Green capitalism is possible—there is increased value for the environment. Competitive markets solve

[Nick J. Fox, University of Huddersfield, UK, 9-23-22 , “Green capitalism, climate change and the technological fix: A more-than-human assessment” ] WL

The term ‘green capitalism’ – which in the literature has encompassed a variety of disparate threads (Tienhaara, is used here specifically to reference the proposition that a ‘free’ or neoliberal market is the best means by which to assure a sustainable future for humans and for the planet 2014, p. 188) –. This liberal (or neoliberal) environmentalism (Bernstein, 2001) aims to replace natural capital (such as rainforests) with ‘human ingenuity and technological development’ (Whitehead, 2014, p. 263). It has been an approach to environmental policy favoured by many right-of-centre political parties in the West (Dawson, 2010, p. 316; Prudham, 2009, p. 1597; Watts, 2002, p. 1316), though it has also been embraced by others, including parts of the labour movement (Sweeney, 2015) and UN climate change policy-makers (Bernstein, 2001). While often silent over the negative effects of a market economy upon the environment, in its more strident manifestations proponents argue that the capitalist market economy is the only means whereby the environment may be saved from human depredations (Lovins & Cohen, 2011, p. 7). Critics have responded to such claims that green capitalism can successfully address anthropogenic climate change by noting capitalism’s inherent drive for growth and accumulation (Prudham, 2009, p. 1596); its dependence on exploitation of natural resources (‘extractive capitalism’) and associated North/South injustices (Dawson, 2010, p. 328); while also noting that it is an exercise in greenwashing the negative consequences of neoliberalism (Croeser, 2021). Green capitalism has offered two qualitatively different analyses of the impact of a market economy. The first of these argued that climate change represents a catastrophic failure of markets, in which producers of greenhouse gases (primarily nations in the North) can avoid the full global consequences of resultant climate change, while affecting parts of the world not responsible for their production (Stern, 2007). This failure may be addressed through regulation of markets, taxation and international collaboration around three initiatives: effective carbon pricing/trading, technological innovation toward lowcarbon solutions, and use of incentives and disincentives to change market behaviour by consumers and businesses (Stern, 2007, pp. xviii–xxi). These measures, Stern claimed (pp. xviii–xxi), could reform the market economy to make it ‘environment-friendly’. The second manifestation is more bullish about market mechanisms. Advocates have promoted a neoliberal environmentalism, in which technological innovation drives future economic growth (Lovins & Cohen, 2011; Perez, 2016, p. 193; Zysman & Huberty, 2014). They fully acknowledge anthropogenic impacts on the environment, including climate change, but argue that a market economy holds the best hope of reversing these impacts through ingenuity and entrepreneurialism, while ensuring the continuity of the economic growth that they argue has been the engine of both national and individual prosperity since the industrial revolution (Prudham, 2009, pp. 1596–1597). Green capitalism is consequently marked out by ‘the increasing incorporation and internalization of ecological conditions into the circuits of capital accumulation’ (p. 1596). Zysman and Huberty (2014, p. xiii) promote the notion of ‘green spirals’, in which new environmentally-friendly infrastructure and energy technologies create new markets, which in turn encourage further technological innovation. These spirals are the basis for policy in developed and developing countries, and can offer new sources of productivity and production (Zysman & Huberty, 2014, p. xiv). 4 The Sociological Review 00(0) Measures such as carbon pricing to incentivise low-carbon technological innovation and emission trading schemes (ETS) that enable corporations to trade carbon credits (Environmental Defence Fund, n.d.) have been adopted or are in the process of adoption in jurisdictions including the EU, Canada, China, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the USA (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, 2021; European Commission, n.d.). However, politicians of both right and left persuasions have also embraced the latter, more upbeat version of green capitalism and its technological fix: promoting technologies such as renewable sources of energy and the development of electric vehicles as the means to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the IPCC’s target date of 2050 (Blakeley, 2021). Supporters of this technological solution to climate change believe that – within a capitalist market framework – these innovations will out-compete and thus replace existing polluting technologies, thereby reducing net carbon emissions to zero to meet global targets. The role of governments, they contend, is to foster such technological development through research funding, fiscal policy and infrastructure investment (Smith, 2016; Wilberforce et al., 2019, pp. 67–68). The following sections develop and then apply a critical, more-than-human ontology, to analyse this technological fix for climate change. A more-than-human approach for assessing green capitalism The ontology that this article will employ to explore green capitalism’s capacity to meet net-zero emission targets draws on the posthuman feminist, new materialist, affective and non-Western ontologies in the humanities and social sciences that have emerged in what has been described as a ‘turn to matter’ (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Lemke, 2015; Tompkins, 2016). These perspectives recognise materiality as plural and complex, uneven and contingent, relational and emergent (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 29), and consider that the world and history are produced by a range of material forces that extend from the physical and the biological to the psychological, social and cultural (Barad, 1996, p. 181; Braidotti, 2013, p. 3). These more-than-human approaches may be characterised as relational and contingent (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 29), post-anthropocentric (Braidotti, 2011, p. 327; St Pierre, 2014, p. 3) and monist (Connolly, 2010; Fox & Alldred, 2018). On the first of these, new materialisms consider materialities such as human bodies, animals and inanimates not as essential entities with pre-existing and fixed attributes, but as fully relational, with contingent and variable capacities and dispositions that emerge only when assembling with other materialities (Bennett, 2005, p. 445; DeLanda, 2016; Deleuze, 1988, p. 125). Second, a post-anthropocentric perspective de-privileges humans and human agency, and instead treats all matter (both human and non-human) as ‘affective’ – that is, possessing capacities to affect or to be affected by other materialities (Deleuze, 1988, p. 101). This shift opens up the possibility to explore how things other than humans (for instance, a tool, a technology or a building) can be social ‘agents’, making things happen. Human agency is no longer the prime mover, nor is it the principal concern. Braidotti (2013, p. Fox 5 60) has suggested that this move also establishes an ethics that encompasses not only human culture but also other living and inanimate things, indeed, the entirety of what is conventionally called ‘the environment’. Finally, the monist or ‘flat’ ontology of these approaches dissolves distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ realms, along with a range of dualisms, including human/ non-human, animate/inanimate, mind/matter, and – perhaps most significantly for the ensuing exploration of capitalism – between agency and structure (van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2010). Interactions between matter are suffused with a ‘philosophy of immanence’ (Connolly, 2010, p. 178), in which the unfolding, becoming world is not dependent upon the mechanisms, systems or structures invoked in some sociological accounts (Scambler, 2007). Methodologically, this shifts the focus of sociological concern toward the endless quotidian interactions between human and non-human matter (Coole & Frost, 2010, pp. 26–27). In place of structures, systems or mechanisms at work ‘beneath the surface’, there are an endless cascade of events comprising the material effects of both nature and culture that together produce the world and human history (DeLanda, 2016, pp. 13–16; Fox & Alldred, 2018; Latour, 2005, p. 130). More-than-human approaches are particularly well-suited to analyse phenomena such as climate change and environmental sustainability that cut across a nature/culture divide (Lockie, 2012; Yuill et al., 2019, p. 126). They have been applied previously to explore human/environment assemblages and ‘affective atmospheres’ that enable human health and well-being (Bennett, 2010; Bell et al., 2018; Duff, 2011; Foley, 2011; Foley & Kistemann, 2015). More generally, these approaches have been put to use to analyse sustainability (Fox & Alldred, 2020b; Lockie, 2012) and different climate change policies (Fox & Alldred, 2020a). This latter approach understands policies as assembled from a variety of human and non-human agencies (Prince, 2010, p. 173) in ways that are inherently dynamic and unstable (McCann, 2011, p. 145; Ureta, 2014, p. 305). Methodologically, it unpacks a specific policy assemblage (for instance, that of ‘green capitalism’) in terms of the human and non-human materialities it includes, and the principal affects between them. It then compares and contrasts these components with a comprehensive model of the event (in this case, anthropogenic climate change), modelled according to a wide-ranging review of current scientific and social scientific evidence, to reveal what materialities have been excluded from that particular policy. According to this assessment methodology, green capitalism engages micropolitically with a partial ‘climate change assemblage’ that comprises the following materialities (in no particular order): material resources (‘the environment’); consumers; market economy; capital; industry; existing energy technologies; innovative green technologies; entrepreneurs; means of production; profit; growth; developing and developed nations and governments; energy; greenhouse gases; the Sun; climate The principal affect (inherent force) driving this assemblage is the capacity of entrepreneurial efforts to transform raw materials such as steel and electronics into innovative technologies such as solar panels and wind turbines. These ‘green’ innovations will subsequently reduce climate change emissions by out-competing existing energy production technologies in the global marketplace. 6 The Sociological Review 00(0) A constructive critique of this green capitalist policy assemblage suggests that, on the one hand, this assemblage does indeed enable technological innovation within a market environment to reduce and remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The development of wind and solar energy technologies has increased the proportion of energy generated from renewable sources massively since 2000, while costs of these forms of energy generation are now lower than both oil and natural gas (Kåberger, 2018; Paterson, 2020, p. 401). Meanwhile, a range of carbon capture/storage technologies have been devised, though it is questionable whether these can be developed commercially for large-scale sequestration of atmospheric carbon (Wilberforce et al., 2019, p. 68). On the other hand, this policy has been criticised for specific shortcomings, sustaining a view of ‘the environment’ (including the global climate and dependent biosphere) merely as a resource base for capitalist production and for humans to utilise and consume (Whitehead, 2014, p. 264): any benefits for the natural world are entirely incidental (Jessop, 2012, p. 18). Critics of green capitalism have also argued that the policy has a fundamental blindspot: that it is capitalism’s market economy that – over the past 250 years – has driven the exponential industrial expansion and growth in energy consumption that have generated the greenhouse gases responsible for anthropogenic climate change (Baer, 2018, pp. 26– 28; Harris, 2014, p. 45; Keen, 2021, p. 1162; Smith, 2016). Furthermore, Smith (2016, p. 49) suggests that sustainable capitalism is ‘misconceived and doomed from the start’, because private sector businesses’ economic priority of maximising profit is inherently in conflict with efforts to save the planet, and cannot be systematically aligned. Others have noted that in a green capitalist perspective, inequalities in wealth and well-being associated with capitalist accumulation – both within nations and between global North and South – remain unaddressed (Baer, 2018, pp. 35–38; Schlosberg and Collins, 2014). By contrast, neoclassical economics has been far more sanguine over the capacity of a capitalist economy to manage the climate crisis while sustaining growth (Keen, 2021). The remainder of this article steps beyond both neoclassical and critical analytical perspectives, to instead evaluate green capitalism from a more-than-human, materialist and micropolitical perspective. The following section begins this evaluation by asking: what does capitalism actually do? The more-than-human micropolitics of capitalism According to Marx (1887/2011, p. 187), capitalism generates surplus value via two socioeconomic transactions. First, a production transaction uses human labour to add value to matter (pp. 186–187). The second transaction takes place in a market environment, where this added-value commodity is exchanged for the money/material resources that provides the capitalist with a return (surplus value or profit) on their investment (p. 168). Marx’s analysis foregrounded human practices (Lettow, 2017, pp. 113–114), with non-human matter such as raw materials and means of production treated as the backcloth to these practices. By contrast, a new materialist and micropolitical perspective can enable analysis of these transactions as ‘more-than-human’ engagements between human and non-human matter, within actual physical manifestations of production and exchange such as a factory and a marketplace (DeLanda, 2006, pp. 17–18). The added value of this Fox 7 post-anthropocentric analysis is to lay bare the range of more-than-human affects (capacities to affect or be affected) that assemble these engagements: picking up aspects of these impersonal and micropolitical flows of power and resistance within production and exchange assemblages not captured by an anthropocentric approach, or glossed over if power is treated as top-down or ‘structural’ (Fox & Alldred, 2018, pp. 323–324). Marx’s summaries of capitalism’s two transactions supply a starting-point to re-analyse production and markets in terms of assemblages and affects. Factory production can be summarised as an assemblage that comprises at least (and in no particular order) the following human and non-human materialities: workers; raw materials; means of production (buildings, tools, technology, energy, knowledge); wages; managers; owner or shareholders While in practice, this assemblage will contain many other additional materialities, the principal affect assembles workers, means of production and raw materials (from physical matter through to information) to establish new capacities in the latter. For instance, in a blast furnace assemblage, the physical affect of heating iron ore and a source of carbon such as coke to high temperatures produces ‘pig iron’ – the precursor of materials including cast and wrought iron and steel (along with significant generation of greenhouse gases). The commodities or services produced by the affects in production assemblages possess capacities distinct from their raw materials, furnishing what Marx (1887/2011, pp. 42–43) called additional use-values (a measure of their qualitative and quantitative utility) and exchange-values (their quantitative market value against a standard such as money). At its simplest, a market-event may be summarised as an assemblage comprising at least (and in no particular order): commodity; trader; customer; competitor traders; competitor customers; money/material resources; market environment A market assembles commodities, traders and customers within a specific place and time, ranging from a town marketplace to a commodities trading floor in a financial institution. This spatiotemporal convergence establishes the principal affect of a market assemblage: the exchange of material goods for money or other resources (DeLanda, 2006, p. 17), while also enabling customers to acquire goods required to meet their personal or commercial needs (p. 36). If these goods are traded at above the costs of production (raw materials, means of production and labour), this affect thereby closes the circuit of capitalist human practice with which Marx (1887/2011, p. 168) was primarily concerned: the use of labour to generate surplus value or ‘capital’. Staying with the previous example, refined iron or steel will be purchased by industrial consumers, who in turn will use this as a raw material for a further production assemblage to fashion disparate commodities such as rail track, cutlery or weapons, to be marketed and sold to end-users in due course. These more-than-human production and market affects define the material arrangements (assemblages) of bodies and other matter in a capitalist economy. However, the two affects thus far described do not fully capture the more-than-human micropolitics of 8 The Sociological Review 00(0) capitalist production and markets. Post-anthropocentric analysis of production and markets in terms of assemblages, affects and capacities also reveals that – alongside the foundational affect that links a trader, a customer and a commodity – there are other market-trading affects that establish further interactions between competitor traders, between competitor customers, between commodities, and between marketplaces themselves. These latter affects have been summarised in classical economics as the ‘laws of supply and demand’ (Moore, 1925). According to these ‘laws’, as the price a commodity realises in a marketplace increases, supply of a commodity will also increase, while demand for that commodity will reduce. If prices then fall as new cheaper commodities enter the marketplace, demand will also increase. Over time, supply and demand establish equilibrium in both prices and quantity sold (Moore, 1925, p. 370). Within a monist ontology, these ‘laws’ are instead revealed as complex flows of affect between human and non-human materialities within production and market assemblages. These flows, as DeLanda (2006, p. 36) notes, are beyond the intentionality and immediate control of human actors. For instance, there are two complementary more-thanhuman exchange affects between money, commodities and consumers. The first is the affective capacity of a commodity or service to meet a human need/want (for instance a need for sustenance or medication). ‘Supply’ is the quantity of this affective capacity available to acquire within a marketplace, and will depend upon production affects in multiple, independent and spatially and temporally distant production assemblages, over which no one producer has control. The second is the affective capacity of money or other economic capital (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 47) to acquire this commodity/service. ‘Demand’ is the quantity of this affect available in the same marketplace. It derives from complex affects determining availability of consumers’ economic capital (for instance, the wages gained by workers in multiple production assemblages or the availability of credit contingent upon broader economic circumstances), and is again beyond the control of individual human actors within production and market assemblages. It is these affects that determine the flows of commodities through production and market assemblages, and foundationally impact what these assemblages actually do in practice – in other words, the micropolitics of capitalism’s capacities. These capacities (which are in themselves further affects) generate a number of unintended outcomes, which I consider in the following paragraphs. First, the more-than-human affects associated with supply and demand create uncertainty among both consumers of commodities and the businesses and workers that produce them. In a competitive market, supply frequently outstrips demand. This circumstance presents producers with unattractive alternatives: either to sustain surplus value per unit of commodity by maintaining commodity prices while accepting erosion of market share as other traders sell more competitively; or alternatively, to trim margins to remain competitive, while attempting to sustain profitability by continually attempting to extend market share and market reach through growth in production and sales (Wrenn, 2016, p. 63). Most businesses will be forced to choose the second option to avoid gradual decline and eventual demise. Waste is a further unintended but inevitable by-product of the more-than-human supply and demand affects imposed upon traders/producers (Wrenn, 2016, p. 66). If producers attempt to sustain their commodity’s prices but accept a loss of market share, this Fox 9 produces waste in the form of unsold commodities or idle means of production (Wrenn, 2016, p. 65). Alternatively, if a producer increases production to sustain market share in the face of over-supply, without increased demand more and more unsold products will be wasted, while also wasting workers’ labour-power, as their exertions generate less surplus value per unit sold than previously (Horton, 1997, pp. 128–129). In extremis, an excess of supply over demand may lead to loss of business viability for one or more competing producers, generating further waste of material resources as means of production (premises, tools, technologies, etc.) fall out of use, and shareholders’ investments lose part or all of their value. Third, this analysis of the more-than-human affects in market and production assemblages also explains the social and economic inequalities that have been widely observed as a feature of a capitalist economy (Coburn, 2004, p. 44; Skeggs, 2019). More-thanhuman supply and demand affects establish both the prices at which goods may be bought and sold, and the exchange-value of workers’ labour in different occupations or localities – depressed by labour surpluses (Wrenn, 2016, p. 70; cf. Marx, 2011, pp. 700– 701), or elevated by a shortage of particular skills. The former establishes benchmark prices, independent of the capacities of different customers to pay these prices. The latter affects establish income inequalities, for instance between manual and professional workers, and between workers in developed and developing countries. Together, these supply and demand affects generate, sustain and gradually exacerbate the material inequalities between rich and poor, global North and South. This exegesis of the micropolitics of more-than-human affective flows within capitalism’s production and market assemblages supplies the starting point for a new materialist assessment of green capitalism. To explore the more-than-human affects of green capitalism, the following section considers the emergence and development of one technology heralded as contributing to the reduction in greenhouse gases required to meet net-zero emissions: the electric car. It analyses the production and market assemblages surrounding this technology, and how the more-than-human affects associated with supply and demand contribute to the intended and unintended consequences of green capitalist micropolitics. What can a green technology do? Case study of the electric car Electric vehicles have been in existence for almost 200 years (Wilson, 2018), with electric trains, trams and trolleybuses powered by overhead cables or conductor rails commonplace in the global North from the 1880s. However, early efforts to innovate electric cars (ECs) in the 1900s were hampered by electric motor and battery technology, and were swiftly eclipsed by the development of the internal combustion engine (ICE) (Standage, 2021). The latter enabled higher speeds and longer ranges than battery-powered vehicles, at a price point around a third that of an electric car (Wilson, 2018). Despite sporadic efforts to develop electric alternatives to fossil fuel powered cars, it is only in the 21st century that innovations in battery, fuel cell and electric motor technology coupled with environmental concerns have led to renewed interest in mass commercial development of ECs (Berdichevsky et al., 2006; Hong & Kim, 2018). 10 The Sociological Review 00(0) The premise underpinning the following review is that the growth in EC manufacture and sales in the new millennium has been achieved principally through entrepreneurial activity within a competitive market, though some incentives to producers and consumers have been provided by governments to support their innovation (Meckling & Nahm, 2018; Nunes et al., 2022). As such, , it supplies a relevant case study of a green capitalist ‘technological fix’ for climate change based on the previous more-than-human assessment of capitalism. To explore this in the following sub-sections, I identify the various affects assembling EC technology, as a means to answer the post-anthropocentric and critical question: what can an EC do – socially, economically and politically? A green technology can supply novel capacities In the contemporary period, the principal innovative affect driving the development of an electric alternative to the ICE has been environmental: supplying private car owners with the capacity to avoid dependence upon fossil fuels (Bilbeisi & Kesse, 2017; Dijk & Yarime, 2010, p. 1372). A further affect is associated with the relative costs of electricity and fossil fuels, enabling considerably lower running costs of ECs, though this benefit is currently offset by their higher purchase price in comparison to ICE vehicles (Moloughney, 2014). In the era of concern with anthropogenic climate change, these novel affects have enabled early innovators of a new generation of electric cars to achieve a return on their investment in raw materials, plant and labour, though with very high start-up costs. These innovators included Nissan, which marketed the compact hatchback LEAF in 2011, and Tesla Inc., which from 2009 entered the market with a sports car and a subsequent sedan/ saloon in 2012 – both aimed at high-end consumers: a market in which there was less price sensitivity. Development of these ECs has been intimately associated with the innovation of new battery technologies, enabling greater range and swifter charging (Berdichevsky et al., 2006; Bilbeisi & Kesse, 2017). I discuss battery technology in greater detail later in this section. A green technology can compete In terms of the analysis developed earlier in this article, the core affect in the EC production assemblage turns out a novel product whose physical capacities are greater than those of its component elements. Its environmental and economic capacities meanwhile establish an affect within the market assemblage that enhances its exchange-value, allowing EC manufacturers to realise a return on their material investments in the production assemblage. However, as noted previously in this article, other more-than-human affects associated with supply and demand also operate within this capitalism assemblage. The short history of Tesla Inc.’s EC business illustrates how these more-thanhuman affects transcend the intentionality and strategies of human actors, to alter the dynamics between suppliers and buyers in a free-market environment and driving down a product’s exchange-value. Tesla Inc. was established in 2003 as a company whose business strategy included innovating a range of congruent energy generation and storage solutions (Bilbeisi & Fox 11 Kesse, 2017), including the battery pack for Tesla cars (Berdichevsky et al., 2006).1 From its outset, the company was unusual in owning its entire supply chain – from manufacturing to distribution (Bilbeisi & Kesse, 2017). As an early innovator, and with demand spiralling as concern over fossil fuel induced climate change grew, it was able to market its high-end sports car Roadster and sedan/saloon Model S with virtually no competition (Nissan’s LEAF was a compact EC, firmly aimed at a family market). Wrenn (2016, p. 63) has suggested that during the innovation phase of a technology such as the EC, more-than-human supply and demand affects benefit start-ups such as Tesla; during the following market consolidation phase – as rivals enter the market – these affects threaten an innovator’s market share, forcing them to either trim margins or accept dwindling sales. As a corporation with no previous history of car making, Tesla gained an initial advantage over established motor manufacturers, whose business models and manufacturing plant were given over to sustaining market share for their ICE models (Riley, 2019). But, as these potential rivals played catch-up for a share of the electric car market, the more-than-human affects associated with supply and demand squeezed margins, entirely beyond Tesla Inc.’s control. In a move to head off competition, it launched its Model X SUV in 2015, followed by the Model 3 mid-range car (2016), both at a competitive price point approximately half that of its previous luxury models. This strategy gained the company a 65% share of the US market by 2021 (Investopedia Team, 2021), way ahead of competitors such as the Nissan-RenaultMitsubishi technology and platform-sharing consortium (Gibbs, 2022) and the Chinese car manufacturer Geely (Riley, 2019). However, Tesla only turned a profit on its EC business in 2020 (Katje, 2021). A decade on from Tesla Inc.’s entry into the EC market, most of the major car manufacturers are now investing massively in plants to build ECs ($34 billion in the case of Volkswagen Group), with some declaring their intentions to cease building fossil fuel vehicles entirely by 2030 or earlier (Chavez & Campbell, 2022; Riley, 2019). With these manufacturers now boosting production of electric cars, projections suggest that Tesla will be pushed into fourth place in terms of sales volume by 2025 (Riley, 2019). According to this modelling, the Volkswagen Group (which includes the luxury Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini and Porsche brands) will top the electric car market with sales of 1.4 million vehicles, directly competing within Tesla’s niche luxury market. Other leading manufacturers including Toyota, Ford, General Motors and Hyundai are all projected to sell similar volumes (around 400,000 cars) as Tesla by 2025 (Riley, 2019), while volume manufacture of ECs may push prices as low as $30K (Chavez & Campbell, 2022). While demand for ECs will continue to grow over coming decades, these more-thanhuman supply and demand affects will inevitably threaten the viability of some manufacturers, as has been seen in other industries such as personal computers (Thompson & Strickland, 1997).