Wealth without wages, wages without wealth

Also published on Resilience.

Wage labour is often seen as a fundamental, even the fundamental, relationship in capitalism. Some twenty years before he completed his multi-volume Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx delivered a short set of lectures entitled Wage Labour and Capital; the lectures were published two years later as a series of five articles in the newspaper that Marx edited.

Marx wrote that “Capital … presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. They condition each other; each brings the other into existence.”1

In her 2025 book Free Gifts: Capitalism and The Politics of Nature, Alyssa Battistoni described this important social and political relationship this way: “Capital … is the power to purchase another’s time and decide how it will be used; the ability of one group of people to command the activity of another…” (Free Gifts, p. 58). (This is the fourth installment in a series on Free Gifts; the others are here, here, and here.)

Purchasing others’ time, whether by the hour, the day, or the week, can be an important tactic for extracting wealth – especially when asserting control over that time allows for speed-ups in the production of exchange value. But Battistoni emphasizes that much wealth depends on natural processes that are difficult if not impossible to speed up. In many such cases capitalism forgoes direct control of labour and finds other ways to extract value. She writes,

“‘Nature-based’ sectors, in which nature is directly cultivated or extracted, remain perpetually reliant on biophysical processes, which operate according to their own logics, and which often preclude rationalization on the factory model. These sectors have tended to deviate from the industrial rule.” (p. 85)

Such biophysical processes, and their implications for attempts at wealth extraction, play starring roles in Bathsheba Demuth’s 2019 book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. 

This book had been on my short list “to read soon” for the past six years without quite making it to the top2 – until last December. It did not disappoint. Floating Coast is a rich history of one particular area of the earth, its diverse species, and cultures which have learned over centuries how to be deeply-rooted participants in these ecosystems. At the same time it paints vivid pictures of other cultures which recently arrived in the Bering Strait, and which have tried many methods of extracting market value from the gifts of nature over the past 150 years. As such Demuth’s history of a specific place offers a wealth of examples of the often abstract principles in Free Gifts.3

• • •

“Does a worker in a factory produce only cotton?” Marx asked in 1847, and he answered “No. He produces capital.” But the necessary inputs for the surplus value that increased capital went beyond the hours of wage labour. The raw cotton, of course, was likely produced by slave labour or by share-croppers, not people who were selling their labour by the hour.

And there were other inputs which did not enter the market through wage labour. Factories needed lubricants, and in the mid-nineteenth century those lubricants came from the bodies of whales killed thousands of kilometers away. “Whale products were critical to textile production,” Demuth wrote. “A single factory would use nearly seven thousand gallons – three sperm whales’ worth – of oil in a year.” (Floating Coast, p. 27) Factories needed artificial light as well, and that came via lamps burning whale oil.

By the mid-19th century, however, Europeans and colonists had carried out intensive commercial whaling for hundreds of years. In most of the earth’s oceans whales were getting scarce. The Bering Strait was remote and its icy waters were only accessible to ships for a few months each year, but commercial whalers eventually found their way to the home of the large whales which summered there.

Demuth sets the context:

“The Bering Strait is the terminus for the world’s deep ocean circulation. Water that began in the North Atlantic arrives in the Bering Sea centuries later, dense with nutrients shed by great rivers. Where the continents lean toward each other at the strait, wind and undersea topography create turbulence. Warm waters mix with cold, roiling iron, nitrogen, and phosphorus upward. At the surface, these elements meet with summer’s abundant solar energy, with atmospheric carbon, and with the organisms that make their cells from this mixture. Where air touches water, over two hundred species of photosynthetic plankton give physical shape to sunlight. These algae and diatoms are the Bering Strait’s primary form of productive life.” (Floating Coast, p. 16)

Energy here was abundant but was diffused both temporally and spatially. Whales, however, were key agents in an age-old process. Demuth explains: “The work of a whale is to turn this distilled energy into hundred-ton bodies. … Bowheads carry more calories per pound of flesh than any other Arctic species on land or sea” (p. 16–17).

Among the many creatures whose lives depended on the energy-capture-and-storage talents of whales were the indigenous peoples who have inhabited Beringia’s shores for centuries or millennia. Whales fed families and villages through the long months of the arctic and subarctic winters, and indigenous people cultivated reverence for the lifeways of the whales. Thus they were able to find constancy in an environment with challenging seasonal dynamics, severe storms, and population booms and busts among smaller animals. Whales were their neighbours for just a few months each year, their numbers were never large, and their life cycles were measured in centuries rather than months. But people who adapted to those timetables, people who regarded themselves as part of this ecosystem, could, like the whales, thrive in this environment.

The new whalers who arrived on big ships about 1850 were also intent on capturing energy – but they regarded the region’s seasonal timetables as mere obstacles standing in the way of accumulation. Rather than asking, “How many whales will our village need to feed us for the coming year?” they asked “How can we turn as many live whales as possible into barreled oil? How can we kill even more whales this year than we did last year?”

The captains and the crews of the ships were the local face of this extraction; the drivers were financiers in the ports of New England and buyers for industrial concerns elsewhere in the US and in Western Europe. At the foundation of the extraction was a worldview that differed radically from that of the indigenous peoples of Beringia. In the increasingly dominant worldview, the ‘free gifts of nature” were being turned into wealth via exchange value. In Demuth’s phrasing, “As labor improved land by farming it, in the theory of the time, so turning whales into oil improved the sea by making it yield currency” (p. 30).

The new whalers in Beringia were cogs in a recognizably capitalist machine – but, key to our discussion here, hourly wage labour was absent. It simply didn’t pay for the heads of this industry to buy labour by the hour or to take direct command over when, where and how the work was done. The returns were too dependent on nature’s timetables, too far away in space, too far away in time, with too many uncertainties – a ship-wrecking storm enroute to the whaling waters, for example, or a late spring that might choke the Bering Strait with ice, preventing wooden ships from chasing bowheads.

Financiers preferred to shunt much of the risk onto the people who did the work. Thus the whaling ships departed home ports with each crew member promised a specified share of the eventual profits – assuming there were profits. In this nineteenth-century gig, workers might do very well at the end of a good year, or come home with little or no cash to claim for months of brutally dangerous work.

“Harbingers of an uncertain future”

Sending gig workers to the ends of the earth to turn whales into currency may sound like an archaic form of capitalism. But Alyssa Battistoni emphasizes that there are many sectors, even today, in which taking direct control over hours of labour is not part of the capitalist playbook. One such sector is arguably the most fundamental of all economic sectors: agriculture.

A factory model works by controlling “abstract time” – the hours measured by the clock. Agriculture answers first of all to “concrete time” – in Battistoni’s words, “time measured in relation to natural processes, from the length of a day to the cycle of the seasons …” (p. 102).

Capitalism’s resulting aversion to exerting direct control over most agricultural labour was explored by Eric Holt-Giménez in his 2017 book A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism (reviewed here).

“Today, despite centuries of capitalism, large-scale capitalist agriculture produces less than a third of the world’s food supply,” Holt-Giménez wrote. “Peasants and smallholders still feed most people in the world, though they cultivate less than a quarter of the arable land.”

Even in the US, where most agriculture is highly industrialized, most farms are family-owned, not corporate-owned. As Holt-Giménez explained, family farms invest their own capital into expensive land and machinery, while bearing the inevitable risks of bad weather. The typically long but irregular hours of work needed to bring in crops are managed by the individual farmers or their families: “Ninety-seven percent of farms in the United States are family-owned and a full 87 percent rely mostly on family labor.”

While capital risk and labour management remain with farmers, there are many other ways in which corporate agribusiness can extract value. “The agrifoods sector is extraordinarily adept at inventing technologies or services to make profits without actually engaging in the risks and limitations of farming,” Holt-Giménez wrote. Farm commodities are bought, sold and processed through a tiny handful of huge corporations, leaving farmers with little control over the prices they receive. Likewise, the markets for inputs including chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery are also controlled by a few corporate players.

In the political economy of agriculture, capitalism employs different strategies than it uses in controlling wage labour in factories. Battistoni emphasizes that this should not be written off as a quirk of history:

“The oddities of agricultural production, then, are not so much the stubborn dregs of a bygone age as the harbingers of an uncertain future, as important for understanding the politics of capitalism as any struggle within the factory.” (Free Gifts, p. 115)

* * *

What capitalism has regarded as the “free gifts of nature” often come with very particular limitations that restrict how surplus value can be extracted. By paying close attention to these particularities, Battistoni provides insight into struggles that may not seem otherwise related. We’ll conclude this essay with a brief discussion of the constellation of subjects often grouped under the heading of “care work”.

The importance of care work has long been recognized as critically important to every aspect of society including the market economy. Where the economy is dominated by industrially organized wage work, children need decades of care before they can become the next wave of that industrial work force. Yet capital has typically declined to invest in this crucial work, leaving care work to be funded, if at all, not by the market but by a combination of families and governments. Why?

In a chapter entitled “Labor of Life,” Battistoni pays homage to the feminist Marxists who started the Wages For Housework movement4 and whose influence continues to be felt today. As Selma James wrote in 1972, “Wagelessness and the resulting dependence on men is the form patriarchy takes under capitalism”.5 Battistoni argues that, as important as patriarchy is, there is more to the devaluing of essential care work than sexism. She asks us to look also at the common factors that make some kinds of work amenable to value extraction through direct control of labour – while others are mostly left out of the labour market:

“It is the very indeterminacy and unpredictability of human needs, born out of the resolutely qualitative processes of bodily function and the subjective elements of human consciousness, that make the act of tending to these needs nearly impossible to standardize or mechanize – and that render the labor processes built around them especially difficult for capital to make productive.” (p. 171; emphasis mine)

“Productive” is used here in the capitalist sense – that is, producing exchange value for the benefit of the capitalist. Battistoni argues that, whether care work is waged or unwaged, and whether it is being done in a given case by women or men, it tends to be systematically undervalued in the market economy because it does not lend itself to the extraction of exchange value.

Image at top of page: The Chase of the Bowhead Whale, oil on canvas, 1909, by Clifford Warren Ashley. From New Bedford Whaling Museum. Photo in public domain; accessed at Wikimedia Commons.

Footnotes

1 In Wage Labour and Capital, accessed via Marxists Internet Archive. 

2 For an introduction to Demuth’s work check out this Cultures of Energy podcast episode from 2019.

3 The extractivist colonizers in Floating Coast include not only agents of capitalism on the Alaskan side of the Bering Strait, but the self-styled disciples of Karl Mark on the Siberian side. Spoiler alert: the ecosystems and the cultures of Beringia suffered violent disruption in both cases.

4 Disclosure: I read this chapter with particular interest because one of my dearest friends, Francie Wyland, was a leader of Wages for Housework in Canada. During her last decade of life Francie was interviewed extensively by Christina Rousseau for her York University PhD thesis Housework and Social Subversion. I have no doubt Francie would have been keenly interested in Battistoni’s discussion of Wages for Housework and its successors, and I wish I could know Francie’s thoughts in response.

5 Selma James, “Women, the Unions, and Work, or, What is Not to Be Done,” in Sex, Race and Class, 68, quoted in Free Gifts, p. 153.

Do capitalists really hate capitalism?

Also published in Resilience.

In North America a belief that capitalism is by far the best economic system has long been an obligatory article of faith for successful politicians. Faith in capitalism is so dominant in public policy circles that most citizens find it hard to imagine that any other system could ever come to supplant capitalism.

But what about this system’s namesakes – capitalists? Do they share the love for the system that has made them and (so far) has kept them rich?

Not so, prolific author and speaker Cory Doctorow has written. In a post entitled “Capitalists hate capitalism,” he writes,

“They don’t want to compete with one another, because that would interfere with their ability to raise the prices their customers pay and reduce the wages they pay their workers. Thus Peter Thiel’s anticapitalist rallying cry, ‘competition is for losers,’ or Warren Buffett’s extreme horniness for businesses with ‘wide, sustainable moats.’” 1

In many blog posts as well as in recent books, Doctorow has described the extensive efforts by major corporate leaders to first achieve, and then maintain, monopolistic or oligopolistic positions in their various industries. While monopolies in past decades were frequently regulated or broken up in the name of protecting competition, recent business leaders have often felt little need to hide their monopolistic intentions.

Writing about Meta/Instagram/WhatsApp/Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Doctorow writes: “This is the guy who put in writing the immortal words, ‘It is better to buy than to compete,’ and ‘what we’re really buying is time,’ and who described his plans to clone a competitor’s features as intended to get there ‘before anyone can get close to their scale again’.2

But as discussed in the previous post in this series, market rule is one of two key components of capitalism outlined by Alyssa Battistoni in her recent book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. The other key element is class rule. While capitalists who have achieved the status of monopolists exhibit only a very conditional love for market rule, there is no evidence their ardour for class rule has waned. On the contrary, captains of industry and commerce court power through increasingly large contributions to those politicians who lower their taxes, reduce profit-hindering regulations, and help them maintain positions at the highest levels of both economic and political influence.

Who’s the boss?

Perhaps the most commonly recognized feature of class rule is that “capitalists control the means of production.” As a consequence they exert direct control over a large portion of many people’s lives: those hours spent at work. In the relationship between capital and wage labour, Battistoni writes, “Capital … is the power to purchase another’s time and decide how it will be used; the ability of one group of people to command the activity of another…” (Free Gifts, p. 58)

This control over where, how, and for what purposes other people labour is a subject to which we’ll return to in the next post. Class rule, however, is more than the control over the working lives of others. Battistoni writes:

“[C]apital is not only title to command the labor of others … but the power to organize production and direct investment more generally. … Owners of capital thus have outsized power not only over the people whose labor they have purchased … but over the conditions of life for many people who have entered into no formal agreement whatsoever …. Capital, then, is the power not only to produce commodities but to produce the physical world, without most people’s consultation or consent.” (p. 59)

In commissioning and opening a factory, capitalists assume control over the working hours of employees who sign up to work in that factory. But that factory may have dramatic consequences for many others who have signed no contract: people living down river or down wind of the factory, for example; people in another province or another country who previously produced similar products and now lose their jobs; people in areas where environmentally ruinous mines are opened, because the factory creates increased demand for a particular mineral.

The power to direct investment is a crucial part of class rule – but as Battistoni notes, the corollary is perhaps equally important:

“[C]lass rule is equally evident in its seeming absences: in the ability to decide what not to produce, to decline to hire a worker, to disinvest from projects or regions, to withhold resources. It lies in the power to neglect those things that don’t promise adequate returns, however needed they might be – and crucially, to do so without being held responsible for the outcomes that might result.” (p. 59)

Due to class rule, decisions over how and where to invest resources are not made through democratic deliberations. Significantly, class rule extends beyond those investments intended to extract profits. Via charitable donations made through foundations that often bear their names, capitalists have outsized, non-democratic influence over which types of music, art and theatre get funding, which hospitals in which locations can afford the best equipment, which types of research universities are able to prioritize, and which projects in Global South countries receive crucial financial lifelines.

A handful of high-profile billionaires have pledged to give away their wealth – but the gifts come with many strings attached. As the teaser to an article by Vasilisa Kirilochkina sums it up: “the performance of billionaire virtue—where giving is grand, but control is eternal.”3

Kirilochkina writes, “According to economist Jeffrey Sachs, ending extreme poverty worldwide would cost an estimated $175 billion per year—less than half the amount America’s ten richest individuals gained in personal wealth in 2023 alone.”

The stated goals of billionaire philanthropy tend to be grand, but Kirilochkina concludes that “while billionaires compete to cure the world, their wealth multiples faster than their giving.” Rare indeed is the billionaire who advocates steep increases in progressive taxation – rates that could reduce wealth and income inequality to the point that billionaires would no longer exist and there would be no need for their gifts.

Capitalists, at least those at the pinnacles of their industries, may have a distinct aversion to being subject to market rule, as Doctorow writes. But as Battistoni writes, they show no such ambivalence about class rule, which gives them non-democratic control over where and how investments are either made or not made.

Footnotes

1 Capitalists hate capitalism, by Cory Doctorow. pluralistic.net, 09 June 2023. 

2 The long game, by Cory Doctorow. pluralistic.net, 20 November 2025.

3 The Big Givers Club, by Vasilisa Kirilochkina, Observer, 6 April 2025.

Image at top of page: The Bosses of the Senate, a cartoon by Joseph Keppler, shows a Senate chamber with the sign “This is a Senate of the Monopolists, by the Monopolists, and for the Monopolists!” First published in Puck 1889, now in public domain. Accessed at Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia quotes a page from the United States Senate website: “Keppler’s cartoon reflected the phenomenal growth of American industry in the 1880s, but also the disturbing trend toward concentration of industry to the point of monopoly, and its undue influence on politics.”

Marx and Sartre go shopping for a car

Also published on Resilience.

Why is it so difficult to find a job or to buy products that align with our values? Why is it difficult to even know whether our personal choices might have effects in the right direction?

In Alyssa Battistoni’s view, the separation of our intentions from the effects of our choices is a core feature of capitalism.

In this second post on Battistoni’s book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, we’ll look at what she identifies as one of the two key social relationships in capitalism: market rule. (Spoiler: the other key social relationship, class rule, is a major focus of the next post in this series.) In exploring market rule, Battistoni draws on insights from existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to extend older concepts of alienation.

Nearly every person alive is dependent on the market for some of the necessities of life at some point. For many of us that dependence approaches totality. Almost every morsel of food we eat, and every bit of clothing we wear, gets to us through market mechanisms. Our homes, our educations, our health care, our transportation, day care for our children – these are generally controlled to a lesser or (usually) greater degree by market interactions.

And what is the market? It is a system for determining the relative value – the price – of everything that is exchanged.

We each have our own judgments about the worth of a healthy and fresh-picked tomato compared to a handful of heavily seasoned packaged corn chips, or the worth of an hour’s work by a skilled nurse compared to an hour’s work by a skilled advertising copywriter. But our personal, individual judgments of worth are wholly irrelevant in the market.

That’s because the market “simultaneously atomizes and aggregates our decisions in ways that defy both individual and collective control.” (p. 57; all quotes are from Free Gifts unless otherwise noted)

Battistoni adds:

“Crucially, our motives have no bearing on these outcomes: markets are indifferent to our purposes, seeing only prices. In other words, they detach intentions from consequences.” (p. 62)

If I enter a store looking for a pair of jeans, I may or may not care whether the people who pick the cotton, spin the cotton, design the jeans, sew the jeans, ship the jeans, market the jeans, or sell me the jeans are fairly paid. And the market doesn’t care whether I care. What counts is whether or not I hand over my money for a pair of jeans, at a price set through a vast chain of other exchanges.1

It is difficult ranging toward impossible for me to know whether the other people in that chain of exchanges are fairly paid, let alone for me to influence their pay scales.

As Battistoni says, in the market “everyone is the abstract other to everyone else.” (p. 69)

Who’s responsible here?

Consider another example. Let’s scramble time, you and I, and go car shopping with Karl Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre.

As we enter a North American dealership, we see that most of the vehicles on offer are huge – even bigger than the last time we went car shopping together. Most of the vehicles are SUVs and pickup trucks, and the current models are longer, heavier, and higher than corresponding models a decade or two ago.

Is this because most of our fellow consumers really value the ability to burn a lot of gas and emit the maximum amount of CO2? Do we each want to have the largest possible blind spots in front of the towering front ends of our personal passenger vehicles? Are we each keen to have a “best-in-class” ability to kill pedestrians if we run them down, or to inflict great danger to the occupants of the smaller cars on the road?

Not likely. We may merely be fashion-sensitive, eager to buy something that other buyers, clearly, think is an impressive car. We may not actually want a car at all – but we live in places where nearly every workplace, school or supermarket is hard to reach without a car. We might prefer a smaller, more economical car, but we fear we will be unsafe in a small car surrounded by much bigger cars.

These intentions don’t matter to the market. What matters is whether, in the end, we exchange our money for a set of keys and drive away as new car buyers. And then our act of purchase is just one in millions of data points aggregated by the market to determine price (and price, to the market, equals value).

So you and I, Marx and Sartre pile into our brand new SUV, and once we’ve decided whose phone will sync with the car’s infotainment system we drive away. But clouds of doubt quickly form at the edges of our euphoria.

From the back seat Karl’s voice competes with the GPS navigation prompts: “This is a marvelous product of industrial organization! But have the workers of the world united? Are they now the vanguard of the overthrow of capitalism?”

“Well … sort of … not exactly,” I say. “The workers who put together this car belong to one of the strongest unions. They have organized and fought and gone on strike many times over the years, and they’ve won good pay and even pensions.”

But you point out that most of the parts that went into the car were made in other factories … and the auto companies are building non-union factories wherever they can … and the raw materials were grown or mined or synthesized all over the world. And we have very little idea, really, which of the workers were well paid or which were barely paid at all, or who is living downwind or downriver of the mines and factories, suffering in ill health while we speed down the highway.

We go silent, until the ghost of Jean-Paul deepens our gloom. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. The four of us all want the world to be a better place, for everybody. But we just spent a lot of money for new wheels, and where is that money going? The fifty thousand dollars we spent might reward somebody who burns down rainforest to plant a rubber plantation. Our money might go to a lobbyist to get environmental regulations scrapped, or ignored. Just a few dollars may make it to kids who are dragging ore out of dangerous tunnels for fourteen hours a day. What are we supposed to do, just stop thinking and get some happy music playing?”

“Yes please!” we say.

“Give it a break already!”

“You’re overthinking things again!”

But that line never seems to work with J-P. So he goes on:

“I just don’t feel free. I should be able to take responsibility for my own decisions. And here I am, with good intentions, but I don’t know if I’m really fucking up the world by spending money this way. And you’re telling me to just stop thinking and listen to chill music? What kind of freedom is that?”

Living in bad faith

Sartre wrote about living in “bad faith” more than eighty years ago,2 and Battistoni sees this as an important concept today. For Sartre true freedom consisted in taking responsibility for one’s own decisions. By contrast, in Battistoni’s phrasing, “Bad faith consists in the denial of our freedom, the disavowal of our responsibility.” 

Why is bad faith a “normal” way of life in market-dominated society? Batttistoni writes:

“Under conditions of near-universal market dependence … in which nearly all our decisions are market mediated, nonresponsibility is pervasive – and the freedom that consists in being responsible for our decisions is radically elusive.” (p. 70)

So must we remain in bad faith? Only to the extent that we collude in denying our own freedom. We are in bad faith “when we refuse to countenance the possibility that things could be other than they are, or to examine the choices we make, whether alone or together …” (p 78)

Battistoni emphasizes that bad faith applies to more than individuals:

“Bad faith, crucially, is not only an individual condition. We are collectively in bad faith when we act as if we have no choice but to organize society in the way it is structured at present ….” (p. 79)

And since the market economy structures much of our relationship to the natural world, “we are in bad faith when we treat our socially specific relationships to the nonhuman world as if they were themselves natural.” (p. 79)

Before moving on, it’s important to note that market rule applies at all levels of society. Market rule restricts the possibilities for car buyers, but it also restricts car makers. It applies at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, in the middle, and also at the top.

A high-level auto executive, for example, may wish his company could sell more eco-friendly cars. But that wish will come to nothing if such cars can’t attract enough buyers at sufficiently profitable prices. The executive may wish to offer workers better job security, but he will be ushered out of the C-suite in a hurry if his company’s shares lose value on the stock market. The executive may lament, “the market doesn’t care a whit about my good intentions – so I’m really not responsible for my decisions.” And in simply accepting that “this is just the way things are”, the executive, too, is unfree and living in bad faith.

Photo at top of page: “Collins Oldsmobile, Indianapolis IN, 1971”, cropped from photo by Alden Jewell, licensed under CC By 2.0, accessed via flickr.

Footnotes

1 There are exceptions to the rule, which will be part of the discussion about getting beyond “bad faith” later in the series. In that discussion we’ll also bring in concepts from Simone de Beauvoir.

2 In L’Être et le néant, 1943, published in English as Being and Nothingness, 1956.

Labour, capital, and the ‘free gifts of nature’

Also published on Resilience.

Political economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century employed a curious phrase to denote the source of wealth at the base of the economy: the “free gifts of nature.”

Alyssa Battistoni, a political science professor at Barnard College, believes that careful attention to the meanings of this phrase illuminates many aspects of the world we inhabit today.

Her book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton University Press, August 2025) is a brilliant study of topics including, but not limited to:

  • Marx’s theories of use value and exchange value
  • class rule and market rule;
  • organization and control of labour;
  • the roots of ecological economics;
  • debates about valuation of ecosystem services;
  • the Wages for Housework movement and recent theories of care work;
  • Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism;
  • freedom and unfreedom in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Free Gifts is not a quick or easy read, but as a guide to many of the most important issues in political philosophy this book is worth careful study. Each chapter builds on previous chapters to present a coherent and compelling vision.

This post begins a series on significant ideas in Free Gifts. Definitions of basic terms are essential, starting with “free”, “gifts”, and “nature”. Let’s take these keywords in reverse order.

What is nature? Is nature separate from humanity? Or is humanity, and all its works, part of nature?

In the framework Battistoni lays out in the opening chapter, we see “nature” as having two major components: non-human nature and human nature. All of humanity is part of nature, but not all of nature is human.

As such, every human activity is necessarily subject to non-human natural laws: for example, the laws of physics, chemistry, biology. Human activity is also shaped by human norms and laws which are socially enacted.

Non-human nature is not necessarily shaped by human laws, and indeed throughout most of the history of the universe nature was entirely unaffected by human nature. Today, on the other hand, much of non-human nature on earth is deeply affected by human, socially-enacted activity. For example, the chemistry of the atmosphere and the physics of global heat absorption are now influenced by human activity.

Battistoni describes this conception of nature in these sentences:

“Rather than cordoning nature off from politics or abolishing the distinction altogether, this book starts from the premise that ‘nature’ pertains to politics of all kinds – not only those issues we tend to think of as ‘environmental.’ Instead of treating ‘politics’ as the organization of human life, to be distinguished from the scientific or technical organization of nonhuman matter, it holds that to organize human life is always also a material enterprise, and hence a natural one.” (Battistoni, page 8; except where otherwise noted, all quotes in this article are from Free Gifts)

Furthermore, because humans are social, our relationship with nature is shaped by human social relationships. In a capitalist society, the relationship between members of that society and nature – both human and non-human nature – is structured by capitalism. As explained more fully in later chapters of the book, “capitalism limits our ability to treat nonhuman nature as something other than a free gift. It constrains our ability, individually and collectively, to make genuine decisions about how to value and relate to the nonhuman world, and to take responsibility for those decisions.” (page 15)

So far … so good? I confess I found the opening section of Free Gifts slow going, and I had doubts about carrying on with what appeared at that point to be a very long book. But there was a pay-off – Battistoni used this carefully constructed conception of nature to good effect in ensuing chapters.

How about those other two key words, “gifts” and “free”?

It’s clear from the writings of early classical economists that they viewed non-human nature and its properties – the fertility of soil, the combustive potential of coal, and the forceful expansion of steam – as a gift, and a very important gift.

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing the gifts of nature embed us in relationships of reciprocity. In classical economics, by contrast, the gifts of nature are unilateral, imposing no conditions on the humans who take these gifts. That takes us part of the way to understanding the “free” in “free gifts”.

In short, capitalism pays no price for nature’s gifts even though these gifts are immensely valuable. Yet they are valuable in only one of two key senses of value: they have use value but not exchange value. (Exchange value comes into play only later, after they have been harvested, extracted, appropriated, and offered on the market.) Because they have no exchange value, the “free gifts” are free because they are priced at zero.

And with that, we’re deep into the weeds with Karl Marx.

Does the air have a price tag?

John (Fire) Lame Deer told a story with an important implication:

“I always remember listening to my first radio. That was in the little town of Interior [South Dakota] way back in the [nineteen] twenties. There was a sign over a door: ‘Listen to wireless music from Sioux Falls—300 miles away! $1.50 per person.’ You had to plunk that much down to be allowed inside this café to give your ears a treat. We saw a guy fooling around with a needle on a crystal and heard a tinny, crackling voice saying something about winter feed, corn, and the price of prime hogs. At that moment an old Indian spoke up. ‘They took the land and the water, now they own the air too.’ So we have the green frog-skin world in which all things have a price tag.” (Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, by John (Fire) Lame Deer with Richard Erdoes, Washington Square Press, 1971; page 35)

This story helps to illustrate how some gifts of nature have come to be exchanged in the market, while others, so far, have not.

In this case the radio receiver itself was still a scarce commodity, and so it was feasible for a small-scale capitalist to charge a price simply to listen. Meanwhile there were new methods of setting value for a previously mysterious phenomenon of physics. The waves in the electro-magnetic spectrum had been part of the free gifts of nature, existing throughout space for billions of years. But in the twentieth century it became possible to chop that spectrum into pieces that were sold on the market. Before that date the spectrum was valued at zero; after that date the spectrum had exchange value.

It may not have been exactly true that the air itself had a price tag – yet – but the radio waves that travel through that air were indeed becoming “owned”, bought and sold.

The air we breathe, the sun that warms us and allows plants to grow, the clouds that bring rain, the forests that cool the landscape and slow the passage of rainfall to the sea – these are immensely valuable, both to us and to non-human nature. These and myriad other natural phenomena have immense use value. But in themselves they have no exchange value unless and until they are exchanged, for the abstract expression of value that is money, on the market.

And it is this abstracted value – exchange value – that determines whether something is treated as valuable in capitalism.

Unless and until a particular gift of nature is traded on the market, its valuation and its price remains zero.

When formerly free – that is, priced at zero – gifts of nature are exchanged on the market, our human relationships to those gifts are transformed. Yet the prior natural characteristics of those gifts remain, and shape the practices of capitalism in their own ways. Coal burns with a specific amount of heat per kilogram and is easy to transport. Methane produces even more heat per kilogram, but as an expansive gas it is tricky to transport. Dried spruce wood pellets can be combusted to produce a lot of heat, but the trees take decades to grow. Specially selected dairy cows produce a lot of milk each day for a period of months. But their lactation cycles are determined by a complex of biological factors that are only partially malleable by capitalist management.

All these physical and biological properties shape how capitalism extracts value when the free gifts of nature are brought into production processes. Of equal importance, the properties of non-human nature are important in determining which gifts of nature are not brought into capitalist production processes:

“[Capitalism’s] ability to wring profit out of every entity, activity, and process on Earth has often been overstated. Although capital seeks to absorb what it can make profitable, it abdicates that which it can’t. It doesn’t only appropriate and exploit; it also abandons and expels.” (p 47-48)

* * *

While capitalism enforces a particular relationship between humanity and the rest of nature, it likewise perverts our freedom and ensnares us in specifically capitalist forms of unfreedom. As Battistoni notes in the book’s epilogue, ending capitalist unfreedom would not necessarily bring about a better world, but it would “allow us to make different kinds of decisions than the ones capitalism offers.” (p 239)

Battistoni enlists the help of Jean-Paul Sartre in elucidating the character of capitalist unfreedom. We’ll delve into that conversation in the next post.

Photo at top of page: “Underground uranium mining in Nucla (Montrose County, Colorado)”, photo by Bill Gillette, 1972, public domain, accessed via Wikimedia Commons.

“Business As Usual, Electrified” is an awful way to reduce auto emissions

First published by Steady State Herald. Also published on Resilience.

Auto industry voices in Canada have made headlines recently by urging a longer timeline for the transition to electric cars. We should hope that Prime Minister Mark Carney does not give in to this demand.

Yet even if Canada’s federal government sticks to the current policy, and Canadian new car sales are 100 percent zero-emission by 2035, carbon emissions will decline much more slowly than the world needs. That is due to the auto industry’s particularly pernicious strategy for continued growth.

The industry can’t keep boosting unit sales in a country where almost everyone who can drive, does drive. But they can boost revenue by selling bigger, heavier, more expensive vehicles when consumers need to swap their old vehicles for new ones.

With that strategy, Canada’s auto industry has done its part in maintaining the growth of gross domestic product (GDP). But the GDP isn’t all that’s growing. Pedestrian deaths and injuries are growing, tire particulate emissions are growing, traffic congestion is growing, and consumer debt (due to auto loans) is growing.

CO2 emissions from cars are holding steady and should start trending down over the next five years. However, a “Business As Usual, Electrified” transition will reduce emissions far too slowly to meet the climate-crisis challenge.

If you can’t sell more, sell bigger. (GM trucks at former GM Canada headquarters in Oshawa, Ontario, 2022. Photo by Bart Hawkins Kreps.)

Car Bloat in Canada

Statistics Canada figures show that unit sales of passenger vehicles grew just over 20 percent between 2010 and 2024, while population grew 21 percent. Auto sales revenue, however, grew by over 100 percent.

Price tags have soared because the mix of new cars has changed drastically. Most new passenger vehicles are categorized as “light trucks”—SUVs and many models of pick-up trucks. But “light trucks” is a euphemism we should translate as “huge cars.” Most of them are used almost entirely to haul around one or two persons, just like small cars do.

In 2010, the huge-car segment was 54 percent of the Canadian market. By 2024, huge cars made up 87 percent of new passenger vehicles. This trend of “autobesity” or “car bloat” has significant implications for Canada’s strategy to reduce carbon emissions by electrifying vehicles.

First, if the auto industry maintains Business As Usual, the vast majority of internal combustion cars sold between now and 2035 will be huge. They will have correspondingly high tailpipe emissions well after 2035. These emissions are often termed “tank-to-wheel” emissions.

A second emissions category is termed “well-to-tank” emissions. Gasoline or diesel fuel goes from oil wells or mines through an extraction-refining-distribution chain. This adds significant emissions for every liter of fuel burned.

An analogous category—“well-to-grid” let’s call it—exists for electric vehicles (EVs) when electricity is produced by coal- or gas-fired generators. Canada’s grid is powered predominantly by hydro or nuclear power, though, so well-to-grid is not a major category of EV-fleet emissions. (That could change if Canada adopts the “all the above” approach to energy taken by the United States, for example.)

There are also substantial carbon emissions in the manufacture of cars. These emissions are higher for larger cars, and ironically, higher for electric cars than for gas- or diesel-powered cars. If most new cars continue rolling off the assembly lines huge, carbon emissions from auto manufacturing will go up between now and 2035. That will remain true until the carbon-intensive industrial processes in the manufacturing chain are also electrified.

Finally, if Canadians continue to buy as many cars as they do now and drive them as far each year, the fleet of huge cars will continue to take up more roadway surface. Road construction is itself a significant source of carbon emissions.

Beyond the Tailpipe

What will it really take for Canada’s auto industry to reach zero emissions by 2035?  To answer this question, I projected six scenarios using a carbon-emissions calculator developed by the International Energy Agency. I estimated tank-to-wheel, well-to-tank, and auto manufacturing emissions in each of the six scenarios.

I incorporated road construction into my projections, using a Statistics Canada emissions-intensity per dollar estimate, multiplied by total road-construction expenditures for 2024. Passenger cars account for 91 percent of total vehicle kilometers driven, while heavy trucks and buses account for 9 percent. However, trucks and buses individually take more road space than cars. Therefore, I assigned 70 percent of road-construction emissions to the car fleet. (I did not find adequate data to estimate carbon emissions from road maintenance, which would make the analysis closer to complete.)

I estimated passenger-car fleet direct tailpipe emissions at about 72 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 in 2024. This is slightly less than Environment Canada’s estimate of 74 Mt in pre-pandemic 2019. However, when I added the car fleet’s share of emissions from the extraction-refining-distribution chain, from auto manufacturing, and from road construction, car-sector emissions came to over 115 Mt. That’s a 60 percent increase over the tailpipe emissions alone.

 

How will this change over the next 15 years? My “Business As Usual, Electrified” (BAU Electrified) projection through 2040 includes two somewhat optimistic assumptions. First, that electrification proceeds on schedule—20 percent of new cars being EV by 2026, 60 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2035. Second, that car bloat gets no worse (but also no better) through the coming years. The car/light-truck mix of new vehicles, and the vehicle sizes within these categories, remain exactly as in 2024. Importantly, however, this would mean that the average size of vehicles on the road would continue to increase. This is because the smaller sedans bought ten years ago would be replaced by large SUVs and pickup trucks.

If Canada’s goal of 100 percent EV sales by 2035 is met, total car-fleet emissions will still drop only 41 percent by 2040.

Based on these assumptions, I projected that Canada’s car-fleet emissions would be 41 percent lower in 2040 than in 2024

A 41 percent drop may sound impressive. But climate experts have warned for years that we must reduce global warming emissions by at least 43 percent by 2030. So, a 41 percent drop by 2040 is dangerously inadequate.

Departures from Business As Usual

Making even modest changes to passenger-transportation rules could reduce these emissions significantly faster. I projected five additional scenarios, the best of which shows total car-fleet emissions dropping by 71 percent by 2040.

Modest changes to a “Business As Usual, Electrified” scenario would bring down car-fleet emissions by 71 percent by 2040.

Scenario 2 is only slightly different from BAU Electrified (Scenario 1). It assumes a 98 percent zero-emission electric grid compared to Canada’s current national average of approximately 84 percent zero-emission.

In Scenario 3, the sedan/light-truck mix is dialed back to 2010 levels between 2026 and 2030. In Scenario 4, the sedan/light-truck mix is dialed back to 1979 levels between 2026 and 2030.

Scenario 5 builds on Scenario 4, except that vehicles within the sedan and light-truck categories drop modestly in size. In addition, I projected new-vehicle sales and average kilometers driven as dropping by 3.5 percent per year starting in 2030.

Finally, in Scenario 6 the annual vehicle-kilometer figure begins dropping by 3.5 percent per year in 2026. In Scenario 6, not only have CO2 emissions dropped by 71 percent by 2040, but the drop begins much sooner. The result is that cumulative emissions over the whole period are much lower.

Rising Demand for Electricity

Car bloat is likely to pose one more serious challenge in the effort to shrink overall CO2 emissions. A fleet of huge electric cars will add greatly to demand for electricity, at a time when we are also working to electrify other important sectors, such as home heating. We won’t have enough renewably generated electricity to meet all these demands for many years. Therefore, a rational policy would conduce moderate levels of new electricity demand.

I calculated that a Canada-wide EV fleet matching the BAU Electrified scenario would require 68 TeraWatts (TW) per year. A fleet of mostly small EVs driving about 60 percent as many kilometers a year (close to Scenario 6) would require only 32 TW per year. Either way, this is an almost entirely new source of demand, as we scramble to convert other carbon-intensive sectors simultaneously. But it would be much less challenging to build out a grid capable of providing 32 TW rather than 68 TW. A smaller grid build-out will likewise require less environmentally destructive mining for critical metals.

Business As Usual Is Killing Us

There are many reasons besides carbon emissions to conclude that a “Business As Usual, Electrified” strategy is a bad route. The huge passenger vehicles now dominating the roads compound the danger to pedestrians, cyclists, and anyone driving a smaller car.

Huge passenger EVs need huge batteries—and thus demand a rapid, reckless increase in critical-mineral extraction.

Huge EVs, since they are heavier than corresponding internal-combustion vehicles, create more dangerous particulate emissions from tire wear.

A fleet of huge cars takes up more road space, increasing traffic congestion.

And, huge cars chew up the roads faster, entailing more road construction and repair.

So, we should support the Canadian government’s plan for new-vehicle electrification by 2035. However, we should also demand that new vehicles be smaller, that the number of cars on the road gradually drops, and that vehicles drive fewer kilometers annually. There is a wide range of policies designed to achieve these goals. CASSE’s Sustainable Transportation Act, for example, includes provisions to get passenger vehicles and freight trucks off the road. It also discourages the purchase and use of the largest passenger cars and trucks.

The sooner such policies are implemented, the better—for drivers, non-drivers, our cities, our roads, our waters, our atmosphere, our future.

Electrification is an important and necessary step for a sustainable, healthy future, but growth-driven Business As Usual—even Electrified—is killing us.

This article is based on research presented at the International Society for Ecological Economics/Degrowth conference in Oslo, Norway in June 2025.

Photo at top of page: On Lakeshore Boulevard East, Toronto, Ontario, October 2015. Photo by Lisa Gallant, released under CC0 Public Domain license, accessed via Public Domain Pictures.

The infinite growth of highways

Also published on Resilience.

In the first few pages of his new book Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction, Erick Guerra lays out several essential points. 

First, while the originally planned Interstate expressway system was completed in 1992, the pace of highway construction spending since then has not slowed.

Second, though President Dwight Eisenhower intended the Interstate system – officially initiated by legislation in 1956 – to be rural, most of the construction funding went to urban and suburban sections, and nearly two-thirds of vehicle travel miles in the system also occur in urban and suburban areas.  

Third, though the length of highways may not be increasing, “There are nearly twice as many lane miles of urban interstate” today as in 1990. (All quotes in this article are from Overbuilt, by Erick Guerra.)

But has 70 years of ceaseless highway construction met the stated goals of relieving traffic congestion and making drivers safer?

On the contrary, “The average time spent in traffic per car commuter increased from twenty-nine hours in 1991 to fifty-four hours in 2019.” Meanwhile, “The US traffic fatality rate is two to four times higher than in Canada or wealthy European countries and has improved much more slowly over time than in peer countries.”

From a political economic point of view, it’s easy to understand one reason the highway system continues to grow: construction companies and their investors expect steadily growing revenues and profits, and successfully prevail on politicians to keep the government funds flowing.

Guerra, an urban planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provides another reason: the highway lobby has insisted for nearly a century that more highway lanes were needed to relieve congestion. But since more roadway has always induced more traffic, the battle against congestions is never won.

The only thing to do, then, is to keep on adding more highway lane miles. Just as the US economic system demands infinite growth of GDP, its transportation system demands infinite growth of highways.

This fondness for highways seems to match the view of Premier Doug Ford in my current home – Ontario, Canada. Guerra’s book, however, is US-focused and makes only occasional comparative references to other countries. Yet the lessons that emerge from Overbuilt are valuable for any country or city struggling with car dependency.

“Dan Ryan Expressway bridges over 24th Place in Chicago, seen from Archer.” Photo by Eric Allix Rogers, August 2008, accessed via flickr, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0.

A history of contestation

Guerra looks back to the early years of the 20th century to trace the growth of the highway lobby, but most of Overbuilt discusses the period since 1956. In that year President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act into law, and a massive, decades-long construction program shifted into high gear.

Though the legislation was associated with the Interstate expressways (or “freeways” as they were often termed), Guerra makes clear that the commitment of funding was far wider. Indeed, it had to be. As controlled access roadways, expressways don’t provide direct access to any homes, businesses, hospitals, schools, or parks. The expressway system requires an even more elaborate system of feeder highways, service roads and arterials to connect the motoring public with their actual destinations.

Many of these roads cross state lines, and are referred to as (lower-case) interstate highways. The 1956 legislation funded both Interstate and interstate highways at a rate of 90% federal funding to 10% state funding.

The program also funded the acquisition of land for new or expanded highways.

In urban areas, that land was occupied by homes and businesses. By the late 1950s, “New interstates were displacing nearly one hundred thousand families per year but providing no relocation support.” Disproportionately, highways were directed through Black, Brown and poor neighbourhoods. (See Justice and the Interstates for a close look at the ongoing struggle to rebuild these neighbourhoods and provide recompense for families that lost their homes or businesses.)

The highway program was criticized on other grounds as well. For one thing, the phenomenon of induced demand was evident even seventy years ago. Guerra writes that “As noted by early observers such as [US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and [philosopher of technology] Lewis Mumford, increased traffic was generally the largest and most substantial effect of new highway investments.”

Even without adequate payment for expropriation of urban lands, urban highway building is exorbitantly expensive. Guerra writes that about $2.5 trillion (in inflation-adjusted dollars) have been doled out by the federal Highway Trust Fund since 1956 – with most of that funding going to urban highway projects. The spending continues today. Although the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) has been widely praised for supporting renewable energy and urban public transit, Guerra writes that the Act will also put “hundreds of billions of dollars into building, rebuilding, widening, and maintaining an already overbuilt roadway system.”

This 1973 photo shows “Heavy traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago Illinois. It is the busiest in the United States with 254,700 vehicles daily, according to figures released in March, 1975, by the Federal Department of Transportation. The Kennedy Expressway in Chicago is the second busiest (not shown) with 234,100 vehicles per day.” Photo by John H. White, October 1973. in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

 

Meeting peak demand

Going back nearly a century, the nascent field of traffic engineering developed a method that is still used today to provide a rationale for highway expansions.

That method was to peer into the future and guesstimate what the future car and truck traffic demand will be – not to find ways to reduce that demand, but always to provide enough highway space to meet that demand. And not just “meet the demand” but “meet the peak demand”. And not just meet “peak demand” but “demand in the thirtieth busiest hour projected during the next twenty years.”

Why the thirtiest busiest hour, instead of the twentieth or fortieth or one-hundredth busiest hour? Guerra says the choice was arbitrary, but was codified as a standard nevertheless. But the choice to plan and build highways to meet demand in the 99.98th percentile busiest hour has kept highway builders busy, and made the US ever more car-dependent, ever since. Due to induced demand, however, the new or expanded highways quickly fill up and even the demand during routine weekday “rush hour” stays ahead of roadway supply.

Guerra shows how gas-tax revenues from less-than-peak hours are used to subsidize traffic at the most congested times – the reverse of congestion pricing. Accordingly, he cites congestion pricing as one of the most significant ways to reverse the pattern of overbuilding.

But surely all these roadway “improvements” have led to greater public safety? Many highway engineers will claim success on that front, pointing to a drop in deaths per Vehicle Mile Travelled (VMT). Guerra responds:

“From 1955 to 1980, the fatality rate per vehicle mile had halved. To put it succinctly, Americans were driving nearly twice as much, thanks to wider and higher-capacity roadways, and killing about the same number of people after adjusting for population growth.”

In agreement with engineering professor and author Wes Marshall (Killed by a Traffic Engineer), Guerra believes we should discuss traffic risk primarily on a per capita basis as is done with most other public health hazards. Judged on this basis, the expanding highway system looks like a very bad safety investment:

“The places with the most highways have the most arterials, the most local roads, the most driving, and the most traffic fatalities. Across urban counties, each 10 percent increase in roadway per capita corresponds with about a 4 percent increase in traffic fatalities per capita.”

A looming fiscal crisis

Of course the highway system can’t keep on expanding forever, given the finiteness of land and resources. Guerra writes that “the current transportation finance model is unsustainable and fast approaching a fiscal crisis.”

Thus the first step to ending the pattern of overbuilding is to stop funding new highways, and stop maintaining, and even dismantle, some of the highways now in existence. A second step, as mentioned previously, is congestion pricing.

Better funding for public transit might help too, but Guerra cautions that in most areas of the United States, public transit is nowhere near competitive with cars in terms of travel times and convenience; increased funding may convince very few drivers to switch to transit. Such is the legacy of 70 years of induced car dependency.

He also draws on the distinction between accessibility and mobility to advocate another change:

“Measuring accessibility – people’s ease of getting to the places they are trying to go – instead of mobility – traffic speeds, traffic volumes, and highway capacity – is perhaps the single most important shift that needs to take place to begin to evaluate and assess the impacts of transportation investments properly. Movement and traffic are quite simply the wrong way to measure the transportation system.” p 162

Guerra has done a great job of describing the recipe for overbuilding. But the recipe for converting an overbuilt network into a safe, sustainable transportation system is still being worked out in countries and cities around the world.

Photo at top of page: “Passing over the Dan Ryan Expressway, with a good view of the skyline in the background.” By The West End, August 2008, accessed via flickr, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0.

The urgent necessity of asset stranding

A review of Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown

Also published on Resilience.

In 2023 delegates from around the world gathered for a 28th session of the Conference Of the Parties (COP), this time held in the United Arab Emirates. The official director of the mega-meeting, nominally devoted to mitigating the climate crisis caused by fossil fuel emissions, was none other than Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC).

At the time, ADNOC was “in the midst of a thrust of expansion, planning to pour more than 1 billion dollars into oil and gas projects per month until 2030.” (Overshoot, page 253)

Overshoot, by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, published by Verso, October 2024.

Sultan Al Jaber’s appointment was praised by climate envoy John Kerry of the United States, which was also committing a historic expansion of fossil fuel extraction.

The significance of COP being presided over by a CEO working hard to increase carbon emissions was not lost on Andreas Malm and Wim Carton. In that moment, they write,

“[A]ctive capital protection had been insinuated into the highest echelons of climate governance, the irreal (sic) turn coming full circle, the theatre now a tragedy and farce wrapped into one, overshoot ideology the official decor.” (Overshoot, p 254; emphasis mine)

What do Malm and Carton mean by “capital protection” and “overshoot”? “Capital protection” is the opposite of “asset stranding”, which would occur if trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuel reserves were “left in the ground,” unburned, unexploited. Yet as we shall see, the potential threat to capital goes far beyond even the trillions of dollars of foregone profits if the fossil fuel industry were rapidly wound down.

In Malm and Carton’s usage, “overshoot” has a different meaning than in some ecological theory. In this book “overshoot” refers specifically to carbon emissions rising through levels that will cause 1.5°C, 2°C, or other specified threshold for global warming. To apologists for overshoot, it is fine to blow through these warming targets temporarily, as long as our descendants later in the century draw down much of the carbon through yet-to-be commercialized technologies such as Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).

Overshoot, Malm and Carton say, is a dangerous gamble that will certainly kill many people in the coming decades, and collapse civilization and much of the biosphere in the longer term if our descendants are not able adequately clean up the mess we are bequeathing them. Yet overshoot is firmly integrated into the Integrated Assessment Models widely used to model the course of climate change, precisely because it offers capital protection against asset stranding.

Scientific models, “drenched in ideology”

If the global climate were merely a complex physical system it would be easier to model. But of course it is also a biological, ecological, social and economic system. Once it was understood that the climate was strongly influenced by human activity, early researchers understood the need for models that incorporated human choices into climate projections.

“But how could an economy of distinctly human making be captured in the same model as something like glaciers?,” Malm and Carton ask. “In the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), the trick was to render the economy lawlike on the assumptions of neoclassical theory ….” (p 56)

These assumptions include the idea that humans are rational, making their choices to maximize utility, in free markets that collectively operate with perfect information. While most people other than orthodox economists can recognize these assumptions as crude caricatures of human behaviour, this set of assumptions is hegemonic within affluent policy-making circles. And so it was the neoclassical economy whose supposed workings were integrated into the IAMs. 

While “every human artifact has a dimension of ideology,” Malm and Carton write, 

“IAMs were positively drenched in non-innocent ideological positions, of which we can quickly list a few: rationalism (human agents behave rationally), economism (mitigation is a matter of cost), presentism (current generations should be spared the onus), conservatism (incumbent capital must be saved from losses), gradualism (any changes will have to be incremental), and optimism (we live in the best of all possible economies). Together, they made ambitious climate goals – the ones later identified as in line with 1.5°C or 2°C – seem all but unimaginable.” (p 60; emphasis mine)

In literally hundreds of IAMs, they write, there was a conspicuous absence of scenarios involving degrowth, the Green New Deal, the nationalisation of oil companies, half-earth socialism, or any other proposal to achieve climate mitigation through radical changes to “business as usual.”

In the place of any such challenges to the current economic order was another formidable acronym: BECCS, “Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage.” No costly shakeups to the current economy were needed, because in the IAMs, the not-yet-commercialized BECCS was projected to become so widely implemented in the second half of the century that it would draw down all the excess carbon we are currently rushing to emit.

As the 21st century progressed and as warming thresholds such as 1.5°C or even 2°C grew dangerously close, overshoot, excused by the imagined future roll-out of BECCS, became a more attractive and dangerous concept. Due to the magic of IAMs incorporating overshoot, countries like Canada, the US, and other petrostates could declare climate emergencies, pledge their support to a 1.5°C ceiling – and simultaneously step up their fossil extraction efforts. 

“Construction Work on Trans Mountain Pipeline outside Valemount, BC, Canada, Sept 16, 2020.” (Photo by Adam Jones, licensed via Creative Commons CC By 2.0, accessed via flickr.) On June 17, 2019, the Canadian Parliament approved a motion declaring the country to be in a climate emergency. On June 18, 2019, the Government of Canada announced its approval of the Trans-Mountain Pipeline Expansion, for the purpose of bringing more tar sands crude to the BC coast for export.

At COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, and most famously at the Paris Accord in 2015, countries could piously pledge their allegiance to stringent warming limits, while ensuring no binding commitments remained in the texts to limit the fossil fuel industry. Overshoot was the enabling concept: “Through this sleight of hand, any given target could be both missed and met and any missing be rationalised as part of the journey to meeting it ….” (p 87)

“The common capital of the class”

There is a good deal of Marxist rhetoric in Overshoot, and Malm and Carton are able guides to this often tangled body of political-economic theory. On some subjects they employ these ideas to clarifying effect.

Given the overwhelming consensus of climatologists, plus the evidence in plain sight all around us, that the climate emergency is rapidly growing more severe, why is there still such widespread resistance to radical economic change?

The opposition to radical change comes not only from fossil fuel company owners and shareholders. Rather, the fierce determination to carry on with business as usual comes from many sectors of industry, the financial sector, nearly all policy-makers, and most of the media elite.

As Malm and Carton explain, if firm policies were put in place to “leave fossil fuels in the ground”, stranding the assets of fossil fuel companies, there would be “layer upon layer” of value destruction. The first layer would be the value of the no-longer usable fossil reserves. The next layer would be the vast network of wells, pipelines, refineries, even gas stations which distribute fossil fuel. A third would be the machinery now in place to burn fossil fuels in almost every other sector of industrial production. The economic valuations of these layers would crash the moment “leaving fossil fuels in ground” became a binding policy.

Finally, the above layers of infrastructure require financing. “Increased fixed capital formation,” Malm and Carton write, “necessitates increased integration into equity as well as credit markets – or, to use a pregnant Marxian phrase, into ‘the common capital of the class.’” (p 133)

The upshot is that “any limitations on fossil fuel infrastructure would endanger the common capital of the class by which it has been financed.” (p 133-134) And “the class by which it has been financed,” of course, is the ruling elite, the small percentage of people who own most of corporate equity, and whose lobbyists enjoy regular access to lawmakers and regulators. 

The elite class which owns, finances and profits from fossil production also happens to be responsible for a wildly disproportionate amount of fossil fuel consumption. Overshoot cites widely publicized statistics that show that the richest ten per cent of humanity is responsible for half of the emissions, while the poorest fifty percent of humanity emits only about a tenth of the emissions. They add, 

“It was not the masses of the global South that, suicidally, tipped the world into 1.5°C. In fact, not even the working classes of the North were party to the process: between 1990 and 2019, per capita emissions of the poorest half of the populations of the US and Europe dropped by nearly one third, due to ‘compressed wages and consumption.’ The overshoot conjuncture was the creation of the rich, with which they capped their victory in the class struggle.” (p 225-226)

Stock, flow and the labour theory of value

Malm and Carton go on to explain the economic difference between fossil fuel energy and solar-and-wind energy, through the simple lens of Marx’ labour theory of value. In my opinion this is the least successful section of Overshoot.

First, the authors describe fossil fuel reserves as “stocks” and the sunshine and wind as “flows”. That’s a valid distinction, of significance in explaining some of the fundamental differences in these energy sources.

But why has fossil fuel extraction recently been significantly more profitable than renewable energy harvesting?

The key fact, Malm and Carton argue, is that “the flow [solar and wind energy] appears without labour. … [T]he fuel is ripe for picking prior to and in proud disregard of any process of production. ‘Value is labour,’ Marx spells out …. It follows that the flow cannot have value.”

They emphasize the point with another quote from Marx: “‘Where there is no value, there is eo ipso nothing to be expressed in money.’”

“And where there is nothing to be expressed in money,” they conclude, “there can be no profit.” (p 208-209) That is why the renewable energy business will never supply the profits that have been earned in fossil extraction.

This simple explanation ignores the fact that oil companies aren’t always profitable; for a period of years in the last decade, the US oil industry had negative returns on equity.1 Clearly, one factor in the profitability of extraction is the cost of extraction, while another is the price customers are both willing and able to pay. When the former is as high as or higher than the latter, there are no profits even for exploitation of stocks.

As for business opportunities derived from the flow, Malm and Carton concede that profits might be earned through the manufacture and installation of solar panels and wind turbines, or the provision of batteries and transmission lines. But in their view these profits will never come close to fossil fuel profits, and furthermore, any potential profits will drop rapidly as renewable sources come to dominate the electric grid. Why? Again, their explanation rests on Marx’s labour theory of value:

“The more developed the productive forces of the flow, the more proficient their capture of a kind of energy in which no labour can be objectified, the closer the price and the value and the profit all come to zero.” (page 211)

Does this sound fantastically utopian to you? Imagine the whole enterprise – mining, refining, smelting, transporting, manufacturing and installation of PV panels and wind turbines, extensions of grids, and integration of adequate amounts of both short- and long-term storage – becoming so “proficient [in] their capture of energy” that the costs are insignificant compared to the nearly limitless flow of clean electricity. Imagine that all these costs become so trivial that the price of the resulting electricity approaches zero.

As a corrective to this vision of ‘renewable electricity too cheap to meter,’ I recommend Vince Beiser’s Power Metal, reviewed here last week.

Malm and Carton, however, are convinced that renewably generated electricity can only get cheaper, and furthermore can easily substitute for almost all the current uses of fossil fuels, without requiring reductions in other types of consumption, and all within a few short years. In defense of this idea they approvingly cite the work of Mark Jacobson; rather than critique that work here, I’ll simply refer interested readers to my review of Jacobson’s 2023 publication No Miracles Needed.

Energy transition and stranded assets

Energy transition is not yet a reality. Malm and Carton note that although renewable energy supply has grown rapidly over the past 20 years, fossil energy use has not dropped. What we have so far is an energy addition, not an energy transition.

Not coincidentally, asset stranding likewise remains “a hypothetical event, not yet even attempted.” (p 192)

The spectre of fossil fuel reserves and infrastructure becoming stranded assets has been discussed in the pages of financial media, ever since climate science made it obvious that climate mitigation strategies would indeed require leaving most known fossil reserves in the ground, i.e., stranding these assets. (One of the pundits sounding a warning was Mark Carney, formerly a central banker and now touted as a contender to replace Justin Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada; he makes an appearance in Overshoot.)

Yet there is no evidence the capitalist class collectively is losing sleep over stranded assets, any more than over the plight of poor farmers being driven from their lands by severe floods or droughts.

As new fossil fuel projects get more expensive, the financial establishment has stepped up its investment in such projects. In the years immediately following the Paris Agreement – whose 1.5°C warming target would have required stranding more than 80 per cent of fossil fuel reserves – a frenzy of investment added to both the reserves and the fixed capital devoted to extracting those reserves:

“Between 2016 and 2021, the world’s sixty largest banks poured nearly 5 trillion dollars into fossil fuel projects, the sums bigger at the end of this half-decade than at its beginning.” (p 20) 

The implications are twofold: first, big oil and big finance remain unconcerned that any major governments will enact strong and effective climate mitigation policies – policies that would put an immediate cap on fossil fuel exploitation plus a binding schedule for rapid reductions in fossil fuel use over the coming years. They are unconcerned about such policy possibilities because they have ensured there are no binding commitments to climate mitigation protocols.

Second, there are far more assets which could potentially be stranded today than there were even in 2015. We can expect, then, that fossil fuel interests will fight even harder against strong climate mitigation policies in the next ten years than they did in the last ten years. And since, as we have seen, the layers of stranded assets would go far beyond the fossil corporations themselves into ‘the common capital of the class’, the resistance to asset stranding will also be widespread.

Malm and Carton sum it up this way: “We have no reliable friends in the capitalist classes. … any path to survival runs through their defeat.” (p 236)

The governments of the rich countries, while pledging their support for stringent global warming limits, have through their deeds sent us along the path to imminent overshoot. But suppose a major coal- or oil-producing jurisdiction passed a law enacting steep cutbacks in extraction, thereby stranding substantial fossil capital assets.

“Any measure significant enough to suggest that the fears harboured for so long are about to come true could pop the bubble,” Malm and Carton write. “[T]he stampede would be frenzied and unstoppable, due to the extent of the financial connections ….” (p 242)

Such a “total breakdown of capital” would come with drastic social risks, to be sure – but the choice is between a breakdown of capital or a breakdown of climate (which would, of course, also cause a breakdown of capital). Could such a total breakdown of capital still be initiated before it’s too late to avoid climate breakdown? In a book filled with thoughtful analysis and probing questions, the authors close by proposing this focus for further work:

“Neither the Green New Deal nor degrowth or any other programme in circulation has a plan for how to strand the assets that must be stranded. … [This] is the point where strategic thinking and practise should be urgently concentrated in the years ahead.” (p 244)

 

1 See “2018 was likely the most profitable year for U.S. oil producers since 2013,” US Energy Information Administration, May 10, 2019. The article shows that publicly traded oil producers had greater losses in the period 2015-2017 than they had gains in 2013, 2014, and 2018.

Image at top of page: “The end of the Closing Plenary at the UN Climate Change Conference COP28 at Expo City Dubai on December 13, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates,” photo by COP28/Mahmoud Khaled, licensed for non-commercial use via Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, accessed on flickr.

Critical metals and the side effects of electrification

A review of Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape The Future

Also published on Resilience.

“The energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables is a crucial part of the cure for climate change,” writes Vince Beiser on page one of his superb new book Power Metal. “But it’s a cure with brutal side effects.”

The point of Beiser’s stark warning is not to downplay the urgency of switching off fossil fuels, nor to assert that a renewable energy economy will be a greater ecological menace than our current industrial system.

Power Metal by Vince Beiser, published November 2024 by Riverhead Books.

But enthusiasm for supposedly clean and free solar and wind energy must be tempered by a realistic knowledge of the mining and refining needed to produce huge quantities of solar panels, wind turbines, transmission lines, electric motors, and batteries.

In Power Metal, Beiser explains why we would need drastic increases in mining of critical metals – including copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and the so-called “rare earths” – if we were to run anything like the current global economy solely on renewable electricity.

Beyond merely outlining the quantities of metals needed, however, he provides vivid glimpses of the mines and refineries where these essential materials are extracted and transformed into usable commodities. His journalistic treatment helps us understand the ecological impacts of these industries as well as the social and health impacts on the communities where this work is done, often in horrible conditions.

While cell phones and computers in all their billions each contain small quantities of many of the critical metals, the much-touted electric vehicle transition has a deeper hunger. Take nickel. “Stainless steel consumes the lion’s share of nickel output,” Beiser writes, “but batteries are gaining fast.” (page 69)

“The battery in a typical Tesla,” he adds, “is as much as 80 percent nickel by weight. The battery industry’s consumption of nickel jumped 73 percent in 2021 alone.” (p 69)

And so on, down the list: “a typical EV contains as much as one hundred seventy-five pounds of copper.” ( p 45)

“Your smartphone probably contains about a quarter ounce of cobalt; electric vehicle batteries can contain upwards of twenty-four pounds.” (p 77)

Extending current trend lines leads to the following prediction:

“By 2050, the International Energy Agency estimates, demand for cobalt from electric vehicle makers alone will surge to nearly five times what it was in 2022; nickel demand will be ten times higher; and for lithium, fifteen times higher ….” (p 4)

If those trend lines hold true – and that’s a big “if” – the energy transition will come with high ecological costs.

The historic leading producer of nickel, Norilsk in Siberia, “is one of the most ecologically ravaged places on Earth.” (p 70) Unfortunately a recent contender in Indonesia, where the nickel ore is a lower quality, may be even worse:

“Nickel processing also devours huge amounts of energy, and most of Indonesia’s electricity is generated by coal-fired plants. That’s right: huge amounts of carbon-intensive coal are being burned to make carbon-neutral batteries.” (p 74)

The Bayan Obo district in China is the world’s major producer of refined rare earths – and “not by coincidence, it is also one of the most polluted areas on the planet. …” (p 28)

Ideally we’d want the renewable energy supply chain to meet three criteria: cheap, clean, and fair. As it is, we’re lucky to get one out of three.

Mining of critical metals can only take place in particular locations – blessed or cursed? – where such elements are somewhat concentrated in the earth’s crust. When there is a choice of nations for suppliers, the global economy leans to nations with lax environmental and labour standards as well as low wages.

There are no geographic restrictions on processing, however, and that’s why China’s dominance in critical metal processing far exceeds its share of world reserves.

The Mountain Pass mine in California is rapidly expanding extraction of rare earths. But the US facility is only able to produce a commodity called bastnaesite, which contains all the rare earths mixed together. To separate the rare earth elements one from another, the mine operator tells Beiser, the bastnaesite must be shipped to China: “ There’s no processing facilities anywhere outside of China that can handle the scale we need to be producing.” (p 36)

The story is similar for other critical metals. Cobalt, for example, is mined in famously brutal conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and then sent to China for processing.

Could both the mining and the processing be done in ways that respect the environment and respect the health and dignity of workers? Major improvements in these respects are no doubt possible – but will likely result in a significantly higher price for renewable energy technologies. Our ability to pay that price, in turn, will be greatly influenced by how parsimoniously or how profligately we use the resulting energy. 

Collection of circuit boards at Agbogbloshie e-waste processing plant in Ghana. Image from Fairphone under Creative Commons license accessed via flickr.

Recycling to the rescue?

Is the messy extraction and processing of critical metals just a brief blip on a rosy horizon? Proponents of recycling sometimes make the case that the raw materials for a renewable energy economy will only need to be mined once, after which recycling will take over.

Beiser presents a less optimistic view. A complex global supply chain manufactures cars and computers that are composites of many materials, and these products are then distributed to every corner of the world. Separating out and re-concentrating the various commodities so they can be recycled also requires a complex supply chain – running in reverse.

“Most businesses that call themselves metal recyclers don’t actually turn old junk into new metal,” Beiser writes. “They are primarily collectors, aggregators.” (p 130) He takes us into typical work days of metal collectors and aggregators in his hometown of Vancouver as well as in Lagos, Nigeria. In these and other locations, he says, the first levels of aggregation tend to be done by people working in the informal economy.

In Lagos, workers smash apart cell phones and computers, and manually sort the circuit boards into categories, before the bundles of parts are shipped off to China or Europe for the next stage of reverse manufacturing:

“Shredding or melting down a circuit board and separating out those tiny amounts of gold, copper, and everything else requires sophisticated and expensive equipment. There is not a single facility anywhere in Africa capable of performing this feat.” (p 145)

Because wages are low and environmental regulations lax in Nigeria and Ghana, it is economically possible to collect and aggregate almost all the e-waste components there. Meanwhile in the US and Europe, “fewer than one in six dead mobile phones is recycled.” (p 146)

Cell phones are both tiny and complicated, but what about bigger items like solar panels, wind turbine blades, and EV batteries?

Here too the complications are daunting. It is currently far cheaper in the US to send an old solar panel to landfill than it is to recycle it. There isn’t yet a cost-effective way to separate the composite materials in wind turbine blades for re-use.

Lithium batteries add explosive danger to the complications of recycling: 

“If they’re punctured, crushed, or overheated, lithium batteries can short-circuit and catch on fire or even explode. Battery fires can reach temperatures topping 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit [538°C], and they emit toxic gases. Worse, they can’t be extinguished by water or normal firefighting chemicals. (p 153)

Perhaps it’s not surprising that only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are currently recycled. (p 151)

Given the costs, dangers, and complex supply chain needed, Beiser says, recycling is not “the best alternative to using virgin materials. In fact, it’s one of the worst.” (p 16)

Far better, he argues in the book’s closing section, are two other “Rs” – “reuse” and “reduce.”

Simply using all the cell phones in Europe for one extra year before junking them, he says, would avoid 2.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year –comparable to taking a million cars off the road.

Speaking of taking cars off the road, Beiser writes, “the real issue isn’t how to get more metals into the global supply chain to build more cars, it’s how to get people to where they want to go with fewer cars.” (p 186)

Given the high demands for critical metals involved in auto manufacturing, Beiser concludes that “the most effective single way that we as individuals can make a difference is this: Don’t buy a car. Not even an electric one.” (p 182) He might have added: if you do buy a car, get one that’s no bigger or heavier than needed for your typical usage, instead of the ever bulkier cars the big automakers push.

In response to projections about how fast we would need to convert the current world economy to renewable energy, Beiser fears that it may not be possible to mine critical metals rapidly enough to stave off cataclysmic climate change. If we dramatically reduce our demands for energy from all sources, however, that challenge is not as daunting:

“The less we consume, the less energy we need. The less energy we use, the less metal we need to dig up …. Our future depends. in a literal sense, on metal. We need a lot of it to stave off climate change, the most dangerous threat of all. But the less of it we use, the better off we’ll all be.” (p 204-205)

  • * *

“Energy transition” is a key phrase in Power Metal – but does this transition actually exist? Andreas Malm and Wim Carton make the important point that both “energy transition” and “stranded assets” remain mere future possibilities, each either a fond dream or a nightmare depending on one’s position within capitalist society. All the renewable energy installations to date have simply been additions to fossil energy, Malm and Carton point out, because fossil fuel use, a brief drop during the pandemic aside, has only continued to rise.

We turn to Malm and Carton’s thought-provoking new book Overshoot in our next installment.

Image at top of page: “Metal worker at Hussey Copper in Leetsdale, PA melts down copper on August 8, 2015,” photo by Erikabarker, accessed on Wikimedia Commons.

november mornings

PHOTO POST

On frosty November mornings I go to the beach.

Raspberry & Juniper

Breakwater

It’s never crowded, though I’m seldom the first to arrive.

So Inclined

Still Life with Coffee II

These days, I have a new bionic eye to play with: my very first cell phone. This is the first photo post I’ve done using a cell phone camera, and it’s fun to see what this device can do (as well as what it can’t do very well).

Group of seven

Past the pebbles

Before the sun pokes above the water, stones begin to blush.

Quiet Turbulence

Submergence

Stones catch rays

By the time the sun is up my last sips of coffee are cold and it’s time to wander back home.

Shining sands

November sunrise

Reflected sunrise

Facilitating a dangerous way of life – traffic engineers in a car culture

Also published at Resilience.

Wes Marshall calls attention to a paradox about the profession in which he began his career:

“It would make sense to assume that newer cities, built with all the knowledge that traffic engineers continue to accumulate, should be our safest cities. But that is not the case. It’s the older cities—mostly built before traffic engineers existed— that tend to be safer.” (Killed by a Traffic Engineer, p 202) 

Elsewhere in the pages of his new book, Marshall notes that the paradox extends to areas within cities as well: “Streets built before the advent of traffic engineers are some of our safest, often with far fewer fatalities and severe injuries than the new-and-improved, fully traffic-engineered versions.” ( p 257)

Killed By A Traffic Engineer, by Wes Marshall, Island Press 2024.

Marshall is now a professor of civil engineering and urban planning at the University of Colorado Denver. He distills 25 years of learning into Killed By a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System. (Island Press, April 2024) While he would like to see his profession become an agent for sustainability, safety, and conviviality, that will require a radical transformation of goals and methods.

The book is an extended take-down of the idea that the voluminous design guidelines, published by groups such as the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), provide evidence-based formulas for safe roads and streets.

Marshall argues that in fact these guidelines, far from prioritizing safety, put traffic volume and speed first. To the extent that safety is considered, he says, safety is typically viewed from the perspective of the drivers, and not those outside cars or trucks. Finally, he demonstrates through extensive historical research that many of the engineers who worked with or developed the guidelines over the past 70 years were aware that supporting evidence was lacking or fragmentary. 

Given the above summary, readers interested in transportation systems and planning might wonder if Marshall’s book largely repeats points made by Charles Marohn in his excellent book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. (Wiley, 2021)

There is some overlap and the messages of the two books are strongly complementary. Yet Marshall includes so much relevant detail, and such insightful probing of engineering and safety research, that Killed By A Traffic Engineer is worth every minute invested in reading its 344 pages, even for those who have already read Marohn’s work.

Marshall’s focus is almost solely on traffic engineering practice in the United States, but residents of car-dependent areas in other countries are likely to find a great deal of relevance in the book. 

In this review we’ll look at a few of the major topics Marshall covers.

First, there is the poor quality of evidence, and frequent misapplication of that evidence, underlying many traffic engineering guidelines. Second, the “factor of safety” used successfully in structural engineering often has contrary consequences in fields that, like traffic engineering, should account for human behaviour. Finally, using per-vehicle-mile safety metrics, instead of per capita metrics, blinds us to the true danger of a society in which driving substantial distances is an obligatory daily ritual for most people.

“Fatal accident on 32 Ave & 68th St NE, Calgary, Alberta, August 2008.” Photo by RAF-YYC, from Wikimedia Commons.

What didn’t they know, and when didn’t they know it?

A nascent field of study got its own scholarly journal when the Eno Foundation began publishing the Traffic Quarterly in 1947. The journal, which was later renamed Transportation Quarterly, continued until 2003 – and it appears that Marshall has read every article in every issue.

Rather than simply assume that the current massive tomes of road and street guidelines are based on extensive safety research, Marshall quotes many Quarterly articles to establish the contrary.

An important case of misapplied data was passed down as Heinrich’s Law, or the “accident triangle”. In 1931, Travelers Insurance employee H.W. Heinrich examined some data on industrial accidents. He determined that “In a workplace, for every accident that causes a major injury, there are 29 accidents that cause minor injuries and 300 accidents that cause no injuries.” (quoted by Marshall, page 94)

Would this same relationship apply in other settings or in other time periods? Who knows? Yet it became widely accepted among traffic engineers that a similar proportional relationship would exist between very serious crashes, moderately serious crashes, and crashes resulting in only minor dents or scratches to cars.

If  a steady, proportional relationship existed between accidents of differing severity, then it would follow that by reducing all accidents of any sort, we would reduce the serious accidents that maim or kill people.

This fixed proportional relationship was an illusion, but it was often a convenient illusion. Particularly when comparing the crash rates of specific locations, data on serious accidents might be too sparse to draw any valid inferences. Aggregating all crashes, however, might seem to provide an adequate number of data points.

As Marshall points out, this methodology cast a harsh light on downtown areas. Such typically congested areas often have a relatively high number of crashes. But since speeds are low, most of the crashes will be fender-benders.

Higher-speed arterials may have few fender-benders, but more serious injuries or fatalities.

An analyst working on the assumption that the total number of crashes was a reliable proxy for serious crashes would label the downtown locations “more dangerous” and the arterial roads “less dangerous”. This line of thinking led traffic engineers, more than sixty years ago, to try to improve safety by lessening congestion. Marshall writes:

“For much of the history of traffic engineering, we considered traffic congestion to be a proxy for road safety. As our good friends over at AASHO1 inform us in their 1957 manual on urban arterials, ‘Congestion breeds accidents.’” (p. 99)

Marshall highlights weaknesses in available data sets in other respects as well. He writes that the best accident data for the whole US is the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). The FARS reports contributing causes, but unless there are eyewitnesses or surveillance footage, the police often have no reliable way to determine something as basic as the speed the driver was driving. This results in a set of statistics that stretches credulity:

“Over a recent six-year period, 28,642 pedestrians lost their lives on streets with a posted speed limit. How many of the drivers who killed these 28,642 pedestrians were speeding? According to FARS, the answer is 2,015.

“Go look at almost any road. Does it seem within the realm of possibility that the speeding problem is limited to 7 percent of drivers? Of course not ….” (p 236)

Suppose the fatal crash report does include speeding as a contributing cause. It is all too easy to conclude “case closed”: the driver was to blame for speeding. But how much sense does this make, in a system where most roads are designed to facilitate speeds higher than the speed limit, where cars are marketed with the promise of exhilarating and consequence-free speed, where law enforcement seldom tickets drivers who are driving modestly above the supposed maximum legal speed, and where most drivers speed whenever the roads are free enough of congestion to allow this? Is it really sensible, in such a system, to simply blame the driver for speeding in those cases where an accident results, when the driver is doing what nearly all drivers routinely do?

Even more to the point, Marshall argues, traffic engineers will only contribute to safety when they stop focusing on the after-the-fact blaming of individual drivers, and work instead to design roads where speeding is not the predictable and average behaviour.2

Why a margin of safety may increase danger

Civil engineers, Marshall writes, typically receive much more instruction in structural engineering than in traffic engineering. But some eminently logical practices in structural engineering do not transfer well to traffic engineering.

An engineer designing a bridge support might calculate the strength needed to support the maximum expected weight, and then double the size of the pillar to add a “factor of safety”. An engineer designing a culvert might estimate maximum water flow, and then double the size of the culvert to add a factor of safety.

The double-strength pillar does not induce heavier trucks to cross the bridge, and the double-size culvert does not induce more rain to fall, so the factors of safety hold true.

But suppose traffic engineers work in the same fashion. Starting from the specified design speed and the estimated traffic volume, they consult the guidelines and sketch a roadway with a certain number of lanes of a certain width, with a certain amount of space beside the road that is cleared of any obstacles such as trees or parked cars. Then, to create a factor of safety, they might increase the width of the lanes, add a lane or two, and increase the amount of clear space beside the road.

In this case the factor of safety is counter-productive. The extra lane(s) induce more traffic to travel on the newly widened road, while the wider lanes and wider visual clear space result in drivers speeding up. With more traffic traveling at higher speeds, the risk of serious injury or fatalities is increased, not decreased, by the “factor of safety”.

“car accident @ vestavia hills”, Birmingham, Alabama, July 2011, photo by Rian Castillo, licensed under Creative Commons ATTRIBUTION 2.0 GENERIC, accessed via flickr.

The fatal flaw in “per vehicle mile” safety metrics

Traffic safety is often quantified using a per-vehicle-mile, or per-million-vehicle-mile, ratio. This has serious consequences. Marshall writes,

“Conventionally, distance traveled is the denominator in our crash rates. The number of crashes, injuries, or deaths on our roads is the numerator. You’d think that focusing on reducing the numerator so as to improve crash rates makes the most sense. The problem is that we’ve instead focused on increasing the denominator. In other words, given the way we measure road safety, we all seem safer if we all drive a lot more. We built places that force us to do so. Crashes go up a little, but we drive a lot more, so we’re convinced we improved safety.” (p 356)

Marshall supports his point with both a hypothetical example and with real-world data.

He asks us to consider the fictional towns of Driveton and Heresville. They each have lost 150 citizens in traffic crashes over the past 10 years. Does that make them equally safe?

Well, the average citizen of Driveton drives 25,000 miles per year, while citizens of Heresville only average 5,000 miles per year. Driveton’s fatality rate is 1.2 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles – approximately the US average – while the fatality rate in Heresville is 1.5 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles. If vehicle miles is the denominator, then Heresville is 25 per cent more dangerous than Driveton.

But consider one more important piece of data. Driveton has 50,000 people, while Heresville has 200,000. But they have the same number of annual fatalities. A citizen of Driveton has four times as much chance of dying in a traffic crash as a citizen of Heresville. And yet, Marshall writes, “conventional traffic engineering metrics tell us that Driveton is safer.” (p 85)

Using a per capita metric, rather than a per vehicle mile metric, tells us something crucially important about car-dependent mobility systems.

Marshall looked at 24 years of data from the US Fatality Analysis Reporting System. This data set includes the zip code of the drivers, and population density data is also available for each zip code. After grouping zip codes into twelve categories ranked from highest to lowest population density, Marshall writes, 

“What I found is that those living in the most urban places in the United States experience safety outcomes on par with the safest countries in the world. It gets worse and worse at every step in between until you reach the most rural places, which are on par with the most dangerous countries in the world. The difference? In the United States, you are six times more likely to die on the roads if you live in the most rural areas than in the most urban.” (p 92)

When we use a population metric, rather than a vehicle mile ethic, it’s clear that traffic violence is a greater risk to people who live in more car-dependent areas.

“One of the greatest barriers to road safety is having to drive everywhere, all the time, even for the simplest errand,” Marshall concludes. “More specifically, the greatest barriers to road safety are the places we’ve built that force people to drive everywhere, all the time, even for the simplest errand.” (p 356)

Traffic engineers have aided and abetted that car-dependency, by prioritizing vehicle capacity, speed and throughput on our roads and streets. Making safety the priority – that is, shrinking the per capita rate of traffic deaths and injuries – will require new ways of thinking. Traffic engineers will need to think about why public transit is a non-existent or unattractive option for so many people, and what they can do to help make good transit possible. Traffic engineers will need to plan streets that are safe for children to cross without worried adults hovering around them. Traffic engineers will need to plan streets that people with reduced physical ability can cross safely, and without going hundreds of meters out of their way. Traffic engineers will need to co-ordinate with urban planners to promote neighbourhoods where residents can routinely go shopping, go to school or work, and meet and visit with friends without getting into cars.

Traffic engineers will need to focus more on accessibility, and less on mobility.3

As Lewis Mumford wrote in 1963, in one of Marshall’s favourite quotes, “A good transportation system minimizes unnecessary transportation.”4

Notes

1 American Association of State Highway Officials, the precursor of today’s American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

2 This is a perspective also discussed at length in Jessie Singer’s 2022 book There Are No Accidents, reviewed here.

3 For a discussion of the difference between mobility and accessibility, see The Mobility Maze.

4 Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City, 1963, quoted by Marshall, page 359.

Image at top of page:, “Multi vehicle accident – M4 Motorway, Sydney, NSW, October 2012, photo by sv1ambo, from Wikimedia Commons.