#fossil capital

[mosswolf]

im reading fossil capital: the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming at the moment, and its absolutely fascinating - i think most of us probably assumed that steam power overtook water power because it was just. better. like using an electric drill over a hand drill or something. but it's actually SO much more complicated than that, because coal was very expensive and water was free, and the reasons steam ended up being the main thing are to do with population/available workers (you can pick the location of steam engines, you can't move rivers), control of the power source (mill owners not being willing to accommodate other mills downstream or tolerate inconvenience caused by upstream), workers winning a 10 hour work day (the river flows arent consistent, and if you can't make your workers stay late then you miss out compared to steam), and so many more complicated social and economic factors??? the author also traces the way people talked about the environment impacts of heavy coal consumption (charles babbage!!! wtf!!) and it's just SO intensely interesting omg

[anthropofugal]

From this historical standpoint, climate change is not so much a surprising reversal of fortunes as a lifting of the veil on two centuries of fossil capital – which is, of course, the literal meaning of the Greek word apokalyptein. The truth has been hidden from view; the present moment reveals the meaning of what has been going on for a long time. Benjamin’s angel of history ‘sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at its feet’; Theodor Adorno concurs – ‘normality is death’ – but emphasises that the eternity of horror ‘manifests itself in the fact that each of its new forms outdoes the old. What is constant is not an invariable quantity of suffering, but its progress towards hell: that is the meaning of the thesis of the intensification of antagonisms.’ From the very start, at the very smallest scale – in the hot factory, the smoky street, the mine laden with explosives – there emerged a pattern – some swept away by the storm we call progress, others sailing to their fortunes – subsequently magnified and iterated on progressively larger scales, until climate scientists discovered it in the biosphere as a whole, where the self-similar storm now spirals on. Every impact of climate change unfolds a fraction of that hitherto folded past.

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital. The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming

[probablyasocialecologist]

…witness Katrina in black and in white neighbourhoods of New Orleans, Sandy in Haiti and in Manhattan, sea level rise in Bangladesh and in the Netherlands, all the realities of differentiated vulnerability in any impact of climate change, direct or indirect. For the forseeable future - indeed, as long as there are class societies on earth - there will be lifeboats for the rich and privileged, and there will not be any shared sense of catastrophe. More than ever, class divisions will become matters of life and death: who gets to drive out of the city when the hurricane approaches; who can pay for seawalls or homes solid enough to withstand the coming flood. The capitalist class is evidently not very worried. Quite a few fractions of it are rather gearing up for some sweet profits from newly available oil resources in the Arctic, desalination plants and floating cities, ownership of even more precious land, the construction of walls, fire insurances, genetically modified crops to withstand the heat, geoengineering. As in all crises of capitalism, this one presents a welter of opportunities for those in clover, and après moi le déluge.

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming

[anthropofugal]

Neither environmental nor labour history has, for their own particular reasons, been very keen on connecting the dots of workers and the wider environment, class and climate. The same silence reigns in research on energy in the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, climate change as such remains primarily an object of natural science, recent spurts of interest in the social sciences notwithstanding. We are awash in data on the disastrous effects but comparatively poor on insights into the drivers. Or, to paraphrase Marx: most climate science still dwells in the noiseless atmosphere, where everything takes place on the surface, rather than entering the hidden abode of production, where fossil fuels are actually produced and consumed. Natural scientists have so far interpreted global warming as a phenomenon in nature; the point, however, is to trace its human origins. Only thus can we retain at least a hypothetical possibility of changing course.

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, London: Verso, 2016.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Reflecting an intra-species concentration on another level, as of 2000, the advanced capitalist countries or the 'North' composed 16.6 percent of the world population, but were responsible for 77.1 percent of the CO2 emitted since 1850, subnational inequalities uncounted. The US alone accounted for 27.6 percent, while Nigeria stood at 0.2 percent, Turkey at 0.5 percent, Indonesia 0.6 percent, Brazil 0.9 percent - these being countries with a historical responsibility sufficiently large to make it on a top-twenty list. Most left even smaller marks. ... In the early twenty-first century, the poorest 45 percent of humanity generated 7 percent of current CO2 emissions, while the richest 7 percent produced 50 percent; a single average US citizen - national class divisions again disregarded - emitted as much as upwards of 500 citizens of Ethiopia, Chad, Afghanistan, Mali, Cambodia, Burundi. There were few signs of fossil fuel combustion being equalised within the human species. Rather, the data suggest a widening polarisation. Are these basic facts reconcilable with a view of humankind as the new geological agent?

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming

[probablyasocialecologist]

In May 2011, herders from Xilingol raised a roadblock in the path of 100 trucks; on the midnight between 10 and 11 May, some drivers decided to force their way through the barricade, hit a herder known by the name of Mergen, dragging his body for 150 metres and then drove over it several times. The killing put a match to the grasslands. Over the coming weeks, out of sight of world media, the Chinese state stamped out the anti-coal revolt by blanketing Inner Mongolia with police, blocking internet and telephone connections, sealing off schools, declaring curfews, imposing de facto martial law. A human rights activist spelled out the seething frustration: 'This land has become a lawless zone in which the companies can do what they like, completely disregarding the indigenous people'. As in the English countryside in the Elizabethan leap, the Middle East in the early oil era, and countless other places and periods, the primitive accumulation of fossil capital inside China has proceeded through violent expropriation of the direct producers, sinking the hooks of capitalist power into 'the earth, the source of all production and of all being', with Marx; once it has taken hold of that source it is exceedingly difficult to unseat.

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming

[probablyasocialecologist]

Capital does not eat because someone is hungry: capital always eats. The ecological voracity of this relation-in-process cannot be captured by a model of substitution and relief, precisely because it is not embedded within the natural limits of ecosystems. It operates on a higher level, above that of use-value, in the thin, abstract air of exchange-value, and just as it must pump out surplus labour in perpetuity, so it must pump out material substrata from the ground whether or not they are scarce. Capital is supra-ecological, one could say: a flying biophysical omnivore with its own peculiar social DNA. It is not a timeless growth pursuit bumping into walls of shortages and transcending them by moving on to abundant goods, not a universal process unfolding through reaction upon specific constraints. Rather, it is a specific process unfolding through a universal appropriate of biophysical resources, insatiable in its appetite, starting and ever continuing with energy.

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming

[probablyasocialecologist]

More than a third of humanity is not even party to a proto-fossil economy: as of 2012, 2.6 billion people still relied on biomass for cooking. Taking into account that the capacity of undernourished humans subsisting on one meal per day to afford to emit any greenhouse gases is small, that low-income households primarily use carbon-neutral transport methods - walking, bicycling, at most riding crowded buses and trains - and that people who scavenge dump sites for waste to recycle and grow forests on their land have negative emissions, Satterthwaite concluded that one-sixth of world population 'best not be included in allocations of responsibility for GHG emissions'. Their contribution hovers around zero. In the words of Vaclav Smil, ultra-prolific authority on energy systems, 'the difference in modern energy consumption between a subsistence pastoralist in the Sahel and an average Canadian may easily be larger than 1,000-fold' - and that is an average Canadian, not the owner of five houses, three SUVs and a private airplane. Depending on the circumstances in which a specimen of homo sapiens is born, then, her imprint on the atmosphere may vary be several orders of magnitude. No other creatures on earth - think of the beaver, the bonobo, a species of zooplankton or cyanobacterium - exhibit anything like a similar disparity in environmental impact. Surely, something is unique about humans.

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming