New Energy = New World (Part 1)

For years I’ve been working to clarify my thinking on the relationship between fossil fuels and the all-encompassing social and economic system we call capitalism. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital provided important insights, as did numerous other works on not just what went so wrong with the world over the last 350 years, but also what could be better about the next one we humans create — not just on Earth but in our minds. This look back to time past provides the underpinning for my exploration going forward in this blog of time present and time future, to borrow a phrase from T.S. Eliot.

The energy transition is more than a game changer, it’s a world changer. Switching from coal, oil and natural gas to renewable electricity, and from gasoline-powered cars and trucks to electric vehicles isn’t easy, and nobody knows whether we’ll do it fast enough to save the planet. But is it enough? Or is even more fundamental change implied in abandoning fossil fuels?

Could it be that the global economic, social and political order — the world as most of us see it — needs fossil fuels to survive?

Many bankers, fund-managers and business leaders realize clearly that climate change will destroy the planet, and all their investments with it, if greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions don’t stop. They may be vision-impaired by self-interest, but they aren’t blind or stupid and they read the UN reports. They are betting that by jettisoning the oil industry — in a non-market-disruptive manner, of course — and pushing Economic, Social and Governance (ESG) investment guidelines tailored to their portfolios, they can save the existing order and remain atop it.

Will it work? Can the global structure of manufacturing, trade and consumerism simply shift from one fuel to another without shaking the foundations on which it was built? I don’t know, but I think not. Humanity is on a self-destruction and planet-destructive path, beyond even the climate crisis. If you ditch fossil fuels but leave the rest, you haven’t gotten off that path, you’ve merely delayed the reckoning.

In any case, fossil fuels and global capitalism are so closely intertwined that abandoning the one and keeping the other probably isn’t possible.

Fossil Roots

A society is the energy it uses. How much and what people eat, whether and where they travel, what goods and services they provide for themselves and each other — all these things are determined by the energy they use — be it solar and wind, or coal and oil, or people and other animals alone.

As long as people and their domesticated animals provided the bulk of their own energy, they ate what grew or could be killed nearby, perhaps supplemented by what they planted themselves or the animals they raised. Few traveled further than food availability dictated, and the rhythm of life was set by the sun, moon, weather and seasons.

That’s an oversimplification, of course. Religions, governments, wars, empires came and went, and new technologies were developed. But the pace of change was slow, and only a small percentage of the relatively few people on earth lived in cities.

Since coal ignited the industrial revolution, fossil fuels and the global capitalism they enabled have changed all that, jointly framing a world that looks very different to its human inhabitants than did the world of 1760. People came to exploit not just the plant and animal life, sunshine, and wind immediately around them, but also the enormous power of millennia of energy stored by the earth in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas, often in far-away places.

As a result, the scope and scale of human activity exploded in the 19th and 20th centuries. Most people moved to cities, often under duress as part of a transition from small farming to mass production of a few choice crops and animals that could both feed industrial workers and provide raw material for manufactured commodities such as wool and cotton.

Technological innovation brought coal-powered trains and steamships that could move fuel to factories and manufactured goods back out to consumers, at a profit to the “owners” of the coal and a cost mainly to the Earth. Coal-fired steam engines kept factories running at the convenience of their owners, not the whim of workers. And eventually oil-powered ships and planes, aided by phones and computers, made complex worldwide corporate activities “efficient.”

The Money Trail

As part of this process, capital in the form of machinery, factories and money replaced land, slaves and serfs as the main foundations of wealth. Clocks replaced the sun as the means of telling time. Economic growth increasingly replaced traditional religion as the great hope for human salvation. Nature, once worshiped in its mystery and largely left to its perpetual cycle of decay and renewal, was demystified, dug up and destroyed.

It fit together functionally — and as a framing of reality, beyond which fewer and fewer could see as time passed.

Nature’s wealth of the ages came to be burned and transformed into saleable things. Many people gained access to out-of-season food from faraway places, personal mobility on a global scale, and heating and cooling that let them ignore the weather.

Fossil-powered capitalism brought a ballooning of the global population and once unimaginable expansion of material expectations. Whether or not people lived better, they indisputably lived longer and became more plentiful. They imagined, came to want, and in many cases got, exponentially more things than their ancestors ever dreamed of.

But at a price, not just to the Earth but to themselves: People lost the ability to envisage a world not striving for economic growth and technological “progress” — a world appreciated viscerally, rather than one constantly measured and numerically analyzed.

Who doesn’t like economic growth? Whether you like it because it makes you richer personally, or because you see it as pulling the masses out of poverty, growth is good. Indeed, growth is the vital drive behind capitalism, as everyone has seen from Karl Marx to those who daily cite the “grow or die” adage about everything from mega-corporations to small community organizations. More about that in Part 2.