Capitalist ideologues are much, much better at lying than at solving problems related to their own greed.
Rob Ray, Freedom News || A couple of years ago I attended a talk by Peter Gelderloos at the London Action Resource Center (Larc) on his then-new book, The Solutions Are Already Here. He wasn’t in the best of shape — as is now common knowledge, he had been diagnosed with a brain tumour and was on his way back to the US to, among other things, try and get some help with it.
Larc being a small venue, and Gelderloos being among the radical scene’s larger names, the place was packed with people, a little claustrophobic as he stood at the front to give his talk on the impossibility of stopping, or even slowing, climate change without a significant social revolution.
In the dim orange light preferred by the Larc crew, a little wired and clearly exhausted from the combination of illness and travel, there was a half-wild and somewhat messianic aspect to his presentation, a shadowed, shaggy-haired and shiny-eyed character grasping and gesticulating as he outlined two futures. A likely one of catastrophic climate change driven by capitalism’s inherent inability to control its own, cancer-like growth, or the almost imperceptible hope of a genuine ecological revolution driven by society’s realisation that survival and business as usual are not compatible. You can find a (better-rested and longer-form) version of it here, in a talk he gave a year prior to the Marxist Education Project:
I was impressed by his zeal (and frankly by the fact he was there and standing at all), but doubted his message would find many converts outside the sort of people who already frequent Earth First! events. The trouble being that telling folk the only solution is to destroy capitalism is a hard sell at the best of times, and in April 2023 capitalists could point to any number of initiatives to show how they were “making progress.” Unconvincing to someone who is disinclined to look past 50 years of excuses, lies, vacillating and half-hearted compromises, perhaps, but enough for your average liberal who really wants to believe someone else can sort it all out while retaining, roughly, the status quo.
Just two years later, though, Gelderloos’s predictions that capitalism would be unable even to maintain its existing lacklustre efforts towards reducing carbon emissions, let alone deepen them, are worth returning to. Because that feverish anarchist, ranting about capitalism’s follies in a stuffy former Methodist Hall, was pretty much spot on.
The 2030-never of electrification
The promises of capitalism to magically technologise the world to reduce emissions hinged, in the 2010s to early 2020s, on a few key ideas. First, reduce the direct emission of carbon dioxide by electrifying everything. Cars, trucks, buses, boilers, even steel foundries. Second, clean up electricity generation by switching to a combination of renewables, and maybe something like nuclear or cold fusion or grid-scale battery for base load (tbd). Third, discourage companies from polluting by introducing a complex system of carbon trading credits. Fourth, lean in to improving efficiency at “consumer” level — better insulation, less waste etc. With a gradual tightening of such policies, it was thought, the system could switch over to a non-damaging model, and capitalism could continue doing its thing.
Now there is, as has been pointed out with increasing volume for the entirety of living memory, already a fundamental problem there which simply cannot be fixed. Growth. Capitalism demands it, and in fact, faces crisis without it. Efficiency on a GDP balance looks very much like recession — lower production, less economic activity. So if you’re going to be both more efficient with what you’re already making and placate the religion of growth you in fact need to accelerate exploitation of resources. Make more, sell more to keep the line going up. The green revolution must be economically justified as an opportunity for growth and the opening of new markets. It must be fully exploited for increased profitability.
Thus we find, in the late 2010s, the enthusiastic initial take-up of electric vehicles as a panacea. Growth with falling emissions. Perfect. First Tesla, then every other company, started to experiment and found, to their delight, that the electric car did present possibilities. You could sell it like a luxury item and get a big State subsidy. You could stuff it full of modern technologies, from big screens to 360-degree cameras permanently connected to central servers. You could make repairs impossible without sending it to your own workshop. Enshittification theory and panopticon surveillance applied beyond the internet, in an industry where much of the population is entirely hostage, unable to function without the range afforded by a vehicle and unsupported by mass transit. We also find the massive new wave of solar and wind farms, thunking megaprojects bypassing the old community ideals of transition towns becoming independent of Big Energy. We see the flogging of replacement green tech for boilers, the promise that (whichever country) will be a Green Energy Superpower.
Spool forward to 2025, and it’s all falling apart. The megaprojects have problems moving energy to where it’s needed. Spain apparently produces too much solar, Scotland too much wind, at the wrong times. To no industry watcher’s surprise, European and US car manufacturers are flubbing the electric market to the point that subsidies were removed by Trump, Tesla has started making sci-fi promises about mass self-driving vehicles to hide its woeful sales figures, and the EU is preparing to ditch its 2035 target to abolish internal combustion engines, with the UK likely to follow. Both the “UK” (internationally owned) oil majors of Shell and BP, after a desultory few years pretending to give a single solitary damn about renewables, have dumped their interest in wind to reinvest in fossil fuels. The big rock candy mountain of cold fusion is as far away as ever, and nuclear baseload remains low, with much-touted “mini” reactors already, as the Financial Times quips, “losing their glow.” Carbon offsetting, meanwhile, simply doesn’t, and has never, worked.
End of the pretence?
Some of this is simply the end of the road for a cycle of demonstrative reactions to political fashions that began in the 2000s, when climate activism was at its height and had forced its way into the global conversation. A combination of the rise of the far-right, the impact of powerful lobbying interests and the collapse of astroturfing, both because it had become less effective and because companies no longer felt the need to virtue signal. At no point had the rich ceased to consume exactly what they wanted, nobody had cut back on private jets or superyachts.
If solar and wind had grown, it was largely to service expanded consumption, rather than decarbonising. Most notable in this farce was that fossil fuels never actually stopped being produced and used. In fact, apart from the pandemic, every year to date has seen a new record for global oil consumption. The same is true for coal. In terms of cutting back on CO2 emissions, capitalism has failed year after year in absolute terms. Every single watt of solar energy was additional to fossil fuel use. China is often blamed for this, but it is the workshop of the world, not just domestic markets. Global consumption of its goods within unaccountable neoliberal models drove the opening of all those Chinese coal plants, exactly as the 2000s anti-globalisation movement predicted it would, outsourcing air pollution to nations where poverty and autocracy ensured few complaints could be raised.
Renewables capacity wouldn’t magically have appeared if these factories had moved to Europe instead. And we know this in part because where a sudden spurt of building new industry has happened, it’s been dirtier than a Texan rigger. Tesla, infamously, ended up fuelling its “superchargers” with diesel. So too the vast server “farms” which have been built to power the extraordinarily wasteful AI bubble. Most of those slop videos and images people generate for social media are burning dead dinosaurs by the tonne. In fact, between the ultra-capitalist dream of crypto markets and this dystopian sci-fi hellscape of tech bros’ imagined Nazi artificial superintelligences, you can pretty much write off the entire benefit from solar and wind as having been sucked up into an exercise filling the internet with a more convincing type of garbage.
That’s what capitalism, in the post-pandemic world, has actually done regarding the one big ecological issue that it said it was going to fix. That was its supposed best effort. Gelderloos, in his own critique (which I should note comes before a much more optimistic and constructive offering of what to do about it), notes:
“Even though they’re they’re reducing it just to climate and they’ve been aware of the danger of climate change – like the US government recognised it as a national security problem already back in the 1960s – their responses have been militarising borders and increasing the deployment of militaries for, you know, so-called disasters, natural disasters, and things of that nature. And then also making big agreements that have done exactly nothing to slow down greenhouse gas emissions.
“So even within their reductionism, they don’t do a good job of dealing with the one part of the problem … The larger part of it they have to ignore, and then of the part that they look at, half of it they don’t get right, and the other half they deal with in a way that that actively harms us.”
This is what we’re now being asked to look past, to “just trust us bro.” We are about to run headlong into any number of issues related to unsustainable exploitation of resources – most notably food and water – in a situation where capital made not the slightest dent in solving the runaway climate change it said it was the only solution to. In fact it made more headway simply persuading the easily-led there was no problem. Capitalists are much, much better at lying than they are at solving problems related to their own greed.
I’ll finish with a quote, culled from Octopus founder and green energy enthusiast Greg Jackson in a December 10th interview with RS. In it, he describes an encounter with one of his opposite numbers in the fossil fuel gig:
“I was sat literally next to a very senior executive from a very big, very well-known oil company. And a person asked him about climate change. And he said ‘look, we’re planning on 2.75 degrees. And the guy said ‘well, what does that mean?’ And he said ‘six metres of sea level rise’.”
When bosses talk to other bosses, you finally get to a version of the truth. What our lords and masters really have in mind for us is death. Mass, irrevocable, on an unimaginable scale. That’s “priced in” to their calculations. That’s what we’re up against. The death cult of Big Oil, fuelling the death cult of Big Tech, paying for the nihilistic, careless lifestyles of Earth’s few thousand early 21st-century ultra-rich, until the clock strikes midnight.
They have to be deposed. The dimly-lit hopes of Gelderloos’ gesticulations and all our decades of struggle towards better alternatives must prevail. The alternative is catastrophe.
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