By Simon Pirani
Fossil fuels are used in most of the economic processes that go on every day. Most of the technological systems all around us – electricity networks, transport systems, urban built environments, industrial and agricultural production, military systems – depend on fossil fuels.
To understand why fossil fuel consumption is frightfully high and rising, we need to understand these technological systems and the way they are embedded in social and economic systems. This understanding is a weapon in the fight to move away from fossil fuels, changing all these systems in the process.
In this article, I will (1) offer an overview of the processes through which fossil fuels are consumed, and how researchers analyse these; (2) discuss how Karl Marx’s theoretical approach might help us develop this analysis; (3) suggest ways to envisage the transition away from fossil fuels; and (4) comment on the strategies needed to hasten the transition.
The article is based on a talk I gave at the Rosa Luxemburg foundation in Berlin[1] and sets out arguments made in my book Burning Up: a global history of fossil fuel consumption (Pluto Press, 2018), which may be downloaded free here.
The Rosa Luxemburg foundation have published this article in German here.
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1. How consumption happens
Putting an end to fossil fuel burning in the coming decades is one of the most pressing tasks facing humanity. Of the greenhouse gas emissions that are the main cause of global heating, at least three quarters result from fossil fuel use.
A growing cohort of young people understand all this only too well, turning out in their tens of thousands to block the coal mine development at Lutzerath and other fossil fuel projects.
To have any chance of keeping global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures, fossil fuel use needs to go down to zero, or near zero, by 2050. Much faster would be better. Governments’ current performance is taking us into extreme danger – warming of between 2.2°C and 3.4°C – according to scientists who monitor it.
But this is not just about the mining of coal, oil and gas. It is also about their use – that is, about the whole economy.
Reducing fossil fuel consumption will require huge technological, social and political changes.
Understanding more clearly how consumption happens, analysing and measuring it, will help us to understand more clearly what changes are needed. But the analysis and measurement involves political judgment about the way society and the economy works.
For example: China in 2009 overtook the USA as the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels – but almost half of those fuels are used directly, and more indirectly, by export-focused industries supplying the rich world.
Another example: the production of hydrogen, for use in petrochemical processes and to make fertilisers, uses large amounts of gas or coal. Worldwide, it emits greenhouse gases at four-fifths of the rate that the aviation industry does – but receives far less attention.[2]
So numbers are important.
Furthermore: fossil fuels consumption is a process, not a single transaction. Fossil fuels are versatile and are used in different ways throughout the economy: they multiply the productivity of labour; they are converted to produce heat, for motive power (for moving things, e.g. cars) and for driving machinery. And they are used as feedstocks – in other words, as raw material, not fuel – e.g. for plastics or fertiliser manufacture.
So analysing consumption is more complicated than for other products.
Researchers who have conducted such analysis, over the last 50 years or so, have used the concept of energy. It is a problematic term, especially because it has often been twinned with the assumption that energy is a commodity (see below, part 2). I use the term energy to mean work done by physical or chemical resources, mobilised by people for that purpose.[3]
The graphic shows how energy researchers break down the process of fossil fuel consumption into distinct stages. Fossil fuels are first got out of the ground (“primary energy”). They undergo physical conversions: gas and coal are burned in power stations to make electricity; gas is burned in boilers to heat water; oil is refined to make oil products (“final energy”). These forms of energy are further converted into types of energy that society uses, e.g. the motion of vehicles, heat at home or for industrial processes (“useful energy”).
Researchers make a further distinction between these forms of “energy”, and “energy services”.
“Energy services” are the uses to which energy is put: the warmth of a home, provided very often by a gas boiler; light in the evening, provided by electricity; the transportation of people or goods by a vehicle; the melting of iron ore to make steel. These “energy services” are what people want from energy.
This distinction was highlighted by environmentalists in the 1970s, when energy conservation was first seriously discussed. They argued that “energy services” could often be delivered with less energy, or with different forms of energy.
An example of delivering energy services with less energy is a programme to insulate, and fit heat pumps in, people’s homes. This would mean that most of the fossil fuels burned to heat homes in Europe need not be burned.
An example of delivering energy services with different forms of energy is the small-scale renewables systems used to deliver electricity to millions of homes in the global south where grid access is unreliable or non-existent. These systems are not perfect, but are definitely better than nothing, and do not burn any fossil fuels.
As a Marxist, I do not like the term “energy service”. It is economics-speak, often used to imply that the heat in someone’s home, or their electricity access, is something they have to buy from a corporate provider.
I think the distinction between the uses to which energy is put, and the form in which it is provided, is better explained by Karl Marx’s concept of commodities comprising both use value and exchange value (see part 2 below).
Returning to the point about the flow of energy through technological systems, let’s go further back up the chain.
For the sake of accuracy, researchers make a distinction between “useful energy” and “final energy”.
The heat at home, the light in the evening, the motive power that moves the vehicle or the heat in the steelmaking furnace are defined as “useful energy”.
The gas that heats water in a boiler; the electricity that provides light in the evening; the petrol that moves a car along the road; the coal that is burned to melt iron ore: these are defined as “final energy”. They are converted into “useful energy” by boilers, light bulbs, car engines and so on.
This “final energy” is often the product of a previous conversion, from “primary energy”.
The most important example of “final energy” is electricity, produced either by burning fossil fuels in a power station, or from renewable sources such as hydro or solar power.
Sometimes, very little conversion is needed from “primary energy” to “final energy”. For example gas, once out of the ground, may only require some processing to remove e.g. sulphur or other impurities, before going into the gas grid.
In the dominant technological systems today, most “primary energy” is oil, gas, coal, nuclear power, hydro, biofuels and renewables.
Using the scheme presented in the graphic, there are four ways of reducing fossil fuel consumption.
1. You make social change that means some energy services are no longer needed, e.g. arrange things so that less stuff is transported half way around the world before use, and so that nobody needs or wants to travel to work by car or plane.
2. You reduce the amount of useful energy needed to produce the energy service, e.g. insulate houses so they can be warmed to the same temperature with less heat energy, which in turn needs less fuel. You go to the shops on an electric scooter or on foot, instead of driving an SUV. You recycle steel scrap instead of burning coal to make more steel.
3. You get more useful energy from less primary energy, by making technological systems more efficient and reducing the number of energy conversions. You use electric heat pumps to heat houses; you install district heating systems with combined heat and power plants; you upgrade electricity systems.
4. You replace fossil fuels as primary energy with renewables and hydro, most significantly to make electricity.
To decarbonise human economic activity, adapting energy use (1 and 2) and minimising conversions (3) will be at least as important as developing non-fossil energy sources (4). (Another task is to find alternatives to the processes, mentioned above, that use coal, gas and oil as feedstock, e.g. for plastics or fertilisers.)
Often, such measures are instinctively resisted by corporations and governments, because they tend to undo the system that has developed, in which all forms of energy are commodified and their sale is the source of profit. Corporations and governments prefer to talk about developing non-fossil energy sources than about developing ways of doing things that use less energy in total.
Given the extent to which the current technological systems depend on fossil fuels, these systems will have to be transformed and in some cases dismantled in order to reduce, and eventually stop, fossil fuel consumption. That will mean transforming the social and economic systems in which they are embedded.
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2. How Marx’s approach to capitalism might help us
Consumption, whether of fossil fuels, food, or anything else, is only one part of what goes on in capitalism. A broader look at Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism can help us to understand this.[4]
Marx saw capital as a social relation, an exercise of power. One of his profound insights was that, as capital rose to dominate society, it dehumanised people. It turned relationships between people, and the relationship between people and the natural world in which they live, into economic relationships measured by money.
He called this dehumanising process “alienation”. Much of his work concerned alienation in the labour process, i.e. in the way that humans take from their surroundings the means of subsistence and the material basis for their society and culture.
Marx showed that the industrial working class, which was taking shape as a significant social force during his lifetime, was alienated from the products of its own labour by capital. He witnessed workers, arriving in European cities in large numbers, being forced to work in factories according to specific disciplines.
People’s labour power was turned into a commodity that they had to sell in order to live. The products of this labour were appropriated by capital and also turned into commodities. The instruments of labour, including sciences and technologies, were turned against the labourers.
Large-scale industrial production was just getting going. Fossil fuels were central to it, because they could multiply the productivity of labour like nothing else.
Through the 19th and 20th centuries, both fossil fuels and forms of final energy produced from conversion – electricity, petrol, heat and so on – were increasingly commodified.
Commodification was always contested. For example, as the labour movement took root among urban workers in Europe in the late 19th century, light and heat at home, along with clean water and sewage systems, came to be seen as rights. The state, under pressure from the labour movement, often provided them as services, rather than commodities.
In the late 20th century, as countries outside the rich world were electrified, urban residents there, too, came to see electricity access as a right. There have been huge social struggles, resisting the provision of electricity as a commodity for which you have to pay a corporation.
Not only is commodification a key to understanding energy systems, but confronting and breaking commodified relationships is and will be a key to transforming those systems.
As for what Marx wrote specifically about consumption, there is less there that is directly useful – for a good reason. He wrote about luxury consumption by the rich, and consumption at subsistence level by the vast majority. Consumption above subsistence level by hundreds of millions of people in rich countries had simply not happened during his lifetime.
Energy technologies crucial to that consumption, such as cars and electrical appliances – let alone plastics and cheap aviation – were only just being invented when Marx died. And obviously capitalism has changed in other ways, too.
For these reasons I sometimes wish Marxist scholars would spend less energy on Marxology (working out precisely what Marx thought about any particular issue), and more on trying to use his principal analytical insights to understand our enemy, 21st century capitalism.
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3. Envisaging the transition
In my book Burning Up, I suggested that the transition away from fossil fuels could be thought about as three types of changes.[5] These overlap; the boundaries between them are not, and can not be, clear. But it is useful to make the distinctions.
a. “Changes to, or adaptation of, existing technological systems, that could reduce fossil fuel use rapidly.”
Such changes include:
□ Insulating homes to reduce the heat energy (a form of useful energy) needed for people to stay warm (an energy service), as advocated by Insulate Britain;
□ Installing district heating systems using combined heat and power plants (making transformation of primary energy into final energy more efficient); or
□ Recycling steel, which reduces the amount of heat energy required to produce each tonne of steel.
Engineers have been advocating these things for decades. They do not require systemic transformation.
b. “Superseding the technological systems in their current form.”
These are transformations of whole technological systems, not just immediate improvements: not only insulating existing homes, but moving urban built infrastructure away from the dominant energy-intensive model, ending construction of energy-inefficient buildings using energy-intensive materials.
To do this in most countries, a complete overhaul of building regulations, of the construction industry, and of the architectural profession, would be needed. So would a change in the way that buildings and land are owned and paid for.
Other examples including current systems of urban transport and electricity. Technologically, these are systemic, not partial, changes – and therefore also imply big social and political changes.
c. “Transformation of the social and economic systems that underpin the technological ones.”
The key points here are: transformation of productive activity (industry) beyond the constraints of the wage labour system, and corporate control, unleashing human creative capacities to make things that are truly useful and desirable. Such production, coordinated with 21st century information technology, would supersede the production of little-needed or unneeded goods, waste in processes and the egregious use of energy-intensive materials.
Not only in industry, but also domestic labour and agriculture, could be transformed.
A society where employed labour is superseded by useful and creative activity (production for use) could move away from consumerism and ideas that material goods are essential means to happiness and fulfilment.
This is what I understand by “socialism”.
What does this mean for the technological systems that consume fossil fuels in the largest quantities? Here are three examples.
1. Transport. Mainstream discussions on decarbonising transport often start with the unquestioned assumption that humans have an intrinsic need to travel, and, especially, to travel in mobile metal armchairs (cars). Actually these forms of travel developed under particular, recent, historical circumstances (see this very good article). Car-based urban transport systems, which account for a huge chunk of transport-sector greenhouse gas emissions, are a product of late-20th-century capitalist economic development.
Changes in the way people live and work in cities, and the way they travel more widely, could lead to rapid decarbonisation. The obstructions here are from car manufacturing companies, but also from assumptions widely shared among politicians, including social democratic ones, about how people should live.
Car-intensive urban transport systems can be understood as the product of a society in which capital expansion is the first driving force; production is for profit not for use; and artificial “needs” are generated (e.g. the “need” to drive to office-based city jobs, young men’s “need” to feel a sense of freedom behind the wheel, the “need” to have next year’s model for the company car fleet, and then the “need” for new roads and parking spaces).
Once we imagine living in a way that supercedes all of this, our approaches to decarbonising transport can be much more direct. We aim for social change that makes possible long-overdue technological transformation.
2. Homes and other buildings. Again, mainstream political discussions about decarbonisation assume that the existence of the property development and construction businesses (both products of late-20th-century capitalism), and landlordism (much older!) are immutable fixtures. They are not.
Once housing and the built environment are considered from the point of view of human need – i.e. the need for places to live – and not from the standpoint of these businesses, the technological routes to decarbonisation are known.
At the Royal Meteorological Society climate change forum last year, Alice Moncaster, a built environment researcher, summarised the immediate priorities as: minimal new building; retrofit not demolition; retrofit for future climates; net zero carbon new build; and minimise steel and concrete. For urban development researchers and architects, these are basic principles.
This is one of many examples of skilled workers in an economic sector being acutely aware of the available means to decarbonisation, that are blocked by social and economic factors.
One could say that these architects and researchers are considering use values, as opposed to exchange values. The system dominated by exchange values is the obstruction.
3. Electricity networks. Mainstream discussion about decarbonising electricity focus on substituting renewables for fossil fuels to produce electricity. This substitution is necessary, but far from sufficient.
There is almost no discussion about who uses electricity and what for, e.g. inflated demand for data centres; large-scale industrial demand; and also the burden on electricity supply and distribution of uninterrupted 24-hour access in rich countries, and the potential of “peak shaving” (managing demand downwards at peak times).
There is too little discussion about the potential, with current technology, for decentralised networks. This potential has risen steadily, because of the advance of smaller-scale, especially renewable, generation, and presents a challenge to the system of ownership and control of the network, because of its compatibility with forms of social ownership.
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4. Strategies for social and political action
The point of what I have written above is not to make detailed blueprints for a future society, but to contribute to a general understanding that can inform social movements’ strategies.
The reality will be very messy. Global heating is a global problem and there is unlikely to be any complete or comprehensive solution. Struggles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will also always be bound up with class struggles for social justice.
What does this mean in practice? Kevin Anderson, a climate scientist and outspoken critic of the discourse around the international climate talks, offered his view of a potentially effective approach to greenhouse gas emissions reduction in a recent article.
Building on his long-standing insistence that the carbon budgets set by the European Union, the UK government and other advocates of “green growth” are inadequate, Anderson argued that the mainstream narrative, and the “techno modernist” fantasy of carbon dioxide removal that goes with it, are major obstructions. He concentrated fire on a “high-emitting and high-consuming” elite, “the owners of the mainstream media, the senior journalists and academics, the entrepreneurs and the policymakers”.
In a response, I argued that this elite was the froth on the surface of a deeper problem; that behind the facade – behind “the political spaces in which the ‘prevailing mitigation narrative’ is manufactured” – are “powerful social and economic relationships that have to be confronted and broken”.
In other words, the climate talks and the discourse around them, which Anderson so convincingly criticises, are expressions of the underlying forces of capital accumulation that drive the expansion of fossil fuel use and the resistance to decarbonisation.
Markus Wissen and Ulrich Brand, in an article about Lutzerath and the way the Greens in Germany have been co-opted by the political establishment, touched on similar issues. “The ‘march through the institutions’ envisaged by the 1968ers resulted in the march of the institutions through the protagonists of the movement”, they wrote. The institutions did not succumb, because they are expressions of the power of capital.
Probably many of us share an understanding that (i) the process around the international climate talks, and the mainstream narrative about decarbonisation, are obstructions to an effective, just transition away from fossil fuels, because of the way in which the political sphere represents the needs of capital; and (ii) opposition to this narrative, and the development of policies for that transition, must be bound up with social movements against capital.
I do not believe there is an all-embracing formula to articulate this understanding (although, in a recent on-line presentation to an audience in Brazil, I suggested points of principle around which movements could unite).
In Germany, there are examples of large-scale actions that have challenged the state and corporations, such as the Lutzerath battle, and of strong alliances being built between social and climate struggles as the united action by Fridays for Future and transport workers.
Organisations in the UK are also working towards such unity. The government’s reckless determination to expand oil and gas production on the North Sea, in direct opposition to the scientific consensus, is a real danger. An especially damaging decision is expected shortly, sanctioning the very large Rosebank field west of Shetland.
So far, this is being challenged mainly by NGOs such as Greenpeace and climate campaign groups such as Extinction Rebellion. But there is also important work being done to involve oil industry workers, and communities in the oil producing areas, in favour of a just transition. Platform, a campaign group, has worked for several years with rank-and-file trade unionists on the North Sea, conducting discussions with workers about how they see a just transition, campaigning for workers to be retrained to work in the offshore wind industry, and so on.
In London, the mainstream narrative, and the accompanying greenwash, is being challenged by a broad-based campaign against a proposed new tunnel under the River Thames, the Silvertown tunnel. The tunnel, like all fossil-fuel-intensive infrastructure, is damaging in climate terms. The decision to build it was made by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan of the Labour party, who (because the Tories control national government) is Labour’s most powerful elected politician – and who also claims to be a champion of climate policy.
The tunnel is half completed. Through a community-based coalition, we have convinced the local borough councils, both Labour, to oppose it, along with transport unions, NHS and teaching unions, high-profile academic researchers, numerous residents’ associations and community groups. We continue to demand that building work be paused and alternative uses (not motor transport) found for the completed part.
No one such campaign can seriously bring down the edifice of hypocrisy and greenwash with which politicians are protecting fossil fuels’ dominance. We need to bring struggles and campaigns together, to deepen social opposition to the mainstream narrative and to hasten the transformation of technological, social and political systems. 14 August 2023.
□ This article is published in German here.
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[1] I thank the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, in particular the doctoral programme “Crisis and Socio-ecological transformation” of the Scholarship Department (Studienwerk) and the Institute for Critical Social Analysis for arranging the talk; Melissa Büttner and Nelo Schmalen for their comments; and Markus Wissen
[2] US military: Burning Up, page 70; China: Burning Up, page 160; hydrogen: see here.
[3] “This follows the Oxford Dictionary definition of energy as ‘the means of doing work by utilising matter or radiation’. That ‘work’ can include anything from running a power station to warming a room. A vital function of energy resources, including fossil fuels, has been to substitute for human labour, whether in industry, agriculture or in households. A physicist would say that energy can neither be ‘produced’ or ‘consumed’, because humans’ energy systems simply take energy in one form and change it to another form. Nevertyeless I have used these words in the usual way.” (Burning Up, page 4.) For a discussion between Larry Lohmann, David Schwartzman and me, about the use of the term energy among other things, see the pamphlet Roads to an Energy Commons
[4] I wrote more on this subject in a conference paper, How energy was commodified, and how it could be decommodified.
[5] Burning Up, pages 188-190
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