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Equalizing qualitatively different kinds of labor in markets is less an outcome of exact measurement and more one of transforming activities that were formerly beyond comparison. Their comparison and exact equalization only makes sense in a setting where the parties involved are seeking to maximize their gains out of a transaction under competitive terms (Heilbroner, 1983). Value is then not some intrinsic quality that objects of human labor possess. Instead, value is a characteristic bestowed on things by a social order influencing people’s behavior. In capitalism, people are rationalized into becoming “economic beings” (Heilbroner, 1983: 276). As such, they pursue the maximization of their self-interest having their livelihoods pitted against each other (De Angelis, 2007). From the Marxian perspective, (capitalist) value is a category that reveals “a set of antagonistic social relations and systemic structures that compel individuals to act in certain ways” (Pitts, 2020: 1). A central tool facilitating the transformation of concrete to abstract labor has been the development of scientific bookkeeping. Historically born in the commercial centers of the Italian city states in the 14th century (Yamey, 1949) it is most famously associated with Pacioli’s work in Venice in 1494 (Pacioli, 1994/1494). Sombart (1987/1916) examines the birth and development of capitalism focusing on a shift from a needs-based economy to one primarily satisfying acquisition. In this process, Sombart identifies the role of double-entry bookkeeping as key in instilling traditional artisans and craftspeople with the capitalist spirit and rendering objective the idea of wealth (Most, 1976). Double-entry objects represent a complex system of needs and motivations in simple calculations, thereby fostering a general economization, and thus fundamental change of social life (Drechsler, 2000). Double-entry bookkeeping is at the heart of capitalist value by crystalizing capitalist mechanics and ethics. Capitalism has procured in double-entry bookkeeping a tool which activates its forces, while this tool proliferated capitalism out of capitalism’s own spirit (Eddie and Murphy, 1984). Double-entry follows a logic of acquisition and exchange which allowed an underlying economic order to expand, rendering land, things, actions, people, and their relations into the new objects of acquisition and exchange. Eventually, economics emerged as a discipline “pure” from moral and value judgment, and by doing so tacitly ascribed moral superiority to commercial success itself (Weber, 2013). Generations of economists have been trained in deprivation of analytical tools to examine value separate from the dynamics of prices (Mazzucato, 2018) – a type of “schooling” that has been exactly the outcome of the dominant perception of value (Pitts, 2020). Political questions of value and justice are examined as mere calculable implications of prices, wages, or profits. The task of theory of value is further from finding practical standards for equalizing commodities. It is the theoretical understanding and explanation of this equalization process, along with its causal relations and practical implications (Rubin, 1973). The process of commodities being equalized in markets is closely connected to the way labor, and other factors of production, are acquired and exchanged. Likewise, it is connected to the enclosure of the commons, the grabbing of livelihoods outside the market order, and the collapse of ecosystems. The abandonment of inquiries on value from the classical political economy to the neoclassical theory is not indicative of a purported irrelevance of value but a direct outcome of how value is conceived and established in capitalism. The function of value as a means of imparting the capitalist principles and structures to economic life remains a persisting feature. In order to address the devastating impact of capitalism on people and ecosystems we need a perception of value that conveys different orderly configurations.

Inquiries on value are relevant and essential for economic thought. As Heilbroner (1983) argues, questions on value are not elementary, but elemental, in the sense that they “powerfully influence the constitution of economic thought by identifying different elements within the social process as strategic for our understanding of it” (253). Digital commoning and commons-based innovation shed light on such elements essential in our understanding of a tentative social order based on the commons. They illustrate value perceptions conditioned on norms and prefigurative institutions that champion sharing and participation over acquisition; openness over control; and pre-distribution over redistribution (Pazaitis et al., 2017b; Bauwens et al., 2019). Digital commons cases illustrate much more than a form of optimizing human affairs over digital media. It is a unique mode of organization of human affairs, with a capacity to maintain “coherence in the face of vanishing transaction costs” (Benkler, 2017: 271). It is a primary form of “structured human living-together” (Drechsler, 2001: 105) that formulates a social whole within which “actions become meaningful to the actor” (Graeber, 2001: 254), i.e., a new definition of value for a new form of social organization. 3.1 CONCEPTUALIZING VALUE AS A COMMONS A conceptualization of value as a commons is a normative and politically connotated task. Based on an understanding of value as a means of establishing a particular social order endowed by certain principles, a normative approach to value aims to define the principles to which the empirical elements conform (Heilbroner, 1983). Hence, there is no objectively or otherwise determined standard defining this order other than a set of political principles. The strength of a normative approach is the realization that “the order manifested by an economic structure should be that which its ruling elements [...] desires it to be” (Heilbroner, 1983: 258). Let us begin this section with summarizing which these ruling elements for value as a commons are. By approaching value itself as a commons we adhere to the understanding of value as the importance of actions rather than things (Graeber, 2014). Value is an expression of a collective agreement, and action upon it, on what is important. It functions insofar people uphold the shared norms and rules that make the system work. Value as a commons defines the meaning of actions, processes, and relations amongst them as inherently collective and embedded in certain social and ecological conditions. All that is valued is predicated by collective action and is meant for collective associations between the agents concerned, human and non-human. With the commons seen as a distinct life form (Bollier and Helfrich, 2019), value as a commons is its special meaning of existence. Value as a commons is manifested in people’s capacities to arrange their life affairs and co-produce their livelihoods through sharing and participation in common doing. Value is created when these capacities are improved, and it is destroyed when they diminish. Value as a commons is also regionally and chronologically pervasive. The capacities for sharing and common doing are directly related to a specific space and time but convey aspects of the past and the future in a synthesis that simultaneously takes place locally and globally. Especially in the digital economy, limitations of time and space become less relevant from a technical point of view and gain significance from a reflective one: They no longer define what we can do, rather show us what we can do differently. They portray the commons as what Helfrich (in Bollier, 2016a: 24) describes as “an important form of transpersonal rationality and coordination – a new category that describes the individual-in-relation-with- others” (Pazaitis and Bauwens, 2019; see also Gadamer, 1960). The weakness of a normative approach is that the moral and political norms upon which it relies are arbitrary and, thus, prone to challenge from different points of view (Heilbroner, 1983). This limitation simultaneously recognizes that economic matters define the means rather than the ends of value practices. The definition of what is important in life remains a political subject. As Graeber (2014: 11) puts it: “Ultimately, a free society can only be one in which everyone has an equal power to determine for themselves what they believe to be important. The only legitimate economic question [...] is what sort of system for the distribution of material goods will best put people in a position to do so”. An approach on value through the commons allows the possibility for various perceptions and interpretations of value to co-exist and co-evolve as long as they remain pertinent to community-defined rules. Local biophysical conditions and community-defined values may function as boundary objects, creating interfaces across different people, places, social systems, and times. Acknowledging the dangers of a totalitarian approach to value, a theory of value as a commons aims at value sovereignty (Bollier, 2016b; Bauwens et al., 2019), i.e., the ability for people to determine and act upon shared definitions of value.

Commons Systems and Entangled Reproduction If capital is characterized by a systemic logic that tends to exhaust the deep commons, then a politics of commoning should strive to produce alternative affective-rhetorical configurations of reality that relate to the world in less destructive, more mutually responsive ways. To articulate this position, we engage the work of Massimo de Angelis, who develops a systemic perspective that attends to how ontological conceptions of the commons translate into concrete practices that dispose bodies toward existence-in-common. De Angelis thus provides conceptual tools for cultivating “rhetorical disposi-tions” (Chaput 17)—new capacities or systemic organizations of affect—that might offer a “living, embodied training” in engaging the deep commons in less destructive ways (Chaput 16).De Angelis begins his account with the insight that individual and collective existence is constituted by an ensemble of systems that a given entity “participates in to different degrees and forms” (78–79). Such systems encompass human and nonhuman scales, at their limit composing a “relational field [. . .] that comprises and bounds pretty much everything” (133). Within this larger perspective, De Angelis focuses specifically on what he calls commoning practices: individual and collective ways of configuring reality that are oriented toward (re)producing mutually empowering capacities of “resi-lience and self-organization” (213). Where capital tends to exhaust the systems that it enfolds in order to produce capacities of limitless potential growth for the subjects it privileges, commoning practices aim to produce capacities of interdependence between the systems they enfold. While such a process still involves cuts and exclusions, the boundary-drawing practices of commons systems attend to their constitutive entanglements with the goal of producing resilience and mutual vulnerability within a commons system and in relation to its provisional outsides.According to De Angelis, the resonances that render commoning practices into stable systems arise through the production of affective relations (in addition to the ambient capacities afforded by physical elements like buildings, tools, forests, and streams). The material performance of communing produces “specific communication patterns” (259) that entail “social and psychic rewards, which feed back into the system” (235). These processes of feedback or systemic resonance produce “the motiva-tion . . . to enter into further commoning relations” (235). They also provide the capacity to reframe the subjective and ecological exhaustion produced by capital as a “common material condition” of vulnerability (235), rather than a condition of precarity to be foisted on the many for the benefit of the few.De Angelis’s theory of commons systems describes a general horizon of practices that might actualize relations to the deep commons without instrumentalizing or economizing it. However, merely affirming the commons in a general sense is not enough. As Yellowknives Dene scholar and activist Glen Sean Coulthard writes, arguments for a “‘blanket return of the commons’” that avoid reckoning with the specific power dynamics constitutive of different commons systems risk “becom-ing complicit in the very structures of domination that [they] ought to oppose” (12), erasing histories of oppression within a utopian vision of the commons as panacea. In order to engage this dimension of specific practices and power dynamics, we now briefly discuss three kinds of boundary-commoning practices that De Angelis sees as crucial to effectively producing and preserving commons systems: antagonistic boundaries between commons and noncommons systems, affirmative boundaries between multiple commons systems, and boundaries between human and nonhuman affective- rhetorical systems.

Capitalism as Affective-Rhetorical SystemMuch of the work needed to theorize capitalism as an affective-rhetorical system has already been performed in rhetorical studies. Building on rhetorical theories of capitalism as a process of affective circulation that capacitates bodies in accordance with its historically specific logics of governance (Chaput; Greene), rhetorical scholars aligned with new materialism have framed capitalism in terms of a multiplicity of infrastructures, or affective-rhetorical systems, that render “meaningless the chicken and the egg question of whether nature or culture dominates the contemporary political economic terrain” (Chaput and Hanan, “Hegemony” 354). Such scholarship conceptualizes capital as a “geontological” and “biopolitical” process that “habituate[s], regulate[s], and transform[s] . . . [its environments] according to fluctuating political economic dynamics” (Chaput and Hanan, “Hegemony” 358).Given the detail of this previous scholarship, this section will not provide a full-fledged rhetorical account of capitalism. Instead, this section will focus on the boundary-making practices and patterns of relation that characterize capitalism as an affective-rhetorical system. Most generally, we argue that capital’s boundaries are structured as frontiers that continually enfold their environments with the aim of ensuring capital’s growth. More specific to the discussion of power relations and the human we have offered so far, we argue that capital deploys a frontier between nature and society that centers humans as the “‘masters and possessors of nature’” (Descartes qtd. in Patel and Moore 51) and further empowers tendentially “white, western bourgeois cis-male” human subjects at the expense of other human and nonhuman bodies alike (Davis 196).Many historical configurations of power are characterized by boundary-drawing practices that violently dispossess the deep commons, whether territorial boundaries drawn to expel hunter- gatherers from arable agricultural land, ancient boundaries between the polis and surrounding spaces (e.g., oikos and chora) that legitimated the dispossession of “barbarians,” or the “parcelized” bound-aries of feudal ownership that underwrote relations of serfdom and tithe (Nail 22–23). However, capital as affective-rhetorical system is uniquely destructive to the deep commons because of its ability to structure its own boundaries according to a logic of frontiers. As Raj Patel and Jason Moore argue, frontiers are polymorphic, porous boundaries that transform capital’s diverse systemic environments into measurable forms that capital can appropriate to fuel a cycle of tendentially limitless growth (19). Capital’s frontiers enable it to overcome systemic crises and barriers “by siphoning life from else-where” (18),) averting tendencies that might disrupt its systemic functioning. They are also oriented toward the “cheapening” (19) of the deep commons that comprise capital’s environments: capital seeks to enfold other kinds of relation into itself, transforming “undenominated relationships” into discrete, quantified “circuits of production and consumption” (22) that generate “as much food, work, energy, and raw materials with as little disruption”—and as little investment—as possible (21). Framed as an affective-rhetorical system, capital is simultaneously reflexive about the myriad of entanglements that produce it, and, at the same time, a relatively sovereign system of power that cheapens the deep commons for the purpose of unlimited accumulation.While capital cheapens the deep commons in relation to a host of frontiers, we focus on capital’s enactment of a frontier between nature and society. As Patel and Moore argue, this frontier is central to capitalist boundary-making because it acts as a central “organizing principle” of capitalism and directly structures the boundaries between capital and its nonhuman environments (51). The nature- society frontier often takes the form of extractive practices that enfold affective-rhetorical systems at different scales into a stock of raw material resources. These practices include the harvest of precious metals that make monetary circulation (and contemporary technologies of finance and computing) possible, ecologically exhaustive industrial farming practices like genetically modified crops and the exhaustion of soil through economies of scale (which provide cheap but ultimately less nutritious food to reproduce the bodies of workers and fuel the ideologies that drive consumer capitalism), and practices like gene and seed patenting that directly commodify nonhuman forms of life. Across a vast array of material-discursive domains, these extractive practices facilitate the circulation of goods and affects through global markets as abstracted, atomized objects, generating surplus value for an ever- smaller swath of wealthy human individuals at the expense of larger ecosystems.In addition to exhausting the deep commons through extractive practices that target capitalism’s nonhuman environments, the frontier between nature and society produces a hierarchy within the social domain that forcefully “shift[s] certain humans into the category of nature” (Patel and Moore 50). This entails that “most women, Indigenous peoples, slaves, and colonized peoples” were (and continue to be) treated as “not fully human” in different yet overlapping ways, and that the labor of those peoples, as well as practices of care labor and “the work of extrahuman natures (animals, soils, forests, fuels) . . . [is] rendered largely invisible” (Patel and Moore 24–25). While the boundary between nature and society is continually renegotiated under capitalism—varying from overtly oppressive and hierarchical forms to apparently liberatory discourses of civic humanism and even transhumanism—the split between agentic, human sociality, and unagentic, nonhuman matter entails that the very figure of the human “presumes . . . violence against those who lack self-determination” or who do not fit the “overrepresented” figures of the human as “White and male” and as self-proprietary economic subject (Towns 353; see also Bost). Such violence is structurally enacted along hierarchies of racialization, hetero- and cissexism, ableism, and class domination that performatively materialize “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks) through the figure of the human.Capital’s deployment of the nature-society frontier—along with other frontier practices that produce everything from cheap food to cheap energy—has the cumulative effect of exhausting the diverse human and nonhuman affective-rhetorical systems that fall within its orbit. To be rendered legible as objects of capitalist circulation, the relational aspects of ecosystems, supply chains, and practices of living labor must be perpetually converted into “a series of inputs or hindrances to production” within a horizon of continued economic growth (Patel and Moore 23). In other words, capital’s patterns of boundary-making demonstrate a great deal of responsiveness to the polythetic, entangled ecology of potential we elaborate above, and, at the same time, deploy a formalizing, yet flexible, logic to govern entanglement in order to produce unlimited growth for capital. As an affective-rhetorical system that transforms ecologically “vulnerable complexity and diversity” (Stormer and McGreavy 19) into discrete objects of value that can be hierarchically ordered and sorted and then circulated in relation to larger systemic patterns of organization, capitalism produces stability for a small swath of humanity while unevenly redistributing precarity along racialized and gendered lines. At the same time, capital renders the environments it metabolizes increasingly unstable, resulting in the disruption of relational patterns at a variety of scales, from the global destruction wrought by climate change to more local disruptions caused by deforestation, desertifica-tion, and changes in weather patterns, which also disproportionately affect the human bodies rendered most precarious by capital.

2.3 VALUE AS A COLLECTIVE AGREEMENT To perceive value differently, we need to break away from the limitations of a theory of value, inquiring about a general substance or the essential nature of value to explain economic phenomena. Instead, we can reach two significant breakthroughs by understanding value as a means or process that conveys certain principles and orderly configurations to economic phenomena. First, we can demystify the underlying mechanisms that drive this process in capitalism, such as accounting practices and market dynamics. Second, understanding value as a conveyor or specific orderly configurations can allow us to imagine different configurations being conveyed. To enunciate such an approach, we need to look further from political economy and into anthropology. Graeber (2001) describes value as the way actions become meaningful to those who act by being incorporated within a larger social whole, real or imaginary. It is a definition in line with the task of a theory of value as described above: as a way people represent the importance of their actions to themselves, value becomes the mechanism that defines and reproduces orderly configurations guiding social phenomena. De Angelis (2007), building on McMurtry (2002), describes such orderly configurations as value systems, i.e., conceptual grids through which people see the world and classify good from bad and normal from abnormal. Most importantly, classify what they have to accept and what they can or should change. Value systems are articulated as value practices, defined as “actions, processes, and webs of relations, predicated on a value system while reproducing it” (De Angelis, 2007: 29). Value practices are expressed in individuals selecting between “goods” and “bads” within a value system and acting upon this selection, thus articulating a social whole constituting those selections anew. Value is then understood through the systematic patterns of individual actions articulating a coherent social system that defines how people live and co-produce their livelihoods. Α value system is the product of people reaching a collective agreement on how their way of living with others becomes meaningful and act upon this agreement. Prone as it may be to power and influence under capitalism, this type of agreement remains a collective consensus. The capitalist value system is based on appropriation, commodification, and exploitation. Yet, the system itself is inherently self-managed: it works insofar as people uphold the implicitly practiced rules and norms necessary for the system to function. Much like our collective memory, heritage, and traditions, the reproduction of a value system is maintained by collective action. In the capitalist value system, value is a means for extraction and capture to drive exchange. But value is itself a commons, albeit an enclosed one under capitalist value practices. As a matter of collective agreement, value is also contested. Though the capitalist value system is what defines capitalism, it is not the only value system in capitalist society (Harvie and Millburn, 2010). People, being people, “may value many other actions: passing time with one’s children and friends, lolling around in bed, praying to one god or another or celebrating a saint, treating fellow humans with respect and dignity, and so on and so on” (Harvie and Millburn, 2010: 635). The contest occurs when it is through a specific value system that people’s livelihoods and security are being reproduced. Therefore, the only way to recognize and possibly transcend a value system that pervades all aspects of our lives, is to step outside it (De Angelis, 2007). The broad disruption brought about by the capabilities and shared imaginaries around the digital commons arguably provides a window of opportunity for this step, as we explain below.

At the very least, a think tank’s “director of health policy studies” should not bury strong counter-arguments from experts. But even in Cannon’s longer discussions of this issue, he at no point takes the objections seriously. He says that the short-term plans “free consumers to avoid coverage they do not want” and cites studies showing that millions would choose the short-term plans, saying that this “would produce significant social-welfare gains” (because the more people’s market preferences are satisfied, the better). But the whole argument of the critics is that the gains of “increased choice” and “letting health people opt to have less coverage” are outweighed by the costs of destroying the whole framework by which the Affordable Care Act has succeeded in getting so many people into plans with strong basic coverage. That’s the AMA’s argument, and if you’re going to be a serious public commentator on health policy, you can’t pretend to readers of the Wall Street Journal that the argument doesn’t exist.

So, the Cato Institute: Never trust them. Because these sorts of people are just not going to represent the issues fairly. They’re not going to report the conclusions of experts accurately (Cannon cites the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to show that industry professionals agree with him, and ignores the many medical practitioners who don’t). They’re going to pick quotes from studies that sound good, and unless you have academic journal access and can check for yourself, you’ll never know whether the studies contained other important findings. In an academic setting, this would border on malpractice. These people may have charts and statistics and degrees, but they are just not scholars. They already think that laissez-faire capitalism is correct, and they think it because it’s what their economic theory tells them must be true, and so any empirical evidence to the contrary will be ignored. (Again, if you truly won’t be satisfied until I go through a dozen more of their publications and show all the same tendencies, I can do it. But just try it for yourself.)

The Top 10 Think Tanks by Amount Received from U.S. Government and Defense Contractors

RAND Corporation $1,029,100,000

“Renewable” electricity — predominantly wind and solar power — is all the rage, described by numerous commentators, politicians, pundits, journalists, and other such “experts” as cost-competitive, clean, and a major part of the solution to the “existential crisis” now purportedly looming large as an attendant effect of anthropogenic climate change. A massive expansion of wind and solar power is a central component of the various proposals subsumed under the heading “Green New Deal” (GND), which has faded from the headlines for now, but which is very likely to return to prominence as next year’s presidential race intensifies. Notwithstanding the romantic view of wind and solar power held by many, they are not cost-competitive, they are very far from clean, and they would do remarkably little to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and anthropogenic climate change, the “crisis” view of which is unsupported by the evidence. Several available analyses show that a major expansion of wind and solar power would increase the emissions of such conventional pollutants as carbon monoxide. Even apart from those problems, the renewable-electricity component of the GND is unworkable as a matter of straightforward electrical engineering, unless one believes that the American electorate will accept constant and widespread blackouts. In the larger context, the opposition to conventional energy that is the core of the GND is fundamentally anti-human, because one major implication of the opposition to fossil fuels is an aversion to increases in the value of human capital and other parameters that have the effect of increasing the demand for conventional energy. Moreover, the authoritarian implications of the GND are serious, however unnoticed. High costs are a major problem with wind and solar power. First, wind flows and sunlight are intermittent: Power generation from windmills and solar panels cannot be scheduled in advance, because the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow. This means that wind and solar “capacity factors” — the percentage of the time that wind and solar units actually produce electricity — are much lower than those for such conventional units as coal, gas, and nuclear, new installations of which have capacity factors of 85–90 percent. For onshore wind units, the figure is 40 percent or less, and it is 30 percent or less for solar facilities. Note that a massive expansion of wind and solar power as envisioned in the GND would drive those numbers downward, because the sites with the best wind and sunlight conditions are developed first, with new wind and solar farms necessarily sited at increasingly unfavorable locations. Accordingly, the wind- and solar-power industries would experience scale diseconomies — rising average costs — as more such capacity was added to the market. Wind turbines operate at a wind farm near Milford, Utah May 21, 2012. The Milford Wind Corridor Project, developed by the First Wind energy company, is a 306-megawatt, 165-unit wind farm. Picture taken May 21, 2012. REUTERS/George Frey Wind turbines at a wind farm near Milford, Utah. George Frey/Reuters The lower capacity factors mean that the cost of generating power is vastly higher for renewables than it is for conventional electricity. The Institute for Energy Research estimates that wind power is about twice as expensive as conventional gas-fired power, and that solar power is almost three times as expensive. The ubiquitous claims that wind and solar power now are cost-competitive ignore substantial costs for backup power and much longer transmission lines, and the effects of massive subsidies and guaranteed market shares. In addition, replacement of a given amount of conventional capacity would require far more renewable capacity precisely because of the lower capacity factors characterizing the latter. The GND envisions replacement of about 850 gigawatts of conventional capacity; my own estimate, based on very conservative assumptions, is that the wind and solar capacity required to replace this would be over 2,600 gigawatts, a twentyfold increase over current U.S. wind and solar capacity. That would impose a net annual cost of $357 billion, or about $2,800 every year for each American household. And that does not solve the intermittency problem; doing so would require conventional backup capacity and generation, the additional annual cost of which would be about $77 billion, or over $600 per household. Let us turn now to the adverse environmental effects of wind and solar power, typically ignored in the public discussion but very serious nonetheless. The energy content of wind and sunlight is unconcentrated, meaning that a renewables system would require the use of massive amounts of land. For the GND, the total land requirement would be, conservatively, 15 percent greater than the entire land area of California. The production process for wind turbines, apart from the massive use of steel, concrete, and other such industrial materials, requires significant amounts of such toxic heavy metals as neodymium and dysprosium for the magnets. For the most part these metals are mined in China, where environmental controls are lax, to put it mildly. Such heavy metals could be produced in the U.S., but the environmental requirements would increase costs massively. The disposal problem for wind turbines — in particular, the magnets and the massive blades — is only now beginning to be recognized. The noise and light-flicker effects of wind turbines are a serious problem that siting arrangements can solve only partially at most. The disposal problem for solar-panel waste — as much as 78 million metric tons worldwide by 2050 — is acute, in particular because of the lead, cadmium, chromium, and other toxic metals that are released if the panels are broken during the disposal process. And there is the wildlife destruction attendant upon the operation of wind farms and solar fields, as large numbers of birds are killed by wind turbines and by the scorching temperatures in solar “flux” regions where mirrors focus sunlight at solar towers. The backup conventional units must be “cycled” (that is, ramped) up and down depending on whether the renewable units are producing power. That cycling reduces the operating efficiency of the backup units — more gas or coal must be burned for a given amount of backup power — and under a broad range of conditions increases net emissions of conventional pollutants and reduces greenhouse-gas emissions by far less than advertised. And to what end? The electricity component of the GND, under highly favorable assumptions, would reduce temperatures by the year 2100 by about 0.173 degrees Celsius, barely distinguishable from zero, from where such temperatures would be otherwise. This backup problem cannot be avoided unless we accept a power system characterized by constant blackouts. Because generation from wind and solar units cannot be ramped up and down in response to disequilibria in power frequencies in a grid, conventional units must be used to regulate those frequencies. In the absence of such frequency regulation, the generators composing the grid often would spin at different speeds, a condition of non-synchronous generation that would result in power outages. Despite casual assertions to the contrary, batteries cannot solve this problem. A battery-backup system cannot maintain output for more than several hours. And batteries produce power that is about twice as expensive as market prices for spare generating capacity. Expansion of wind and solar power, and the GND, is justified constantly on the grounds of a climate crisis for which there is little evidence. Temperatures are rising but, as the Little Ice Age ended around 1850, it is not easy to separate natural from anthropogenic effects. The latest research in the peer-reviewed literature suggests that mankind is responsible for about half a degree Celsius of the global temperature increase of about 1.5 degrees since 1850. There is little trend in the number of “hot” days (maximum temperatures above 100 or 105 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1895 and 2017; eleven of the twelve years with the highest number of such days occurred before 1960. Global mean sea level has been increasing for thousands of years; the increase may or may not be accelerating. Changes in the extent of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice tell very different stories. U.S. tornado activity shows either no trend or a downward trend since 1954. Tropical storms, hurricanes, and accumulated cyclone energy show little trend since satellite measurements began in the early 1970s. The number of U.S. wildfires shows no trend since 1985. (Wildfire acreage is far more driven by federal forest-management practices.) The Palmer Drought Severity index shows no trend since 1895. U.S. flooding over the past century is uncorrelated with increasing greenhouse-gas concentrations. The available data do not support ubiquitous assertions about the dire impacts of declining pH levels in the oceans. The International Panel on Climate Change, in its Fifth Assessment Report, is extremely dubious about the various severe effects often hypothesized or asserted as future impacts of increasing greenhouse-gas concentrations. The one exception is the disappearance of the summer Arctic sea ice, which the IPCC views as “likely” with “medium confidence,” but only under an extreme greenhouse-gas concentration path that is not plausible. Two larger observations remain to be made. First: Increases in incomes lead to significant increases in expenditures on energy. For the economy as a whole, a 1 percent increase in incomes is correlated with an increase in energy expenditures of over 0.9 percent. (Correlation is not causation, but no one can argue seriously that this correlation is spurious.) Accordingly, if conventional energy is a social “bad,” as assumed by proponents of the GND, then by implication rising GDP, incomes, and employment are “bads” as well. And so the factors that improve incomes similarly are “bads” in the ideological universe of renewable power and the GND: greater employment opportunity, rising compensation for employed individuals, education and training investment, investment in productivity-enhancing capital, health-care investment, and on and on. The promotion of renewable power and the GND fundamentally is anti-human in that its goals are diametrically opposed to the aspirations of virtually all individuals. Second: The campaign for ever more renewable power and the GND must engender a massive erosion in the freedom of individuals and businesses to use their resources in ways that they deem appropriate. If the adverse consequences of the GND emerged and grew, government would be driven to circumvent them by increasing explicit rationing and political favoritism, a process that inexorably would expand government surveillance of energy use and erode individual freedom and privacy. Such has been the recent experience in California in the face of perceived water shortages. The forced expansion of renewable electricity and the adoption of the Green New Deal would yield no positive outcomes. They are all cost and no benefit, derived from falsehoods, environmentally destructive, anti-human, and authoritarian. They are a fitting monument to leftist ideology.

A notable number of countries around the world have pledged to go renewable in the next 10-20 years. On the other hand, countries notorious for their massive amounts of carbon emissions, such as China, have also pledged to drastically cut down their greenhouse emission rate. This has resulted in an accelerated focus on constructing renewable energy plants. Although the intention of these pledges is to reduce the harmful effects of carbon emissions on the planet, are such initiatives as friendly toward the environment as they are believed to be? According to International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the total renewable power sector net additions recorded in 2014 reached new highs. In 2014, the global renewable power sector net additions were noted at 133 GW. Data from a report published by IRENA shows that hydro energy led the global installed capacity by 301.8 GW, followed by wind at 115.4 GW, solar energy at 38.2 GW, bioenergy at 13.5 GW, and geothermal at 3.5 GW. Hydro – The Giant among Renewables Leading to Giant Floods Hydropower dominates the global renewable energy market. Hydropower does not cause any air quality impact directly; however, building and operating a hydroelectric reservoir can lead to several harmful impacts on the environment. The dams constructed for harnessing hydropower tend to greatly influence the flow of rivers, which can alter ecosystems and negatively impact wildlife and people. The most negative impact of this giant among the renewables is the flooding of an area. When the water stored within the dam is released all at once, it can cause the river downstream to suddenly flood. This can result in the destruction of agricultural land, forest, wildlife, and land. For example, the Dhauliganga hydroelectric station in India, in 2013, led to unprecedented flash floods causing the complete submergence of the power house. Wind - It belongs to the Birds and Bats as Well A report from the Joint Research Centre (JRC) states that in 2014, wind energy provided 8% electricity to Europe. This figure is expected to grow to 12% by 2020. Wind has a substantial share in the global renewable energy market, and an appreciable number of wind farms are to be constructed worldwide in the coming few years. However, the wind power sector has fallen under intense scrutiny in the past few years due to its impact on birds and other species. A recent review by the National Wind Coordinating Committee (NWCC) found that collisions with wind turbines and air pressure changes caused by spinning turbines resulted in several bird and bat deaths. Similarly, offshore wind turbines can harm marine birds. Solar – What about the Soil Erosion? The sun is a tremendous source of renewable energy. Nevertheless, the adverse effects of solar power are associated with land use, water use, habitat loss, and the harmful materials used in manufacturing of solar panels. To build a utility-scale solar power facility, a large area of land is required. This can interfere with the existing land uses. The use of many acres of land can result in clearing and grading of land, which can cause soil compaction, erosion, and alteration of drainage channels. Furthermore, solar energy systems can impact the land in the process of materials extraction, exploration, manufacturing, and disposal. Bioenergy – It is not really Green Some of the biomass resources used for producing electricity are crops, forest products, agricultural waste, and urban waste. The bioenergy feedstock and the way it is harvested can negatively impact land use along with global warming emissions. For example, human and animal waste used to power engines may cut down on carbon emissions, but increase harmful methane emission. Furthermore, using tree or tree products to create bioenergy comes with its own set of problems. To collect enough lumber, substantial forest land needs to be cleared, which again causes topical changes and destroys animal habitat. Geothermal – Heating, Electricity, and Poisonous Gases Geothermal power plants construction call for intensive R&D efforts to identify areas that have hot rocks beneath their surface. This R&D costs a lot of money; also, to drill a hole deep enough in the earth needs a lot of finance. Besides being costly, geothermal power has many other disadvantages. Geothermal sites contain poisonous gases that can escape when holes are being drilled in the earth’s surface. Also, geothermal energy stations, under extreme circumstances, can cause earthquakes. This shows how renewables can negatively impact the planet. However, renewables are making a notable difference in the world as they are helping to curb carbon emissions. What scientists, engineers, companies, and nations expanding their power capacities need to focus on, is implementing solutions that keep negative impacts of renewables in check. For example, instead of building solar power stations by clearing a piece of land, homes and buildings can be equipped with individual solar panels on a large scale.

Solar geoengineering research is being conducted primarily by scientists in the Global North, although some research is occurring in other parts of the world (Biermann & Möller, Reference Biermann and Möller2019). The leading effort in terms of funding, scientific research, governance development and experimental preparation is Harvard's HSGRP. The expansive influence of the HSGRP represents the power imbalances in solar geoengineering research. The HSGRP is largely composed of white men at an elite institution advocating research into planetary-scale climate manipulation on behalf of the poor in the Global South (Horton & Keith, Reference Horton, Keith and Preston2016). This well-meaning approach does not appear to recognize the structural power imbalances invoked in this stance or the colonial legacies of paternalistic, technocratic humanitarianism flowing from the Global North to the Global South (Escobar, Reference Escobar2011; McCarthy, Reference McCarthy2009; Mitchell, Reference Mitchell2002). Privileged scientists are justifying their research by making claims that they might be able to fix injustices for the global poor in a way that does nothing to address the root causes of either climate vulnerability or global inequality, amounting to a form of ‘expert imperialism’ (see Flegal & Gupta, Reference Flegal and Gupta2018; Hourdequin, Reference Hourdequin2018; McLaren, Reference McLaren2018; Surprise, Reference Surprise2019).

That solar geoengineering has the potential to reduce climate vulnerability without addressing the structural injustices of global power and inequities makes it an attractive ‘philanthropic’ venture for billionaires and other wealthy elites concerned with climate change. Major funders of solar geoengineering research include, for example, Bill Gates, whose Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER) authorizes Harvard University Professor David Keith and Ken Caldeira (of the Carnegie Institution for Science) to distribute millions of dollars to solar geoengineering researchers (FICER, 2019). In addition to Gates, Harvard's research programme is supported by an array of other technology billionaires, hedge fund managers and boutique foundations that serve as philanthropic arms of wealthy individuals (Surprise, Reference Surprise2019). For example, the Open Philanthropy Project, founded by Cari Tuna, billionaire Dustin Moskovitz (a co-founder of Facebook) and Holden Karnofsky (formerly of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates), is another major supporter of SAI research at Harvard and around the world. Although some of these billionaire philanthropists invest in a range of climate change initiatives, solar geoengineering plays a specific role in their climate investment portfolios. Given its capacity to slow the rate of change and reduce the urgency of decarbonization, SAI enables wealthy, corporate-connected philanthropists to support moderate climate policies rather than more transformative, systemic changes that would directly threaten their own concentrations of wealth and power.

Last week, temperatures crested at 40C (104F) in England, bringing the climate crisis to the fore and spurring a fresh wave of dismay. How is it, despite a steady drumbeat of extreme weather events, a rising tide of public outcry, and growing consensus across the political spectrum, that the world remains so profoundly far from the outer limits of the climate targets considered “safe”?

The answer is increasingly located not in climate denial, but in a proliferation of non-solutions advocated by policymakers and business interests with varying degrees of earnestness and good intention, under the umbrella of “green capitalism”. These are proposals sold as urgent, pragmatic tools for cutting emissions or reversing ecosystem loss, but which in fact deliver neither.

Smith 19 [Tibbe Smith was a professor at Lund University in the Human Geography department. Serves as a critical coordinator at Clean Clothes Campaign, a clothing brand that prioritizes sustainability and planetary well-being. “The Hegemony of Green Capitalism: A critique of the imaginary that the environmental crisis can be solved by capitalism,” 07/2019, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338047199_The_Hegemony_of_Green_Capitalism_A_critique_of_the_imaginary_that_the_environmental_crisis_can_be_solved_by_capitalism, DOI:10.13140 / RG.2.2.11373.33762, accessed 6/26/2023] junkwon

Green capitalism, along with green growth, appear to bridge the gap from irresponsible business practices to an idea about the corporation as a moral citizen (Wright & Nyberg 2015: 169). This process is a form of ‘passive revolution’ in the Gramscian sense (Gramsci 2007), to ensure the hegemony of capitalism. It serves to characterise the response to the environmental crisis by the international political elites (Swyngedouw 2011; Wanner 2015). “A Gramscian ‘passive revolution’ has taken place over the past few years, whereby the elites have not only acknowledged the climate conundrum and, thereby, answered the call of the ‘people’ to take the climate seriously, but are moving rapidly to convince the world that indeed, capitalism cannot only solve the climate riddle, but that it can actually make a new climate by unmaking the one it has co-produced over the past few hundred years.” (Swyngedouw 2011: 270). Likewise, Wanner writes “Sustainable development emerged as a passive revolution to maintain capitalist hegemony and economic growth in the light of environmentalist critiques about disastrous social and environmental consequences of industrial modern capitalism and calls for ‘limits to growth’” (2015: 27). ¶ There is no mentioning of limits, crisis, or inequality in the documents by P4G. Thereby they can be ignored and pose no challenge for P4G. While the initiative claims to address the major problems of our time, they only focus on a selected five SDGs, none of which concern climate change, biodiversity loss or inequality. Rather, these are renamed and framed for business. It is evident that sustainable development for P4G does not concern the physical limits of the planet. Instead it puts business at the forefront of sustainable development and gives more power to business elites. ¶ 6.2 Neoliberalization and the Ideological State Apparatus ¶ The reinvention of capitalism as green capitalism (Wright & Nyberg 2015: 4) was an unavoidable development under the regime of neoliberal capitalism (Heynen& Robbins 2005). P4G is a good example of the neoliberalist tendencies that are on the rise globally and in Danish politics. While it may not be obvious, neoliberalization transfers power to the market as trust in the market overrules other priorities traditionally attributed to the Danish state. Consistent with the neoliberalization of society, through which governance is directed to favor capitalist interests, natural and common resources are privatized and commodified (valorized) (Heynen & Robbins 2005). The agenda in P4G is professed to lead to wider prosperity and wellbeing, thereby presenting ideology of green capitalism and green growth as the interest of all. This relies on the idea of the trickle-down effect, fostered by the doctrine of neoclassical economics. This theoretical field underpins the ideology of neoliberal processes, and takes place in the ideological state apparatus of education (cf. Althusser 2014) and shapes the formation of a common sense (cf. Gramsci 2007). From there neoclassical economics and neoliberal ideology influence the political apparatus, the state, and manifests in policies, ministries, civil service organs, and public administration. The state thereby simultaneously produces and becomes an instrument of the economic superstructure (Jessop 1977: 355). Making the connection between neoliberalism, green growth and the role of the state and state apparatuses, provides an understanding of P4G and its role in maintaining the hegemony of capitalism. P4G functions as a state apparatus to maintain the present economic structure.

CLIMATEWIRE | A controversial idea for cooling the earth’s climate through artificial means would likely require a much longer global commitment than policymakers and the public understand, according to a recent study that raises new questions about the potential for using solar geoengineering.

If world leaders decide to use solar geoengineering to meet international climate goals, they could be locked into it for a century or more, the study suggests. The potentially long timeframe further complicates the debate about geoengineering and its viability.

Some prominent economists have criticized the idea that higher efficiency and substitution of consumption away from the most harmful categories are sufficient to ensure sustainable development.Footnote36 For one thing, there is an absence of institutional frameworks (e.g., legislation, regulations, taxation, and subsidies) for changing the quality of growth. In addition, private enterprises as well as many politicians have been strong opponents of the introduction of such institutional arrangements. More fundamentally, even if institutional frameworks were eventually established, serious doubt may be raised against the possibility of making continuing economic growth environmentally sustainable. In its physical dimension, the economy is an open subsystem of the earth system, which is finite, non-growing, and materially closed (except for the influx of solar energy and occasional solid particles, like meteorites). As the economic subsystem grows, it incorporates an ever greater proportion of the total ecosystem into itself and must reach a limit.Footnote37 Institutional arrangements that may change the quality of growth are thus only able to postpone the collision between ecological limits and economic growth. They cannot enable humanity to trespass such limits. One of the most important elements in dematerialization is recycling, which means that the same resources are used again and again—and again. With ever-increasing product volumes the recycling rate must increase. In practice, this implies that the products tying up resources must be taken out of use with a shorter interval each time. However, recycling is not environmentally neutral. It consumes energy and material resources, and even more so if the circulation rate is increased.Footnote38 Moreover, many materials begin to fail after a couple of recycling cycles and have to be put to different uses.

Decoupling so far: at best only partial. Despite the fact that decoupling has been on the sustainability agenda for nearly thirty years, the attempts to compensate, through increased eco-efficiency and sub-stitution, for the increased pressure against the environment resulting from eco-nomic growth have only been able to slow down the environmental degradation. Within most sectors, and for most impact categories, the annual environmental load is higher today than thirty years ago, both in total and when measured per capita. The accumulated environmental degradation and resource depletion, for example in terms of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, extinction of species, loss of farmland, and exhaustion of finite energy sources and minerals, are far more exten-sive today than in 1987 when the Brundtland Commission published its sustain-ability report.Admittedly, rising GDP levels accompanied by reduced emissions have been found for certain pollutants at a local scale. However, for a number of other types of environmental impacts there is far less evidence of such decoupling. Minimizing The illusion of green capitalism 177the consequences on one impact category may also sometimes result in increased environmental load on another impact category. According to Spangenberg (2001), no indication of an environmental Kuznets curve can be found when using meas-ures accounting for the total use of energy, materials, and land. During the period 1974–2013, global CO2 emissions increased steadily along with economic growth, while there was non-growth or reduction in the emis-sions in three periods of economic downturn (in the early 1980s, 1992, and 2009). For the first time during the whole forty-year period in which the International Energy Agency has been collecting data on carbon dioxide emission, 2014 showed no increase in CO2 emissions despite economic growth (IEA, 2015). It remains to be seen whether the 2014 result, which IEA attributes to greater generation of elec-tricity from renewable sources in China, and increased energy efficiency and more renewable energy in OECD countries, will continue. Anyway, zero-growth in CO2emissions is far from sufficient in a situation where a reduction of 90 percent or more within the next fifty years is called for in order to avoid “dangerous climate change.” Moreover, without the 3 percent global growth in 2014, the emissions would probably have decreased instead of remaining constant, as they did in 2009 when the global economy also had a downturn due to the financial crisis.In a somewhat older study, Azomahou and Van Phu (2001) investigated economic growth and CO2 emissions in one hundred countries during the period 1960–1996. Using non-parametric regressions, they found a correlation between economic growth and increased CO2 emissions among poor countries, middle-income coun-tries, and wealthy countries. Within all three groups of countries, the CO2 emissions tend to increase with higher gross domestic products.To the extent that correlations between affluence levels and emissions of some pollutants (notably NO2, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide) consistent with the EKC hypothesis have been found, this may in part be due to the limitation of many such studies to a confined geographical scale (e.g. cities). According to Stern (2004), the total pollution emissions tend to rise with increasing income rather than follow an inverted U-shaped curve. Pollution concentrations may still follow the curve predicted by the EKC hypothesis due to urban and industrial decentralization, taller smoke stacks, and so forth. Moreover, reduced emission levels in wealthy countries may be a result of outsourcing polluting industries to third world countries. Another case in point is the fact that the emission reductions obtained for impact categories where some evidence for the EKC hypothesis can be found are invariantly resulting from strong governmental regulations. While the EKC hypothesis is often used in the environmental debate to create an image of a “self-regulatory” market economy, the empirical examples referred to in supporting this hypothesis were dependent on precisely the type of regulations that are usually fiercely opposed by its proponents.The fact that dematerialization to a degree sufficient to counterweigh the impacts of economic growth has not taken place until now does not in itself rule out the possibility for a stronger and more successful dematerialization in the future. The prospects for this still do not seem very promising in the light of the nearly forty-five years that have passed since the publication, and the nearly thirty years since the publication of the Brundtland report. Decoupling growth from environmental degradation has been on the agenda during the very same period when only partial or local evidence of the EKC hypothesis has been found. Moreover, many of the lowest-hanging fruits have probably been picked in this period. Improving eco-efficiency further will often require technologically more challenging and socially more controversial measures. This may be the reason why some more recent studies indicate that in the longer term, the Environmental Kuznets Curve tends to be N-shaped instead of following the originally hypothesized inverted U shape. This suggests that pollution increases as a poor country becomes industrialized, decreases once a threshold affluence level is reached, and then begins increasing again as national income continues to increase.In much of the debate about economic growth and decoupling, there has been a tendency to focus solely on emissions of various pollutants (and in recent years a rather one-sided concentration on CO2 emissions only), whereas nega-tive environmental impacts resulting from land take and land fragmentation have tended to be overlooked. The prospects for decoupling growth from the latter kinds of impacts may be even less bright. This is particularly the case for the direct impacts on biodiversity, natural areas, food-production soil, and landscape qualities from converting undeveloped land into building sites or technical infra-structure such as roads and power plants. The few studies carried out on loss of biodiversity suggest that further economic growth in an already wealthy country or region is accompanied by higher biodiversity losses (Mills and Waite, 2009; Tevie et al., 2011).Theoretically, it is possible to imagine a “Factor 4” or “Factor 10” reduction of the land use per produced unit by building more densely and higher, as well as pla-cing most of the buildings in areas that are already technically affected, such as traffic areas and derelict industrial estates/brownfields. However, unless the new buildings or infrastructure replace existing, less environmentally favorable parts of the built environment, construction of new, eco-efficient buildings or infrastructure will at best be ecologically friendly in a relative sense, i.e. compared with environmentally more straining solutions (Xue, 2014; see also Chapter 8). In the USA, farmland is reduced ten times faster than the influx of new cultivated land, and in China the reduction of farmland is 30–40 times faster than the supply of new soil for food production (Steigan, 2011). Phosphorus is another natural resource of key import-ance to food production. According to Cordell et al. (2009), the peak of phosphorus production may be reached already within 30–40 years, and the known sources of phosphorus may be exhausted within 50–100 years.Some of the raw materials used in renewable energy production, such as lithium, are also becoming increasingly scarce (Defra and BIS, 2012). Along with a number of other so-called rare minerals (including beryllium, cobalt, and tantalum) used in computers, mobile phones, aircrafts, communication satellites, and rechargeable bat-teries, lithium is on the “critical list” identified by a panel of sixty-nine executives of key global companies in seven different industries (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2011).

Improving resource efficiency is probably the most common argument put forward in defence of decoupling. However, every action that responds to savings in resources is prone to rebound effects, that is a difference between the projected and the realised environmental savings from an efficiency improvement. Such a phenomenon was hinted at already in the 18th century by Stanley Jevons in The Coal Question (1865, pp. 140–142): “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. […] Whatever, therefore, conduces to increase the efficiency of coal, and to diminish the cost of its use, directly tends to augment the value of the steamengine, and to enlarge the field of its operations” – hence the rebound effect often qualified as “Jevons Paradox” (Giampietro and Mayumi, 1998; Jevons, 1865). This idea that efficiency changes would rebound into more consumption gained ground in the field of energy economics in the context of the oil crises of the 1970s, most notably with the work of Khazzoom (1980) and Brookes (1990) – later referred to as the “Khazzoom-Brookes postulate” (Saunders, 1992). After more than 40 years of research, the literature has expanded to encompass a variety of causes and effects.28 In order to account for overall decoupling, the concept we find most relevant is the “environmental rebound effect” (originally used by Goedkoop et al., 1999, and then by others such as Murray, 2013; Spielmann et al., 2008; and Takahashi et al., 2004), which goes beyond energy issues to encompass a wider range of environmental concerns.29 Several types of rebound effects Rebound effects come in many shades depending on whether efficiency leads to an increase of consumption of the same product or service (direct rebound effect), whether freed resources are allocated elsewhere (indirect rebound effect), or whether consumption is induced by structural changes in the economy as a whole (structural rebound effect). These effects, alone or together, are then either partial or total depending on the magnitude of their impact on resource use. First-order: direct rebound effects Direct or first-order rebound effects refer to cases where the efficiency gain is reinvested as additional consumption of the same product or service. This is especially true for normal goods for which a decrease in the cost of use perceived by users translates into higher consumption. For instance, driving a more fuel-efficient car more often, faster, or over longer distances; the petrol that was saved in efficiency by the car rebounded into more usage of the car. Direct rebound effects can also occur in production, for example when the acquisition of a more energy-efficient machine motivates additional production (output effect). 28 Here are a few examples that show the wide span of the concept: time rebound effects (Jalas, 2002), socio-psychological or mental rebound effect (de Haan et al., 2006; Girod and de Haan, 2009; Santarius and Soland, 2018), international rebound effects (Bergh, 2017). 29 For a general framework for the study of environmental rebound, see Font Vivanco et al. (2016). IS DECOUPLING LIKELY TO HAPPEN? 37 Second-order: indirect rebound effects Indirect or second-order rebound effects refer to cases where resources freed by an efficiency or sufficiency improvement are re-allocated to another type of consumption (re-spending effect). For example, driving a more fuel-efficient vehicle (efficiency) or deciding to use it less often (sobriety) could save money (income effect), which can then be spent on impactful products or services (e.g. a faraway holiday trip by plane) or invested on problematic financial products (e.g. related to fossil fuel extraction). For producers, profits resulting from productivity gains can be reinvested into expanding production capacity (re-investment effect). What Wallenborn (2018) calls “structural rebound effect” is a good example of such indirect rebound.30 It is structural because it has to do with economic structures such as markets, ownership, and money. In a globalised economy where money can be used to buy almost anything (one then speaks of generalpurpose money), all purchasing power is a potential polluting power. Even if euros are spent on green products, and even if the sellers of these products spend these euros in a sustainable way, at some point down the chain, these euros are likely to be used in a polluting manner. Even euros not spent will cause resource consumption and pollution when re-lent by the bank to finance new investments. The only way to avoid this effect would be to change the structure of the economic system itself (decommodification, localisation, special-purpose monies like complementary currencies, etc.). Third-order: economy-wide rebound effects Efficiency in resource use can also rebound at the macro-level (economy-wide or macroeconomic rebound effect). For instance, efficiency gains in internal combustion engines have helped made private car transportation effective and affordable and resulted in a wide diffusion of this technology. This generalisation of private car transport has in turn driven the spatial configuration of cities and territories, resulting in extensive spatial configurations which now rely on, and even require, the use of private cars. This wide-scale modification of the system of needs now results in a dramatically higher energy consumption from the transport sector. In other words, more fuel-efficient cars reinforce the hegemony of cars at the expense of more sustainable modes of transportation like trains and bikes. Resource efficiency can also lead to a restructuring of the economy around nature-intensive activities (composition effect). For example, abandoned mining activities can be resumed after the development of new efficient techniques makes it economically profitable again, as it is currently the case for gold mining where lower grade ores (including the former overburden) are now reprocessed. 30 In the words of Jevons’s himself writing in the The Coal Question (1865): “[…] In fact, there is hardly a single use of fuel in which a little care, ingenuity, or expenditure of capital may not make a considerable saving. But no one must suppose that coal thus saved is spared – it is only saved from one use to be employed in others, and the profits gained soon lead to extended employment in many new forms. The several branches of industry are closely interdependent, and the progress of any one leads to the progress of nearly all” (Jevons, 1865: 136 cited in Missemer, 2012, p. 99). IS DECOUPLING LIKELY TO HAPPEN? 38 Partial and total rebound Depending on its magnitude, a rebound effect can result in either an overall decrease (partial rebound) or increase in resource use (total rebound, also known as overshoot or back-fire). In the first case, the savings are larger than the extra rebounded consumption (e.g. a heater consumes 50% less and rebounds in being used 1.5 times more, which means there are still 25% net savings). In the case of total rebound, however, the rebounded consumption is larger than the savings and savings are totally offset (e.g. if the money saved by using a car consuming 30% less energy per km is used to pay for a holiday trip by plane where it pays for much more energy than in the case of gasoline which unlike kerosene is heavily taxed).31 In relation to decoupling, this means that a rebound effect can either slow down the expected rate of decoupling (partial rebound) or reverse it altogether (total rebound). Empirical evidence of rebound Indirect and structural rebound being highly complex, most empirical research focuses on direct rebound effects, which are easier to measure. In their review of energy use rebounds, Ackerman and Stanton (2013, pp. 120–121) conclude that evidence for total direct rebound effects is rare: “estimates of 10 to 30 percent seem common […] actual evidence of rebound effects of 100 percent or more appears to be non-existent.” Same conclusions for surveys conducted by Greening et al. (2000) and Sorrell (2007) who find a diverse range of rebounds, sometime low like in the case of lighting (up to 15%), moderate like in the case for aviation (19%), or very high like in the case for motorised transport (up to 96%).32 Galvin (2014) reports a rebound for household energy conservation in the range of 0-50% for older EU member states between 2000 and 2011 – certain countries, notably Eastern European countries, as well as Finland and Denmark, show situations of total rebound. Grafton et al. (2018) show that higher use of efficient technology rarely reduces water consumption. Kyba et al. (2017) report a situation of backfire in the case of LED technology for outdoor lighting. Antal and van den Bergh (2014) estimate the re-spending rebound for saving energy from gasoline to range between 45 and 60% for large economies such as Russia, China, and India. Magee and Devezas (2017) examine numerous statistical sources to estimate the use of 69 different materials from 1960 to 2010, arguing that the Jevons paradox applies to just about every substance. Out of their sample, they find only 6 cases of absolute decline. Four of these materials – asbestos, beryllium, mercury, and thallium – have been phased out deliberately by legal restrictions because of toxicity issues. The other two are wool, which has declined without decreasing the global populations of domestic sheep or other wool-producing animals, and tellurium, a byproduct of refining copper whose use in solar panel manufacturing means its overall consumption is likely rising again. 31 In the literature, and following Ehrhardt-Martinez and Laitner (2010), what we call partial and total rebound are often referred to as “typical rebound” and “back-fire.” The authors (ibid. 7-77) also add a third category: a “negative rebound” for situations where actual energy savings are higher than expected (e.g. “a family that installs a new energy-efficient water heater may be motivated to find other ways to save energy by taking shorter showers, washing clothes in cold water, or by limiting dishwasher use to full loads”; negative rebound, better example, direct causality: isolating walls reduces heating demand, making existing heating installations oversized. This, in turn, requires installing new and smaller boilers, which are more efficient, so energy demand sinks again. or on the producer side if the price of a new machine is greater than the saving in operating cost it allows). To avoid confusion, others prefer to speak of a “super-conservation” effect (Saunders, 2005) or “amplifying” and “leverage” effects (Spielmann et al., 2008).IS DECOUPLING LIKELY TO HAPPEN? Empirical studies of macroeconomic rebound effects are scarcer than their micro counterparts. In his review of the literature, van den Bergh (2017, p. 4) concludes that “the majority of economy-wide studies suggest overall rebound is above 50% and possibly much higher.” In a survey of computable general equilibrium studies, Dimitropolous (2007) finds three cases of total rebound, three others above 50%, one in the range of 30-50%, and one around 15%. Even though rebound effects of the 2ndor 3rdorder are the most determining ones, these remain the most difficult to study empirically. The rebound effect argument minimises the plausibility of the decoupling hypothesis. Thus rebound effects must be taken into account while considering decoupling scenarios as they might make rates of resource use more or less sensitive to the introduction of resource-saving technologies and sufficiency-driven behavioural changes. The point is not to argue against those, which may still have positive overall impacts, as long as rebound effects remains limited, especially if anticipated by decision makers and counterbalanced with proactive policies. But it remains very risky to rely exclusively on sectoral and technical improvements. Rather, what is necessary is an in-depth and systemic consideration and anticipation of potential rebound effects in the design of sustainability policies.

On mountain peaks scattered across Colorado, machines are set up to fire chemicals into the clouds in attempts to generate snow. The process is called cloud seeding, and as global temperatures rise, more countries and drought-troubled states are using it in sometimes desperate efforts to modify the weather.

But cloud seeding isn’t as simple as it sounds, and it might not be as promising as people wish.

With water shortages in the American West continuing to worsen, policymakers are starting to recognize that incremental changes such as “avoiding long showers [and] fixing leaky faucets” will not be sufficient. During crises, “silver bullets”—promising but overly-simplistic technological solutions to complex problems—become increasingly appealing, despite the acknowledgement that no single technology or policy can address complex challenges like water shortages or climate change.

Cloud seeding is perhaps the ultimate silver bullet, in which literal silver in the form of silver iodide is infused into clouds, causing ice crystals to form and water to condense into rain or snow. Cloud seeding is a form of planned weather modification. Most commonly used to increase precipitation as a drought management technique, cloud seeding is also regularly used to clear fog in airports, fight forest fires, suppress hail, and even divert rainfall, as it was used, for example, during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Carbon Capture and Storage: An Expensive and Dangerous Plan for Louisiana Louisiana is gaining an ever-increasing amount of national and international attention for Cancer Alley, an eighty-five-mile stretch along the Mississippi River lined with industrial plants, and the corridor’s role in perpetuating environmental racism and threats to public health. Simultaneously, the state’s policymakers are turning toward a new pernicious industrialization effort that threatens to impact Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities: carbon capture and storage (CCS). Residents of and visitors to the Gulf states have to face the facts: Carbon capture and storage is not a viable climate solution. The focus must turn to renewable, regenerative solutions that uphold environmental justice and reduce emissions now. In the face of mounting public pressure to reduce the emissions driving the climate crisis, talk in Louisiana has turned to carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a purported solution. This brief highlights the risks and concerns of CCS.[1] “Carbon Capture and Storage” refers to processes designed to collect or “capture” carbon dioxide generated by industrial processes — such as coal-, oil-, and gas-fired power production or plastics manufacturing – and then transport those captured emissions to sites where they are used or stored underground. Concern 1: CCS is not a climate solution. Carbon capture and storage is expensive, energy-intensive, and unproven at scale, and it does not reduce carbon in the atmosphere. CCS technology entrenches reliance on fossil fuels rather than accelerating the needed transition to cheaper and cleaner renewable energy. Of particular importance to targeted communities in Louisiana, the technology also poses environmental, safety, and health risks. Adding carbon capture to coal- or gas-fired power plants makes them more expensive, less efficient, and less competitive than renewable energy projects, which are already the cheapest source of electricity for most of the country and most of the world. Nearly 80% of captured carbon is just being used to produce more oil. Concern 2: Louisiana is a target for CCS development. Louisiana has been widely touted as a potential epicenter for industrial carbon capture and storage development in the United States. Existing concentrations of oil, gas, and petrochemical infrastructure make Louisiana attractive to proponents of CCS. Supporters pushed a CCS-friendly regulatory program through the Louisiana legislature in 2009. Current law places responsibility for regulating carbon dioxide injection, storage, and use with the Department of Natural Resources, an agency known for protecting instead of regulating the industry. [Facilities potentially eligible for 45Q CCS tax credits. Source: Regional Carbon Capture Deployment Initiative] Concern 3: Residents will pay the costs for CCS. Massive tax subsidies will be required to implement carbon capture and storage, and the costs of construction are significantly higher than renewable energy and storage options. Proponents claim that there is already pipeline infrastructure available for transportation and injection of CO2 in these areas along the Gulf. However, these pipelines would have to be repurposed — and therefore reconstructed — to accommodate transport of compressed carbon dioxide, placing additional burdens on land, water, and communities, at a hefty cost that local ratepayers would likely bear.[2] CCS would also threaten Louisiana’s wetlands. The wells and pipelines would contribute to land loss, directly contradicting the Governor’s Executive Order for state agencies to adhere to the Coastal Master Plan. Because carbon capture infrastructure would be built near emitting sites, facilities would further harm the same people already overburdened by industrial pollution. In Louisiana, that would put Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities at even greater risk. Map of existing and proposed pipelines and fields operated by Denbury [Source: Denbury, Inc.] Concern 4: Carbon pipelines are dangerous. Piping CO2 through communities presents a dangerous threat to health and safety. To transport CO2 through pipelines, it must be highly pressurized and kept very cold, which would require the construction of pipelines that can withstand those conditions. Condensed CO2 can be corrosive to the steel used to build those pipelines, increasing the risk of leaks, ruptures, and potentially catastrophic running fractures.[3] In addition, explosive decompression of a CO2 pipeline releases more gas, more quickly, than an equivalent explosion in a gas pipeline, because of the intense pressures involved.[4] As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recognized, “carbon dioxide leaking from a pipeline forms a potential physiological hazard for humans and animals.”[5] In areas closest to pipelines, released CO2 could quickly drop temperatures to -80°F, coating the surrounding area with super-cold dry ice.[6] At high concentrations, CO2 is a toxic gas that can restrict breathing. Potential contaminants in CO2 streams, like hydrogen sulfide (H2S), can dramatically compound these risks. Residents of Yazoo County, Mississippi, learned this in 2020 when a Denbury Enterprises CO2 pipeline ruptured. Three hundred people were evacuated, and 45 people had to be hospitalized, including some sickened individuals whom authorities found near the scene acting like ‘zombies’. Concern 5: CCS focuses on the wrong thing. Carbon capture allows industries to keep burning fossil fuels. Even worse, the vast majority of captured carbon today is used to produce more oil through so-called “enhanced oil recovery.”Real solutions for climate change in Louisiana do exist, supported by local communities. The focus of Louisiana leaders and policymakers should remain on cost-effective strategies that maximize public benefit and ensure a stable and safe economic future for Louisiana and its people. Carbon capture and storage does not fit that bill.

We know how the first paragraph begins. We’ve read about the changing climate for over twenty years, infrequently at first and then daily until we couldn’t deny it any longer. The world is burning. The oceans are heating up and acidifying. Species are dying in the Sixth Great Extinction. Koalas have replaced polar bears as the charismatic species whose dwindling numbers bring us to tears. Millions are displaced and on the move, only to be met with fences, borders, and death.¶ We’ve read the news and it keeps getting worse. As pandemics spread, as the climate crisis continues unabated, the imperatives of capital prevent state action on anything but protecting banks and corporations. Since 1988, when human-induced climate change was officially recognized by the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the oil and gas sector has doubled its contribution to global warming. The industry emitted as much greenhouse gas over the twenty-eight years after 1988 as it had in the 237 years since the beginning of the industrial age. Regular reports announce that the atmospheric impact of these emissions is manifesting faster than scientists previously expected. The IPCC clock tells us that we have eleven years to prevent warming from rising more than 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels. Some places on earth already hit that mark in the summer of 2019. “Climate change”—that innocuous moniker preferred by Republican political consultant Frank Lutz and adopted by the George W. Bush administration because “global warming” seemed too apocalyptic—has moved from seeming far away and impossible to being here, now, and undeniable. This has not stopped the United States and Canada from providing economic relief funds in the wake of coronavirus to oil and gas companies.¶ Those least responsible for climate change, those who have suffered the most from capitalism’s colonizing and imperial drive, are on the frontlines of the climate catastrophe. How to find clean water amidst never-ending drought? How to gather needed herbs, food, and firewood amidst rapid deforestation? How to survive the floods and fires? Centuries of colonialism, exploitation, and war undermine people’s capacities to survive and thrive, hitting poor people, women, children, people with disabilities, already disadvantaged racialized and national minorities, and the elderly hardest of all. According to a UN report, “We risk a ‘climate apartheid’ scenario where the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer.” Capitalism has always permitted some to flourish by forcing others to fight for survival. The climate crisis—and now the coronavirus—intensifies these dynamics into a global class war. In Marx’s words, “ruin or revolution is the watchword” for our times.