Energy Climate and Sustainability

10b: the backlash

work@mishavelthuis.nl

Thu 17 April 2025

Recap

By the way

Cloud capital

The capital that owns and controls the platforms that have locked us in. We are allowed to use it, as long we provide it - in return - with the means to sustain and expand its power (i.e. we give them data, and we let their algorithms steer our content, which allows them to shape our preferences).

Unequal exchange

When more is taken than given in return.

Neoclassical economists would say: the value of something is what is paid for it.

Marxist political economists would say:

Imagine we live in a world where everyone owns the same. Everyone would have equal access to the means of production.
In principle things would be exchanged for their "real value", which to Marxists would be the time it takes to produce them (labour theory of value).
You would exchange something you (generally, on average) produce in 2 hours, for something else that you would (generally, on average) produce in two hours. That is equal exchange. (This general, average time required to produce something is called "the socially necessary labour time).
There are multiple reasons why things do not exchange at their "true value" (in terms of the time that goes into it to produce it). There are of course the dynamics of the market (variation in space and time of supply and demand).
But, according to Marx, one very important reason for such "unequal exchange", is that historical processes of (often violent) accumulation weaken the bargaining position of some, and strengthen the bargaining position of others.
The main example is the relationship between capital and labour: workers have no access to the means of production, so they are dependent on those who do. That is why workers agree to for example work for 8 hours, for a wage that is equivalent to the product of 6 hours of work. The fact that you depend on (the means of production owned by) your boss, means that you are forced to accept unequal exchange.
More generally you could say that when someone's bargaining position is actively undermined, they can be forced into unequal exchange.
So to take the example of Colombian coal: if your boss is using paramilitaries to kill the leaders of your union, and you're quite desperate for a job because the land you owned with your family has been violently taken away from you, you will be willing to work very long hours in the mine for a low wage. Dutch electricity consumers will pay the equivalent of a few minutes of their day, to purchase the product of hours of work. This is unequal exchange. Dutch people taking more than what they give back, by - in a way - using the desperation (and therefore weak bargaining position) of poor people in Colombia.
In the end, you could maintain that both parties benefit, but the party with the strong bargaining position benefits much more from the exchange than the party with the weaker bargaining position. This in turn strengthens the power asymmetry that created the unequal exchange in the first place.

The right is right

What are they right about?

Image from: Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O., & Ludwig, C. (2015). The trajectory of the Anthropocene: the great acceleration. The anthropocene review, 2(1), 81-98.

Some quotes from Klein:

Capitalism

"if the dire projections coming out of the IPCC are left unchallenged, and business as usual is indeed driving us straight toward civilization-threatening tipping points, then the implications are obvious: the ideological crusade incubated in think tanks like Heartland, Cato, and Heritage will have to come to a screeching halt."

"Just as the Heartlanders fear, the existential crisis that is climate change has the power to release these suppressed values on a global and sustained scale, to provide us with a chance for a mass jailbreak from the house that their ideology built—a structure already showing significant cracks and fissures."

"Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony."

"There is a certain irony at work: it is the success of their own revolution that makes revolutionary levels of transformation to the market system now our best hope of avoiding climate chaos."

"Nor have the various attempts to soft-pedal climate action as compatible with market logic (carbon trading, carbon offsets, monetizing nature’s “services”) fooled these true believers one bit. They know very well that ours is a global economy created by, and fully reliant upon, the burning of fossil fuels and that a dependency that foundational cannot be changed with a few gentle market mechanisms. It requires heavy-duty interventions: sweeping bans on polluting activities, deep subsidies for green alternatives, pricey penalties for violations, new taxes, new public works programs, reversals of privatizations—the list of ideological outrages goes on and on."

"it’s also the case that there is no way to get cuts in emissions steep or rapid enough to avoid those catastrophic scenarios without levels of government intervention that will never be acceptable to right-wing ideologues."

Colonialism

"And there is also the matter of “global equity” that keeps coming up in the climate negotiations. The equity debate is based on the simple scientific fact that global warming is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over two centuries. That means that the countries that got a large head start on industrialization have done a great deal more emitting than most others. And yet many of the countries that have emitted least are getting hit by the impacts of climate change first and worst (the result of geographical bad luck as well as the particular vulnerabilities created by poverty). To address this structural inequity sufficiently to persuade fast-growing countries like China and India not to destabilize the global climate system, earlier emitters, like North America and Europe, will have to take a greater share of the burden at first. And there will obviously need to be substantial transfers of resources and technology to help battle poverty using low carbon tools. This is what Bolivia’s climate negotiator Angélica Navarro Llanos meant when she called for a Marshall Plan for the Earth. And it is this sort of wealth redistribution that represents the direst of thought crimes at a place like the Heartland Institute."

What is the response? Why?

(Image from website Heartland Institute)

The logic

The far-out
meets the far-right

Regular right

The far-out

The Far-out during COVID-19

The context:

At the start of the pandemic there were some months in which science did not have the answers yet: wellness and fitness gurus stepped in: what to eat. How to stay healthy.
Professions that rely on physical presence/ contact were especially hard-hit: trainers, masseuses, fitness trainers.
MV: People not used to spend time with themselves inside: escapism in social media.

Lockdown required sacrifices, that many people - as it turned out - were unwilling to make:

The morality of discipline (ugly): I am strong because of my disciplined life-style. They are weak because they are lazy and undisciplined. Why should I sacrifice my freedom for their (self-inflicted) weakness.
Morality of eugenetics (uglier): I am stronger because of my genes. You are weak because of your genes. Why should I sacrifice my freedom for your weakness?

Klein: the historical alliance between wellness, fitness, new-age thinking and fascism (more next Thursday!) reappeared:

"After the horrors of the Second World War, the fascist/fitness/New Age alliance broke apart. When the New Age experienced its next big wave of popularity, in the 1960s, it was firmly associated with hippies, environmentalism, and the Beatles studying transcendental meditation. Now, however, it seemed as if the movement’s older, supremacist roots were reasserting themselves.

Coopting legitimate concerns

Seeds of resistance are not just broken, they are used to fight the resistance.

Example 1:

Legitimate concern: big Pharma pursuing profit over the health of the common people.
Far-out, antivax Covid twist: "They want to vaccinate my children to make profit"

Example 2:

Legitimate concern: big tech accumulating unprecedented levels of control over what we read and see.
Far-out antivax covid twist: "They want to implant a computer chip so they can track my movement"

Example 3

Legitimate concern: (Sexist) blind spots of modern medicine (including premature recourse to medicalized solutions, too little recognition of more holistic, non-medicalized solutions).
Far-out antivax covid twist: "I don't need vaccines. My body/nature knows better.

Frustrations and fears over these problems - that could have been seeds of of a Degrowth resistance - were drawn in by right wing anti-vax movement.

Image:

Separation of state and science?

The backlash

The great reset

Echoes of nitrogen

Mirror world

A powerful tactic: know your own weak spots (things that would not go down well with public opinion), and accuse your opponents of exactly that, so that when they accuse you of those things, it will be less credible. (So that people will think: "these are just toddlers on a playground": "You are pedophile". "No you, are a pedophile!". (People will think: this is confusing, what is even true these days, let's continue with the day.)

Calling the lockdown fascist, while the defiance of the lock down (choosing your own freedom over the survival of the vulnerable) is actually something that would fit with fascist worldview.

Calling people who take the vaccine selfish (while actually not taking the vaccine (because you are worried about your own health) is selfish).

Claiming to fight freedom of speech, while your movement is banning books, and having government agencies use lists of forbidden words to redirect government funding to unversities.

Bannon: "It’s rule “by the wealthy, for the wealthy—against you,” he says." That is exactly what his political movement has been doing.

People protesting against the genocide in Gaza are antisemites, while your own movement is part of (or closely works with) explicit, self-proclaimed neonazis.

Spreading rumours about large-scale child-trafficking/ pedophile-rings in the Democratic part, when Donald Trump was literally hanging out with Jeffery Epstein.

This article talks about the "populist camera obscura" that inverts the world:

"authoritarianism is seen as real democracy and people’s freedom"
"dismissing feminism as endorsing gender equality"
"and the systematic use of deception and falsehood as truth and courageous honesty"