“Market forces” will never prevent climate disaster

Review of The Price is Wrong: why capitalism won’t save the planet, by Brett Christophers (Verso: 2024, 398 pages)

Wind and solar power projects, that for so long needed state backing, can now provide electricity to wholesale markets so cheaply that they will compete fossil fuels out of the park. It’s the beginning of the end for coal and gas. Right? No, completely wrong.

The fallacy that “market forces” can achieve a transition away from fossil fuels is demolished in this highly readable polemic by Brett Christophers.

Solar panels at Dau Tieng Solar Power Complex in Tay Ninh, Vietnam. Photo by VnExpress/Quynh Tran

Prices in wholesale electricity markets, on which economists and analysts focus, are not really the point, he argues: profits are. That’s what companies who invest in electricity generation care about, and these can more easily be made with coal and gas.

Christophers also unpicks claims that renewables projects are subsidy-free. Even with renewably-produced electricity increasingly holding its own competitively in wholesale markets, it’s state support that counts: look at China, which is building new renewables faster than the rest of the world put together.

The obsession with wholesale electricity prices, and costs of production – to the exclusion of other economic factors – emerged in the 1980s and 90s as part of the neoliberal zeitgeist, Christophers explains. The damage done by fossil fuels to the natural world, including climate change, was priced at zero; all that needed correcting, ran the dominant discourse, was to include the cost of this “externality” in prices (page 108).

Climate change and social justice in Greenwich: why targets matter

By Simon Pirani. Reposted, with thanks, from the Greener Greenwich Community Network web site.

The Greener Greenwich Community Network aims for our borough to achieve its decarbonisation target, in a way that makes life better for us all.

Lofty ambitions! But what does it mean here and now? In this blog post I try to answer some questions about the target, and what we can all do about it.

What is the target? Who worked it out?

The borough of Greenwich declared a “climate emergency” in 2019, and adopted the policy of becoming “carbon neutral” by 2030. Like many local authorities, and even the UK parliament, Greenwich felt moved to act by a huge wave of protest about the lack of action on climate change by groups such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion.

Looking over the Thames from Shrewsbury Park, Woolwich

The reasoning in the council’s declaration was sound: climate breakdown is already causing “serious damage around the world”; “all governments (national, regional and local) have a duty to act” – and local government “should not wait for national governments to change their policies”. Greenwich would create a local partnership to face the issue, and “use its lobbying power” to campaign at London and national level.

Inaction, the declaration stated, would lead to “higher energy and food costs”, and “increases in social injustice and inequality”. A draft of the council’s Carbon Neutral Plan (CNP) warned that, globally, rising temperatures would mean “more extreme weather and rising sea levels” that would lead to “growing risks to fresh water supplies, food security, economic prosperity and biodiversity”.

All this justifies the borough’s aim of being “carbon neutral”, i.e. of cutting the amount of greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere to zero.

Contraction and convergence, development and urbanisation

Part 6 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers

Download the whole series as a PDF here

From the perspectives of real human needs and capacities, and present forms of technology, it is perfectly possible for all the world’s peoples and societies to follow a low energy and low emissions economic path from now onwards.

The obstacles to that come from the forces of capitalist growth, and the powerful interests invested in a more destructive future.

The Kibera shanty town in Nairobi, Kenya. Source: Wikimedia / Creative Commons

The obvious rational route to decarbonisation and a more liveable environment is “contraction and convergence”, a concept pioneered by the Global Commons Institute.

It means that the world’s high consumers of materials and energy need to contract their material and energy footprints dramatically; in turn, that creates consumption space for the world’s poor to consume more per capita use-values than they do now – to converge upwards on the per capita living standards of the global north.

All of that needs to happen across all sectors of the economy. It also needs to happen within a shrinking material consumption budget globally – and in the context of steep rises in forecast population.

There is plainly a tension between the extent of “permissible” material consumption, and the enormous needs for social development internationally. At least half the world’s population lives in material poverty.

The China shock

Part 4 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers

Download the whole series as a PDF here

The most dramatic example in history of production-based expansions in the built environment have taken place in China.

Since 1978, the Chinese economy has grown at around 10% per annum, as measured in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). Under Deng Xiaoping, the opening of the economy, and market reforms, coupled with massive state interventions, have brought large foreign capital inflows.

Construction workers in Beijing in 2013. Photo: Joe Tymczyszyn at Flickr / Creative Commons

With its build-out in industrial and manufacturing capacity, rising incomes have drawn people to cities, spurring urban enlargement. Economic growth has therefore been the carrot for mass rural-urban migration; forced ejections by private enclosures of the countryside have been the stick – such that China’s rate of urban population growth has outpaced that of its population as a whole.

There has also been considerable urbanisation of the countryside “in situ”, either through the explosive growth of small towns, or the growth of whole cities from scratch. China has escaped both the “shock therapy” experienced by Russia in the 1990s, and other forms of structural adjustment that pushed poor regions to the wall.

China’s coal economy today is several orders of magnitude larger than the UK’s was in the 19th century. On a production basis, the UK’s annual CO₂ emissions in 1900 were around 420 million tonnes; in 2020, China’s were 10.67 billion tonnes. Per capita, China’s production-based emissions have overtaken the EU-27. China’s consumption-based emissions have been rising towards Western footprint sizes, and today they are close to those of the EU-27.

The built environment in the fossil economy: a history

Part 3 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers

Download the whole series as a PDF here

The built environment tends to reflect the form of the society of which it is a part. And so a large and growing majority of built environments reflect a world dominated and governed by capitalism – a capitalism whose energetic basis, overwhelmingly, is fossil fuels.

However, that has not always been the case – nor need it be in future.

Three characteristic features of capitalism are: the accumulation of capital; competition for profits; and a population without autonomous means of survival outside a world of waged work.

Women are primary producers of biofuel worldwide. Photo: M-Rwimo/ Wikimedia Commons

When production is organised along capitalist lines, it proceeds on a competitive basis, drawing in labour and building capital. Capitalist production is competitively intensive in its appropriation and recombination of labour, energy, and other materials.

Ever since the origins of fossil capitalism in eighteenth-century England, coal, and later gas and oil, have acted as a “force multiplier” to industrial forms of capitalist production.

In this part, I will show how the built environment has been tied up with fossil-fuelled capitalism through history: from the emergence of a fossil capitalist economy in Britain in the 1700s (section 3.1); through the rapid economic expansion of the rich countries after world war two (section 3.2) and during the economic crises from the 1970s onwards (section 3.3).

3.1. From the 18th century to the 20th century

The “at will” nature of commodified fossil energy seems first to have given fossil industrialists a competitive edge in subduing organised labour. That was its main advantage to owners of capital, before it afforded a straightforward energetic advantage over water power.

The built environment: concepts & measures

Part 2 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers

Download the whole series as a PDF here

In this part, I will define some ideas that will be used throughout the series: first, what I mean by the built environment and other key terms; and then flows and stocks (section 2.1); material footprint and carbon footprint (section 2.2); embodied emissions and operational emissions (section 2.3); Life Cycle Analysis (section 2.4); and varieties of footprint (section 2.5). In a final section 2.6, I comment on the politics inherent in the idea of footprints and the way they are calculated.

Graphic: Fraunhofer IBP/Jan Paul Lindner. From the Circular Flooring web site

Researchers who study greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts, conventionally understand the built environment to include all elements of human-made infrastructure and buildings: large, durable products that sit in one place and (usually, ideally) provide a long lifetime of use, from homes to office buildings, roads to reservoirs.

In order for the built environment to function well, it needs to be appropriate to its environmental context; durable, resilient to changes in the environment, and actively maintained.

The category of the built environment tends to exclude agricultural land-use, except for the buildings and infrastructure that make farming possible.

Also, the built environment is conventionally distinguished both from transport and from energy transmission.[1]

Nevertheless, the kinds of transport and energy infrastructures that get commissioned and built – roads, railways, wind farms, pipelines – bear very strongly not only on the end-use footprints of the transport and energy sectors, but also on the operational use of buildings and of non-energy and -transport infrastructure.

How to do away with fossil fuel consumption

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.

–

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.

Steelmaking in the US

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.

Ukraine: war makes just energy transition more urgent

By Simon Pirani

Even in the midst of war, there is a struggle for Ukraine’s energy future.

It’s one that international allies of Ukraine’s social movements need to pay attention to, because states like the US and UK, and international organisations like the European Union, will be influential in how that tussle turns out.

War has taken its toll on energy infrastructure. Photo from Ecoaction

In almost every country in the world there is a battle for influence between partisans of renewable, decentralised energy production, and those of legacy nuclear or carbon-intensive methods, who often have deeper pockets and stronger political connections.

But in Ukraine, that struggle is intensified by the unprecedented catastrophe inflicted on its energy sector by the Russian military, and the resultant urgency to invest.

“No European power system has ever suffered, endured and withstood such large-scale destruction, including during the first and second world wars”, a report by the Energy Charter Secretariat, an inter-governmental body, stated last month.

In May this year, more than half of Ukraine’s pre-invasion electricity generation capacity (27 gigawatts or GW), was occupied or damaged. That was before the disastrous destruction of the Kakhovka dam on 6 June, likely from within. Fears of sabotage at the Zaporizhya nuclear plant, Ukraine and Europe’s largest, remain.

Governments are reinforcing fossil fuels’ power. We need to build alliances against it

In Part One of this article, I comment on the “energy crisis” and suggest some principles around which we might bring together wider sections of society, to push forward the transition away from fossil fuels. These are practical suggestions and feedback is welcome. In Part Two, I offer a view of the relationship between the climate crisis and Russia’s war in Ukraine, as I don’t think these two shocking events can be understood separately from each other.

The article is based on an on-line talk I gave on 4 July at the Humanitas Unisinos Institute (IHU) of the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brazil, and I thank my friends there for inviting me. (Update, 2 August: the article has now been published in Portuguese, in the institute’s on-line journal here. A video of the talk, in Portuguese only, is here.) Simon Pirani.

Part One. “Energy crisis” and the transition

The combined effect of western sanctions, Russian “self sanctions” and market volatility last year produced a sharp spike in gas prices and an increase in oil prices. There were fears that the shortage of gas supplies to Europe would result in some rationing in the winter, but these were not realised. The same problems could be replicated this coming winter.

For the longer term, the western powers stated their determination to reduce their dependence on Russian oil and gas supplies. Most, but not all, of the large western oil companies said that they would sell or close down their oil producing operations in Russia.

Demonstration in London in April. Photo from Extinction Rebellion Lincolnshire

Politicians and company executives presented this to the public as an “energy crisis”. And although the disruption to oil and gas markets is real enough, this “crisis” is also in some respects a mirage that serves corporate power. We need to question this way of looking at things, for at least these four reasons.

First. The most serious effects of the war were not only about energy, but – apart from the horrendous destruction in Ukraine itself – (a) the human cost to millions of people who have fled Ukraine as refugees, and (b) the impact on food markets in north Africa especially, due to the constraints on Russian and Ukrainian exports of agricultural products.

Second. The increase in retail prices of gas and electricity for households, especially in Europe, resulted from decisions by large energy corporations, working in liberalised markets, and from decisions of governments who regulate those markets. The war’s influence was only indirect. Some governments decided to protect households from these impacts, and all governments could have done so.

Western capital, warmonger Putin and the climate policy disaster

By Simon Pirani

Russia’s monthly revenues from oil exports rose by $1.7 billion to $15 billion in April, the International Energy Agency reported this week.

The combination of shipments to China and India, which are taking about 80% of Russian oil, and of sanctions-avoiding tricks by European and other shipping companies, means that the western powers’ price cap on Russian oil is causing few problems.

The IEA’s monthly Oil Market Report showed that in March, Russian oil exports were at 8.1 million barrels per day (bpd), their highest level since April 2020. In April they went up even further, to 8.3 million bpd.

School students march with Fridays for Future Germany, in a joint action with public transport workers demanding action on climate change, and collective bargaining rights and investment in public transport, on 3 March 2023. Photo from FFF Germany twitter feed

What is going on, 15 months after Russia’s murderous full-scale invasion of Ukraine?

In this article – based on a talk I gave at the Berlin School of Economics and Law last week – I look at (i) the background, (ii) oil and sanctions, (iii) gas and the Kremlin’s self-sanctioning, and (iv) what this all means in terms of cutting fossil fuel use and climate policy.

–

1. Background

The character of the war

To understand the economic aspects of this biggest military conflict in Europe since the second world war, we need to understand its political character.

The primary target of the Russian military operation is Ukraine’s civilian population – and, to underline this, it’s worth summarising the main points from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights interim report  (December 2022).

The actions by the Russian Federation that “may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity” included:

□ “Repeated and apparently indiscriminate strikes in densely populated areas using explosive weapons with wide area effects, resulting in widespread civilian death and injury”;

□ “Devastating and intensified attacks reportedly carried out against civilian infrastructure, […] resulting in high numbers of civilian casualties and loss of access to critical infrastructure for millions”.