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The Conspiracy is Capitalism's Reviews > How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
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The Conspiracy is Capitalism's review
bookshelves: z-questionable-reformist, econ-development, econ-market, econ-resources, econ-sci-techno, econ-environment, environment-agriculture, environment-climate-change, z-propaganda-liberalism
Jan 14, 2024
bookshelves: z-questionable-reformist, econ-development, econ-market, econ-resources, econ-sci-techno, econ-environment, environment-agriculture, environment-climate-change, z-propaganda-liberalism
Liberal Crisis Management 101…
Preamble:
--In reading/reviewing this book, I tried to stay focused on:
i) How is Gates framing the causes of the crisis (esp. his omissions: “capitalism” is unnamed in this book), and how does this affect his solutions? What tools and traps does he provide?
ii) What are the incentives of those in Gates’ position? What are their potentials, limitations, and contradictions to enacting Gates’ solutions, as well as more critical solutions?
The Useful:
1) (Liberal) Materialism:
--Why Gates?
--I’ve already unpacked “liberal materialism” in reviewing Gates’ favourite author, Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future.
--Gates provides his own accessible summary. We can critique the political uses behind liberal managerialism’s systems thinking, but these big picture tools (Thinking in Systems: A Primer) can be repurposed for social needs:
i) Goal:
--The current global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per year is 51 billion tons. The goal is to reduce this to near net-zero, starting (by 2050) with the richest countries.
ii) Breakdown:
--The 51 billion tons per year is composed of:
a) production (37%):
--The production of the foundational trio of cement/steel/plastics is also Smil’s focus, leading to his slow net-zero transition pessimism.
--Gates coins the term “Green Premiums” to represent the costs of decarbonization; it’s a lens gauging the social (although Gates often frames only the “technical”) difficulty of decarbonatization, which might be missed by raw emissions numbers alone. The priority for reducing “Green Premiums” in production (especially difficult for cement) is to electrify (using a decarbonized grid) as many of the production processes as possible.
b) electricity (27%):
--Given the need for electrification in production, Gates actually starts with decarbonizing electricity generation given its spillover uses in production/transportation etc.
--Post-WWII recovery was built on the “cheap energy” of fossil fuels, making up 2/3 of global energy (40% coal, 26% oil/gas, 7% solar/wind). The “Green Premiums” are from intermittency/storage/distribution. Gates is also invested in nuclear energy research (via his company TerraPower).
c) agriculture/forestry/other land use (19%):
--Meat production is the biggest offender here, especially in the form of methane and nitrous oxide. Related is deforestation.
--Gates once again preaches technocratic innovations to reduce “Green Premiums”, inspired by the “Green Revolution” farming innovations that disproved the global so-called “overpopulation” crisis (1968 The Population Bomb; ironically another great example of liberal crisis management, this case responding to the convergence of 20th century decolonization with post-WWII fossil fuel “Great Acceleration”). See: Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
d) transportation (16%):
--The “Green Premiums” challenge here is actually long-distance aviation/shipping/trucking for global commodities (esp. due to outsourcing production) more than passenger (for which long-distance is mostly relatively-wealthy for leisure).
e) heating/cooling (7%):
--Decarbonized electrification once again.
iii) Scale:
--Convert tons of emissions to a percentage of the 51 billion per year.
--Units for power: kilowatt = US house; gigawatt = mid-size city; hundreds of gigawatts = big rich country, 5,000 gigawatts = world.
--Power density: determines the efficiency of space needed, from 500-10,000 watts per square meter for fossil fuels, to 5-20 for solar with 100 being theoretical, to <1 for wood/biomass.
2) The Existence of Real-World Capitalism (without naming it):
--This section is just Gates passing the lowest bar set to weed out ivory-tower utopic-capitalism propagandists. Gates, as a hardened real-world capitalist, must realize he would look likea free market economist an idiot if he didn’t acknowledge:
i) Market price failures:
…see the comments below for the rest of the review (“The Bad/Missing”)…
Preamble:
--In reading/reviewing this book, I tried to stay focused on:
i) How is Gates framing the causes of the crisis (esp. his omissions: “capitalism” is unnamed in this book), and how does this affect his solutions? What tools and traps does he provide?
ii) What are the incentives of those in Gates’ position? What are their potentials, limitations, and contradictions to enacting Gates’ solutions, as well as more critical solutions?
The Useful:
1) (Liberal) Materialism:
--Why Gates?
I can’t deny being a rich guy with an opinion. I do believe, though, that it is an informed opinion, and I am always trying to learn more.…I’ll discuss the omissions/distortions later; first, let’s consider the technical tools provided, as Gates passes the low bar of climate change denial (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming).
I’m also a technophile. Show me a problem, and I’ll look for technology to fix it. When it comes to climate change, I know innovation isn’t the only thing we need. But we cannot keep the earth livable without it. Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary.
Finally, it’s true that my carbon footprint is absurdly high. For a long time I have felt guilty about this. I’ve been aware of how high my emissions are, but working on this book has made me even more conscious of my responsibility to reduce them. Shrinking my carbon footprint is the least that can be expected of someone in my position who’s worried about climate change and publicly calling for action. [Emphases added]
--I’ve already unpacked “liberal materialism” in reviewing Gates’ favourite author, Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future.
--Gates provides his own accessible summary. We can critique the political uses behind liberal managerialism’s systems thinking, but these big picture tools (Thinking in Systems: A Primer) can be repurposed for social needs:
i) Goal:
--The current global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per year is 51 billion tons. The goal is to reduce this to near net-zero, starting (by 2050) with the richest countries.
ii) Breakdown:
--The 51 billion tons per year is composed of:
a) production (37%):
--The production of the foundational trio of cement/steel/plastics is also Smil’s focus, leading to his slow net-zero transition pessimism.
--Gates coins the term “Green Premiums” to represent the costs of decarbonization; it’s a lens gauging the social (although Gates often frames only the “technical”) difficulty of decarbonatization, which might be missed by raw emissions numbers alone. The priority for reducing “Green Premiums” in production (especially difficult for cement) is to electrify (using a decarbonized grid) as many of the production processes as possible.
b) electricity (27%):
--Given the need for electrification in production, Gates actually starts with decarbonizing electricity generation given its spillover uses in production/transportation etc.
--Post-WWII recovery was built on the “cheap energy” of fossil fuels, making up 2/3 of global energy (40% coal, 26% oil/gas, 7% solar/wind). The “Green Premiums” are from intermittency/storage/distribution. Gates is also invested in nuclear energy research (via his company TerraPower).
c) agriculture/forestry/other land use (19%):
--Meat production is the biggest offender here, especially in the form of methane and nitrous oxide. Related is deforestation.
--Gates once again preaches technocratic innovations to reduce “Green Premiums”, inspired by the “Green Revolution” farming innovations that disproved the global so-called “overpopulation” crisis (1968 The Population Bomb; ironically another great example of liberal crisis management, this case responding to the convergence of 20th century decolonization with post-WWII fossil fuel “Great Acceleration”). See: Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
d) transportation (16%):
--The “Green Premiums” challenge here is actually long-distance aviation/shipping/trucking for global commodities (esp. due to outsourcing production) more than passenger (for which long-distance is mostly relatively-wealthy for leisure).
e) heating/cooling (7%):
--Decarbonized electrification once again.
iii) Scale:
--Convert tons of emissions to a percentage of the 51 billion per year.
--Units for power: kilowatt = US house; gigawatt = mid-size city; hundreds of gigawatts = big rich country, 5,000 gigawatts = world.
--Power density: determines the efficiency of space needed, from 500-10,000 watts per square meter for fossil fuels, to 5-20 for solar with 100 being theoretical, to <1 for wood/biomass.
2) The Existence of Real-World Capitalism (without naming it):
--This section is just Gates passing the lowest bar set to weed out ivory-tower utopic-capitalism propagandists. Gates, as a hardened real-world capitalist, must realize he would look like
i) Market price failures:
It’s no accident that fossil fuels are so cheap. They’re abundant and easy to move. We’ve created big global industries devoted to drilling for them, processing and moving them, and developing innovations that keep their prices low. And their prices don’t reflect the damage they cause—the ways they contribute to climate change, pollution, and environmental degradation when they’re extracted and burned.ii) State Capitalism:
In general, the government’s role is to invest in R&D [research and development] when the private sector won’t because it can’t see how it will make a profit [i.e. long-term, high-risk, lack “demand-side incentives”; the latter means existing market laws providing immediate, profitable customer demand]. Once it becomes clear how a company can make money, the private sector takes over. This is in fact exactly how we got products you probably use every day, including the internet, lifesaving medicines, and the Global Positioning System that your smartphone uses to help you navigate around town. The personal computer business—including Microsoft—would never have been the success that it was if the U.S. government hadn’t put money into research on smaller, faster microprocessors.…From these passages alone, you might think Gates is well inline with “progressives” like Mazzucato (Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism).
In some sectors, like digital technology, the government-to-company handoff happens relatively quickly. With clean energy, it takes much longer and requires even more financial commitment from the government, because the scientific and engineering work is so time-consuming and expensive. […]
It might seem ironic that I’m calling for more government intervention. When I was building Microsoft, I kept my distance from policy makers in Washington, D.C., and around the world, thinking they would only keep us from doing our best work.
In part, the U.S. government’s antitrust suit against Microsoft in the late 1990s made me realize that we should’ve been engaging with policy makers all along. [uh, okay…]
The United States, which is by far the largest investor in clean energy research, spends only about $7 billion per year. How much should we spend? I think the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a good comparison. The NIH, with a budget of about $37 billion a year, has developed lifesaving drugs and treatments that Americans—and people around the world—rely on every day.
…see the comments below for the rest of the review (“The Bad/Missing”)…
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The Conspiracy is Capitalism
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2) Enlightened Capitalism?--Now, let’s say you censor all the anti-capitalists, and you rely on the most enlightened capitalist technocrat to fix this crisis.
--During the Great Depression, there was a reformer with a much more “informed opinion” on fixing capitalism than Gates has today. His name: John Maynard Keynes.
--Keynes did not believe in anti-capitalist working-class revolutions seizing the means of production and running it for social needs/via workplace democracy rather than to profit absentee shareholders. Keynes wanted to appeal to the enlightened capitalists/managerial class to make reforms to keep capitalism’s irrationalities in check.
--Keynesian State-led investments/redistributions like the US New Deals managed to see the light-of-day before being pulled back by capitalists fearing a path to socialism. In the end, it took the most destructive war in human history (WWII) to revive profits (since the war market’s destruction provided perpetual demand, and also snuck in State-led industrial cooperation and long-term research and development revolutionizing production).
…As this was still State capitalism in war (thus, not directed for social needs, i.e. socialism), the result was a “military industrial complex” built on fossil fuels, leading to the “Great Acceleration” in climate/ecological degradation: Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System.
--Despite the end of WWII and the fear of retuning to a depression, Keynes’ plan to regulate global capitalism’s finance/trade could not sway enough enlightenment from the capitalist class. It was rejected, leading to a series of heart attacks that proved fatal.
…The diluted welfare state and financial regulations that were adopted (buttressing the post-WWII “Golden Age of Capitalism”) was instead a compromise to the increased bargaining power/politicization of the working class (those who fought in the war, and the women and minorities who took over the waged work) who saw the USSR leading in welfare programs.
--The diluted reforms stabilizing profits eroded after not even two decades, leading to a withdrawal of the compromise (accelerated by the demise of the USSR threat).
-The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
-And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
-for Global South perspectives:
-Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
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3) Crisis, Enlightenment, and Gates: --If we apply the above to Gates’ book, his pleas for capitalist enlightenment may see the light-of-day in the tepid manner the US New Deals did, which means we will have to wait for the most destructive climate/ecological crises in human history (to parallel WWII) to force capitalists into action.
…And capitalists may just respond with fascism, as they did in much of Europe and planned for in the US (“The Business Plot”, aptly named…): Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
--While there is much technical analysis needed to address the climate/ecological crisis, it will only appear in a convoluted and wholly-inadequate manner if we rely on capitalists and their addiction to financial markets: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg
--Gates:
The United States is lucky to have mature and creative capital markets that can grab great ideas and get them developed and deployed quickly; I’ve suggested ways that the federal government can help move those markets in the right direction and partner with the private sector in new ways. Other countries—China, India, and many European nations, for example—don’t have private markets that are as strong, but they can still make big public investments for climate change. And multilateral banks, like the World Bank and development banks in Asia, Africa, and Europe, are also looking to get more involved.--Before “climate change”, Gates’ technocratic “philanthropy” focused on Global South poverty, but we already have the technology to overproduce food, essential medicines, infrastructure, etc.
…It is capitalism’s profit-seeking that contradicts the distribution needed by social needs: slapping rent-seeking patent monopolies on medications, forcing the Global South to export cash crops rather than feeding themselves/building infrastructure, all on the bedrock of preventing economic sovereignty (the continuation of colonization/imperialism).
--Evading this crucial need and instead partnering with multinational corporations like MasterCard to sell “financial inclusion” to individuals in the Global South (while their states are burdened with foreign debt), this is the best capitalist enlightenment has to offer.
--Gates remarks that global food waste is “bad for the economy”, once again obscuring the contradictions between profit-seeking and social needs, which we’ve already explored in the destruction of food during the Great Depression (The Grapes of Wrath).
--Gates:
Extreme poverty has plummeted in the past quarter century, from 36 percent of the world’s population in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015 [this is mostly from China’s development, as they preserved their economic sovereignty] —although COVID-19 was a huge setback that undid a great deal of progress. […]…What a joke. The lack of Global South economic sovereignty means the flow of Global North foreign aid is more than made up for by the flood extracted from the Global South in perverse trade tailored for the Global North/rent-seeking patent monopolies/interest on corrupt debts with Western-backed dictators, etc.
Rich nations, already generous in their giving for global health, will need to be even more generous to make up for this loss. The more they invest in strengthening health systems around the world, the more prepared we will be for the next pandemic.
-The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
--We’ll have plenty of technocrats once we re-direct all the technical wizardry being wasted on Wall Street/financial markets (creating new financial instruments to hide risk) and in the military industrial complex (building new ways to kill poor people to enrich the merchants of death).
…The real solution is building the bargaining power of the working class, so that we can control the means of production etc., We need to unleash our creative potentials to solve our own issues, rather than be dictated by capitalist markets which even the enlightened cannot wield.
-Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
-The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
-Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
-A People’s Green New Deal
-This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
-On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal
--At the beginning of my review, I quoted Gates talking about reducing his own “carbon footprint”. Gates is clearly obscuring the system and its structural logic. As Varoufakis reminds us in Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present:
Liberalism’s fatal hypocrisy [...] was to rejoice in the virtuous Jills and Jacks, the neighbourhood butchers, bakers and brewers [1], so as to defend the vile East India Companies, the Facebooks and the Amazons, which know no neighbours, have no partners, respect no moral sentiments [2] and stop at nothing to destroy their competitors. By replacing partnerships with anonymous shareholders [3], we created Leviathans that end up undermining and defying all the values that liberals [...] claim to cherish.
[1] Adam Smith’s often-cited quote on self-interest leading to social good.
[2] Adam Smith’s forgotten book, 1758 The Theory of Moral Sentiments. As a moral philosopher, surely Smith thought a good society needed more than just self-interest?
[3] Stock markets, one of capitalism’s peculiar markets: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
This is probably an ideal book to read through the filter of Bowles and Gintis. Everything the Gates Foundation promotes as a "solution" or "reform" is somehow tied to ***PROPRIETARY*** green technology (the "proprietary" part can't be overemphasized) as a new engine of accumulation or the basis of another Kondratiev longwave.
Kevin wrote: "This is probably an ideal book to read through the filter of Bowles and Gintis. Everything the Gates Foundation promotes as a "solution" or "reform" is somehow tied to ***PROPRIETARY*** green techn..."Ah, great reference with A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution!
This book is sneaky because we are critiquing its omissions, as “proprietary”/“intellectual property”/“patent” are entirely absent, let alone economic rent/artificial scarcity/fictitious commodities/exchange-values vs. use-values, or alternatives (public/collective ownership, commons, cooperation, zero marginal cost/abundance).
So, the unnamed “capitalism” is amorphous and eternal. “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
…All we get are vague, pseudo-progressive, End-of-History slogans like “public-private collaboration”. So much “how to win over the rich” rather than “why do we need to win over the biggest parasites in human history?”:
As a Citizen
[…] But putting this new energy system in place requires concerted political action. That’s why engaging in the political process [narrowly defined as “Make calls, write letter, attend town halls”, and “Run for office”] is the most important single step that people from every walk of life can take to help avoid a climate disaster.
[…] What we do need to do, though, is to translate these calls for action into pressure that encourages politicians to make the tough choices and trade-offs necessary to deliver on their promises to reduce emissions. […]
As a Consumer
The market is ruled by supply and demand, and as a consumer you can have a huge impact on the demand side of the equation. If all of us make individual changes in what we buy and use, it can add up to a lot—as long as we focus on changes that are meaningful. […]
But reducing your own carbon emissions isn’t the most powerful thing you can do. You can also send a signal to the market that people want zero-carbon alternatives and are willing to pay for them. […]
As an Employee or Employer
As an employee or a shareholder, you can push your company to do its part. Of course, big companies will have the largest impact in many of these areas, but small companies can also do a lot, especially if they work together through organizations like local chambers of commerce.
[…] The private sector will also need to embrace the harder steps.
For one thing, that means accepting more risk—for example, financing projects that might fail, but might turn into a clean-energy breakthrough. Shareholders and board members will have to be willing to share in this risk, making it clear to executives that they’ll back smart investments even if they don’t ultimately pan out. Companies and their leaders need to be rewarded for making bets that could move us forward on climate change.
[…] If the world’s biggest private-sector consumers of materials like steel and cement got together and demanded cleaner substitutes—and committed to investing in the infrastructure needed to make them—it would accelerate research and shift the market in the right direction.
Finally, the private sector can advocate for making these hard choices—for instance, by agreeing to use its resources to develop these markets, and by demanding that governments set up regulatory structures in which new technologies can succeed.
What's the verdict on the green revolution?
Kevin wrote: "This is probably an ideal book to read through the filter of Bowles and Gintis. Everything the Gates Foundation promotes as a "solution" or "reform" is somehow tied to ***PROPRIETARY*** green techn..."I recently watched "How the Internet was Stolen" by Then & Now, and I'm curious to read Gates' 1976 "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" complaining about software piracy lol
John wrote: "What's the verdict on the green revolution?"I remember having a chat after an “Economic Development” class with Jim Glassman, and from what I recall his response fits with the overall contradictions of “Economic development”: some immediate improvements in output production, along with a mix of contradictory social changes.
So, a verdict would require case-by-case analysis of the material conditions and weighing the various opportunities available.
One of the deeper questions for today/future is what our everyday relationship with the land/ecology should be in terms of how much we need direct interactions in order to build respect/understanding for ecological processes. So, this really gets into the decolonization (both settler and Global South) questions on land, industrialization’s rural-urban division of labour, etc.
1) Capitalism in Crisis:
--Let’s start with a historical analogy. It’s the 1930’s, and the capitalist world is mired in the endless Great Depression.
…Capitalists, who own and dictate the use of the means of production (factories etc.), are all in a downward spiral of pessimism, anticipating no stable markets where consumers have the money to buy their mountain of products at a profit.
--So, while the public lack the money to feed themselves, capitalists spray mountains of oranges with kerosene, dump milk, bury pigs in ditches and cover them with quicklime, etc. …all the absurd scenes popularized in The Grapes of Wrath.
…Due to the systemic pessimism crashing prices, these individualist capitalists could only rationally think to decrease supply in hopes of reviving prices. And they certainly could not have the products be distributed based on social needs, opening the door for challenges to their capitalist ownership.
--Now, many anti-capitalists long diagnosed the irrationality of capitalism in fulfilling social needs:
i) Expanding socialization of production, where more and more of the public becoming wage labourers (selling their labour to capitalists) to produce for the public,
ii) But increasing concentration of ownership, as passive income accumulates at the top (“1%”) absentee shareholders, who hire others to manage the workplace and the growth of their investments.
iii) While distribution of goods to the public and investments are dictated by expanding markets under the viral pursuit of profit, increasingly addicted to finance’s short-termism and abstraction-of-risk.