The plan is an attempt to circumvent the ecological decay created by capitalism using a global externalization strategy based in imperialism

Climate intervention: Imperialism, the capitalist state, and SAI The “classical” notion of liberalism as an excoriation of servility and domination in the name of individual liberty has always been predicated upon and sustained by its opposite. In Domenico Losurdo’s apposite conception, the liberal project constructs a “community of the free” which rules over those condemned to its constitutive outside through three forms of “dictatorship”: “civilized” peoples over “barbarians” in the colonies; suppression of popular subversion in the metropolis; and capacity to limit political change via reform from above (Losurdo, 2011: 256). The liberal “community of the free” cannot be widened indefinitely as its hegemony is (re)produced by the dictatorships through which it rules. Indeed, forms of primitive accumulation, expropriation, exploitation, and exclusion construct and define the severely restricted realm of “the political” in liberal-capitalism, as the power of the capitalist class is predicated upon the formal separation of “the economic” from the “the political.” This is a fiction, but nonetheless materially operative—a “real abstraction” (Thomas, 2009; Toscano, 2008)—imposing limits on the capacity for political intervention into realms deemed private or governed by “nature” (Losurdo, 2011: 192–193; see also Poulantzas, 2000; Wood, 1981). Hence, while the economic and the political are interdependent, the state can only “intervene” in the capitalist economy, and the language of “intervention” is presupposed by the formal separation of these two realms. As Poulantzas argues (2000: 190–191, original emphasis): The limits to state intervention in the economy are consubstantial with the relative separation under capitalism of the political state-space and that of the economy … the State exists if and only if the hard core of capitalist relations of production is guaranteed, thereby ensuring the exploitation of the working class … the capitalist State is constituted by a negative general limit to its intervention—that is to say, by specific non-intervention in the “hard core” of capitalist relations of production … within a global strategy of hegemony, state activity is constituted as ad-hoc tinkering with conditions already laid down by the process of valorization of capital. That process is not susceptible to mastery by the State. Capital’s solipsistic drive for accumulation cannot be mastered, merely managed in an “ad hoc” fashion within a global strategy of hegemony whereby the state does not direct the capitalist economy, but structures the political conditions that undergird and enable its expansionary drives (Panitch and Gindin, 2005; Wood, 2005). As Wood argues, the drive for accumulation cannot be realized “unless and until the ‘laws’ of the capitalist economy are themselves extended—and this is something that needs extra-economic help, both in domestic class relations and in imperial domination” (2005: 20). This interplay leads David Harvey (2003) and Giovanni Arrighi (2010) to define capitalist imperialism as a dialectic of “capitalist and territorial logics of power.”5 For Harvey, capitalist imperialism is a contradictory fusion of “‘the politics of state and empire’ … and ‘the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time’” (Harvey, 2003: 26). The latter aim to exploit “asymmetries” in capital accumulation (unequal exchange, monopoly rents, extortionate practices, etc.), with the former working to “preserve that pattern of asymmetries … to its own advantage” (Harvey, 2003: 31–32). Thus, for Arrighi, capitalism as an imperial world-system is predicated upon finding systemic resolutions to the tension between “the endless accumulation of capital and a comparatively stable organization of political space” (Arrighi, 2010: 34). Such resolutions have historically emerged in hegemonic states capable of expanding the spatio-organizational capacities of capital accumulation by “widening (or deepening) the functional and spatial scope of the capitalist world economy” (Arrighi, 2010: 225). Hence British hegemony enfolded settler states into the orbit of capitalism via colonial-territorial control and “free-trade imperialism,” and post-Second World War U.S. hegemony absorbed decolonizing states via formal sovereignty and market rule. Indeed, under U.S. hegemony the imperial scope of liberal-capitalism extended to a truly world-scale (Arrighi, 2010: 76). Yet, as U.S. hegemony is potentially in decline, prospects for a renewed era of expanded accumulation are in doubt, requiring a “territorial” strategy of spatio-organizational expansion beyond the world-scale instituted by the U.S., and the capacity to “internalize the costs of reproducing both human life and nature, which the U.S. regime has tended to externalize” (Arrighi, 2010: 379). The necessity of such “internalization” turns on the fact that molecular processes of capital accumulation are running up against a series of ecological and climatic limits. Myriad socio-ecological fixes are being deployed to circumvent, overcome, and indeed internalize these limits under the guise of “green capitalism” (Büscher and Fletcher, 2015; Mann and Wainwright, 2018; McCarthy, 2015; Prudham, 2009; Sapinski, 2016a; Wanner, 2015; Nelson, 2015). Yet climate change portends a systemic underproduction crisis—the “second contradiction of capitalism”—whereby exhaustion of key socio-ecological relations that underpin the creation of capitalist value can engender crises via rising costs, loss and damage, depreciation of assets, onerous regulation, and unproductive expenditures that restrict the capacity to generate surplus-value, and thus inhibit expanded accumulation (O’Connor, 1988; see also Ekers and Prudham, 2017; Fraser, 2014; Moore, 2015). Such a crisis looms in the increasing rate of climatic change, and finance capital’s inability to respond (Channell, 2015; Christophers, 2017; Dafermos et al., 2018; Dietz et al., 2016; Smith et al., 2015). SAI potentially offers a singularly unique spatio-temporal fix for climate-driven accumulation crises, amounting to a “territorial” imperial tactic. Modifying planetary albedo by altering stratospheric chemistry can effectively expand the atmospheric waste sink, allowing for greater carbon dioxide absorption without attendant warming. This artificial production of atmospheric space can slow the rate of climatic change and thus drastically reduce both potential loss and damage and the immediate financial burdens of rapid decarbonization. SAI deployment would thus constitute an intervention into the climate system to maintain (however temporarily) the value of existing energy infrastructure and forestall the rising costs associated with climate change, in effect expanding—via planetary management—the spatio-organizational scope of capital accumulation otherwise running up against climatic limits (see Surprise (2018) for detailed elaboration). Firmly rooted in the logics of capital, this imperial tactic is nevertheless proceeding under the auspices of humanitarian universalism—SAI for the poor, in the name of humanity. This ideological aspect is my central focus here. That is, the separation of “the economic” and “the political” that structures the contours of the capitalist imperialism also structures its limits. HSGRP researchers acknowledge that the technological capacity exists to keep global temperature rise below 1.5℃, yet its global scale implementation would require “draconian social measures incompatible with market economies” (Horton et al., 2016: 3). Moreover, they concede that global redistribution of wealth for adaptation is “theoretically possible,” but highly unlikely (Horton and Keith, 2016: 82). Effectuating a rapid transition to equitable, low-carbon societies is possible, but would require measures that fundamentally challenge hegemony of capital. If accumulation is threatened by climatic limits, and the capitalist economy cannot be fundamentally altered, the climate system itself must be managed, altered, and artificially expanded. Thus, my aim is to demonstrate—counter to the narrative of necessity—that SAI is a fundamentally political choice, and one decidedly on the side of capital and liberal-capitalist elites.