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In the English language, few critics have tackled this issue as well as Max Ajl, whose 2021 book, A People’s Green New Deal, refuses to shy away from the global nature of the questions at hand. “Much of left-liberal climate talk is based on administering rather than eliminating capitalism,” he writes, accurately, “and as a result is built on a seldom acknowledged foundation of assumptions regarding the global distribution of wealth and consumption, and the institutions with which it is tied, in terms of why emissions are produced and their consequences, which are intimately related to which lives matter and which lives do not.”51 What good is a dense electric vehicle charging network in Poughkeepsie to Grigris, the Chadian dancer turned petrol smuggler? Freezing the consumption of everyone in the world at current levels preserves global inequality, leaving some people cruising in EVs and some people burning wood as cooking fuel.
If there is a commodity into which the marketcrafting transition strategy crystallizes—and there is—it’s the electric vehicle. While the IRA’s tax credits for energy generation are agnostic, the extensive support for EVs is specific. Despite creating all sorts of international problems, cars are the crux of the American climate strategy. On the surface it makes sense: Internal combustion engines are the cause of the lion’s share of direct American household fossil fuel consumption, especially as the grid decarbonizes. But as I’ve said, it’s indirect consumption of fossil fuels—through agricultural products, plastics, and basically everything we consume, period—that drives emissions. It’s easier to change the cars than it is to change where people are going. If the marketcraft strategy is a compromise between a reasonable democratic approach to the climate crisis and the demands of capital, how much reason do we have to sacrifice to the status quo? And how can we be sure it’s not too much? Here’s one indicator I think we can use: The number of cars should go down, not up.
A reasonable society would not have nearly a car for every person. That America does is a sign that we live in an unreasonable society. We as a public subsidize cars in innumerable ways, including by ceding much of public space to their coming, going, and parking.ii Much as they did with cigarettes, researchers are continually discovering new ways that cars are bad for society: As I write, there is new attention on toxic pollution from tires, pollution that has turned rainwater runoff deadly for spawning coho salmon on the West Coast.68 And then there’s the climate crisis: In 2023, a team of physicists from Imperial College London concluded, in admirably plain language: “[A]s well as implementation of emission-reducing changes in vehicle design, a rapid and large-scale reduction in car use is necessary to meet stringent carbon budgets and avoid high energy demand.”69 Building a lot more cars, it suffices to say, will not help with that.
truth
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 investment at only $28.5 billion.73 The energy transition has lured asset managers deeper into the climate-related energy, transportation, and water sectors, where private-equity deals jumped from around $60 billion in 2020 to nearly $150 billion in 2022.74 But that doesn’t necessarily bode well: As Brett Christophers points out in his book Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World, real asset funds would rather buy stuff that already exists, wrench more money out of it, and sell it on. They much prefer it to building new infrastructure, which is the plan in less than 20 percent of these investments.75 “What the evidence both before our eyes and in fund performance data shows,” he writes, “is that actually holding the asset—let alone stewarding it—is really not what the business is about.”76 For financial actors, “exposing” themselves to the green transition’s upside is not the same thing as building and maintaining it.iii A number of electric car manufacturers, however, have raised significant capital.
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—What if the price goes down?!—or invest in planting large amounts of guayule, a shrub indigenous to the American Southwest from which it was proposed to extract significant amounts of rubber.iv This left the United States so underprepared when Japanese advances cut off rubber supplies that the country was forced to restrict automobile travel not for lack of gas but for fear of running out of tires. Industry dragged its feet, refusing to invest in synthetic capacity, since it assumed the cheap natural rubber would start flowing again after hostilities concluded—an attitude that ignored the fact that the United States could lose the war. When the synthetic program did get up and running with government money, the oil industry insisted on using petroleum (rather than easily produced alcohol) as a feedstock, unnecessarily slowing output at a crucial time. Field concludes that the wait for synthetic rubber delayed the American invasion of France on D-Day by a year.77 “The decision to structure the program around an almost exclusive emphasis on petroleum as a feedstock,” he writes, “worked at cross-purposes with the immediate objective of winning (or at least not losing) the war.”78 We can imagine a future historian saying something similar about today, trying to answer the perplexing question of why, at a historical turning point for the planet, humanity spent such a large percentage of its collective resources on electrifying Americans’ cars: The decision to structure the transition program around electric vehicles worked at cross-purposes with the immediate objective of cooling (or at least not heating) the world.
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 players we already have? Should the government, with little experience or organizational capacity, really take over EV production from the automakers, for example? Wouldn’t it be inefficient to hold a national referendum on what color trim options to offer on the state hatchback? There’s nothing obvious to gain by shutting down the private companies and rehiring everyone at USA Cars to do the same jobs, not from a climate perspective. If our central task as a society is to build three hundred million electric cars, then it’s probably best to get the autoworkers and automakers to do it. But who’s to say we need to build three hundred million electric cars? What if we need to build three hundred gigawatts of pumped-storage hydropower? When you look at the green transition from the perspective of grid-scale energy storage, it’s clear that, no matter how great the social need is, capitalists will simply decline to invest in certain kinds of projects, even with a reasonable expectation of long-term profit. And since no capitalist is ultimately responsible for society’s metabolism as a whole, there’s no guarantee that some decisive detail of decarbonization won’t drop between them like a fly ball in front of a lackadaisical Little League left fielder.
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 planning and EVs from a social-metabolic, public-power perspective: Instead of looking at the problem from one side, they examine a few different variables, including lithium demand, average battery size, rate of vehicle ownership, and battery recycling.ii The paper offers four different planning scenarios, ranging from mere electrification to a deep transformation in land use and urban design that would increase walking, biking, and the use of public transit.13 Profit and even cost of development are not considered. The report’s real virtue isn’t the revelation that the United States can deeply reduce its incipient demand for rare-earth metals by moving away from car dependence—that’s simple. The point is the kind of planning-thinking that a public-power perspective enables, the kind of thinking in which a neighborhood bus schedule in California is connected to a mine in Australia. Anything less than that is willful ignorance. Among the benefits of the low-lithium scenarios, the report concludes, are mitigated harms of lithium mining, reduced geopolitical tensions with regard to control over mineral deposits, safer communities, and achieved climate targets. Such a scenario would also be in line with public power–style efforts in mining countries to capture more of the value chain—think Chile’s nationalization of its lithium and Indonesia’s successful ban on the export of unrefined nickel—which means richer countries paying more for less.14 This equalization of global exchange is a basic requirement for what’s called a just transition. Those are the kinds of planetary goals Huber refers to, the ones even well-intentioned capitalists are not able to achieve because they require social planning at a level that is above the capitalist pay grade.
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 power seeks to ensure that no one out there is left vulnerable and alone, dependent on capitalist vultures in order to meet their basic needs. Along with public health care, public housing is therefore the strategy’s foundation as much as electric power is. Childcare, education, and eldercare as well. And there is no life, public or otherwise, without recreation and art. A picture of a public-powered life comes into focus, and it involves a shift of collective resources toward low-carbon, high-touch care work. With more than enough doctors and nurses to go around, capitalism can’t hold your loved one’s life over your head and compel you to smuggle petrol in order to get enough money to save them, for example. No one could even justify their highly paid antisocial career with their child’s need for a good education, not if everyone’s child was entitled to a good education regardless of parental income. Perhaps this is counterintuitive, but in such a world we could all take more personal responsibility for our choices.
I strive to keep my critique mostly out of the psychological realm, but here it’s worth citing Anselm Kizza-Besigye, who argues that Western horror, even on the political left, at the idea that our access to particular consumer items might decline in a better-planned world is a reflection of geopolitical castration anxiety. Taking up the Western addiction to what he (as a Ugandan) sees as our “sad bananas,” he writes, “They can envision no good substitute for their sad bananas because the desire Westerners feel for them is not for the fruits themselves—even at their best bananas are a mid-tier tropical fruit—but for the relations of unequal exchange that enable Americans to take a disproportionate share of the world’s agricultural surplus and, with perverse glee, waste almost half of it.” I wouldn’t know how to test such a claim, but I find it quite believable. Anselm Kizza-Besigye, “Banana Republics,” Africa Is a Country, September 11, 2023.
footnote. this is so good and i think reading this was roughly coeval with me ending my daily banana consumption
But that’s not how Earth First! organizer Judi Bari saw it. She saw herself and her comrades as being on the side of workers—workers who might want to go fishing or camping on occasion—as opposed to the clear-cutting, job-automating timber bosses. She told an interviewer at the time, “There are very few people who think the right of a few people to make $7.00 an hour for a few more years is worth the extinction of a 10,000 year-old eco-system. I’m one of the strongest advocates for the loggers and the millworkers. I’m certainly a stronger advocate for them than their own unions are, and I’m certainly a stronger advocate for them than their employers are.”77 As she pointed out, logging jobs were few and dangerous, and they involved chopping down so many trees in the name of Value that soon there wouldn’t be any trees or logging jobs left.viii Most timber workers aligned against EF! regardless, tying yellow ribbons around their front-yard trees to signal their allegiance to the bosses. Some workers went a lot further than that, and Bari’s writings are thick with scenes of loggers punching Earth Firsters in the face in defense of their jobs. (They weren’t the only ones getting hit—Bari recounts a sign from a timber-wife counterdemonstrator: “If you take my husband’s job, he takes it out on me.”)78 Bari and EF! were right, of course, that no real analysis of workers’ interests could conclude in favor of clearcutting old-growth forest, and no conceivable public-power regime would allow it—even the American federal government ultimately didn’t—but the loggers followed their bosses’ plans. By placing jobs first, these workers ended up affirming capital.
That there’s still work to be done is dramatically clear in New York State, where public-power advocates got their win with the Build Public Renewables Act. While strategists in the Democratic Socialists of America plan for the state’s public power workers to grab hold of the planning function and trigger a worldwide cascade of social transformation, the local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is engaged in some of the worst planning you could possibly imagine, as a headline on the New York Focus website in June of 2022 proclaimed: ELECTRICAL WORKERS UNION FIGHTS TO EXPAND FOSSIL FUEL–POWERED CRYPTO MINING IN NEW YORK. Joined by the AFL-CIO, the IBEW lobbied Governor Kathy Hochul not to sign a bill (she did) that put a moratorium on new proof-of-work cryptocurrency mines powered by fossil fuels. Since cryptocurrencies produce zero social goods, there’s no excuse for them except to appease capital. The IBEW’s legislative council head, Addie Jenne, was clear: The crypto industry can “reignite” disinvested communities through jobs and taxes, Jenne told the Focus, and “provide buzz to attract a certain type of workforce… and attract cluster economic development.”84 It’s not the first time the state’s big unions have backed fossil fuels.ix “We need a realistic approach to meet the state’s bold climate goals and must leave every option on the table,” said the New York State AFL-CIO president, Mario Cilento, in defense of gas-powered energy plants.85
noooo