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One of the main problems with the Oil-Value-Life chain is that human desperation anywhere becomes a threat to human life everywhere, because capital reliably conscripts the reserve army of labor into environmentally noxious work. To counteract this predatory (though impersonal) phenomenon, public p…

There is a perfect example of sophisticated public-power thinking along these lines in a 2023 report from the Climate and Community Project (now the Climate & Community Institute). In “Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining,” the authors approach American transportation plannin…

Some have accused public-power advocates of taking advantage of the climate crisis to push an unrelated socialistic agenda. Why would state control over the means of production make the United States more likely to meet its emissions and adaptation goals than crafting a better market for the player…

Field’s signature example is the US synthetic rubber program. Though historians traditionally consider the program to have been an industrial miracle, he finds a series of preventable errors. First, cheap rubber imports from Southeast Asia made US firms unwilling to hold significant reserve stocks—…

The larger financial markets aren’t as yet any better focused than the VCs are. A meta-analysis from the Climate Policy Initiative found that, while estimates for needed annual climate-related investment in global agrifood systems range from $212 billion to $1.267 trillion, they tracked the actual …