A new fossil of a vampire squid bridges a 120 million-year gap in their fossil record. Vampire squid today are adapted to low oxygen, deep sea environments. I for one might welcome our new super-cuttlefish overlords, considering that it looks less likely that the awkward reality that the paradigm of market economics has hidden from view will not achieve substitution for renewable energy unless radical financial solutions are found.
The history of carbon capture and its technology pilot projects is still dominated by profitability rather than seeing capitalization in the context of ecosocialism.
Nick Bernard’s new book on financialization has just been published, coming at a moment when many folks are working on critiques of financialization. beyond those of the MMT groups. He announced its contract in 2022, although it seems we still have a way to go to achieve “an alternative way of approaching the power of finance without losing sight of the wider contradictions of capitalist accumulation.” Carbon costs, price, and value must still be entangled and then disentangled.
Nick Bernards provides a comprehensive critique of the financialization discourse, offering vital insights about finance's relationship to production, the state, colonialism, and nature.
Rather than indulging in the harmful fantasy that confronting the financial elite will fix the economy, Bernards provides an alternative approach. Starting from the premise that risk and speculation are core to the operation of all capital and not just the hallmark of a perverted financial sector, this Marxist reading of the interconnection between capitalism's uneven exploitation of labour and nature and financial capital lays the groundwork for a much-needed view of the real powers of finance. www.plutobooks.com/...
Brett Christophers, in The Price Is Wrong, adds to this list a potentially more drastic symptom: a failure on the part of policymakers to understand the energy transition on which the future of the planet hinges. The operating assumption of energy economists over the years has been that the key obstacle to the growth of renewable energy is its higher cost, which renders it unable to compete against fossil fuels in the energy market, and hence reliant on government subsidy. It was a moment of great excitement, therefore, when in 2015 the International Energy Agency reported that, finally, renewable technologies (primarily solar and wind farms) were ‘no longer cost outliers’ relative to gas, coal, oil and nuclear power generation. According to policy orthodoxy, that should have been a turning point. It should have been the moment when governments could withdraw their subsidies for the renewables sector and stand back as the price mechanism worked its magic. If coal, gas and oil were now the less price-competitive option, the laws of supply and demand would suggest that they would soon be left for dead. But none of this has happened. Why?
Brett Christophers goes further in setting out the way capitalism still manages to thrive despite the absence of productivity gains or prosperity.
In a word, profitability. As Wael Sawan, the CEO of Shell, put it only last year, ‘Our shareholders deserve to see us going after strong returns. If we cannot achieve the double-digit returns in a business, we need to question very hard whether we should continue in that business. Absolutely we want to go for lower and lower and lower carbon, but it has to be profitable.’ Companies such as Shell expect to make at least 15 per cent returns on their investments in fossil fuels, but only 5–8 per cent returns on their investments in renewables. The appeal of fossil fuels, from the vantage point of the ‘antimarket’, is that they continue to offer the kinds of monopoly rent that the far more competitive, more marketised industry of renewables does not. This, as Christophers sees it, is the awkward reality that the paradigm of market economics has hidden from view. He shares the fear expressed by the New Yorker cartoon in which a man explains to three children sitting by some future campfire: ‘Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.’
[...]
The challenge is daunting. In 2022, 61 per cent of the global electricity supply came from fossil fuels, the majority from coal, compared to just 12 per cent from wind and solar combined. To keep pace with rising demand, new coal-fuelled power stations are being built all the time — an average of two per week are approved in China alone. The IEA’s plan to reach net zero by 2050 involves a rise in the contribution of wind and solar to 68 per cent, and the virtual eradication of fossil fuels in electricity generation, with the remainder made up by other renewables such as hydropower and bioenergy, as well as nuclear. Given that global electricity demand is likely to double over the same period (thanks especially to the electrification of other technologies), the task would appear almost impossible. But to the extent that there is any hope at all of preventing a rise in global temperatures of two or more degrees, it hangs on the rolling out of new wind and solar farms at extraordinary speed.
www.lrb.co.uk/...
Power, as well as price, matters in a well-run economy
That’s the lesson to take from both the founding of the Bretton Woods system 80 years ago and the Biden administration today.
[...]
...yet the problem of the day isn’t a shortage of Barbie dolls — or, indeed, any sort of throwaway consumer item. It’s that more cheap stuff in landfills didn’t make up for the fact that wages in many countries simply haven’t kept pace with the cost of being middle class.
[...]
In a recent CEPR webcast, Johnson points out that the “postcolonial” vision put forward by the Biden administration, one focused on people and planet rather than merely price, is what the Bretton Woods system meant to deliver before it was hijacked by powerful state and corporate interests.
It’s a point well worth remembering as we look to reinvent these institutions and reform global trade today
www.ft.com/...
