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).
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.
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.
Review of No Miracles Needed: how today’s technology can save our climate and clean our air, by Mark Jacobson (Cambridge University Press, 2023). First published in the Ecologist
The main barriers to reaching 100% clean, renewable energy provision the world over “are neither technical nor economic; instead they are social and political”, Mark Jacobson finally declares, more than four-fifths of the way through this book.
Before seeing that, readers should have ploughed through 13 of the 15 chapters, which describe the physical and technical properties of fossil-fuel-dominated energy provision, and contrast to it Jacobson’s proposal for a system powered 100% by wind, water and solar sources (WWS).
The proposal is based on computer modelling by Jacobson and his colleagues at Stanford university in California, showing that wind farms, solar panels, hydro, tidal energy and other renewable resources could produce sufficient energy to replace all fossil fuels.
The modelling is controversial: other researchers have questioned the assumptions made, especially about how electricity could be stored and transported.
Some of Jacobson’s arguments about technologies make a refreshing change from most narratives associated with the world’s “green new deals”, though: he argues against using gas, direct air capture, carbon capture, nuclear fuels and biofuels for electricity generation – all beloved of, and hyped by, oil companies, politicians and technomodernists.
But his exclusive, even wooden, focus on technologies is combined with a stubborn lack of attention to the social and political transformations needed for society to dump fossil fuels. Even when he acknowledges social and political obstructions to change, his comments on them are brief and superficial.
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.
Two clouds darken the sky. A close-up one: gas and electricity bills have shot up since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and millions of families are struggling to pay. And a bigger, darker, higher one: the climate disaster, and politicians’ refusal to tackle it.
Ultimately, both these threats have a single cause: fossil fuels and the systems of wealth and power that depend on them. We need social movements to link the fight to protect families from unaffordable bills with the fight to move beyond fossil fuels, and in that way turn back global warming.
Here I suggest ways to develop such a movement in the UK, starting by demanding action on home heating.
Since the government lifted the price cap on energy bills on 1 April, the average energy bill for 18 million households on standard tariffs rose to £1971 per year, from £1277. Another 4.5 million households on pre-payment schemes are paying an average of £2017 per year. And in October, bills could well rise above £3000.
There are now 6.3 million UK households (including 2.5 million with children) in fuel poverty, meaning that they are unable to heat their home to an adequate temperature. The End Fuel Poverty Coalition says that could rise to 8.5 million by the end of this year.
The main fuels for UK homes are gas, and electricity produced from gas and nuclear power. Retail prices have been driven up by a rise in gas, oil and coal prices on world markets – which started rising last year, as economies recovered from the pandemic, but shot upwards faster from March, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The war, and sanctions on Russia by western powers, could keep fossil fuel prices high for years. They have also driven global food prices upwards. This is the biggest bout of inflation worldwide since the 1970s.
Larry Lohmann’s comments, “And if energy itself is unjust?”, about my article on energy commodification, are really welcome. There is much we agree on: that we have to question whether there is, was or could be such a thing as “energy” that was not commodified and is therefore somehow OK; that the relationship of thermodynamic energy and labour is somehow at the bottom of all this; and that there is much wrong with the way issues such as “energy democracy” and “energy justice” are framed on the “left”.
(Actually I don’t like the term “left”, either, (a) because it obscures the fact that, whatever it might be, it certainly isn’t the motive force of history in the way many of its adherents think, and (b) because it implies that I am part of some entity that doesn’t include most working people, but does include people who think Putin is doing fine in Ukraine and Bashar al-Assad is an “anti imperialist” hero. But I digress.)
One way to take our discussion forward is to focus on four parts of it, where we don’t see things in the same way, or haven’t understood each other. Here goes.
1. How do we define “energy”?
When I read Larry’s comments, I looked back at the introduction to my book Burning Up, where I first used the definition of energy he is questioning. In the introduction, I proposed to use the word “energy” in a way that does not include human labour, as “work done by physical or chemical resources, mobilised by people for that purpose”.
Part of the reason I went for this approach was to try to deal with an issue that Larry raises, that thermodynamic energy and capitalist labour (I’d say, labour under capitalism) are not the same, can not substitute for each other, and are not additive or mergeable as capital would have us think. I would have had to write the book very differently if I wanted not to use the word “energy” at all, or not to use other words, such as “democracy” and “socialism”, that can be inscribed with different, indeed opposite, meanings by people who use them.
Protestors from the Canada Real shanty town in Madrid, saying “light is not a luxury, it’s a right”
It could be said that my definition missed out the way that the concept of “energy” has been imbued with meanings by the social process during which it was first used, i.e. the work of physicists, and the philosophers, economists and others whose work influenced them, at the heart of 19th century British empire-building. And that process has not stood still: the way that the term has been used in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century has added further layers, in particular in terms of “energy” as an extractivist process embedded in imperialist and neo-imperialist relationships. And Larry has said a great deal about the role of “energy” in the battles between capital and labour.
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