How to Blow Up a Pipeline
by
Andreas Malm
Published 4 Jan 2021
But every respite, every little intermission in business-as-usual is a reminder that a world – not another world, 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 long in advance, with 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 see diminishing returns from activist investment; Ende Gelände has continued to draw in larger numbers and outmanoeuvre the police.
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A pandemic may course through the world for a couple of years. It could peter out. It might be combatted with a vaccine. But global heating will only become progressively 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 now. The tactical choices this book ponders will then reappear. I should like to believe that the arguments put forth here have a decent chance of surviving this pandemic, insofar as the movement rebounds.
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Collective self-discipline – submitting to the guidelines of the operational leadership; conducting an action in accordance with plans – is a virtue. The determination of the movement to scale up its challenge to business-as-usual by means of ever bigger, bolder 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 sole admissible tactic in the struggle to abolish fossil fuels? Can we be sure that it will suffice against this enemy? Must we tie ourselves to its mast to reach a safer place?
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by
David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019
Eight hundred million in South Asia: Muthukumara Mani et al., “South Asia’s Hotspots: Impacts of Temperature and Precipitation Changes on Living 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., “Estimating Economic Damage from Climate Change in the United States,” Science 356, no. 6345 (June 2017): pp. 1362–69, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal4369
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Saying so sounds almost like a cop-out, in fact. “It is easier to imagine”: Jameson wrote this in “Future City,” published in New Left Review in May–June 2003. pet 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 in Capitalism in the Web of Life, and it is discussed at some length in Benjamin Kunkel, “The Capitalocene,” London Review of Books, March 2, 2017.
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It encompasses us; in a very real way it governs us—our crop yields, our pandemics, our migration patterns and civil wars, crime waves and domestic assaults, hurricanes and heat waves and rain bombs and megadroughts, the shape of our economic growth and everything that flows downstream from it, which today means nearly everything. Eight hundred million in South Asia alone, the World Bank says, would see their living 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 been, before wood and coal and oil, an eternal Malthusian trap. In which case, we would have to retire the intuition that history will inevitably extract material progress from the planet, at least in any reliable or global pattern, and come to terms, somehow, with just how pervasively that intuition ruled even our inner lives, often tyrannically.
The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by
Brett Christophers
Published 12 Mar 2024
Fouquet, ‘Historical Energy Transitions: Speed, Prices and System Transformation’, 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, for instance, R. C. 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, p. 5. 33 See ibid. 34 ‘Two PV Plants Bring Clean Energy to Senegal’, Renewable Energy Magazine, 2 June 2021. 35 ‘PBOC has lent banks $44 billion for “green projects” ’, 31 March 2023, centralbanking.com. 36 Note that by no means all cost-based incentives have been focused on investment or financing costs.
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What, in turn, of history, and the history of energy transitions such as the one that fuelled the Industrial Revolution? It will be recalled from Chapter 4 that the theory 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 belied by the facts. It is simply not true that steam was cheaper. On the contrary: water was, and remained, cheaper, mainly because it required no human labour to call forth its powers, whereas coal could only be transformed into an energy source through massive inputs of costly human labour power.
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Carr, ‘Wind Blows Ill for Natural Gas in Texas’, Platts Energy Economist, 1 February 2016. Their observation built upon academic research substantiating exactly this relationship. See, for example, M. J. Barradale, ‘Impact 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 How Ridiculous GOP Fearmongering about Sustainable Investing Really Is’, 2 December 2022, newrepublic. com. 28 B. Christophers, ‘The End of Carbon Capitalism (as We Knew It)’, Critical Historical Studies 8 (2021), pp. 239–69. 29 Both cited in A.
A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice
by
Tony Weis
and
Joshua Kahn Russell
Published 14 Oct 2014
Stephen Harper, “Address by the Prime Minister at the Canada-UK 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: 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.
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Royal Canadian Mounted Police, “Creation of an RCMP-led INSET in Alberta,” June 6, 2012, www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/news-nouvelles/2012/06-06-inset-eisn-eng.htm. 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 industry (Edmonton: Parkland Institute, 2012). 2. Kate A. F. Crehan, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 71. 3.
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On the metabolic relations of nature in capitalism, see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), chapter 5. 6. See: Karl 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 Balanced and Inclusive Green Economy: A United Nations System-wide Perspective (Geneva: United Nations, 2011). For “market ecology” strategies in Canada, see “CAPP on Climate,” Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, 2013, www.capp.ca/environmentCommunity/Climate/; Clare Demerse, Reducing Pollution, Creating Jobs: The Employment Effects of Climate Change and Environmental Policies (Drayton Valley, AB: Pembina Institute, 2011); Chris Bataille, Benjamin Dachis, and Nic Rivers, Pricing Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The Impact on Canada’s Competitiveness, C.D.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by
Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019
To the green movement of the twentieth century this is heretical. Yet it is they who, for too long, unwisely echoed the claim that ‘small 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 see more of the world than ever before, eat varieties of food we have never heard of, and lead lives equivalent – if we so wish – to those of today’s billionaires.
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MIT Technology Review, 16 November 2017. The Future of Work Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, 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 to Rapid Climate Change in the Future’. NASA, 14 December 2011. Can We Survive Climate Catastrophe? Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by
Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014
Peters et al., “Rapid Growth in CO2 Emissions After the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 2. 25. Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 149. 26. Corrine Le Quéré et al., “Trends 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 Change 2 (2012): 2. 27. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, “Beyond ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 35; Kevin Anderson, “EU 2030 Decarbonisation Targets and UK Carbon Budgets: Why So Little Science?”
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Peters et al., “Rapid Growth in CO2 Emissions After the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 2; “Technical Summary,” in O. Edenhofer et al., ed., Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change, Contribution of Working Group III to the 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,” Energy Policy 38 (2010): 351; Ming Xu et al., “CO2 Emissions Embodied in China’s Exports from 2002 to 2008: A Structural Decomposition Analysis,” Energy Policy 39 (2011): 7383. 38.
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William Derham, Physico-Theology: or, A demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from His Works of Creation (London: Printed for Robinson and Roberts, 1768), 110. 25. Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (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 Review 56 (January 1833): 313–32; François Arago, Historical Eloge of James Watt, trans. James Patrick Muirhead (London: J.
Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by
Peter Frase
Published 10 Mar 2015
Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. 7Christian Parenti, “A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis,” Dissent, Summer 2013. 8Minqi Li, “Capitalism, Climate Change and the Transition to Sustainability: Alternative Scenarios for the US, China and the World,” Development and Change 40: 6, 2009, p. 1,047. 9Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009. 10Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, Meridien, CT: Ralston Society, 1938; Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, Australia: 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 2, Winter 2012. 14Ibid. 15Ibid. 16Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division, New York: Tor Books, 2000, p. 62. 17Francis Spufford, Red Plenty, London: Faber and Faber, 2010. 18Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312, New York: Hachette Book Group, 2012, p. 125. 19Ibid. 20Erik Olin Wright, “Transforming Capitalism through Real Utopias,” American Sociological Review 78: 1, 2013, p. 7. 21Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking, Washington, DC: APA Planners Press, 2005. 22Leon Trotsky, “‘Business Secrets’ and Workers’ Control of Industry” in The Transitional Program, Marxists.org, 1938. 23Leon Trotsky, “Conditions and Methods of Planned Economy” in Soviet Economy in Danger: The Expulsion of Zinoviev, Marxists.org, 1932. 24Bertell Ollman, “Market Mystification in Capitalist and Market Socialist Societies,” in Bertell Ollman and David Schweickart, eds., Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 81. 25Ibid. 26Mike Konczal, “Socialize Uber: It’s Easier than You Think,” The Nation, December 10, 2014. 27Alyssa Battistoni, “Alive in the Sunshine,” Jacobin 13, Winter 2014. 4.
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
Published 16 Oct 2017
Special issue of Rachel Carson Center Perspectives 2013, no. 2: 11–15. Altieri, Miguel. 1999. “Applying Agroecology to Enhance 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 Dwyer. 1988. An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Anderson, Benedict. 2006.
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
Published 14 Aug 2020
Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of a Catastrophe. London: Verso. Loftus, Peter, et al. 2015. ‘A Critical Review of Global Decarbonization Scenarios: What Do They Tell Us 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 York: Norton. Marriott, McKim. 1976. ‘Hindu Transactions: Diversity Without Dualism,’ in Transaction and Meaning, edited by Bruce Kapferer. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 109–142.
Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
by
James Bridle
Published 6 Apr 2022
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2015 Roger Harnden and Allenna Leonard (eds.), How Many Grapes Went Into the Wine: Stafford Beer on the Art and Science of Holistic Management, John Wiley & Sons, 1994 Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World, C Hurst & Co, 2017 Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, University of California Press, 2008 Jason Hribal, Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance, AK Press, 2011 Aldous Huxley, Island, Harper, 1962 Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, The Free Press, 1986 Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine, Little Brown & Co, 1981 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Penguin, 2020 Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour, Faber & Faber, 2012 Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, California University Press, 2013 Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Freedom Press, 2009 Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Polity Prss, 2018 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, Harper & Row, 1974 Konrad Lorenz, King Solomons Ring, Routledge, 2002 Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks, Hamish Hamilton, 2015 Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Verso, 2015 Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, Verso, 2021 Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, Columbia University Press, 2013 Lyn Margulis, The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998 Shannon Mattern, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, University of Minnesota Press, 2017 Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think, W.
Energy: A Human History
by
Richard Rhodes
Published 28 May 2018
The History of Nantucket, Being a Compendious Account of the First Settlement of the Island by the English, Together with the Rise and Progress of the Whale Fishery. Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1835. Maddox, John. The Doomsday Syndrome. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Madhaven, Guru. Applied Minds: How Engineers Think. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso, 2016. Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population. London: J. Johnson, 1798. Mann, Charles C. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York: Knopf, 2011. Marchetti, Cesare. “Energy Systems—The Broader Context.”
The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
by
Greta Thunberg
Published 14 Feb 2023
But now, together with my colleague, infographic journalist Maria Westholm, I could show that the real figure is way higher. When you add in emissions from consumption and the burning of biomass, the total reaches around 150 million tonnes – three times the official number. And this does not include, for example, emissions from pension funds with fossil capital or the emissions from the state energy company’s coal business abroad. I talked to scientists, to experts on the connection between global justice and the climate transition. Sweden would need double-digit percentage emissions cuts each year to be even close to doing its fair share of the transition, they told me.