Workers at a car parts factory in Italy, closed by the multinational GKN corporation, have made an international appeal to support their plan to launch a co-op producing cargo bikes and solar panels.
Climate activists’ action in support of the GKN workers. See “About the photo”, below
The factory, at Campi Bisenzio near Florence (Firenze), has been occupied since July 2021, when Melrose Industries, the asset-stripping corporation that took over GKN, announced it would close. Other GKN plants were also junked.
Negotiations with a possible new owner failed earlier this year. The 185 workers who remain at Campi Bisenzio are now threatened with the sack, and eviction from the building, on 1 January 2024.
They have issued an appeal to international supporters to help them raise 1 million euros for a co-operative that will keep the factory open: more than €315,000 has come in so far. Organisations are asked to buy 500 euro shares, and individuals to signify their readiness to contribute 100 euros and club together with others.
Any socialist vision of the future must deal with global heating and other ways that capital has ruptured humanity’s relationship with the natural world. That means specifying how fossil fuels may be driven out of the economy – and that, in turn, means considering reducing total material throughput, and using the potential of renewable electricity generation.
Against this background, the dramatic shift that has begun in the electricity industry deserves our attention. Economically, oil, gas and coal still dominate energy production – not only to generate electricity, but also in transport and industry, for heat and so on – and hoover up hundreds of billions of dollars a year in state subsidies.
Residential rooftop solar. Creative commons photo
But solar and wind power are starting to expand rapidly, not only in the US and some European countries but also in China. Capital is pouring into these technologies, with more money going to solar than to upstream oil investment globally for the first time in 2022. Engineers’ attention is increasingly focused on how networks can operate when dominated by these variable[1] renewables.
This shift is fraught with dangers; large sections of capital see renewables as an addition to fossil fuels to help drive endless expansion, and the supply chains for the minerals needed are no less exploitative and extractive than those for oil or uranium.
Nevertheless, socialists have good reasons to welcome renewables.
They are secure, very-low-carbon sources of electricity that – in the context of far-reaching economic changes that reduce overall material and energy throughput – can be used to tackle dangerous global heating. Future electricity systems can and should be based on these technologies.
The first part of this article dealt with the supply of energy by renewable electricity generation or by nuclear power. This second part focuses on how electricity networks are changing.
2.1. Is it really technologically possible to base electricity networks on renewables, since they produce electricity intermittently? Could there even be advantages?
There are already big electricity networks based on renewables, and more are on their way. Denmark generates 61% of its electricity from wind and solar, and a further 23% from modern biofuel use. Three of the largest European economies – Germany, the UK and Spain – generate 41%, 40% and 35% of their electricity from wind and solar, respectively, and that share will surely keep rising. Within these countries, variable renewables’ share of electricity generation is much greater in some places: in Scotland, a nation of 5.5 million people, it averaged 60% in 2019-21 and is growing. While variable renewables only contributes 16% of the USA’s electricity, their share in the state of California (which uses more electricity than most countries) is 43%, balanced with another 24% from hydro, 10.5% from nuclear and 22.5% from gas. And then there are nations such as Norway and Paraguay, where hydro power, a non-variable renewable resource, accounts for 88% and 99.5% of electricity generation respectively.[1]
A dispatch centre in Beijing that controls most of China’s ultra-high-voltage lines and monitors renewable electricity inputs. Photo from State Grid Corp of China
The growth of renewables is forcing two big changes to electricity networks: they are becoming less centralised, and bi- or multi-directional. The networks installed in rich countries in the first half of the 20th century, and across much of the global south in the second half, were designed to carry electricity in one direction: mostly from big coal, gas and nuclear power stations, to users. Peak centralisation was in the 1970s; combined heat and power plants, and power stations using combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT) built in the 1980s and 90s, were smaller. As for wind farms, only the largest, with 100 or more turbines, are comparable in scale to coal-fired plants. Solar power mostly operates at still smaller scales: only about half of the world’s supply is from utility-scale solar farms; the rest is from rooftop panels. In China and Europe, the leading installers in recent years, more solar is being added as rooftop panels than as solar farms.[2]
The physical decentralisation of electricity generation is accompanied by growth of centralised operational coordination. As the number and type of electricity generators increases, networks – i.e. the “grid” of transmission lines, storage facilities and the computers that regulate flows – adapt to manage their inputs. This is part of the “third industrial revolution”, analogous in some respects e.g. with changes made by a committee that uses video conferencing (geographically disparate people using centralised operational technology to work), or a newspaper (geographically disparate reporters, editors and managers who in the last century produced a physical product distributed from one physical location, and now coordinate digitally to produce multiple digital products).
Worldwide, thousands of socialists are active in movements demanding action on climate change; many more participate in co-ops and community energy projects. But our collective efforts to map the transition away from fossil fuels, and how it relates to the transition away from capitalism, have fallen short, in my view. In particular, we need some starting-points for understanding how electricity systems are changing.
In this article[1] – both this first part on energy supply, and a second part on electricity networks – I suggest what these starting-points might be. It aims at clarification, including self-clarification, and I invite responses.
I include some polemical comments on recent would-be socialist arguments, by Matt Huber and Fred Stafford, supporting nuclear power against decentralised renewables.[2]
Workers inspecting a wind farm in Inner Mongolia, China
Here are some assumptions I start with. First, in the transition away from fossil fuels, electricity’s role will expand: not only will it be used to provide heat and light, for cooking and to drive appliances and machinery, but it will have to spread in transport and industry. This expansion is to be welcomed as a method of junking fossil fuels, but unless combined with measures to curb capital’s cycles of overproduction and overconsumption – and thereby cut total throughput of energy through economies – it will fail.[3]
Second, I think renewable electricity generation is in principle better than nuclear or doubtful, borderline technologies such as hydrogen and biofuels,[4] in part because of its potential for underpinning a collectively owned and controlled energy system. However, all good (and all bad!) outcomes will most likely involve a combination of technologies; each has its pros and cons, and socially-determined potentials for good or bad uses.
“Profound changes in the socio-economic structure of modern society” are needed to limit the increase in global temperature, climate scientist Kevin Anderson argued in Responsible Science journal last month.
Scientists and academics joined other demonstrators on 25 March at Eindhoven airport in the Netherlands, demanding a ban on private jets, a frequent flyer tax and an end to short-distance flights. Photo from the Scientist Rebellion NL web site
I hope that everyone who cares about climate change and social justice will read Anderson’s short, clear article, available on the Scientists for Global Responsibility site. It’s a great starting point for discussion.
Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at Manchester university, briefly summarises the “carbon budgets” that need to be stuck to, if society is to limit global warming to 1.5-2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
He thinks it is “still do-able – just”, despite thirty years of “failures, tweaks to business-as-usual, carbon markets” and talk of the “dodgy prospect” of carbon removal technologies.
What would count as “serious climate action”, in Anderson’s view? A “roll-out of low and zero-carbon technologies”, in the style of the Marshall Plan – an international, state-directed reconstruction programme for Europe after world war two.
These technologies cover retrofitting our houses, public transport and massive electrification. It’s much more this “far from sexy” end of technology that’s important: the everyday technologies that allow us to live sustainable and fulfilling lives, rather than dreams of big and powerful electric vehicles (EVs), electric planes and lots of future carbon dioxide removal.
But, Anderson continues, rapid deployment of these technologies will no longer be enough. “We also need profound changes in the socio-economic structure of modern society. That is to say, a rapid shift in the labour and resources that disproportionately furnish the luxuries of the relative few – not just the billionaires, but also people like me.”
Society’s productive capacity, its labour and resources, need to be mobilised to “deliver a public good for all – a stable climate with minimal detrimental impacts”.
Forests, grassland and other biomass remove carbon dioxide from the air now – and, properly looked after, could do much more. Mechanical methods of removing carbon dioxide, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC), are ineffective and may never work at scale.
So public funds poured into mechanical carbon capture projects, often operated by oil companies, should be redirected to proven biological methods, and to monitoring technologies that can check how effective they are.
These are the conclusions of a new paper by a US-based research team of scientists, economists and policy analysts, headed by June Sekera of the New School for Social Research in New York.
Forests in the Serra do Mar, on Brazil’s Atlantic coast. Photo: Deyvid Setti and Eloy Olindo Setti / creative commons
To avert dangerous global warming, the volume of CO2 and other greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuels, needs to fall to zero. CO2 removal could help compensate for emissions that are harder to stop.
The amounts of CO2 that could be removed from the atmosphere by biological methods will never come close to the amounts being poured in by fossil fuel burning. But, over time, they could help – and will definitely go farther than the mechanical carbon capture methods beloved of some politicians, journalists and other techno-optimists. (See “Quick technological catch up”, below.)
In the US, the total amount of CO2 now being removed from the air by mechanical methods is zero, Sekera and her colleagues found – while biological methods are removing about 0.9 billion tonnes per year (Gt/year).
That amount could be more than doubled by the preservation and restoration of forests, grasslands and wetlands, amplified urban tree cover and accelerated regenerative agriculture practices.
An additional 1 billion Gt/year of CO2 captured would equate to around one-fifth of current US emissions. So it is no substitute for rapid decarbonisation. But the research team’s results provide good reasons to cut off the billions of dollars of funding going to mechanical carbon capture projects – or “a taxpayer-financed sewer system for the fossil fuel industry”, as Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Centre, called it.
In the US, mechanical methods of carbon capture (CCS and DAC) received $10.7 billion in subsidies from Congress in 2010-2021; $1 billion in tax credits in 2010-2019; and $12 billion in the 2021 infrastructure spending package – 66 times more than the $180 million included for new programmes related, only indirectly, to biological sequestration.
The National Green Hydrogen Mission adopted by the Indian government in January is a major policy initiative, and it is a sign of the poverty of Indian politics that it remains so election-obsessed that has not been subjected to the public debate it deserves.
The absence of any critical evaluation by India’s opposition parties of this initiative, which has major implications for India’s development path, is staggering.
Student climate protesters in Delhi, 2019. Photo by Vikas Choudhary
The Indian government is poised to offer energy companies subsidies to set up hydrogen “hubs” – but how this fits with climate policy and social justice goals remains unexplained.
As part of the Hydrogen Mission, companies such as Reliance and Indian Oil will be invited to bid for cash from a 20,000 crore rupee ($2.4 billion) fund.
There will also be money for manufacturing electrolysers, needed to make “green” hydrogen, and subsidies for fertiliser and steel makers to buy it.
But the Hydrogen Mission has been surrounded by hype that raises unjustified expectations.
Prabhat Kumar, an external affairs ministry official, claimed recently that hydrogen could be “our main source of energy in future”. But that will never happen.
Even if the government meets its ambitious target of producing 10 million tonnes of “green” hydrogen each year, that would still only provide about one-fifteenth of the energy that India gets from coal.
The very idea that India will become a major exporter of hydrogen, which runs through all the government’s documents, is questionable.
India may need 6 million tonnes/year of “green” hydrogen to displace the “grey” hydrogen it uses now, for fertiliser manufacture and in oil refineries.
Review of Road to Nowhere: what Silicon Valley gets wrong about the future of transportation, by Paris Marx (2022, Verso)
Unleashing Uber on cities would cut car ownership, because ride-hailing would be cheaper, Travis Kalanick, then Uber’s chief executive, claimed in 2015. It would reduce traffic congestion, allow car parks to be converted to other uses, and complement public transport with its “last mile” service.
Uber drivers demonstrate in London in March 2021, when the IWGB union won a court decision that they are workers, not self-employed. Photo from IWGB
Investors bought into Kalanick’s story, that Uber’s innovative app would produce these benefits, to the tune of billions of dollars. Central to his patter was the claim that Uber was a tech company, not a transport company (since denied by courts in the UK and New Zealand), and his crusade against local government regulations and the “taxi cartel”.
In Road to Nowhere, Paris Marx not only unmasks these falsehoods, but also explains Silicon Valley’s place in the broader crisis of capital, and the social, economic and ecological damage it does.
Marx recounts how Uber expanded in the US after the 2008 recession, flooding the market with drivers, to whom it offered incentives that were then withdrawn, while pay was cut.
Uber’s predatory pricing, financed by stock exchange investors, drove traditional taxi companies out of business. Taxi drivers’ incomes plummeted and their lives fell apart, triggering a slew of suicides.
The post-recession environment provided both a large pool of precarious labour and what Marx calls “incredible technological optimism” (page 109). Central to Uber’s strategy was an assault on cities’ transport regulations and on the labour conditions won over decades by taxi drivers’ union power. Uber and the other technology companies, cheered on by US conservatives and libertarians, deployed technologies as weapons in the class war.
In the midst of the gathering climate crisis, Uber’s new technology drove greenhouse emissions upwards. Directly contradicting Kalanick’s promises, the Uber model put more vehicles on the road.
In this excerpt from Road to Nowhere, PARIS MARX explains how and why the big tech companies moved into urban transport in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash. Republished here with permission.See also People & Nature’s review of the book
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the tech industry grew substantially and claimed a dominant position not just in the United States, but across the global economy. The internet was firmly established by that point, and it began moving from the desk to the palm of people’s hands as smartphone adoption soared through the 2010s. Cloud computing and other software products made it much cheaper than in the past to launch a start-up and compete for a piece of the rapidly growing industry. Meanwhile, financing was abundant, not just because decades of inequality had caused more wealth to flow to those at the top, but also due to policy choices taken to combat the recession.
The trillions of dollars printed by the Federal Reserve and other central banks through quantitative easing, and the low interest rates that persisted throughout the 2010s, created an environment that boosted the stock market even as most workers’ prospects continued to stagnate, which benefited venture capitalists and made it much easier for new companies in the tech sector to access capital. Such a dynamic granted investors, influential founders, and executives at the dominant companies in the industry a significant degree of power in shaping what the post-recession economy looked like – and who it served.
By 2010, today’s tech giants were continuing their rapid growth, but they were not yet the juggernauts they would become a decade later. Google had a number of popular services in addition to Search, but many people still believed its “do no evil” slogan. Amazon’s positions in ecommerce and cloud computing were growing, but it was not yet seen as such an existential threat to brick-and-mortar retail. Apple was reinventing itself with the iPhone, but it was far from being one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. Yet, as they expanded, other companies made use of smartphone access, new digital tools, and the excitement around the tech economy, to make their own splash.
“We have to do things very differently”, transport researcher Jillian Anable told the Royal Meteorological Society’s Climate Change Forum in London last week. “It’s not about celebrating electric vehicles.”
Cars are “getting bigger and heavier”, Anable warned, meaning that “it will take longer to decarbonise the system”. Of new car sales globally, 46% are SUVs.
Architects for Climate Action and Architects Declare joined Fridays for Future to march through London on 23 September. Photo from Architects Declare twitter feed
For every electric car sold, 10-15 large vehicles are sold: they “negate the effect of that electric vehicle many times over”. Moreover, half the electric cars sold are plug-in hybrids, which use “a great deal” of petrol and diesel.
No country has “achieved the speed and scale of reductions [in greenhouse gas emissions] that we now need”, Anable, professor of Transport and Energy at the University of Leeds, said. And no country has “achieved deep and long-term reductions [in transport emissions] without restricting car use.”
Anable was one of several researchers at the Forum who addressed the yawning gap between government declarations about climate change, and the snail’s pace of action – the gap that has infuriated, and motivated, the new generation of protesters from Greta Thunberg to Just Stop Oil.
Transport, the built environment and the food chain – three areas of gigantic fuel consumption – were covered in detail. Adaptation (coping with the effects of climate change) was considered along with mitigation (how to minimise the level of global heating).
Built environment researcher Alice Moncaster launched a broadside against the culture of demolish-and-build, as opposed to retrofitting existing buildings.
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