Unsustainable resource flows and obscene inequalities are as inherent in the use of green technologies as in that of the fossil fuels they are meant to replace. The notion that the world economy is undergoing a green transformation is based on the illusion that renewable energy is replacing, rather than just adding to, fossil energy consumption. To move beyond this impasse, we must recognize that technologies are fetishized social relations and that money systematically obscures the material injustices on which modern civilization is based.
Alf Hornborg || To understand the relation between inequalities and the green transformation,Footnote1 we need to think about materiality. And to understand the problems we have with materiality, we need to go back about 2,600 years in history. This was the beginning of what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers (Citation1949) called the Axial Age. It was a time when, in various parts of the world, the first abstract philosophies and transcendental religions were developed. As the historian Richard Seaford (Citation2004) has shown, it was also the time when ancient Greece, India, and China saw the emergence of the first coined money. And money, of course, was to become the very essence of capitalism.
According to Seaford, the idea of abstract exchange value, embodied in coins, stimulated transcendental thinking. Transcendental thinking cognitively displaced us from the material world accessible to our senses to a literally metaphysical, celestial realm, leaving physical reality largely stripped of spiritual and moral considerations. The focus of human life, our ancestors were told, was an immaterial, spiritual world they could only imagine. In subtle ways, transcendental thinking has also shaped our modern understandings of economy and technology, not only among mainstream economists but even in much Marxist thought. Categories such as “value” and “development of the productive forces” tend to be fundamentally detached from the material metabolism of global capitalism.
In early modern Europe, in what Marshall Sahlins (Citation2022) has called the “Second Axial Age,” people started to believe in technological progress. The human spirit would not only master the material world but also improve it. Given the Cartesian distinction between body and mind, technology – although undeniably material – to this day continues to be understood as primarily a result of engineering knowledge, a product of mind rather than body.
Mainstream economics is similarly committed to transcendental thinking. It views production and trade in terms of immaterial abstractions such as values and prices. To mainstream economists, the very idea of “ecologically unequal exchange” – the fact that world trade implies highly asymmetric transfers of material resources – is simply inconceivable. The monumental textbook Economics by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells (Citation2018), in its 27-page, four-column index does not even mention “unequal exchange.” When measured in money, apparently, all trade is fair.
Yet, towards the end of the twentieth century, it had become common knowledge that the world economy is not only obscenely unequal but also materially unsustainable, based to over 80% on the combustion of fossil fuels leading to climate change. This impasse gave birth to the notion of a “green transition.” The idea is to shift technologies from those relying on fossil energy to “green” technologies based on renewable energy sources. But as the environmental historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has shown in his recent book More and More and More (Citation2024), the notion of an “energy transition” is, as he says, “the ideology of capital in the twenty-first century” (220). Historically, there has never been an energy transition. Instead, new sources of energy have been added to previous sources to cover a constantly growing consumption of energy. Moreover, each new form of energy has required specific kinds of materials, the production of which has been contingent on earlier forms.
For example, in requiring enormous quantities of mine props, coal mining in Britain in the year 1900 relied on between 6 and 7 times as much wood to produce energy as 150 years earlier (Fressoz Citation2024: 45-46, 48, 60). Such figures give the concept of a “subterranean forest” (Sieferle Citation2001) a completely new meaning. Similarly, the use of oil and gasoline in propelling cars and other machines made of steel inevitably relies on the still increasing amounts of coal used to manufacture those machines. Coal remains technically indispensable for steel production. What Fressoz seems to suggest is that we should view the car itself as a tool for energy extraction – without the combustion engine, gasoline would not be a source of energy. And today, half of the world’s electric vehicles are made in China, where the steel and two-thirds of the electricity are produced from coal (Fressoz Citation2024: 77, 79). When we understand how much resources are embodied in our machines, we must realise that the machines are contingent on those resources – and on the ecologically unequal exchange through which the resources have been appropriated.
So, what might this tell us about the “green” energy transition? Unsurprisingly, Fressoz notes that greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production are still rising (Citation2024, 212). “Decarbonization” is not leading to a decrease in the global use of fossil fuels (216-217). Why? Because fossil energy is used in the constantly expanding manufacture of, as he says, “just about everything,” in agriculture, mining, building materials, cement, global transports, and so on. This, of course, includes the infrastructures for generating “non-carbon” energy, whether nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, or solar. As before in history, each new source of energy is added to previous sources without replacing them (York and Bell Citation2019). “More and more and more … ” We now use three times more wood than a century ago. Global coal use has doubled between 1980 and 2010, while oil consumption has increased by 60%.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who is remembered as the father of both ecological economics and the concept of degrowth, was sceptical of the possibility of replacing fossil energy with solar power (Georgescu-Roegen Citation1986). His pessimism was based on the huge amounts of materials that would be required to harness such quantities of solar energy. Was he right or wrong? Should we trust the ecomodernists who say that we will be able to derive all the rare earth minerals we need from deep sea mining, or even mining asteroids? Will green technology become increasingly immaterial, as proposed by Aaron Bastani (Citation2019)? Or are we suffering from a gigantic illusion about technological progress as somehow detached from the materiality of the world?
We may be seeing the end of the road for a civilization unable to recognize that it is entangled with the material world. Beyond acknowledging the impacts of modern society on global ecology and climate, and its consequences in terms of global inequalities, we need to fundamentally rethink the role of technology in human life. Looking back at the history of technology, we can now see that the vision of human engineering since the Industrial Revolution has been nothing less than the creation of artificial life. Machines propelled by fossil energy were developed to replace human and animal labor – they are counterfeit organisms whose metabolism is based on solar energy captured by living things many millions of years ago. The solar panels that are supposed to replace them suggest a kind of artificial photosynthesis. But are they really more efficient than living plants? And, for all their horsepower, given their demands on resources, are tractors propelled by biofuels truly more efficient than horses propelled by oats? Finally, is Artificial Intelligence really preferable to the human mind? Why do we keep trying to transcend organic life? We are still pursuing the fantasies of immateriality conceived in the Axial Age, two and a half millennia ago.
In the 4th century BC, in his Politics, Aristotle (Citation1995) speculated that slaves would not be necessary “if every instrument could accomplish its own work [and] the shuttle would weave” by itself. When we today contemplate artificially intelligent robots, powered by the sun, we can trace their roots to Aristotle’s ancient fantasy of mechanical slaves. But what history tells us is that machines do not replace slavery but merely displace it. The steam engines that propelled nineteenth-century British cotton mills may have liberated some people from muscular labor, but they were contingent on the toil of African slaves in American plantations (Hornborg Citation2023). Technological progress in one part of the world-system tends to imply displacements of both workloads and environmental loads to other, less affluent parts. Each bale of cotton fibre that crossed the Atlantic embodied uncounted hours of slave labor, as well as the vast expanses of land on which the cotton – and the food that nourished its enslaved cultivators – was grown. Such embodied materiality of world trade – and such inequalities – remain invisible for mainstream economists to this day. The global commodity chains on which contemporary technologies are built rely on new kinds of slavery. While cobalt miners in West Africa are paid the equivalent of one US dollar per day, top executives like Jeff Bezos already seven years ago made an average of 275 million dollars a day (Crawford and Joler Citation2018). In contemporary capitalist ideology, such obscenities pass as normal.
Humankind faces an evolutionary choice: either we keep aspiring, suicidally, to transcend ecosystems, or we accept sustainably embedding ourselves – body and mind – in the biosphere, as a species among others. A truly green transformation would mean coming to our senses, organically embedded in ecosystems, beyond transcendental fantasies of immateriality. It would require a fundamentally redesigned world economy, in which complementary currencies with spatially restricted reach, distributed as basic income, would generate a localization of social metabolism, rather than unequal and unsustainable global transfers of resources. A “green transformation” must begin, not with new kinds of technology, but with new kinds of money. Under globalized capitalism, general-purpose money makes everything interchangeable and relentlessly intensifies the global exploitation of the lowest-wage labor and the least protected environments. The ultimate challenge for humankind will be to redesign money. At the current moment in history, it seems that this will only be feasible in the context of what we envisage as socialism.
If the “green transformation” is conceived simply as a shift of energy technologies within current capitalism, it will be the privilege of those who can afford it, while greenhouse gas emissions are displaced to lower-income nations. The (unequal) distributive dimensions of technologies are essential aspects of their mystified rationale, which is to save time and space for some, at the expense of time and space lost for others. To grasp these distributive dimensions of technologies, we must acknowledge their reliance on asymmetric flows of embodied biophysical resources – that is, ecologically unequal exchange. Such material transfers are veiled by the fictive reciprocity of market prices, which obscure the materiality of world trade, and by the mainstream view of technological progress as primarily an immaterial phenomenon, as if it were merely an innocent product of human ingenuity. Socialist visions of sustainability must not advocate technologies that are intrinsically contingent on unequal global transfers of embodied labor time and other resources.
These considerations should be crucial to ecosocialist thought on the prospects of a green transformation. If, as Marxist theory holds, value produced by labor is multiplied by the advancing productive forces of capitalism, but those capitalist technologies tend to draw on cheap labor and resources in the global South, the distributive asymmetries extend far beyond class struggles in the North. This should prompt ecosocialists to rethink not only the labor theory of value, but also the promises of green technology.
Notes
1 This was the topic of a plenary session at the joint 18th Conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) and 11th International Degrowth Conference, held in Oslo on June 24-27, 2025, at which this talk was presented.
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