A Tainted Decarbonization

Given my interest and investment in solarpunk (both as a literary genre and as a political ideology), I’m very passionate about speculating how our future is going to look, and as decarbonization picks up pace, it’s tempting to take the win and ride the projections for 2040 and 2050.

However, for better or for worse, we’re “living in interesting times”, in which the postwar order is being… dismantled? Undermined? Self-sabotaged? The nuance can change depending how optimistic or doomerist you feel on the day, because the key feature of these current “interesting times” is that they escape predictions: the complexity and speed of changes and chains of events is far beyond what every single one of us can manage to parse, interpret and sometimes even just keep up with. Fascist Russia invading Ukraine to restore the Soviet area of influence, 80-years-long genocides suddenly on everyone’s screens, USA blockading a blockade, that sort of thing. The Roaring 2020s, call ‘em that.

So calibrating which events are favourable for us, what is “a win” and how will 2040 look like is by no means easy. And since we live in capitalism, I can’t help being suspicious (terribly so) of decarbonization; could it be just another ace up the capitalists’ sleeve?

Allow me then to take a short historical detour first, and then I’ll add decarbonization to the mix. Pinky promise.

Histories of Imperial Collapse

The one go-to place we have to look at the future in these whirlpools of chaos is… the past. We have extensive records of multiple empires and civilizations collapsing and the comparisons are in fact compelling: from the Mongolian to the British, from Ancient Rome to the Dutch and the Shogunate. Indeed, I’ve seen many solarpunks in my circles rejoice and welcome the tragicomical spiral of self-inflicted defeats the US is collecting (I see at least one “American Century of Humiliation” gif per day), but I’d like to say a few words to keep each other grounded.

Yes, the American Empire is crumbling. But the capitalist one isn’t.

The US will likely not keep its position at the top of the global capital chain of command (although it’s still possible, given that the majority of international trades is still denominated in dollars). But capital, we all know by now, goes beyond single countries: despite changes in geography or nationality, the fundamental structure of how it operates remains the same. So if the most popular imagery of collapsing polity on the internet is that of the Roman Empire (as an Italian, I hate it), I’d argue that a more accurate one would be the seat of power moving eastwards: not a sudden, tragic crash but an uneven, uncomfortable and unpredictable rollercoaster of changes. We’ll still live in a capitalist world for decades (hopefully not many!), but it will be a world whose contingent rules will be shaped by different actors.

As my fellow anarchist writer @Hex@kolektiva.social">Hex suggests, capital is like the demon in the movie “Fallen” (1998, not the Twilight copycat): it uses economically powerful countries as hosts, and when the current one becomes impoverished and socially fractured, it jumps to another, healthier one with more resources to extract or more power to wield. This happened once already: during the postwar period, the British Empire began to sunset (pun intended) and the American one took the lead. The seat of capitalist power moved from London to Washington (quite literally). The UK is still collapsing to this day, by the way! And before you ask: no, I haven’t watched Fallen myself.

But since I’m already hearing furious historians growling at my door because of sloppy historical comparisons, let’s end the tangent and keep this focused on what I actually want to talk about: decarbonization, and is it a good thing?

Cui Prodest?

Let’s start from the obvious: yes, decarbonization is good, and indeed even ecologically required if we want to retain a livable planet that can support complex societies. I’m not arguing we should keep using fossils. However, from a social and political point of view, it depends who undertakes it and for what reasons.

This has been a hot topic (pun intended) for the better part of forty years, in which activists, scientists and environmentalists have tried to make the world aware of how important it was to decarbonize our societies, how slow it was being undertaken and how fast it should’ve been ramped up in order to avoid the worst disasters imaginable. They (we?) have manifestly failed (think of how little impact the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement and every yearly COP have had on global emissions)... and yet decarbonization is finally happening at breakneck speed.

How is that possible?

Nowadays (unlike ten years ago) we know that decarbonization was going to happen sooner or later; we’ve know for a few years already (see Pakistan’s flash-fast solarization from below, India leapfrogging oil altogether or the slow death of coal as a fuel in high-income countries). It was just a matter of how fast, for what reasons and, inevitably, to the benefit of whom.

I’d argue that decarbonization has picked up pace only now because scientists and activists failed. We could’ve, as a society, decarbonized on scientific grounds (the science on this is extensive and unmistakably clear) or on moral grounds (solidarity, regards for future generations, etc), and yet we once again marched to the beat of economy and capital. Decarbonization is happening the way we’re currently witnessing because it is convenient to the capitalists. Once it cleared the way from threatening, un-economic alternatives (such as not extracting more oil, or reducing total energy consumption), it started plowing through and racking up state funding and quarterly revenues. Hence the hectares covered in solar panels and tax breaks to battery companies.

Capital has once again had the upper hand in determining which energy sources become viable and which become stranded assets.

When capital was steered by the British Empire, it was powered by muscles (as in, horses and slaves), rivers and then coal; those were the energy sources used in productive industries. When it was steered by the US, it was oil and gas. Whoever comes next (and I’m not taking for granted that it will be China), will have to marshal solar panels and batteries (in terms of resources: silicates and rare earths) in order to channel the flow of money and power (and, to an extent, electricity to the citizen for basic appliances).

Inconvenient Convenience

The counterargument is that if capital could, like an RPG player at the beginning of a videogame, create its perfect host, it would make one with plentiful resources, a large population, a powerful army to impose its will on other players and, most importantly, global control of a key energy source every other player needs. As you can see, decarbonization fits none of these characteristics; it is undesirable and cumbersome, since so many of the items around us are downstream of oil: controlling oil means controlling the production AND the prices of those items. That can’t be replicated by control on renewables, so in principle capital would do away with decarbonization altogether, as it has notably attempted to for the better part of this century.

The catch is that now it no longer can.

Indeed, decarbonization isn’t convenient to the capitalists in absolute terms; had it been, they’d have embarked on this project a hundred years ago, or as soon it was found that carbon dioxide is greenhouse gas. It’s convenient in comparative terms, which means that it’s a B-plan for when control on oil can no longer be secured. It’s convenient because it’s the required adaption it must undertake in order to keep being the dominant economic system. In other words: from the point of view of capital, it has become impractical to avoid decarbonizing.

The US won’t survive this adaption. It has built its own society and political relationships with other societies so deeply around fossil fuels that it would require a miracle of statecraft to disentangle itself, and their current ruling class does not appear to be suited for the challenge (this includes the Democrats). This kind of shift to different energy sources is also not a reversible process, since once a complex system finds a new equilibrium, it almost never goes back to the former one; history rarely moves backwards. Russia and the Saudis are ten times as fucked, although, unlike USA, they’ve known for a while and tried to plan around it. It’s not been working quite well for them, which shows how hard it is to redesign whole polities that depend on a single resource.

Uneconomical Thoughts

Whatever world is created in the next twenty years will still be shaped by capital needs, and will still leave other concerns on the side. Generational questions like elder care, ecological stewardship and how to maintain an open internet are just three examples of discussions we should have by not taking only the economic axis into account, or capital will always win. It will inevitably win because it can steer the whole economic apparatus to suit its own needs, while we cannot. What it cannot steer as easily (although it definitely tries, and sometimes succeeds) is science and public opinion.

Worse: even if we were suddenly put in charge of designing policies instead of our capital-addled governments, I’m not sure we’d prioritize non-economic factors either (though at least they would be loaded in our favour). Indeed, part of why decarbonization is happening “from below” in some places is because solar is terribly cheaper than oil; it’s a choice that swathes of people are making not on moral or scientific grounds, but economic ones. And “from below” is in inverted commas here because that cheapness is defined by production costs, which are downstream of resource control and capital investment, so not entirely a “power to the people” scenario. Better than refineries and pipelines, though.

Here you might point out that it’s not very solarpunk of me to admit that our agency in determining our energy choices is so tiny. You would be right: as a former activist and scientist, it does piss me off to make this concession. I don’t have any “buts”; science, morals and history are a less effective policy framing than economics in our century, and until this societal hyperfocus on profit and growth becomes outdated (I refuse to think that humans will be forever haunted by chasing wealth, given that it was not the case until two hundred years ago), we’ll be fighting global banking institutions and overly armed police forces with cardboard signs and social media posts.

The most defeatists among us are right in that we can’t directly impact negotiations between state interests or which sector gets zero-interests loans for a decade and then bailouts, but we can start building systems in which we can make decisions that are non-economic and therefore more resistant to capital cooptation.

Eventually, a win is a win, and a decarbonized world in which we get to have a livable planet is by all means better than a scorched, waterless one. But I can’t shake off the thought that it’s a win we did not score ourselves; it’s one scored by capital on the basis of its own sheer convenience (and a historical own goal by the US, which accelerated their own imperial collapse due to pure incompetence). In the same way, it’s convenient for capital to burn trillions on machines that consume energy like entire countries to blend the digital commons and dump their waste directly in our brains. So maybe you’ll understand why I’m not that eager to cherish that capital’s uneasy convenience got us a win, and that we might have to rely on similar dynamics when other chemical cycles are thrown off balance (say hi to nitrogen, phosphorus and chlorine! See you next century).

Science shows us what can be done, morals what should be done and history what could’ve been done. But we’ll need more than these to prevent our futures from being steered by capital again, away from us.