Policies aimed at achieving green growth get commodified into the racial capitalist order --- forwards U.S imperialism and domination.

Goldstein’s ethnography affirms the value of studying peo-ple’s desire to make a social impact. Cleantech participates in a dominant culture Goldstein refers to as the “entrepre-neurial savior complex” (p. 119) that cultivates and har-nesses the desire to improve the world, yet rarely challenges how “doing good” operates within and builds on historical geographies of settler colonialism and power relations or po-litical economies of racial capitalism. As Goldstein (p. 61) compellingly argues, such desires are not merely false con-sciousness; they operate in long-standing modes of imperial subjectivity and property relations, civilizationist discourse, and—what the book especially excels at showing—the co-lonial waste-conversion epistemology of “improvement.” Goldstein situates cleantech’s so-called new green spirit of capitalism within a genealogy of “planetary improvement.” The term names how cleantech and other green entrepre-neurs apprehend and enclose the world through (racial-ized) claims of planetary dominion over what needs to be fixed or saved. Planetary improvement evidences modern-izing imperatives to develop and profit from a productive landscape, as well as aspects of frontier ideology and (set-tler) colonialism’s ontological treatment of nature as waste requiring improvement. Planetary improvement promises technological salvation through asymmetries of power, sympathy, and concern: There are those who adjudicate and have the right to comment, troubleshoot, judge, tech-nologically intervene, and feel compassion, whereas others are obliged to submit, to be saved (Asad 2015). We might call this heroic enterprise white man’s burden 2.0: The bur-den of cleaning up and converting the dirty, industrial world (made by old unenlightened energy-hog capitalism 1.0) for the sake of humanity needing to be saved. This “undifferentiated humanity” is itself a colonial construct (Lowe 2015).Goldstein describes how such an imperial vision conflates U.S. interests with those of the planet, and, in the case of cleantech, frames the world’s problems in terms of the scar-city of energy, even as the material energetic footprint of imperial subjectivity remains unacknowledged. The settler spectacle of planetary improvement broadly informs ascen-dant green markets and governance that treat the planet as a knowable and controllable object or system. This co-lonial-racialized framing of the world stems from and feeds back into the dominant regime of property (Bhandar 2018). Goldstein conveys how “improvement” encloses creativity as a property relation through techno-fetishism and posses-sive neoliberal entrepreneurship (which we should situate within the racial capitalism of the tech economy more gen-erally). Goldstein contends that entrepreneurialism means submission to the community of money. The process entails an enclosure of collective creative capacity. Entrepreneurs are creative workers; investors want to transform them into employees and separate them from their products. This in-volves the conversion of the inventor to entrepreneur to employee, and a parallel process of innovations becoming owned assets and intellectual property. Inventors become “freed” from the means of production and willing to sub-ject themselves to waged labor under capital’s control.So how do we decolonize improvement and free creativity from the straitjacket of market–property relations? Gold-102 THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKSstein concludes the book in a speculative mode that is cre-ative and pragmatic. He explores a more radical politics of technology and innovation, pluripotent intellect, amateur-ism, and redirecting creative labors toward “care-full ap-proaches.” I have been thinking with the book in another direction: connecting the entrepreneurial savior complex with the global financial system and fiscal entrepreneur-ialism. Building from Goldstein’s analysis, we can struc-turally see the lie of liquidity and reliance of capital on the manna of state budgets—whether tax base, debt base, bailouts, or all three (p. 152). Moreover, when consider-ing “just transitions,” it is clear that the choice to live and thrive with less energetic and material consumption and therefore with less formal economic activity is very differ-ent than degrowth imposed under conditions of auster-ity, such as in Puerto Rico, where the governor described the post–Hurricane Maria territory as a “blank slate” for energy conversions (i.e., privatization), or the rightsizing, downsizing, shrinking, and greening impositions on his-torically black U.S. cities. In these cases, the logic of debt asserts that people cut off from capital need to develop their own capacities and reform their backwardness (Byrd et&Sal. 2018). Goldstein’s excellent book can be put in conversation with emergent South-to-South studies and scholarship on racial capitalism to denaturalize epistemol-ogies and policies of improvement across routinized Global North–South power structures: connecting the neoliberal criminalization of “making do” and predatory fines pushed onto public services in Flint, Michigan, or Birmingham, Alabama, to the heroicized figure of the “slum entrepre-neur” in the developmentalist framework of Global South megacities. This conjunction with Goldstein’s work makes plain that decolonizing improvement requires “public provisioning”—a process that would differentiate use from property or enclosure to prioritize social uses over proper-ty’s function as an instrument of financial investment, and that would undo or redress racial regimes of ownership, debt, and deservedness.