A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore · 16 Oct 2017 · 335pp · 89,924 words
the Productivity of Peasant Farming Systems in Latin America.” Environment, Development and Sustainability 1: 197–217. Altvater, Elmar. 2007. “The Social and Natural Environment of Fossil Capitalism.” Socialist Register 2007: 37. Amrine, Frederick. 2010. “The Unconscious of Nature: Analyzing Disenchantment in Faust I.” Goethe Yearbook 17, no. 1: 117–32. Amussen, Susan
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein · 15 Sep 2014 · 829pp · 229,566 words
in the Sources and Sinks of Carbon Dioxide,” Nature Geoscience 2 (2009): 831, as cited in Andreas Malm, “China as Chimney of the World: The Fossil Capital Hypothesis,” Organization & Environment 25 (2012): 146; Glen P. Peters et al., “Rapid Growth in CO2 Emissions After the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis,” Nature Climate
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Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 15. 37. Andreas Malm, “China as Chimney of the World: The Fossil Capital Hypothesis,” Organization & Environment 25 (2012): 146, 165; Yan Yunfeng and Yang Laike, “China’s Foreign Trade and Climate Change: A Case Study of CO2 Emissions
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(New York: Penguin, 2004), 44. 26. Emphasis in original. Many of the sources in this recounting were originally cited in Andreas Malm, “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry,” Historical Materialism 21 (2013): 31. 27. J. R. McCulloch [unsigned], “Babbage on Machinery and Manufactures,” Edinburgh
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. 7. Personal interview with Charlene Alden, October 22, 2010. 8. Personal interview with Henry Red Cloud, June 22, 2011. 9. Andreas Malm, “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry,” Historical Materialism 21 (2013): 45. 10. Personal interview with Larry Bell, July 1, 2011. 11. Carolyn
A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice
by Tony Weis and Joshua Kahn Russell · 14 Oct 2014 · 501pp · 134,867 words
Chamber of Commerce” (speech, London, July 14, 2006), pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?id=1247. 3. Elmar Altvater, “The Social and Natural Environment of Fossil Capitalism,” in Socialist Register 2007: Coming to Terms with Nature, ed. Leo Panitch et al. (London: Merlin Press, 2006), 39. 4. Matthew Huber, “Energizing Historical Materialism
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: Fossil Fuels, Space and the Capitalist Mode of Production,” Geoforum, 40,1 (2008). 5. Altvater, “The Social and Natural Environment of Fossil Capitalism.” 6. Ibid., 50. 7. Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 16. 8. Minqi
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. 44. Andrew Nikiforuk, “The Republican Who Dared Tell the Truth About Oil,” The Tyee, August 30, 2010. 45. Altvater, “The Social and Natural Environment of Fossil Capitalism,” 54, original emphasis. 2. Haluza-DeLay, Assembling Consent in Alberta 1. David Campanella, Misplaced Generosity Update 2012: Extraordinary profits in Alberta’s oil and gas
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Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1976 [1867]). 7. Elmar Altvater, The Future of the Market (London: Verso, 1993); Andrea Malm, “The Origins of Fossil Capital,” Historical Materialism, 21,1 (2013). 8. UNEP, Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication (Nairobi: UNEP, 2011); UN, Working Towards a
A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje · 14 Aug 2020 · 375pp · 105,586 words
About Feasibility?’ WIRES Climate Change 6:93–112. Mak, Geert. 2010. An Island in Time: The Biography of a Village. London: Vintage. Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso. Malthus, Thomas. (1798) 1976. An Essay on the Principle of Population. New
The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers · 12 Mar 2024 · 557pp · 154,324 words
of relative prices has long been the dominant explanation for the victory of steam and coal over water power in early nineteenth-century England. In Fossil Capital, however, published in 2016, Andreas Malm shattered that received wisdom.7 He did so in two ways. First, Malm demonstrated that the existing orthodoxy is
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of Public Policy Uncertainty on Renewable Energy Investment: Wind Power and the Production Tax Credit’, Energy Policy 38 (2010), pp. 7698–709. 26 A. Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2015). 27 Cited in K. Aronoff, ‘BlackRock’s Larry Fink Shows Just
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’, Energy Research and Social Science 22 (2016), pp. 7–12. 25 Ibid., p. 7. 26 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 27 Ibid., p. 8. 28 Malm, Fossil Capital, p. 13. 29 Ibid., p. 83. 30 Ibid., p. 14. For an example of an essay in which such a conclusion has been drawn, see
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. Allen, ‘Backward into the Future: The Shift to Coal and Implications for the Next Energy Transition’, Energy Policy 50 (2012), pp. 17–23. 31 Malm, Fossil Capital, p. 14. 32 A. Persaud, ‘Unblocking the green transformation in developing countries with a partial foreign exchange guarantee’, version 7.0, June 2023, climatepolicyinitiative.org
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T. Weisskopf, ‘Marxian Crisis Theory and the Rate of Profit in the Postwar US Economy’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 3 (1979), p. 341. 7 Malm, Fossil Capital. 8 Ibid., p. 192. 9 Ibid., pp. 119–20. 10 Ibid., p. 124. 11 M. Cembalest, ‘Growing Pains: The Renewable Transition in Adolescence’, March 2023
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells · 19 Feb 2019 · 343pp · 101,563 words
conditions sharply diminish by 2050 on the current emissions track, and perhaps a climate slowdown will even reveal the bounty of what Andreas Malm calls fossil capitalism to be an illusion, sustained over just a few centuries by the arithmetic of adding the energy value of burned fossil fuels to what had
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save us from anything and everything. But in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a number of historians and iconoclastic economists studying what they call “fossil capitalism” have started to suggest that the entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the eighteenth century, is not the result of
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. The most exciting research on the economics of warming has come from Solomon Hsiang and Marshall Burke and Edward Miguel, who are not historians of fossil capitalism but who offer some very bleak analysis of their own: in a country that’s already relatively warm, every degree Celsius of warming reduces growth
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?” The Great Divergence offers something almost as simple as a one-word answer: coal. As an account of industrial history, the reductionist story implied by “fossil capitalism”—that what we conceive as the modern economy is really a system powered by fossil fuels—is in ways persuasive but also incomplete; of course
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Standards,” World Bank (Washington, D.C., June 2018), p. xi, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/28723/9781464811555.pdf?sequence=5&isAllowed=y. fossil capitalism: Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016). about one percentage point of GDP: Solomon Hsiang et al
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for Paradise; Jedediah Purdy in After Nature but perhaps more strikingly in his essays and exchanges published in Dissent; and of course Andreas Malm in Fossil Capital. the socialist countries: History is not a much better guide, with Left industrialization during Stalin’s Five Year Plan or Mao’s Great Leap Forward
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theory of the socialist Left: Degrees of emphasis vary, of course, but you can find forms of the “fossil capitalism” argument in Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization, along with Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital and Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life. Can capitalism survive climate change?: Moore raises this question
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natural resources followed by decline precipitated by military overreach. The Progress of This Storm: The main thrust of this book, Malm’s follow-up to Fossil Capital, is that while we may believe that “nature,” as something distinct from “society,” has disappeared, in fact global warming has brought it back with a
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani · 10 Jun 2019 · 280pp · 74,559 words
is beautiful’ and that the only way to save our planet was to retreat from modernity itself. FALC rallies against that command, distinguishing consumption under fossil capitalism – with its commuting, ubiquitous advertising, bullshit jobs and built-in obsolescence – from pursuing the good life under conditions of extreme supply. Under FALC we will
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, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W.W. Norton, 2014. 5. Limitless Power: Post-Scarcity in Energy Energy and Disruption Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso Books, 2016. Arrival of the Anthropocene Lynch, Patrick. ‘Secrets from the Past Point
Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future
by Alan Weisman · 21 Apr 2025 · 599pp · 149,014 words
a sultan who heads the state oil company—Petro added: “Since 2010, global CO2 emissions have risen 12 percent. Rich states won’t devalue their fossil capital by decarbonizing. The American dream, European comfort, and China’s outreach depend on burning carbon. Transferring wealth from the north so that peoples of the
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
by Andreas Malm · 4 Jan 2021 · 156pp · 49,653 words
worse until the moment greenhouse gas emissions cease and drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere commences. Nothing indicates that this will happen by itself – that fossil capital will die a natural death – which means that the climate movement will be in even greater historical demand one or two or five years from
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mass actions of precisely this kind cannot be called into question: this is the main way forward. Let a hundred Ende Gelände camps bloom and fossil capital might find itself under some real pressure. What can be questioned, however, is something else. Will absolute non-violence be the only way, forever the
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cool it down. And the disconnect was widening. Timed for the XR ‘autumn uprising’, the Guardian published a series of revelations of just how much fossil capital prepares to burn. The world’s fifty largest oil companies were poised to flood markets with more of their supply. Of that group, the two
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spiralling curves. On the whole, it has not established physical contact with the adversary – primarily, of course, because the states standing in between have shielded fossil capital and punctiliously served it with everything needed for expanded reproduction. More than that: private capitalists and capitalist states are often impossible to tell apart, the
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, political legitimacy and, above all, money. If the movement should shun uphill battles, a divestment campaign seems like the worst possible choice: trying to sap fossil capital by means of capital. There is a centuries- or even millennia-long history of slingshots downing Goliaths and other tactics ingenious enough to find cracks
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, this world – might still be possible. Climate camps have a way of building on each other, spreading horizontally, stacking up experiences of how to fight fossil capital on the ground. Unlike the Occupy and similar camps that cropped up in 2011 – to which they are of course related – climate camps are planned
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fixed dates for erection and dismantling; neither spontaneous nor reactive, they feed into a plotted escalation. Ende Gelände has now raised the ante against German fossil capital for half a decade, while forming cadres that go home to other countries and organise their own camps, and so on. We have yet to
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force field of collective action. If we accept that climate change is the cumulative effect of action at the level of class – the product of fossil capital and the classes ruling on its behalf – then every time the switch is flipped, a counteraction could, logically, in principle, negate that action and turn
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social life for Homo sapiens. Unlike the deep variety, it would target a particular deformed kind of civilisation – namely, that erected on the plinth of fossil capital – and tear it down so that another form of civilisation can endure (or none will). This implies that climate militancy would have to be articulated
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and greens, had resolved not to close some of the greatest coal riches of the continent, but to throw them straight into the jaws of fossil capital. Up on the railway tracks, no wagons running, the blockade in full effect, my affinity group itched for more. We wanted to press on. So
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blockades, shooting fire-crackers into them and chasing activists in cars. More violence of that kind should perhaps be anticipated, as the task of defending fossil capital is passed on to the far right in Europe and elsewhere. But if destroying fences was an act of violence, it was violence of the
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, ‘Sabotage as Environmental Activism’, Public Seminar, 3 July 2018, publicseminar.org. Cf. Jeff Diamanti and Mark Simpson, ‘Five Theses on Sabotage in the Shadow of Fossil Capital’, Radical Philosophy 2.2 (2018): 3–12. p. 69. ‘The current global energy system …’ Seto et al., ‘Carbon Lock-In’, p. 426. p. 70. ‘Protest
Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by Peter Frase · 10 Mar 2015 · 121pp · 36,908 words
: Atria Books, 2006. 11Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, New York: Bantam Books, 1993; Blue Mars, New York: Bantam Books, 1996. 12For example, see Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, New York and London: Verso Books, 2016. 13Bruno Latour, “Love Your Monsters,” Break Through
The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
by Greta Thunberg · 14 Feb 2023 · 651pp · 162,060 words
Energy: A Human History
by Richard Rhodes · 28 May 2018 · 653pp · 155,847 words
Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
by James Bridle · 6 Apr 2022 · 502pp · 132,062 words