Infrastructure, finance, and the sale of the future

A review of Timothy Mitchell’s The Alibi of Capital

Also published on Resilience.

Imagine yourself as a housing developer – an entrepreneur, a big-time player, a real deal-maker. Your people devise a plan to borrow money, buy land, design and win approval for a new subdivision, and sell 1,000 new housing units. Then, perhaps years before the houses are completed and decades before the initial mortgages are repaid, you sell your shares in the venture for a tidy profit. A neat trick, this, cashing in today on bills that others will pay long into the future.

You have become wealthier, but have you been a “wealth creator”? For that matter, are you contributing to “economic growth”? Where does the money come from for this venture: is it capital accumulated from the past, or is this money newly created the moment credit is extended by banks and off-setting debts are recorded on balance sheets?

These are among the many questions addressed by Timothy Mitchell in his new book The Alibi of Capital, out on March 10 from Verso.

Mitchell works his way through a profound rewriting of economic history and economic theory. He wants us to think carefully about who pays for what is labelled “economic growth.” Is the earning of interest some natural property of money? Why was the phrase “the economy” almost never used until the mid-20th century, while today the economy is routinely invoked as the determinant of what is politically, socially, or environmentally acceptable? Why do banks continue to invest in new fossil fuel infrastructures, in full public knowledge that these infrastructures are robbing future generations of a stable climate?

Let’s begin with a simpler question: is “financialization” an adequate term for the process by which a housing developer turns still-unbuilt houses into immediate profit? Mitchell doesn’t think so. While the creation and swapping of financial instruments is one essential part of the process, two others are equally essential. First, the process depends on the manufacture of long-lasting infrastructure. Second and equally important, there must be a legal and political framework that ensures holders of the financial instruments can enforce their claims to ongoing revenues five, ten, or even fifty years in the future.

What is often termed financialization, Mitchell, argues is really a technopolitical “apparatus of capture.”1 Mitchell writes:

“The apparatus is neither fully public nor private but combines aspects of both; is made up of both materials and ideas; deploys both law and violence; and depends upon both careful calculation and the imaginative construction of prospective worlds.” (The Alibi of Capital, page 30) 

Rail lines converging on Hauptbahnhof (central station) in Zurich, Switzerland, July 2025.

 

Shipowners and rail barons

The use of an “apparatus of capture” to secure present profits from future events did not begin recently. Mitchell traces the process back hundreds of years to early joint-stock companies engaged in long-distance commerce.

Shipowners typically required credit to finance long voyages in which revenue from the sale of products would only come many months later. The letters of credit, which were also “letters of debt plus interest,” were sometimes traded, with the seller accepting a discount so that they could be paid immediately, while the buyer would receive the principal plus interest perhaps a year or more later.

The infrastructure was not very durable – ships often sank – and the time frames were short, just a few months to perhaps a couple of years. This commerce didn’t provide much scope for capturing revenue from the future. That changed in the nineteenth century with the development of railroads, which Mitchell describes as a turning point.

Railroads were large-scale durable infrastructures – and required major investment up-front. Once built they offered the promise of revenues coming in for decades. They were often built as colonial enterprises, requiring imposition of governance and military/police power to protect that revenue. The prospect of strikes also grew in importance, as workers increasingly organized against dangerous conditions, long hours, and inadequate wages; the realization of future profits required the suppression of organized labour power.

If the technical and the political factors were aligned, however, the issuance of the credit/debt associated with new railroads gave financial markets a way to buy and sell the future, earning profits immediately on services which workers would provide and customers would pay for decades later.

Railroads were followed by many other large-scale and durable infrastructures: bridges, wharves, assembly lines, oil wells, refineries, paved roads. Though some were financed by the private sector and some by governments, there were exponential increases in credit and debt. These debts, of course, were recorded as assets by financial institutions – assets which could be sold for immediate profit, as long as the buyers could be reasonably confident of the long-term collection of promised revenues.

The process moved beyond large scale commerce to involve most citizens in capitalist societies. The invention of the long-term mortgage in the first half of the twentieth century made average homeowners into ongoing revenue sources for banks. That was soon followed by the introduction of credit cards, auto financing, and university education loans, and in some countries, huge medical debts, “converting the course of human lives into repayment schedules.” (p. 8)

This process of creating new money by issuing credit, then marketing the corresponding debts as assets, is highly profitable for some while many others pay the costs for decades. Mitchell cites an estimate that between 1950 and 2000, from 75% to 90% of the price rise of housing was attributable to capitalisation by the mortgage industry.

Theodicy and oikodicy

Those who mis-spent their youth studying philosophy might recall the centuries-old conundrum of theodicy: if the world is governed by an all-knowing, benevolent god, then why does evil persist, frequently placing good people in terrible circumstances?2

Mitchell borrows the coinage oikodicy from Joseph Vogl. Based on the Greek word oikos (root of oikonomia), oikodicy helps draw attention to “the unacknowledged role of economics in the justification of suffering.” (The Alibi of Capital, p. 138)

If capitalism is the best of all possible economic systems, and the market represents the collective wisdom of all buyers and sellers, why is there drastic and crushing inequality, both between countries and within countries? Does “the economy” simply dictate, with the force of natural law, that a few will be rich while many will struggle to find food or shelter?

Mitchell sees the apparatus of capture of the future, so central to corporate capitalism, as a key mechanism in maintaining and worsening inequality. He argues that the profession of economics, as it is typically practiced in universities, the corporate world, and government, “both facilitates and obfuscates the capture of the future.” (p. 13)

Most significantly: what is economic growth? Growth of GDP is commonly presented as an obviously good thing and an obvious necessity; a temporary lull in this growth is a grave matter requiring government intervention. Mitchell argues, however, that a great deal of what is counted as “growth” is achieved at the expense of the future. In the language of economics, anticipated revenues are “discounted”; the full value will be repaid by a future generation; and the difference between the discounted value and the full value is chalked up as “growth”. But why should the impoverishment of future generations be considered as today’s “growth”?

This comes into sharp relief when considering fossil fuels and climate change. Fossil fuels are clearly precious substances, able to provide easily storable, transportable energy which can be used on demand.

It has been understood and accepted for more than a hundred years that fossil fuels are finite. The rapid extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, then, clearly leaves future generations with far less of a precious material. Yet this ongoing depletion has been celebrated for a hundred years as an engine of “growth.”

For forty years or more we have also understood that intensive exploitation of fossil fuels is depleting the future of something even more precious: a stable climate. This depredation too continues to be excused and celebrated as the “growth” which “the economy” depends on.

The rules-based order

The final chapter of The Alibi of Capital focuses on the climate crisis, but Mitchell takes a long and winding route to get there.

He includes a fascinating discussion of village society in the Nile River basin, the sophisticated ecological understanding embodied in centuries- or millennia-old hydrological management, and the way large-scale dams reduced the overall productivity of the Nile basin while making possible the colonial extraction of profits from large-scale sugar and cotton plantations. Several important figures in the history of economic theory appear here, including Joseph Schumpeter who posited a key role for “the entrepreneur” in his theory of creative destruction.

In his previous book Carbon Democracy Mitchell argued that “the economy” came into common parlance in the mid-twentieth century, coincident with a huge influx of low-cost energy from fossil fuels. In The Alibi of Capital he explores this at greater length. He delves into usage of the word economy over the past three hundred years, through various permutations of the discipline of political economy. Economy was seen as a process akin to “economizing” until shortly after WWII, when it took on a new guise as a noun, the new entity known as “the economy”. Then, suddenly, the economy became the powerful and vengeful god which might wreak havoc on society, if we didn’t allow specially-trained experts to make sure the needs of the economy are given constant priority.

Tracing these changes takes us through the development of new forms of credit and its calculation, new developments in physical infrastructure, and new rules by which the eventual repayment of debts can be assured. The new rules work on many levels from personal struggles with credit card debt or student loans, to national regulation of securities-trading, to contracts in which international financial institutions demand veto power over national budgets to make sure these banks have priority over domestic claimants.

I would have liked to see Mitchell’s concluding chapter provide further ideas on how to respond to the climate crisis. As it is, though, The Alibi of Capital elucidates how the economy, in claiming to produce growth, is extracting profits from the future while saddling coming generations with both financial debt and ecological deprivation. In closing, then, we can think of Mitchell’s ideas in relation to a recent work by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, Overshoot (reviewed here).

Malm and Carton note that major banks have dramatically increased their investments in fossil fuel infrastructure since the 2015 Paris Agreement. Fossil-dependent infrastructure, however, goes far beyond the mines, the wells, the pipelines or the refineries, and includes airlines and airports, most current auto manufacturing, the plastics industry, the cement industry, and other sectors – who in turn receive financing through investment banks.

Equity and bond markets, then, together hold vast encumbrances on the future – they are profiting today from debts that they expect other people to be repaying, ten, twenty or thirty years from now. The rules of the game protect this extraction from the future, regardless of our full awareness that the burning of fossil fuels is more destabilizing, with each passing day, to the climate we all depend on.

All these fossil-dependent investments, then, are assets that must be stranded – written down, written off – unless we consent to valuing the profits of investors above the rights of future generations to health and prosperity.

Wim and Carton proposed a focus for climate justice 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.” (Overshoot, p. 244)

Mitchell’s new book reinforces this essential point. We must see through the alibi of capital, we must reclaim society from the grip of the economy, and we must change the rules of the game to save our collective future.

Footnotes

1 He credits the phrase “apparatus of capture” to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1987.

2 The Wikipedia entry quotes philosopher Alvin Plantinga: “theodicy is ‘an answer to the question of why God permits evil’”. As an undergraduate philosophy major more than 50 years ago I took a course taught by Plantinga.

Image at top of page: Negishi LNG Terminal, Yokohama City, Kanagawa Pref., Japan, January 2015, by Σ64, accessed via Wikimedia Commons.

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.

The concentrated ills of concentrated agribusiness

A review of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry.

Also published on Resilience.

If you are a government-approved American hog farmer, you drive: a) a dusty pickup truck, from your barn to your local small-town feed store; b) a huge articulated tractor, through your thousand-acre fields of corn and soybeans; c) a private jet, which you fly from your midwestern corporate headquarters to a second or third home in Florida.

Barons, by Austin Frerick, published by Island Press, March 2024.

If you’ve read Austin Frerick’s new book Barons (Island Press, March 2024), you’ll pick the private jet. The hog farmer won’t drive to a small-town feed store, because small towns in agricultural areas are losing most of their businesses. The hog farmer won’t use a big tractor to till fields of corn and soybeans; as a hog specialist who raises no grain, he or she will buy feed “inputs” from big grain farmers who raise no animals.

But as two prominent US Department of Agriculture secretaries advocated, farmers should “get big or get out”. And a hog farmer who has really “got big” will want that private jet, either to get to a second home on the Gulf Coast or to make quick trips to Washington to lobby for subsidies and tax breaks.

In his highly readable book, Frerick describes the businesses of barons who dominate seven sectors of the US food industry. In the process he illuminates much in recent American history and goes a long way towards diagnosing environmental ills, socio-economic ills, and the ill health of so many food consumers.

Although two of the barons, Cargill Inc. and JAB Holding Company, are well over a hundred years old, all seven barons have seen explosive growth in the 40 years since the US government switched to very lax anti-trust regulations. Except for JAB (a little-known Luxembourg-based company that has recently swallowed coffee supply chains around the world), all the highlighted barons are US-based, and all are very much involved in international trade.

One of the companies is neither a grower, processor, nor retailer of food – its core businesses are in marketing and in owning and licensing genetics. Driscoll’s is the major brand of strawberries and several other berries sold in supermarkets in the US as well as in Canada. (Frerick writes that they control about one-third of the US berry market.) The company buys from 750 growers in two dozen countries, employing more than one hundred thousand people. The growers work to Driscoll’s specifications, but Driscoll’s has no legal responsibility to those hundred thousand workers.

Now that American consumers have learned to buy fresh – albeit nearly tasteless – fruit twelve months of the year, it’s essential for Driscoll’s to have suppliers in countries with different seasons. This has other business advantages, Frerick writes: “the Driscoll’s model is based on shifting farming out of the country to companies that don’t need to worry about US minimum wage laws or environmental regulations.”

For two of the barons profiled, most of the production as well as most of the environmental damage occurs closer to home. Jeff and Deb Hansen, who own that private jet from the opening paragraph, rule an empire known as Iowa Select which brings five million pigs to market each year. “Today,” French writes, “Iowa raises about one-third of the nation’s hogs, about as many as the second-, third-, and fourth-ranking states combined.”

Dairy barons Sue and Mike McCloskey own a vast complex in Indiana called Fair Oaks Farms. Besides being an (indoor) home to 36,000 dairy cows, and the midwest’s largest agri-tourism destination, Fair Oaks produces about 430,000 gallons of manure every day.

The huge hog, chicken, dairy or beef operations favoured by the current rules of the game share this problem – they produce far more manure than can be safely used to augment local soils. The result, in many locations across the country, is polluted groundwater, runoff that disrupts river and lake ecosystems – and an overpowering stench for residents unlucky enough to live just downwind.

For workers in the hog, dairy, berry, slaughter, and grocery businesses profiled by Frerich, working conditions are often dangerous and the pay is low. The book reflects on Upton Sinclair’s century-old classic The Jungle, in which immigrant workers toil for meagre wages in filthy and dangerous Chicago slaughterhouses. In the decades after Sinclair’s book became a runaway bestseller, workers unionized and working conditions and wages in slaughterhouses improved dramatically. Today, however, many of the unions have been defeated, many slaughterhouses have moved to small towns where there is little other opportunity for employment, and most workers once again are new immigrants who have little ability to fight back against employers.

The most widely recognized name in Barons is Walmart. The mega-retailer is far and away the largest grocer in the US. As such, there are obvious advantages in buying products in huge, uniform quantities – in short, products that barons in the hog, dairy, grain, and berry sectors are ideally suited to provide. It matters not whether these products are truly nutritious. What matters is whether the products are cheap and, in line with WalMart’s directives to suppliers, cheaper year after year. Still, French explains, not cheap enough for WalMart’s own employees to afford – WalMart employees in many states require government assistance just to feed their families.

Barons is not a long book – under 200 pages, not including the footnotes – but Frerick covers a lot of ground. He does not spend a lot of time discussing solutions, however, beyond some very good ideas sketched briefly in the Conclusion. Still, for people not already deeply familiar with industrial agribusiness and its associated environmental, labour, health and political ills, Barons is a compelling read.

Image at top of page: “State of the art lagoon waste management system for a 900 head hog farm,” photo by Jeff Vanuga for the United States Department of Agriculture, public domain, accessed on Wikimedia Commons.