eight companies in the Fortune 500 are in the fossil fuel business (Malm p  ).  So-called ‘scope three’ emissions “cover the entire value chain of a business from the extraction of its raw materials through its suppliers and on to its end users… Scope three emissions are highly concentrated within a small number of firms…  220 of our 5,000 companies [analyzed for the Economist report], with a value of about 14 trillion dollars, accounted for 84 percent of the total carbon footprint… [and] the biggest 250 financial firms [in the world] control about 86 percent of the emissions from the investor-controlled [ie. private] companies with the highest scope three emissions” (June 20th p9).  A study of top financial institutions worth a total of 40 trillion in assets found that only 9 percent have even bothered to set targets in the businesses they fund for emissions reduction that would be compatible with 2 degree centigrade warming (June 20th p59).  In other words, most of the harmful emissions are produced by the biggest of the big companies, that are bankrolled by the biggest of the big financial institutions.  And very few of them are even pretending to set targets for reductions.

The Biggest Banks and Corporations in the World are Directly Responsible for the Vast Majority of Global Supply Chain Emissions and Global Warming of 4 Degrees centigrade May Not Hurt Profits

-- Another way to get financial investors to pressure companies they invest in to reduce emissions “is to make it harder for companies to get money… This is the idea behind the ‘stress tests’ that central banks in England, France, the Netherlands and Singapore are forcing on banks and insurers: by modelling a 4 degree centrigrade [sic!] world, or a 100 dollars a tonne carbon price, they seek to discover how badly the banks’ lending to their current portfolio of clients [the big emitters] endangers them… The central bank of the Netherlands found only 3 percent of banks’ loan books were at risk” (June 20th p60).  This appears to mean that even a catastrophic 4 degree centigrade warming would have little or no negative effect on profits.  There is zero economic market incentive for the big polluters and their funders to ‘decarbonize’.

-- There is nothing about the intrinsic qualities of solar or wind energy that would induce any company to go to the considerable expense and trouble of changing their product (e.g. internal combustion automobile to electric car) or production process and technology just in order to replace fossil with clean.  The Economist notes how long it took for coal and then oil and gas to take over from earlier types of fuel.  They are perplexed that capitalist entrepreneurs could be so slow to awaken to the innovative possibilities created by new technology (e.g. Watt’s steam engine driven by coal).  They can only offer that capitalist growth has always been so considerable and fast that the total energy pie gets bigger faster than the new fuel production can expand and find buyers.  Comparing the 1780 to 1900 period to now, they comment that “[p]revious transitions, though shaped by government policy at national levels, were mostly caused by the demand for new services that only a specific fuel could provide, such as petrol for engines.  The growth in renewable-generation capacity is the exception.  It has not been driven by the fact that renewable electrons allow you to do things of which those from coal [or oil or gas] are not yet capable” (May 23rd p49).  It is not like the internal combustion car gets invented and this means that the new fossil energy has to be used to make it possible to mass produce automobiles.  There is nothing that clean energy can do that dirty energy cannot do.

-- There is no need to replace fossil with clean due to any shortage in supply of coal, oil and gas for the foreseeable future.  Malm observes that there are enough known supplies, especially of coal, to “raise the temperature on earth by between 15 and 24 degrees” centigrade (Malm p   ).

Sun Blocking and Carbon Capture are Not Just Pretexts for Inaction – They Could Lead to Disastrous Re-Warming and to Other Forms of Poisoning

-- Malm examines and debunks some of the many geoengineering fixes that scientists and right-wing think tanks and oil and gas companies and Green New Deal entrepreneurs like Bill Gates have championed, as at least delaying the speed at which we have give up dirty production while market forces work their magic.  The inventor of the Anthropocene theory Paul Crutzen observed that the eruption in June 1991 of the Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Phillipines had blocked some of the incoming solar radiation, and the next year the average temperature on earth fell by half a degree (but the effect dissipated).  Crutzen suggested that “[w]e could spread sulphate aerosols, intentionally, and systematically, like a sunshade around our planet”.  Since then there have been hundreds of studies proposing methods of sulphate aerosol injection.  The physicist and entrepreneur David Keith proposed doing the seeding every year and stressed “how fantastically cheap the operation would be”.  “Bill Gates is now the world’s number one financial supporter of geo-engineering research” and is a “patron of Keith”. 

Malm points out that the aerosols would “only stay in place for a year before sailing down towards earth [so] the annual injections would have to grow perpetually”.  If this was done and something happened to break through the aerosol shield “the result would be an extreme pulse of sudden warming.  As the lid is removed, the radioactive forcing of all the accumulated carbon dioxide would boil over violently” such that “average temperatures on the land surface might increase by 3 degrees per decade” and “some regions could heat up by 15 degrees per decade for a while” (386-7).  He lists off six other likely catastrophic consequences of the simple impact of aerosol injection, even if the shield is not ruptured.  I urge you to read Malm for the details.

Some times you are better off not listening to the (current group think) science, or the scientists.  Some of them are motivated, consciously or not, by a combination of fantastical and wishful thinking and conservative free enterprise ideology.  This happens often enough to all of us, left or right.  When we cannot understand exactly what or why something bad is happening, especially when it arouses unwelcome fears, we are open to conspiracy theories about the causes of the problem.  The same is true when we cannot see any solution that does not, when implemented, threaten other things we hold dear.  There are likely some geoengineering fixes that can usefully put a bandaid on some open wounds.  There should be no restrictions on pure research (but it is also true that promoting funding of one thing often pre-empts funding another, and choices need to be made).  But both sun blocking and carbon capture are more like conspiracy theories about magical solutions.  Those corporate and state interests, with something to lose from strong action to force reduction in their emissions, have a big interest in promoting conspiratorial magical thinking, and the left should critique and expose this.

(4)  SOME CONCLUSIONS ABOUT WHAT PROGRESSIVES COULD DO DIFFERENTLY

The main thrust of this essay is to critically examine a set of beliefs about clean and dirty energy that are dominant among both progressives and conservatives like Gore and Gates (conservative, but they are seriously committed to doing something to forestall climate change).  The target of the critique is the idea that there is a Market Solution involving a Green New Deal.  The core proposal (besides the scam of token carbon taxes and magical thinking geoengineering fixes) is to support massive taxpayer subsidies to ‘our country’s innovative private sector entrepreneurs’, so that they can seize the best locations for clean energy production and create some untold number of ‘green new jobs’.  A policy of increasing clean energy will automatically result in business and individual consumers decreasing their use of fossil energy (making changes to dirty polluting production techniques and technologies rarely comes up, although there is some talk about getting rid of dirty products).

Activists in the USA Should Support Sanders and AOC in Calling for a Green New Deal – If Only Because the Main Battle There is Still with the Climate Change Denying Republicans

I am not trying to dictate tactics to activists on the front lines of these struggles, or the scholars and public intellectuals who do research and publication to support their political work.  The best choice of tactics always depends on the specifics of the political situation.  For example, in the USA right now, the political situation is defined by the battle between the Republican Climate Change Deniers and advocates of some type of Green New Deal.  To not join forces with the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would be a hopelessly sectarian approach, that could only result in weakening the fight against the aggressively destructive policies being implemented by the Trump administration.

Deciding what is the best tactic can often mean supporting a particular set of solutions that one actually disagrees with (my view is that this okay if, and only if, you are quietly clear about your personal disagreement as you go along with the majority approach).  For example, I understand the logic of left-wing people who supported the passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in 2010, even though it further institutionalized and extended a health system based on private for-profit health facilities and private insurance companies (it actually made it compulsory for individuals to buy private insurance if they were not already eligible for some other form).  Obamacare did after all increase the number of people who could afford and qualify for some form of insurance (albeit in a system that encourages different plans that vary greatly in quantity and quality of coverage).  It did so by providing means-tested subsidies and by mandating that no insurance company could refuse to sell a plan to someone based on the fact that they had pre-existing illnesses or conditions. My own thinking at the time was that everything depended on whether Obamacare would open the door to legitimating a Medicare for All alternative, even though enacting Obamacare strengthened the vested interests that would fight such an alternative.  Supporting Obamacare was the right call because the tactic advanced the movement for a non-profit public health system towards its strategic goal, without doing irreparable harm to the people in the meantime.

Similarly trade unionists (a vanishing species) are routinely caught in a situation where there are two possible employer offers that they could recommend to their membership.  One offer provides more money and benefits than the other, but at the price of percentage (instead of across the board X dollars) increases and/or different increases for workers in different job categories.  Such an offer would further worsen the inequalities between different sets of workers.  The inequalities typically correspond with the gender or age or ethnicity/race of the different subgroups of workers.  The other offer (which might well require a strike, or at least a willingness to go for a much longer period without a new contract) is for less total money and worse benefits, but it makes progress in reducing inequalities between subgroups of workers, while winning enough for everyone.  Needless to say most of the time the only practical choice is to accept the first type of offer and to try to get the most egregious inequality-reinforcing bits out of it.  But sometimes workers are in a strong enough bargaining position to choose the second approach, wage a long struggle and actually push the level of money and benefits up too.  Here again an assessment of the balance of forces, the relative power of the two sides, what I am calling the political situation, is key in deciding what is the best tactic.

Climate Change Denialism is Already Dead as a Smokescreen for Inaction and That is Why Challenges to the Market Solution Must be Front and Center in Our Activism

Whether the issue is to figure out the best tactic for the Green New Deal  movement, Obamacare or an employer offer, a single set of questions need to be asked and answered.  What tactic unites the people and divides the power-holders the most?  What will be the practical short-term consequence for the people in terms of their ability to meet their fundamental material needs?  In what ways does any possible tactic reinforce existing inequalities (and the hold over people’s minds of the corporate liberal ideology of meritocracy that says that equality of opportunity to compete to be a winner justifies those inequalities of result)?  Will accepting the less desirable but more achievable X, instead of insisting on Y, move us closer to a political situation where we are more likely to win the strategic goal – or is it best to lose X in order to keep our movement strong so that it can win more later?

Having said all this, the thrust of my argument, rooted in Malm’s analysis of the problem, is not directed mainly at which tactics are better or worse (but please send me examples of good tactics and campaigns so that I can publicize them on this website).  I am trying to make a case about what is wrong with the theoretical framing of the problem, and with the strategic goals that are proposed as long-term solutions.  Put simply, the main obstacle to getting private and state actors to make the changes necessary to eliminate 90 percent of emissions in short order is not Climate Change Denialism.  That position is not sustainable as the basis for the policies that governments and corporations will soon have to implement, whatever their interests or ideology.

The main obstacle is the idea that there is a Market Solution.  It is the theory that too many emissions are the unfortunate and unintended consequence of decisions made long ago to adopt fuels and products that are now out of date.  The upward tick in emissions is the sad result of business and individual consumers being unaccountably too slow to embrace new clean fuels and products.  Somehow the market has not sent the right price signals to nudge consumers to switch to clean (a type of ‘market failure’).  The solution is for taxpayers to fund a Gore and Gates style Market Solution, one that relies partly on changing the relative price of fossil fuels and partly on technological fixes, but mostly relies on winning popular support for a Green New Deal with the promise of hundreds of thousands of green new jobs.  Generating enough clean power to actually replace 90 percent of current emissions will require seizing ownership and control of the high intensity power producing locations.  If this is done by private sector entrepreneurs (and/or by their state on their behalf), it means de facto private ownership of the resource by a particular set of companies from a particular set of countries (no points for guessing which ones), and inevitably a new set of resource wars.  It will also serve as a giant distraction from the fact that nothing is being directly done to reduce dirty production and dirty products or even fossil fuel production (capping wells and closing mines).

The Failure of Companies to Ditch Dirty Production is not a Market Failure – It is an Absolutely Economically Rational Consequence of the Workings of Private Markets

Of course, adopting a strategy that categorically rejects a Market Solution will be unpopular, no matter what you do to ensure that your disagreements with the Green New Deal don’t get in the way of whatever progressive campaigns are underway to call for replacing fossil with clean.  It may even require the creation of some separate organizations to lead campaigns that are very public about having a different analysis of the reasons for dirty prevailing over clean, campaigns that also advance different proposals for solutions.  What I am suggesting here is of necessity a left flank strategy, that can only hope to engage a minority of progressives in the short run (although the Extinction Rebellion protests, whatever their ‘carbon footprint’ overtones, are encouraging because they stress the danger of dirty more than the promise of clean). 

It is necessarily a strategy that is very upfront and public about the root problem, which is the capitalist market imperative to both maximize profit for the individual enterprise and gain greater market share and comparative advantage.  It is a strategy which never ceases to emphasize that the problem is not about what consumers decide, because they do not actually decide much of anything about what products get made and how and with what fuel. (Something deep within me prays for the day to come when progressives publicly reject all virtue signaling nonsense about personally reducing their carbon footprint, and shaming others who don’t follow their lead – but it is an empirical fact that when people are fighting against an evil, like perhaps racist police brutality, it actually helps them to become more dedicated to the cause, and it helps other people believe that their movement is sincere, when they try to change their own behaviour, even though it will have little impact on reducing the evil).

It is a strategy that endlessly repeats and amplifies the core message that the problem is Dirty Production (indeed all forms of pollution caused in production and by products, not just greenhouse gas pollution).  It is the producers who need to be targeted.  It is their behaviour that must change.  The main culprits turn out to be the biggest banks and corporations headquartered in the most ‘advanced’ and post-industrial countries.  It is a strategy that exposes the fraud of all three components of the Market Solution – the Green New Deal idea that increasing clean reduces dirty; the promotion of geoengineering solutions that will lead to greater harm not just an illusion of benefits; and all the schemes for carbon pricing to get consumers to make different ‘choices’ (cap and trade, carbon taxes especially ones that cut spending or reduce taxes in order to be ‘revenue neutral’ instead of being used to reduce dirty production).

Rejecting a Market Solution means Repeating Endlessly that Dirty Production is the Problem and that Increasing Clean Energy Alone Does Nothing to Solve the Problem

It is an anti-capitalist theory and strategy and set of solutions, but it is not premised on replacing capitalist economies with socialist ones, or even on increasing state or other types of non-profit ownership of parts of the economy.

I am not in possession of any miracle solution.  I intend to return at a later date to examining various strategies and tactics being proposed in theory and/or advanced in practice by people closer to the actual struggles than I am myself at this time (again, please send me any information that you may on this, so that I can publicize what good new things people are already doing).  All I have to offer is this broad approach to redirecting the orientation of the left flank of global warming activism.  I am proposing a two-part policy solution that would not threaten the capitalist system (it might save it), but would nevertheless involve creating institutions and practices that are consistent with the logic of a (future) post-capitalist sharing economy.  To repeat, this policy solution is not a ‘transitional demand’, because we are not in a revolutionary political situation.  Inventing clever demands that sound innocuous, but would actually destabilize the system, is not what we should be doing.  We are trying to save planet earth.  Capitalist market solutions are incapable of achieving that goal.

I believe that history shows us that the long transition from late feudalism to mercantile and then industrial and then post-industrial capitalism happened in a pattern Stephen Jay Gould referred to (when talking about Darwinian evolution) as punctuated equilibrium.  This means that, if one steps back and looks at change over the long term (the longue duree) we can see that there are long periods of relative stability and only incremental and incidental changes (but lots of them).  Those periods are interrupted, are punctuated, with brief outbursts of intense conflict and popular upsurge, that may take the form of waves of protest and radical reform or the form of revolution and regime change.  Success or failure in winning change in the punctuated historical moments will be strongly affected by how prepared the progressive forces have made themselves by what they do in the periods before the political situation becomes suddenly favourable.  (It is not just a matter of waiting for Godot of course – the central goal of all progressive struggles in whatever period is to change the relative power of people and rulers.  Push, push, push, outburst).

Green New Deal Policies will be Implemented in Rich Countries but Dirty Production will Not Go Down Fast Enough Until After we have a COVID19 type Great Calamity

As I have already asserted above, and I read Malm as saying this too, it is entirely possible for dirty energy to be replaced by clean energy at the 90% plus level in a totally capitalistic and imperialistic way.  It is in the interest of the biggest capitals and nation states to do that, to save their system .  But I do not think that they will do so, until it is too late.

I do expect that the richest countries and regions, the most ‘post industrial’, will do a lot to build up clean energy production in the places where they mostly live and work.  Governments will legislate some restrictions on the dirtiest forms of production in their backyards, but this will be limited by fears of private companies relocating to poorer countries with the resulting loss of jobs and taxes.  The relocations (spatial fixes) will happen.  Post-industrial areas will be cleaner, but dirty production will be sustained.  There may even be new resource wars over ownership and control of prime clean energy sites.

What I expect is that there will be Green New Deals, carbon pricing and geoengineering fix solutions in the near term.  They will not stop ruinous increases in global warming ‘side effects’ (floods, storms, droughts etc), except closer to home where the post-industrial post materialists live.  Then, in the coming decades, there will be one calamity after another, as the Destruction of Nature Train gathers speed.  At one point or another there will be a Calamity Too Far, some kind of Covid19 Plague World Event, that hurts some of the rulers personally and threatens their rule.  At that point, enough of the most wealthy and powerful corporations and governments will be open to the post-capitalist policies that I am proposing.  Our job on the left is to bring that day closer in as little time as possible.

Here is the two-part solution stripped down to the bare essentials.

STEP ONE:  Demand that nation states and capitals enter into agreements for building up a clean energy production system at the highest power generating locations as an inter-national publicly-owned utility.  This would include plans for a world-wide system of high voltage transmission, storage and allocation to end users.  There would be room for some private companies to get contracts to build this system, and later provide services to it, but the ownership and control of the system would be public.

We Must Demand that the Best Clean Energy Locations be Shared as part of a Single World-Wide Public Utility

A clean energy global public utility preserving sun and wind as part of the Global Commons would get the price down to a low level.  It is the only way that energy from the prime locations, capable of generating the volume of power required to actually replace dirty, can be shared between all the ‘downstream’ business and individual users.  The increase in profit of business users due to lower fuel costs will not be enough to pay for all the retrofitting they will need to do to their techniques, technology and products, but it will help a bit. 

STEP TWO:  Demand that nation states enter into global agreements to enact policies within their states to require all businesses to meet strict quota targets to reduce emissions by a specific amount every year for the next, 10, 20 or 30 years (the time span depends on when it begins and how long we expect to have to avoid the Warming Apocalypse).  These policies are coercive.  Companies that repeatedly fail to meet their targets are punished by having states temporarily seize their assets (put them under trusteeship, permanently take all dividends and revenues that would have gone to stockholders in the period of trusteeship, ban the sale of the stock until the end of the trusteeship) until the emissions get reduced.  The target levels and timetable of deadlines would have to be higher and shorter in the most developed countries in order to create space for relatively higher economic growth in poorer countries. There would have to be enough enforcement by agencies operating at the global level to reduce the amount that competing states and capitals cheat in order to gain competitive advantage.  If all of this sounds extremely difficult to accomplish, and only something that will get done when people get desperate for a solution, it is.

Make no mistake about it.  This is what Malm referred to as a “planned economic recession”,  just like the ones that have been consciously engineered by states everywhere in order to flatten the curve of COVID19 infections.  Except that it is a ‘recession’ that will have to be planned and maintained for a very long time, a reduction in the total amount of annual economic growth.

Deflating the world economy over a long period to make the transition from dirty to clean fuel, but also to change the dirty production and products down the line, will require the elimination of many many millions of jobs.  Consequently the transition plan will have to include some other post-capitalist reforms, notably some version of a left-wing Guaranteed Annual Income.

Our Second Demand is for Governments to Dictate Quotas and Timetables for Reduction in Dirty Production and to Enforce It by Imposing Trusteeships on Repeat Offenders

Reducing the size of the pie produced by economic growth will also require other policies that change which goods and services are invested in and produced more, and which are thereby invested in and produced less.   There will have to be more production to meet fundamental needs for housing, food, healthcare, education/training, social care, and the arts and science and social science etc – all the things that contribute to a baseline quality and quantity of life for all.

The sum of all these policies do not constitute a post-capitalist or socialist economic system.  But they create institutions and policies, and open the people of the world to lived experiences of things that work, which are post-capitalist and egalitarian.  And it could save us all to live another day.

Progressives should reconsider the strategy of Happy Talk about a Painless Transition to a Clean Energy Future, where everyone displaced by the transition can have a high-paying unionized green job.  That is not compatible with the logic of capitalist markets, and will not happen.

We should tell it like it is, and act as a left flank that changes the way many people think about the causes of the problem and the things that we need to do to have a solution that will actually happen.

We will not be thanked by very many people for our efforts, but we may help prepare the ground for movements that succeed in winning bold reforms when the opportunity for drastic action presents itself.

There are two basic approaches to this issue, a Market Solution and a Global Commons Solution.  The first road is much easier, but will fail.  The second road is vastly more difficult, but it is the only road to saving planet earth and all the species living on it, including us humans.

(5) POSTSCRIPT: ECOMODERNISM MASKS THE TRUE CAUSES MORE EFFECTIVELY THAN CLIMATE CHANGE DENIALISM DOES

There are multiple factors that need to be grasped in order to design a solution that preserves the capitalist economy that produced it (we do not have time to replace capitalism first), but still solves the immediate problem fast enough to save the planet from disastrous global warming.  Having said that, the underlying and overwhelmingly decisive causal force is very simple, and it is in a sense the opposite of what the environmental movement and even many on the left have put their focus on.  The cause is the insatiable need for private capital to expand the volume (and to do that, increase the rate) of profit from its investments.  The problem is dirty production and distribution of dirty products using dirty fuel that has maximized profit (usually euphemized as maximizing ‘economic growth’) in both capitalist and state socialist economies for 200 years.  The problem is an enormous system of vested interests in physical capital and types of products and ways of producing and ways to transporting goods to their ultimate business and individual consumers.

The Cause of Dirty Production is Not Unchangeable Human Greed – It is a Very Changeable Economic Model Based on Ever-Expanding Profit

The problem is not the insatiable need of individual consumers for emissions-releasing products (e.g. cars, boats, planes).  It is not their personal ‘carbon footprint’, not really, for the simple reason that consumers do not get to decide what gets produced and how and with what fuel.  (Unequal levels of consumption by relatively rich individuals, businesses, regions and countries is a problem in the aggregate, but even here the decisions of individuals do not have much causal force in creating or reducing the problem of too much dirty production.)  All of those decisions are made 100% by private capital and government leaders.  Consumers only decide whether to buy the product and use it, or to go without.  Yes consumers have power in consumer goods and services markets, but the power is to choose between this version of a product by Company X and that version of the product by Company Y.  Marketers for Company X and Y are very attentive to this fact, but it explains nothing about why almost all production by all companies is dirty, including production using non-dirty fuel inputs.  If governments and businesses all agreed tomorrow to stop dirty production and sell clean products, the consumers would accept the change, without protest, overnight.

Unfortunately many of those who do see through the smokescreen of climate denial, do not see this picture of an entire very modern system of dirty production as the problem.  Instead, we embrace some version of what Malm calls Eco-modernism theory (discussed below), and it blinds us.  Having misidentified the problem, we are open to persuasion that the solution should target the consumer, business and individual, not production itself, and certainly not the ostensibly clean, very post-industrial and post-materialist part of the system that finances and manages it.  The picture of the problem that we have in mind is of individual consumers driving cars and flying in planes that produce emissions.  We also see smokestacks in ‘traditional’ industrial-era factories that survive into the post-industrial era in poor Third World countries.  These are certainly significant parts of the problem, but this visualization leaves out the most important parts of the picture.  It is a picture of a car that shows us parts of the chassis and the tailpipe but leaves out the engine, and suggests that the solution is leaving that engine alone while improving the EPA rating with filters on the exhaust and driving the car less often.

It may help to visualize the scope of the problem if we break down the cycle of dirty production resulting in escalating emissions as taking place over six stages, very briefly listed.  Because the basic law of capitalism is that capital must get more out than it puts in, and must then reinvest it to make even more, these six stages have a tendency to get ever larger in scope and volume. 

There is Pollution at Every Stage of a Global Production Chain and the Biggest Cause of Pollution is Also the Cleanest (First) Stage — Investing

In short, it is a positive feedback loop.  At the end of each production cycle, more capital is accumulated and there is a larger amount to invest in the next production cycle.  The dirty production of commodities pie gets ever larger, and wild uncommodified Nature gets ever smaller.  There is room for both increasing fossil fuel use and clean energy use because the pie gets bigger faster and faster.  Ecomodernists blame this on too many (poor) people demanding more pie.  They deny that the problem is a system that requires ever-expanding production to generate ever more profit, and more precisely profit for the most post-industrial corporations in the global system, ultimately the most digitized and financialized forms of capital in the richest countries and regions.

Stage one is the decision by capital investors, and by the vast apparatus of managers and professionals that act on their behalf, to set up the five remaining stages, to invest in a particular sequence of production and distribution processes using particular methods and raw materials and technology and types of labourers (these are forms of capital) to produce particular kinds of products with known consequences for the environment.  This is the pure Capital or Money stage.  It is the least visible and seemingly the most clean – it is people in offices in highly post-industrial financial institutions and corporations headquartered in technologically advanced mainly service economy countries engaging in the operation of all the markets involved in raising and allocating and managing capital in all its forms.

Stage two is the (Dirty or Clean) Fuel Production stage – the decision to use this or that fuel is made and there is pollution that the extraction and transport of that fuel creates.  Stage three is the (Global) Dirty Production Stage—the business user of the fuel and the set of production processes they engage in, whether they produce goods or services or both.  In fact, this is typically a large number of different productions in a global supply chain.  Stage four is the Distribution and (Managing and Financing of) Sales stage -- marketing and transporting and warehousing and distributing of the good or service to the end user, business or individual.  This is the stage where the potential profit that comes from having produced a good or service becomes an actual money profit that returns to the capital owner (what Marxists call the stage of actually ‘realizing’ the potential surplus value of a commodity).  A lot of this activity is labelled as post-industrial services work.

There is No Such Thing as a Goods Producing Economy that is Separate from a Post-Industrial Services Economy. 

A Large Proportion of the Post-Industrial Service Part of the Economy is Personal Services that Require More Goods Production. 

An Even Bigger Part is the Activity of Financialized Markets and Managers and Experts and Sales/Marketing People to Support the Production and Sale of Goods.

Stage five is the stage of the Product itself, and the pollution and destruction of Nature, that results from the Consumption of this type of product.   Here again, it is often the seemingly clean ‘service’ product that is actually the stronger causal force in creating the amount of pollution.  For example, business and personal travel and tourism are services, but the planes and hotels and taxis and leisure activities that generate the actual emissions are ‘industrial’ goods consequences of ‘post-industrial’ service industries, and would not exist without them.  Stage six is the Destruction of Nature Consequences stage, the global warming consequences for planet earth and for humans as part of it.  I include this as a stage because it is here that Market Solution advocates propose that we rely on blocking the sun or carbon capture, to presumably make the cycle of production and consumption ‘cleaner’ in its effects.

All of these stages overlap in time and place.  It is not a simple straight line from A to B.  This is relevant because the stages are interdependent.  It is difficult to change one, without changing the others.  It is a vastly complex system of vested interests and invested capitals in hard-driving competition with one another to maximize profit.  To convince this or that capital investor in stage one to replace dirty with clean in any of the subsequent stages you will have to persuade them that they will not lose their competitive advantage and their market share by doing so.  I will argue that this makes a Global Commons type solution the only one that can possibly actually work.

Ecomodernism theory is a variant of a theory that is almost universally accepted among liberal as much as conservative thinkers, the idea that the most ‘advanced’ economies are the ones that have post-industrialized the most and are post-industrializing further with the AI-driven digitalization of both production and their products and consumption.  The key claim is that these post-industrial societies are also post-materialist.  Their domestic companies produce mostly services and are clean.  Their consumers are secure in the meeting of their basic material needs, and seek to consume non-material things that meet their higher level psychological and spiritual needs for autonomy, meaning, recognition etc

The Idea that Post-Industrial Economies are Post Materialist is Total Bunk – the Richest and Most Advanced Societies are actually Hyper Materialistic

It does not seem to matter that there is almost no factual support for any of this, either as a description of what people in the past most valued as needs and wants and in fact often felt they got from meeting some of their material needs and wants, or as a fact-based account of the volume of very material devices that today’s post-industrial companies produce, and post-industrial rich country consumers consume, compared to their grandparents and great grandparents.  I would argue that the overwhelming weight of the evidence is that today’s post-industrial societies are hyper-materialist in every sense of the word, not post-materialist.

According to post-materialist theory, the consumers in the poorer countries and regions are still materialistic, still preoccupied with demanding more production of goods.  Hence, in a sense the problem is that there are too many poor people in poor countries and regions demanding goods that require dirty industrial era production relative to the number of post-materialist consumers.  This last inference is one that liberals would avoid, but it follows inexorably from the claim that post-industrial producers and consumers are mostly post-materialist, and those in poor countries and regions are not.  This is of course a thinly disguised version of Thomas Malthus’s theory that famine was due to the excessive birth rate of poor people and that the solution was not to produce more food and basic survival goods for them (and maybe less for the upper and middle classes) but to arrange to have fewer poor people.  But the theory is wrong yet again in its post-materialist theory application, and for the same reason.  The problem is not due to too many people with needs.  It is a system of production that is not oriented to meeting the needs of all, but to the profit and luxury consumption of a few.

Malm articulates a deeper theoretical critique of the ecomodernist neo-Malthusian explanation of the cause of too much emissions than I go into here.  He then shows how it is not supported by the facts either in the Industrial Revolution or in China and elsewhere today.  He also shows how contemporary economics explanations use neo-Ricardian arguments to come up with another version of ecomodernism, where the focus is on how changing the relative price of carbon versus clean for the business and individual consumer will magically lead to a decarbonized economy without changing anything else in the economy.  For the more theoretically inclined, I would very much urge you to buy the book to read Malm’s critique and alternative explanations.

Malm Shows that both Postmaterialism Theory and Anthropocene Theory are Thinly Disguised Malthusianism – They See the Problem as Too Many (Poor) Consumers who are Greedy for Too Much ‘Industrial Era’ Goods Production

As someone steeped in the natural sciences ecology literature, Malm also does a brilliant job of showing how the Anthropocene theory, taken as gospel by so many natural and social scientists, is another variant of ecomodernism.  It is repackaged Malthusianism.  It sees the driver of excessive emissions as an unchangeable human nature of insatiable desire to consume, not the changeable social model of our profit-maximizing economy.  This of course ignores the basic fact that the point in history when the Anthropocene theorists say humans took over from ‘Nature’ in determining the level of emissions was the point at which (industrial) capitalism emerged.  If human nature is as they claim and doesn’t change much, then it could not be the cause of the accelerated destruction of Nature which has coincided with the rise and spread of free market capitalism. 

As Malm put it, the climate change deniers blame physical Nature for global warming; the Anthropocene theorists blame human nature.  This has consequences for the envisioning of solutions.  For many natural scientists it seems to buttress a pessimistic fatalism, and a temptation to look for technological fixes (blocking the sun and carbon capture), instead of social and political ones.  For some, it leads to an anti-modern utopianism, where the solution is to withdraw from the social world, and build little oases of Walden pond.  In extreme cases, it could justify eco-terrorism.  To be fair, many of those who embrace the Anthropocene thesis can be seen as having taken the first step in the direction of an historical critique of our social model.  They are saying that it is not Nature but humans who are at fault.  But their theory is extremely vague, and at best amounts to no explanation at all:  An indeterminately vague ‘they’ are polluting too much because another ‘they’ are too greedy.  This way of thinking is more of a misstep, then a step.

Malm devotes a full chapter to taking on the version of ecomodernism that blames poor countries, and most prominently China, for the sharp upturn in global emissions since the 1980s and especially since China joined the WTO in 2001.  In this case, there are some facts in support of the claim.  It is true that China has gone on an extended spree of building a new infrastructure to support a greatly increased level of industrial (but also cutting edge post-industrial) goods production within China.  It is true that the Chinese government has gone so far as to impose martial law type repression in Inner Mongolia and elsewhere in order to ramp up coal production to very high levels.  It is true that this has caused much higher levels of carbon emission, and that most of China’s cities have major problems with air and water and other types of pollution.

Anthropocene Theory Blames Unchangeable Human Nature instead of a Changeable Economy – This Way of Thinking Leads to both Politicial Passivity and Delusional Thinking about Technological Fixes

But the dirty production is not only China’s doing.  Half of China’s total emissions have been in the export sector where some 63% of the industries are direct transplants of foreign companies (331, 339).  And despite the fact that most of the emissions ever produced have been since the 1980s, and China’s rise has contributed significantly to that increase, it is not like post-industrial country domestic production is clean.  China and other countries are catching up, but production in global North countries still accounts for a large majority of irreversible historic emissions. 

But Malm’s main point is not about who is dirtier, poor countries or rich countries.  They are both dirty.  His main point is that the relentless uptick in global emissions is literally the direct result of changes in the social model of capitalism in the most developed countries that began in earnest in 1973, and have been exported to the rest of the world.  It is the result of by far the biggest Spatial Fix in the history of capitalism.  This story of the rise of globalized neoliberalism and the reasons for it has been told in great detail in many places.  What Malm contributes to the story is an enumeration of the reasons why China has been central to the success of the shift to the new social model, and how this impacts global greenhouse emissions.  He makes three main points. 

First, China met the preconditions for a shift of production that, unlike earlier colonial and neo-colonial shifts, could quickly achieve the same level of labour productivity in ‘relative surplus value’ production as existed in post-industrial countries.  Ironically, this was precisely because it had built up a high capacity, Communist party ruled, state whose main reason for existing had always been to catch up rapidly to the advanced economies of the West (and to ‘Make China Great Again’).  The Fall of Communism in China meant changing its economy to a state-directed but otherwise fully capitalist one, open to foreign capital.  (Russia listened to the Friedmanite Chicago School economists and tried to privatize everything quickly.  This undermined state capacity and led to ultra-corrupt gangster crony capitalism, that in turn put Putin power to cover this up with racist nationalism and militarism.)

Ironically the Fall of Communism in China has Allowed both International and Chinese Capital to Save Capitalism by Expanding Globalized Supply Chain Production

Unlike India or Indonesia or Nigeria or Brazil or any other country that might have been the place to relocate advanced production, China had developed the so-called ‘human capital’ of its labour force in a more systematically equal way (not the same of course as saying there aren’t big inequalities between cities and countryside etc).  The Chinese Party/State was willing to force considerable foregoing of consumption on its working people, in order to extract very high levels of profit to then invest in building an extensive and hyper-modern infrastructure, that provided huge subsidies to the profit of foreign and domestic private companies.  And they were willing to maintain much of the system that prevented labourers from moving freely from one part of the country.  This system holds down the price of labour, by making people in poorer areas willing to accept worse conditions, in order to gain entry as ‘temporary workers’ to the economically booming areas.  It pre-empts the possibility of opposition movements linking up on the level of the whole country.  It is combined  with repression of worker strikes and protests to win better wages and conditions (the state is slowly losing here).  China has a very authoritarian, and often repressive, Communist party-led state, but it is also an instance of Maximum Capitalism.

Second, as a corollary, the production in China is cheap labour based, but it was also highly automated from the beginning.  Ecomodernists and economists sidestep the fact that more machines and technology means a greater demand for fuel, and hence higher emissions. Global warming is not going to be headed off because we automate production more and faster, in either poor or rich countries.

Third, the globalized neoliberalism social model is a model that aims to maximize labour productivity by removing as many impediments as possible to the freedom of private capital to move wherever it wants, in order to drive the hardest bargain with its workers wherever it is located.  Malm highlights one feature of it – truly globalized production – that lifts the ecomodernist veil on the driving forces increasing dirty production.  China is a locus of high emissions, but it is only one small part of a world-wide system that is increasingly dirty, both because it is neoliberal and because it is global.  Neoliberal policies in China, but also in the USA and elsewhere, means deregulation, and this often includes environmental deregulation.

Both Longer Supply Chains and UltraModern Robotized and AI Production Increase the Demand for Fuel and for Production and Distribution Processes that Pollute

Globalization does not just mean relocation of production to poor countries.  It also means that the world economy is increasingly flattened.  More and more production is a single Global Factory, a supply chain of productions in multiple countries resulting in products that are exported to consumers at greater and greater distances.  The sheer increase in the number of production processes and the tremendous expansion in ships, trucks, planes, roads, airports, trains, pipelines, transmission lines, warehouses  etc to get the product between production sites and ultimately to consumers in more distant markets is a major contributor to the jump in pollution everywhere.  And changing from dirty to clean will require changing the way goods and services are produced in every part of that system, a system that is owned and controlled by the biggest banks and corporations and the most powerful states.