October 17, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Source: Lorie Shaull - A woman holds a Just Transition Now sign at a rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota
This is a reply to the recent polemic against renewable energy by Peter Gelderloos. We agree with a number of the points Gelderloos makes. But we disagree with his claims about renewable energy and we disagree with his strategy for achieving an ecologically viable future.
The environmental crisis is a multi-faceted situation of growing environmental devastation along many dimensions — from over-fishing and extractivist land-grabbing, deforestation, declining insect populations, and vast plastics pollution to the global heating emergency — caused by the destructive logic of the globe-straddling capital and state system which continues its grip on human society.
To account for the system’s tendency to environmental devastation, critics often point to two aspects of the dynamics of capitalism. First, socialist environmentalists — including both Marxists, and anarchists such as Gelderloos — point to the system’s relentless drive for growth. Capitalist firms seek profit to build up the scope of their operation, to develop new markets, and hire more experts and managers. Competition forces firms to do this. Creating new products has often been part of the strategy to grow the firm, as in the vast growth in the markets for automobiles and appliances during the past century. Thus in practice capitalism generates persistent expansion in the production of commodities for sale. This leads a particular group of critics — the “degrowthers” — to argue that growth is the basis of the environmental crisis.
But growth by itself does not explain the global warming crisis or the system’s tendency towards environmental devastation. The basic source of the tendency to environmental devastation lies in a second feature of the system’s dynamics. An essential part of the profit drive is the constant effort of firms to reduce their expenses per unit of output. This is itself the basis for both the degradation of nature and the degradation of work over time. Capitalism has used all sorts of tactics to extract materials from nature at the lowest price, from avoiding costs of repairing environmental damage from mining and quarrying to land grabs against indigenous populations. Unsustainable extractivism — such as over-fishing in the oceans or clear-cutting of forests — avoids the social cost of ensuring the future of the resource. Capitalism also uses nature as a free dumping ground for its wastes. Cost-shifting is a pervasive feature of capitalism. If an electric power utility burns coal in a power plant, the emissions may damage the respiratory systems of thousands of people downwind, and also contributes to global warming. Indeed, according to a recent study, coal-fired power plants have killed at least 460,000 Americans in the past two decades, causing twice as many premature deaths as previously thought. Power firms don’t have to pay for these damages. Mainstream economists refer to these damages as a “negative externality.” That’s because the affected people are outside — external to — the buyer/seller transaction between the power utility and the customers who pay for electric power. But global heating is the greatest negative externality of them all — threatening the very human civilization capitalism is based on.
Thus we can say the global warming crisis has its root cause in the way firms minimize expenses through dumping wastes into nature — in all phases of economic activity, from extraction of resources to production processes and the damaging effects of products designed by the capitalist firms — such as exhaust emissions from the vehicles produced by the capitalist vehicle industry.
Growth does play a role because capitalism’s expansionist drive greatly amplifies the effects of cost-shifting. This is why the degrowthers have a point. Since World War 2 there has been a vast growth in the burning of fossil fuels and a massive expansion in the production of plastics by the petro-chemical industry. This is sometimes called the “great acceleration.” And the rise in global temperature since 1950 goes hand in hand with increases in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
But it is also useful to ask, What is growth? Capitalist firms do produce things we want — from food and houses to electricity and drugs that save lives. But capitalist technological development is inherently conflicted. Producing things we want has to be set against the tendencies towards work degradation, authoritarian control over the workplace, speed up, deaths and injuries from cost-cutting and chemical exposures, extractivist land-grabbing, and the vast “negative externalities” from treating nature as a free dumping ground for wastes. If we measure growth as more human benefit provided, this has to be set against the costs.
Here a useful concept is throughput. The throughput of production consists of two things: (1) All the material extracted from nature for the production process (minerals from mines, wood from forests, fish from the sea), and (2) all the damaging emissions (“negative externalities”) from the production process. With the concept of throughput, we can define a concept of ecological efficiency. If a production process is changed in ways that reduce the amount of damage from emissions (or amount of extracted resource) per unit of human benefit, then that change improves the ecological efficiency of production. If changes were made in production to reduce throughput per unit of output, production of human benefit could be increased without additional ecological damage. This is what “green growth” is. For example, replacing coal or gas-burning power plants with renewable sources such as solar or wind power increases the ecological efficiency of electricity production. Better recycling to reduce virgin materials required from mineral extraction is another way to improve ecological efficiency. Increasing ecological efficiency means reducing the damage to the biosphere from human production. The problem is this: Capitalism has no inherent tendency to improve ecological efficiency. Just the opposite.
The Green Transition is Real but Conflicted
Despite the complaints of Peter Gelderloos about “carbon counting bureaucracies” like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global heating is real. And it’s cause is the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and oceans — including methane as well as carbon dioxide. This is a crisis of the capitalist production system.
The “green transition” is the shift away from technologies in production, transportation and the built environment that generate greenhouse gases — mainly it’s a shift away from technologies that rely on burning of fossil fuels. Despite the claims of Peter Gelderloos, the transition is real — but it’s highly conflicted. And we agree with Gelderloos on some of the reasons why the transition is being slowed.
Gelderloos claims that there has been “a decrease in electricity production from renewable sources.” This is incorrect. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), “wind and solar [photovoltaic] were up 75 percent in 2023 over 2022. Sales of electric vehicles increased by 35 percent. “Without the deployment of…clean energy technologies” — such as photovoltaic panels wind power, heat pumps, electric vehicles — “emissions growth would have been three times larger.” In the first half of 2024, renewable energy in the USA, including small-scale solar, has generated 40 percent more electricity than in the first half of 2019. In 2023 greenhouse gas emissions world-wide rose by 1.1 percent over 2022. As the International Energy Agency (IEA) points out, the rate of growth of emissions has been lower in recent years than in the 1970s and 1980s. Says the IEA: “Emissions…are undergoing a structural slowdown even as global prosperity grows.” And renewable energy “is at the heart of this slowdown in emissions.” According to the IEA, carbon dioxide emissions in the European Union declined by 9 percent in 2023 — despite economic growth. Says the IEA: “The primacy driver behind the decline was the deployment of renewables in the electricity.” Emissions in the core “advanced” capitalist economies fell by 4.5 percent — to a level lower than 1973.
Since 2010 battery costs have dropped by 90 percent. In California batteries and other storage systems have covered 80 percent of electricity at certain points. Battery output to the California grid has doubled in just one year. The long-run trend will be for batteries to replace natural gas “peaker” plants to cover spikes in demand. It takes at least an hour or two to get a gas peaker plant up and running. But electricity from battery systems is available almost instantaneously — making gas peaker plants obsolete.
However, we agree with Gelderloos when he points to the “advanced” countries exporting their emissions to other countries. Countries like Sweden and Germany export gas-powered cars and other gear that depends on fossil fuels. The USA is the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas. In fact, studies suggest that “exported gas emits far more greenhouse gas emissions than coal, despite fossil-fuel industry claims it is a cleaner alternative.”
Although the “green” transition is real, it is taking place within the capitalist framework and for this reason is inherently conflicted or “contradictory.” Capitalist firms are trying to make profit from production and installation of green energy gear or production of electricity using this gear. We can expect the capitalist cost-shifting dynamics and labor exploitation will occur in the “green” sector as in others — as with low-wages and unsafe conditions under non-union contractors doing solar panel installations. These are conditions that need to be fought. This means a struggle to unionize the green sector — such as the efforts of the United Auto Workers to organize workers in battery manufacture.
Some forms of technology developed within capitalism have an inherently capitalist logic, such as the development of labor control methods, such as the use of AI and video and computer surveillance of workers in Amazon warehouses to gain maximum work intensity. Fossil fuel technology also is inherently capitalist because of the way it is built on the shifting of costs onto others through the vast impact of the methane and carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, and the volatile organic compounds that pollute the air around gas fields or refineries. But renewable energy technology is not inherently capitalist because in principle it can be controlled by workers and communities, and can help to improve the ecological impact of humanity. This is why the fossil fuel industry has dug in its heels to try to block shut down of their ecocidal industry.
A part of Gelderloos’s critique of renewable energy is the reliance on extraction of copper, lithium, and so-called “rare earths” (that are not actually very rare). What we need to consider here is the bigger picture of how these materials are necessary to a vast array of devices, from mobile phones, computer displays, and mining equipment to components used in combustion engine cars. The amount of these materials used in renewable energy equipment is a very small fraction of the total usage. Many of these materials could in principle be recycled. But capitalist firms are interested in maximizing their markets and they use planned obsolescence in their designs to sustain market demand. We thus have billions of mobile phones that are replaced every couple years, and the growing problem of electronic waste. Renewable energy gear usually has a lifespan of at least 25 years, and the components can in principle be mostly recycled. With more modular engineering that allows for repair and refurbishing of equipment and more robust recycling systems, the demand for virgin materials could be reduced. Capitalist logic has no inherent tendency to do this.
We also disagree with Gelderloos when he claims that “green energy investment is causing an increase in fossil fuel production.” He doesn’t really provide any evidence for this statement. Fossil fuel energy capacity is expanding although renewable energy is growing faster. Fossil fuel energy expansion is not caused by renewable energy but is investment-driven — the vast sunk investment of capitalists and certain state apparatuses (such as China) in fossil fuels and equipment based on fossil fuels. This leads these sectors to continue that expansion, pursuing their existing profit strategy.
Some critics of renewable energy would point to the reliance on fossil energy in the extraction and manufacture of green energy gear. But with the development of more battery powered mining and transport equipment and changes in manufacturing, this “carbon footprint” of green energy gear manufacture can be reduced over time. And even with this reliance on fossil fuels in extraction and manufacturing, the greenhouse gas emissions of renewable energy are still vastly lower than fossil fuel energy.
Although there are “green” capitalists making profits from production of electric vehicles and renewable energy gear, the green transition thus far is also powered by protests and conflicts at the grassroots level — social and political pressure from below, including the kinds of protests and land occupations that Gelderloos highlights.
The Inflation Reduction Act and Its Limitations
Although the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) serves the interests of “green” capitalists making electric vehicles and solar panels, it would not have been passed without the social and political pressure created by climate justice and environmental groups and their supporters — and the growing social awareness of the dangers of the global heating generated by capitalism’s reliance on fossil fuels. And major disruptive protests such as pipeline blockades and other actions of the sort Gelderloos advocates are in fact an important force for building this social pressure.
As economist Robert Pollin says, the IRA “is the most significant piece of climate legislation ever enacted by the U.S. government.” Reflecting the contemporary dominance of neo-liberalism, it’s based on “public/private partnerships.” Thus the IRA uses $400 billion of public money to leverage another $600 billion in private funds for an investment in renewable energy that will amount to a trillion dollars over 10 years, mainly in subsidies for heat pumps, solar panels and electric vehicles.
From our point of view, the IRA has many defects. To begin with, the IRA has no supports for a “Just Transition.” The slogan “Just Transition” arose as a labor movement concept, first coined by Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) union. A Just Transition means we’re not throwing the workers in fossil fuel industries under the bus; instead, a Just Transition would provide things like income support and retraining and moving expenses for workers displaced in the ramping down fossil fuel operations such as fracking. The OCAW became a part of the United Steel Workers union and this union does support a just transition to a green energy economy.
As Pollin points out, the IRA’s level of investment in the green transition is way too small for the problem at hand. He estimates that it would take 2.5 percent of global investment between now and 2050 to reach the IPCC’s goal of “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Pollin says the IRA — if all the funds were devoted to green energy — would amount to only 25 percent of the needed investment for “net zero’ by 2050.
The IRA also allows the fossil fuel industry to obtain vast federal funding for their Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) scam. CCS was invented by the oil industry in the 1970s. Removal of carbon dioxide is part of the preparation of natural gas and the industry decided to use this carbon dioxide to inject deep into depleted oil and gas fields, to force out more oil and gas. But it has s major problem of the carbon dioxide leaking out. Because of the ineffectiveness of this technology, it’s evolved into a kind of scam for the fossil fuel industry getting more subsidies from the government. CCS is also used by the fossil fuel industry as a cover to allow them to keep producing fossil fuels with the fake promise of capturing the emissions.
When we say the green transition is conflicted, we mean that there is an internal conflict within the society between social and economic forces pushing for replacement of fossil fuels with green energy versus the fossil fuel capitalists and the array of think tanks and political and economic allies who are dragging their feet. As we’ve argued, the inherent dynamics of capitalism favor continued use of nature as a dumping ground for wastes, shifting the social costs of capitalist production onto the ecological commons humans require for our future. We agree with Gelderloos where he writes about this:
“Fossil fuel companies cannot and will not abandon their massive, fixed investments in fossil fuel infrastructure — they will keep producing fossil fuels. As they face increasing competition from other energy sources like wind or solar, they are doing the only logical thing from a capitalist standpoint: doubling down on investment in fossil fuels, building ever more pipelines and power plants even as the world burns and the waters rise.”
Insurrectionary Anarchism or Green Syndicalism?
What is needed in this situation is a social force that can push back against the fossil fuel industry and the environmentally destructive dynamics of capitalism. We need to consider: What is the social force for a transition away from an ecologically destructive capitalist regime?
Here we can see that the strategy Gelderloos proposes for revolutionary transformation is not up to the task. He highlights a number of important actions and struggles such as the Mapuche struggle over protection of water sources and forests in Chile, a major effort in France to block an airport expansion that would gobble up small farms, rebellions expressed through mass popular assemblies such as those in Egypt in 2011, and the many anti-police uprisings such as the Black Lives Matters protests in 2020 that were a reaction to the murder of George Floyd. These are struggles and actions we support.
However, many of these were short-lived as rebellious protest actions come and go. What he overlooks is the way these protests and struggles presuppose organizing and support organizations that are on-going. Certainly indigenous land and water protectors draw on a long history of indigenous community efforts, and rooted in community organizations. The potential for worker action against environmentally destructive actions of employers is completely disappeared in his discussion. Yet various worker occupations and strikes to force a shift to low-carbon products and against environmentally destructive actions of employers is a growing trend.
As an insurrectionary anarchist, Gelderloos is anti-organizational. This is reflected in the way he fails to distinguish different types of “non-governmental organizations.” That tag covers a vast array, from top-down, bureaucratic non-profits drawing on philanthropy of the rich, to grassroots community organizations, relatively democratic local unions, autonomous tenant unions, and a variety of grassroots environmental groups. These are all organizations where there is rank-and-file participation and members can control the decision-making.
We think workers and unions have the potential to be a social force to push back against environmentally destructive activities of employers now and can develop into a social force for a shift to self-managed eco-socialism. We already see green unionism as a growing trend. From the 2022 strike of United Electrical Workers at the Wabtec locomotive workers in Erie, Pennsylvania, pushing for manufacture of green locomotives, to the strike of West African workers on Spanish and French fishing fleets, fighting not only for higher wages but against over-fishing. Another example would be the March, 2023, strike of 400,000 German transport workers, not only for higher wages, but for lower transit fares, to encourage people to make more use of public transit. The strike was supported by environmental groups such as the “Fridays for the Future” protests against global warming. The climate protest movement was frustrated with the unwillingness of the German government to provide the subsidies needed for lower transit fares.
Early examples of the green unionist trend were the “Green Bans” of the Australian Building Laborers Federation in the 1970s and the 1980s organizing by Judi Bari and Earth First!/IWW Local #1 in wood products mills in Northern California, not only against worker injuries and unsafe conditions, but to protect the forests against unsustainable extractivism. Another early influence is the concept of worker counter-planning — such as the efforts of Lucas Aerospace workers in the 1970s to suggest ways the plant equipment and their skills could be used to build more socially beneficial products. Building on that, workers at Rolls Royce were more recently able to win an agreement from their employer to consider low carbon products, using the firm’s equipment and the skills of the workers.
Another example of worker counter-planning is the long-running factory occupation at the GKN auto parts factory in Florence, Italy, which began in 2021. The factory was owned by British firm Melrose Industries. The workers occupied the plant to fight a shut down. They have proposed conversion of the factory to manufacture of other products — such as “cargo bikes” used in product delivery. This is part of an orientation they call “re-industrialization from below.” In the course of the occupation they have sought ways they could use both their skills and the plant’s equipment that would be socially beneficial, such as production of renewable energy technology.
The potential of unionism as a force in the fight against the environmental devastation of the capitalist regime is the basis of the green syndicalist strategy. Green syndicalism is a self-organization strategy based on building grassroots unions and other kinds of social movement organizations among the working class and subordinated groups in society, to have organizations where the members are able to participate and control the decisions. These are organizations where there’s not an entrenched bureaucracy that can place limits on militant action. An essential part of the syndicalist strategy is encouraging collective forms of resistance and disruptive action such as strikes, land or building occupations, and militant mass marches. Through the building of self-managed mass organizations and mass actions, this builds confidence and a growing sense of “us versus them,” and an openness to ideas about transformation to a self-managed form of eco-socialism. And it builds the movement that has the power to ensure a democratic result in a revolutionary struggle.
Thus the building of self-managed mass organizations has a kind of dual role. It provides the means of democratic control over actions which initially may focus on short-term goals people want to achieve. But also builds up the social force, confidence, and consciousness needed for revolutionary transformation.
While Gelderloos raises some crucial and important critiques of green capitalism, his critique paints too broad a brush and all too quickly overlooks some of the prefigurative elements and transformative potential of worker unionism for a green syndicalist revolution.
This essay has also appeared on Worker Solidarity webzine
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Source: Lorie Shaull - A woman holds a Just Transition Now sign at a rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota
This is a reply to the recent polemic against renewable energy by Peter Gelderloos. We agree with a number of the points Gelderloos makes. But we disagree with his claims about renewable energy and we disagree with his strategy for achieving an ecologically viable future.
The environmental crisis is a multi-faceted situation of growing environmental devastation along many dimensions — from over-fishing and extractivist land-grabbing, deforestation, declining insect populations, and vast plastics pollution to the global heating emergency — caused by the destructive logic of the globe-straddling capital and state system which continues its grip on human society.
To account for the system’s tendency to environmental devastation, critics often point to two aspects of the dynamics of capitalism. First, socialist environmentalists — including both Marxists, and anarchists such as Gelderloos — point to the system’s relentless drive for growth. Capitalist firms seek profit to build up the scope of their operation, to develop new markets, and hire more experts and managers. Competition forces firms to do this. Creating new products has often been part of the strategy to grow the firm, as in the vast growth in the markets for automobiles and appliances during the past century. Thus in practice capitalism generates persistent expansion in the production of commodities for sale. This leads a particular group of critics — the “degrowthers” — to argue that growth is the basis of the environmental crisis.
But growth by itself does not explain the global warming crisis or the system’s tendency towards environmental devastation. The basic source of the tendency to environmental devastation lies in a second feature of the system’s dynamics. An essential part of the profit drive is the constant effort of firms to reduce their expenses per unit of output. This is itself the basis for both the degradation of nature and the degradation of work over time. Capitalism has used all sorts of tactics to extract materials from nature at the lowest price, from avoiding costs of repairing environmental damage from mining and quarrying to land grabs against indigenous populations. Unsustainable extractivism — such as over-fishing in the oceans or clear-cutting of forests — avoids the social cost of ensuring the future of the resource. Capitalism also uses nature as a free dumping ground for its wastes. Cost-shifting is a pervasive feature of capitalism. If an electric power utility burns coal in a power plant, the emissions may damage the respiratory systems of thousands of people downwind, and also contributes to global warming. Indeed, according to a recent study, coal-fired power plants have killed at least 460,000 Americans in the past two decades, causing twice as many premature deaths as previously thought. Power firms don’t have to pay for these damages. Mainstream economists refer to these damages as a “negative externality.” That’s because the affected people are outside — external to — the buyer/seller transaction between the power utility and the customers who pay for electric power. But global heating is the greatest negative externality of them all — threatening the very human civilization capitalism is based on.
Thus we can say the global warming crisis has its root cause in the way firms minimize expenses through dumping wastes into nature — in all phases of economic activity, from extraction of resources to production processes and the damaging effects of products designed by the capitalist firms — such as exhaust emissions from the vehicles produced by the capitalist vehicle industry.
Growth does play a role because capitalism’s expansionist drive greatly amplifies the effects of cost-shifting. This is why the degrowthers have a point. Since World War 2 there has been a vast growth in the burning of fossil fuels and a massive expansion in the production of plastics by the petro-chemical industry. This is sometimes called the “great acceleration.” And the rise in global temperature since 1950 goes hand in hand with increases in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
But it is also useful to ask, What is growth? Capitalist firms do produce things we want — from food and houses to electricity and drugs that save lives. But capitalist technological development is inherently conflicted. Producing things we want has to be set against the tendencies towards work degradation, authoritarian control over the workplace, speed up, deaths and injuries from cost-cutting and chemical exposures, extractivist land-grabbing, and the vast “negative externalities” from treating nature as a free dumping ground for wastes. If we measure growth as more human benefit provided, this has to be set against the costs.
Here a useful concept is throughput. The throughput of production consists of two things: (1) All the material extracted from nature for the production process (minerals from mines, wood from forests, fish from the sea), and (2) all the damaging emissions (“negative externalities”) from the production process. With the concept of throughput, we can define a concept of ecological efficiency. If a production process is changed in ways that reduce the amount of damage from emissions (or amount of extracted resource) per unit of human benefit, then that change improves the ecological efficiency of production. If changes were made in production to reduce throughput per unit of output, production of human benefit could be increased without additional ecological damage. This is what “green growth” is. For example, replacing coal or gas-burning power plants with renewable sources such as solar or wind power increases the ecological efficiency of electricity production. Better recycling to reduce virgin materials required from mineral extraction is another way to improve ecological efficiency. Increasing ecological efficiency means reducing the damage to the biosphere from human production. The problem is this: Capitalism has no inherent tendency to improve ecological efficiency. Just the opposite.
The Green Transition is Real but Conflicted
Despite the complaints of Peter Gelderloos about “carbon counting bureaucracies” like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global heating is real. And it’s cause is the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and oceans — including methane as well as carbon dioxide. This is a crisis of the capitalist production system.
The “green transition” is the shift away from technologies in production, transportation and the built environment that generate greenhouse gases — mainly it’s a shift away from technologies that rely on burning of fossil fuels. Despite the claims of Peter Gelderloos, the transition is real — but it’s highly conflicted. And we agree with Gelderloos on some of the reasons why the transition is being slowed.
Gelderloos claims that there has been “a decrease in electricity production from renewable sources.” This is incorrect. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), “wind and solar [photovoltaic] were up 75 percent in 2023 over 2022. Sales of electric vehicles increased by 35 percent. “Without the deployment of…clean energy technologies” — such as photovoltaic panels wind power, heat pumps, electric vehicles — “emissions growth would have been three times larger.” In the first half of 2024, renewable energy in the USA, including small-scale solar, has generated 40 percent more electricity than in the first half of 2019. In 2023 greenhouse gas emissions world-wide rose by 1.1 percent over 2022. As the International Energy Agency (IEA) points out, the rate of growth of emissions has been lower in recent years than in the 1970s and 1980s. Says the IEA: “Emissions…are undergoing a structural slowdown even as global prosperity grows.” And renewable energy “is at the heart of this slowdown in emissions.” According to the IEA, carbon dioxide emissions in the European Union declined by 9 percent in 2023 — despite economic growth. Says the IEA: “The primacy driver behind the decline was the deployment of renewables in the electricity.” Emissions in the core “advanced” capitalist economies fell by 4.5 percent — to a level lower than 1973.
Since 2010 battery costs have dropped by 90 percent. In California batteries and other storage systems have covered 80 percent of electricity at certain points. Battery output to the California grid has doubled in just one year. The long-run trend will be for batteries to replace natural gas “peaker” plants to cover spikes in demand. It takes at least an hour or two to get a gas peaker plant up and running. But electricity from battery systems is available almost instantaneously — making gas peaker plants obsolete.
However, we agree with Gelderloos when he points to the “advanced” countries exporting their emissions to other countries. Countries like Sweden and Germany export gas-powered cars and other gear that depends on fossil fuels. The USA is the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas. In fact, studies suggest that “exported gas emits far more greenhouse gas emissions than coal, despite fossil-fuel industry claims it is a cleaner alternative.”
Although the “green” transition is real, it is taking place within the capitalist framework and for this reason is inherently conflicted or “contradictory.” Capitalist firms are trying to make profit from production and installation of green energy gear or production of electricity using this gear. We can expect the capitalist cost-shifting dynamics and labor exploitation will occur in the “green” sector as in others — as with low-wages and unsafe conditions under non-union contractors doing solar panel installations. These are conditions that need to be fought. This means a struggle to unionize the green sector — such as the efforts of the United Auto Workers to organize workers in battery manufacture.
Some forms of technology developed within capitalism have an inherently capitalist logic, such as the development of labor control methods, such as the use of AI and video and computer surveillance of workers in Amazon warehouses to gain maximum work intensity. Fossil fuel technology also is inherently capitalist because of the way it is built on the shifting of costs onto others through the vast impact of the methane and carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, and the volatile organic compounds that pollute the air around gas fields or refineries. But renewable energy technology is not inherently capitalist because in principle it can be controlled by workers and communities, and can help to improve the ecological impact of humanity. This is why the fossil fuel industry has dug in its heels to try to block shut down of their ecocidal industry.
A part of Gelderloos’s critique of renewable energy is the reliance on extraction of copper, lithium, and so-called “rare earths” (that are not actually very rare). What we need to consider here is the bigger picture of how these materials are necessary to a vast array of devices, from mobile phones, computer displays, and mining equipment to components used in combustion engine cars. The amount of these materials used in renewable energy equipment is a very small fraction of the total usage. Many of these materials could in principle be recycled. But capitalist firms are interested in maximizing their markets and they use planned obsolescence in their designs to sustain market demand. We thus have billions of mobile phones that are replaced every couple years, and the growing problem of electronic waste. Renewable energy gear usually has a lifespan of at least 25 years, and the components can in principle be mostly recycled. With more modular engineering that allows for repair and refurbishing of equipment and more robust recycling systems, the demand for virgin materials could be reduced. Capitalist logic has no inherent tendency to do this.
We also disagree with Gelderloos when he claims that “green energy investment is causing an increase in fossil fuel production.” He doesn’t really provide any evidence for this statement. Fossil fuel energy capacity is expanding although renewable energy is growing faster. Fossil fuel energy expansion is not caused by renewable energy but is investment-driven — the vast sunk investment of capitalists and certain state apparatuses (such as China) in fossil fuels and equipment based on fossil fuels. This leads these sectors to continue that expansion, pursuing their existing profit strategy.
Some critics of renewable energy would point to the reliance on fossil energy in the extraction and manufacture of green energy gear. But with the development of more battery powered mining and transport equipment and changes in manufacturing, this “carbon footprint” of green energy gear manufacture can be reduced over time. And even with this reliance on fossil fuels in extraction and manufacturing, the greenhouse gas emissions of renewable energy are still vastly lower than fossil fuel energy.
Although there are “green” capitalists making profits from production of electric vehicles and renewable energy gear, the green transition thus far is also powered by protests and conflicts at the grassroots level — social and political pressure from below, including the kinds of protests and land occupations that Gelderloos highlights.
The Inflation Reduction Act and Its Limitations
Although the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) serves the interests of “green” capitalists making electric vehicles and solar panels, it would not have been passed without the social and political pressure created by climate justice and environmental groups and their supporters — and the growing social awareness of the dangers of the global heating generated by capitalism’s reliance on fossil fuels. And major disruptive protests such as pipeline blockades and other actions of the sort Gelderloos advocates are in fact an important force for building this social pressure.
As economist Robert Pollin says, the IRA “is the most significant piece of climate legislation ever enacted by the U.S. government.” Reflecting the contemporary dominance of neo-liberalism, it’s based on “public/private partnerships.” Thus the IRA uses $400 billion of public money to leverage another $600 billion in private funds for an investment in renewable energy that will amount to a trillion dollars over 10 years, mainly in subsidies for heat pumps, solar panels and electric vehicles.
From our point of view, the IRA has many defects. To begin with, the IRA has no supports for a “Just Transition.” The slogan “Just Transition” arose as a labor movement concept, first coined by Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) union. A Just Transition means we’re not throwing the workers in fossil fuel industries under the bus; instead, a Just Transition would provide things like income support and retraining and moving expenses for workers displaced in the ramping down fossil fuel operations such as fracking. The OCAW became a part of the United Steel Workers union and this union does support a just transition to a green energy economy.
As Pollin points out, the IRA’s level of investment in the green transition is way too small for the problem at hand. He estimates that it would take 2.5 percent of global investment between now and 2050 to reach the IPCC’s goal of “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Pollin says the IRA — if all the funds were devoted to green energy — would amount to only 25 percent of the needed investment for “net zero’ by 2050.
The IRA also allows the fossil fuel industry to obtain vast federal funding for their Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) scam. CCS was invented by the oil industry in the 1970s. Removal of carbon dioxide is part of the preparation of natural gas and the industry decided to use this carbon dioxide to inject deep into depleted oil and gas fields, to force out more oil and gas. But it has s major problem of the carbon dioxide leaking out. Because of the ineffectiveness of this technology, it’s evolved into a kind of scam for the fossil fuel industry getting more subsidies from the government. CCS is also used by the fossil fuel industry as a cover to allow them to keep producing fossil fuels with the fake promise of capturing the emissions.
When we say the green transition is conflicted, we mean that there is an internal conflict within the society between social and economic forces pushing for replacement of fossil fuels with green energy versus the fossil fuel capitalists and the array of think tanks and political and economic allies who are dragging their feet. As we’ve argued, the inherent dynamics of capitalism favor continued use of nature as a dumping ground for wastes, shifting the social costs of capitalist production onto the ecological commons humans require for our future. We agree with Gelderloos where he writes about this:
“Fossil fuel companies cannot and will not abandon their massive, fixed investments in fossil fuel infrastructure — they will keep producing fossil fuels. As they face increasing competition from other energy sources like wind or solar, they are doing the only logical thing from a capitalist standpoint: doubling down on investment in fossil fuels, building ever more pipelines and power plants even as the world burns and the waters rise.”
Insurrectionary Anarchism or Green Syndicalism?
What is needed in this situation is a social force that can push back against the fossil fuel industry and the environmentally destructive dynamics of capitalism. We need to consider: What is the social force for a transition away from an ecologically destructive capitalist regime?
Here we can see that the strategy Gelderloos proposes for revolutionary transformation is not up to the task. He highlights a number of important actions and struggles such as the Mapuche struggle over protection of water sources and forests in Chile, a major effort in France to block an airport expansion that would gobble up small farms, rebellions expressed through mass popular assemblies such as those in Egypt in 2011, and the many anti-police uprisings such as the Black Lives Matters protests in 2020 that were a reaction to the murder of George Floyd. These are struggles and actions we support.
However, many of these were short-lived as rebellious protest actions come and go. What he overlooks is the way these protests and struggles presuppose organizing and support organizations that are on-going. Certainly indigenous land and water protectors draw on a long history of indigenous community efforts, and rooted in community organizations. The potential for worker action against environmentally destructive actions of employers is completely disappeared in his discussion. Yet various worker occupations and strikes to force a shift to low-carbon products and against environmentally destructive actions of employers is a growing trend.
As an insurrectionary anarchist, Gelderloos is anti-organizational. This is reflected in the way he fails to distinguish different types of “non-governmental organizations.” That tag covers a vast array, from top-down, bureaucratic non-profits drawing on philanthropy of the rich, to grassroots community organizations, relatively democratic local unions, autonomous tenant unions, and a variety of grassroots environmental groups. These are all organizations where there is rank-and-file participation and members can control the decision-making.
We think workers and unions have the potential to be a social force to push back against environmentally destructive activities of employers now and can develop into a social force for a shift to self-managed eco-socialism. We already see green unionism as a growing trend. From the 2022 strike of United Electrical Workers at the Wabtec locomotive workers in Erie, Pennsylvania, pushing for manufacture of green locomotives, to the strike of West African workers on Spanish and French fishing fleets, fighting not only for higher wages but against over-fishing. Another example would be the March, 2023, strike of 400,000 German transport workers, not only for higher wages, but for lower transit fares, to encourage people to make more use of public transit. The strike was supported by environmental groups such as the “Fridays for the Future” protests against global warming. The climate protest movement was frustrated with the unwillingness of the German government to provide the subsidies needed for lower transit fares.
Early examples of the green unionist trend were the “Green Bans” of the Australian Building Laborers Federation in the 1970s and the 1980s organizing by Judi Bari and Earth First!/IWW Local #1 in wood products mills in Northern California, not only against worker injuries and unsafe conditions, but to protect the forests against unsustainable extractivism. Another early influence is the concept of worker counter-planning — such as the efforts of Lucas Aerospace workers in the 1970s to suggest ways the plant equipment and their skills could be used to build more socially beneficial products. Building on that, workers at Rolls Royce were more recently able to win an agreement from their employer to consider low carbon products, using the firm’s equipment and the skills of the workers.
Another example of worker counter-planning is the long-running factory occupation at the GKN auto parts factory in Florence, Italy, which began in 2021. The factory was owned by British firm Melrose Industries. The workers occupied the plant to fight a shut down. They have proposed conversion of the factory to manufacture of other products — such as “cargo bikes” used in product delivery. This is part of an orientation they call “re-industrialization from below.” In the course of the occupation they have sought ways they could use both their skills and the plant’s equipment that would be socially beneficial, such as production of renewable energy technology.
The potential of unionism as a force in the fight against the environmental devastation of the capitalist regime is the basis of the green syndicalist strategy. Green syndicalism is a self-organization strategy based on building grassroots unions and other kinds of social movement organizations among the working class and subordinated groups in society, to have organizations where the members are able to participate and control the decisions. These are organizations where there’s not an entrenched bureaucracy that can place limits on militant action. An essential part of the syndicalist strategy is encouraging collective forms of resistance and disruptive action such as strikes, land or building occupations, and militant mass marches. Through the building of self-managed mass organizations and mass actions, this builds confidence and a growing sense of “us versus them,” and an openness to ideas about transformation to a self-managed form of eco-socialism. And it builds the movement that has the power to ensure a democratic result in a revolutionary struggle.
Thus the building of self-managed mass organizations has a kind of dual role. It provides the means of democratic control over actions which initially may focus on short-term goals people want to achieve. But also builds up the social force, confidence, and consciousness needed for revolutionary transformation.
While Gelderloos raises some crucial and important critiques of green capitalism, his critique paints too broad a brush and all too quickly overlooks some of the prefigurative elements and transformative potential of worker unionism for a green syndicalist revolution.
This essay has also appeared on Worker Solidarity webzine
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Tom Wetzel
In Deer Hunting With Jesus Joe Bageant says "those who grow up in the lower class in America often end up class conscious for life" and so it has been with me.After leaving high school I worked as a gas station attendant for quite a few years and got let go from that job in one of the first job actions I was involved in. I gradually worked my way through college and in the early '70s was part of an initial group who organized the first teaching assistants' union at UCLA in which I was a shop steward. I had been involved in the anti-war movement in the late '60s and first became involved in socialist politics at that time.After obtaining a PhD at UCLA I was an assistant professor for several years at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee where I taught logic and philosophy and in my spare time helped to produce a quarterly anarcho-syndicalist community newspaper. After I returned to California in the early '80s, I worked for a number of years as a typesetter and was involved in an attempt to unionize a weekly newspaper in San Francisco. For about nine years I was the volunteer editorial coordinator for the anarcho-syndicalist magazine ideas & action and wrote numerous essays for that publication. Since the '80s I've made my living mainly as a hardware and software technical writer in the computer industry. I've occasionally taught logic classes as a part-time adjunct.During the past decade my political activity has mainly been focused on housing, land-use and public transit politics. I did community organizing at the time of the big eviction epidemic in my neighborhood in 1999-2000, working with the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. Some of us involved in that effort then decided on a strategy of gaining control of land and buildings by helping existing tenants convert their buildings to limited equity housing cooperatives. To do this we built the San Francisco Community Land Trust of which I was president for two years.
