Malm, Andreas. _Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming_. London New York: Verso, 2016. > fossil fuels won the original race because they were cheapest, and the same advantage will now have to be secured for renewable alternatives if they shall have a chance. I question this statement. It is true in the limited sense that renewables will only be popular if they are cheaper. But it completely fails to address various problems with renewable energy - most renewable energy infrastructure will require fossil energy to build. Perhaps we need to move away from our current monetary system completely. Changing our energy system without changing our interest-based and general-pupose money system won't help much. It will still permit the logic of razing forests to build solar panel farms. > If the fossil economy is a train that never stops but always accelerates, even when approaching the precipice, the task is to pull the brakes (or maybe jump off) in time, and if there is a driver who seeks to keep this from happening, she has probably been seated in the locomotive for some time: we need to know who she is and how she works (or perhaps it is an automatic engine, a driverless construction – but the need would be the same). # Power I like the observation that the English word "power" combines 2 meanings which in most other European languages remain separate: power as energy, and power as unequal social relations. I also like the observation that academic discourse rarely combines the two. Vaclav Smil doesn't bring in politcal power in his analysis of energy transitions. And Steven Lukes doesn't talk about energy in his discussion of political power. # Steam Engine In 1784, James Watt patented his steam engine. His breakthrough innovation was to harness the burning of coal to the wheel. His rotative engine was able to power machines and vehicles, which are the main fulcrums of "self-sustaining growth". The British cotton industry was "the fast lane of the Industrial Revolution, in which self-sustaining growth first appeared". Before steam, the machines were powered by the waterwheel. Why did the cotton capitalists switch to steam? Answering this may help us understand what drives our current fossil fuel economies. # England and China Kenneth Pomeranz in The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, argues that England and China were at comparative stages of development all the way until the 19th-century. > Both exhibited high population densities, specialisation, Smithian division of labour, a gradually heightened propensity to truck, barter and exchange: economic growth, in short. Both likewise achieved rising agricultural productivity, relatively free markets for land and labour, improved standards of living – and both were running headlong towards ecological crash. The difference is that England discovered "colonies and coal". > Anchored in nearby mineral endowments (and distant dominions, with scant purchase on the strictly energetic side of the process), Western Europe – England its core – ‘became a fortunate freak,’ breaking ‘through the fundamental constraints of energy use and resource availability that had previously limited everyone’s horizons. Smith - division of labour Ricardo - trade Malthus - population growth England and China had all these drivers. They were threatened by land constraint. England broke through to exponential growth. # Wrigley Wrigely, E. A. “The Supply of Raw Materials in the Industrial Revolution.” _The Economic History Review_ 15, no. 1 (1962). "A thermodynamic Ricardian": > Plants capture a fraction of the incoming solar radiation and convert it into organic matter on the land, which is restricted, leaving only a narrow energy base on which humans can draw. The organic economy of preindustrial Britain was characterised by its complete dependence on plants, directly (wood as fuel) or indirectly (fodder for beasts of burden, and so on). # CO2 > On 9 May 2013, the daily average concentration of carbon dioxide in the air as measured high on the slopes of a Hawaiian volcano, at the Mauna Loa Observatory, the oldest station for monitoring CO2 in the world and the global benchmark site for tracking the rise and rise of the gas, first crept above 400 parts per million (ppm). The last time CO2 was at this level was 2.5 million years ago, during the Pliocene. # Anthropocene Atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen coined the term Anthropocene in a short article in Nature in 2002, "The Geology of Mankind": > The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens to coincide with James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784. The idea that Watt's rotative steam engine started the Anthropocene was also suggested by Henri Bergson in his 1907 book L'Evolution Créatrice: > A century has elapsed since the invention of the steam engine, and we are only just beginning to feel the depths of the shock it gave us … In thousands of years, when, seen from a distance, only the broad lines of the present age will still be visible, our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even supposing they are remembered at all; but the steam engine, and the procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of pre-historic times: it will serve to define an age. # Fire In ‘Carbon and the Anthropocene,’ prominent climate scientists Michael R. Raupach and Josep G. Canadell propose that: > the ‘essential catalyst’ and ‘primary reason’ for the large-scale combustion of fossil fuels as it spread in the industrial era are in fact the mastering of fire by a particular primate species some half a million years ago. My learning to walk at the age of one is the reason for me dancing salsa today: the same with humanity burning first a tree and then, 500,000 years later, a barrel of oil. > Geographer Nigel Clark goes even further. He avers that climate change ‘is primarily the result of an escalating human capacity for combustion,’ traced back to Homo erectus’s handling of fire on the African savannah 1.6 million years ago – standard Anthropocene talk, but then he proceeds to ask: ‘What kind of planet is this that births a creature capable of doing such things?’ > > The pyromaniac inclination inheres in the earth itself. A store of fireworks circulating around the sun, the planet possesses an atmosphere rich in oxygen, flammable fuels and plenty of materials for ignition; as long as the earth has existed, its surface has been burning. Wherever there is vegetation, a wildfire sooner or later breaks out. Humans have done nothing more than articulate this geological DNA, augmenting ‘the planet’s own pyrophytic tendencies,’ accelerating ‘a combustive imperative that defines the earth itself’ of which ‘the recent propensity to tap into sedimented and fossilised biomass is the latest’. Here the concept of the Anthropocene is pressed towards its outer limits. Human agency is now the medium through which the planet realises its latent destructivity, the combustion of coal and oil a sort of telluric ventriloquism or delegated pyromania. In Clark, the earth qua celestial body is the active incendiary: it has invested in fire, ‘wagered on fire’ – it has been ‘perverse enough to produce a fire creature’ known as man.²⁶ On this view, the ultimate cause of climate change in the Anthropocene, implemented through the steam engine and all the other technologies, is not a distant event in the evolution of the human species, but the genesis of planet Earth itself some 4 billion years ago, from whose combustible rocks an arsonist son has arisen. # Determinism Marx subscribed to a form of technological as well as historical determinism. He felt that the adoption of the steam engine was inevitable, and that this then caused the emergence of class relations, because the technology required a certain kind of social structure to operate it. Presumably you now need capitalists because capital was required to build the technology. # Types of solar energy Flow - wind and water - restricted by geography, because wind and water could only flow in certain areas - restricted in time by the seasons, eg water freezes in winter Animate - embodied in man or animals - this was restricted by the requirements of metabolism, eg rest and nutrition Stock - coal and oil - relics of solar energy from the distant past # Coal Coal is plant matter that sank into bogs, was turned into peat, and then under heat and pressure, lost its water content and solidified into coal. 90 percent of the world's coal reserves come from the Carboniferous period, ranged from 360 to 286 million years ago, when the rate of coal burial reached a level 600 times higher than the average for the other 98 percent of Earth's history, thanks the following favourable conditions: wet climate, vast flood plains, large woody plants colonising upland areas as well as swamps and seashores, leaving an abundance of material for coalification. # Renewables Herman Scheer, probably the most influential European ideologist of renewable energy, the architect of the German transition project known as Energiewende, has constructed an entire vision for the rejuvenation of modern civilisation around localisation. > Scheer envisions closed loops of energy, goods and services inside local communities, with no trucks or high-voltage cables criss-crossing the earth. Energy consumers will have to adapt to ‘the intensity of insolation, strength of the prevailing winds, presence or absence of hydropower potential’ in situ. A readjusting process of ‘industrial relocation’ will ensue, in compliance with the distribution of energy supplies. Factories will besprinkle the globe. There will be no centres. > If Scheer is correct about the ramifications of a transition to the flow, it stands in antagonistic contradiction to the logic of global capital, for the means of production would have to be shackled to communities formed around energy nuclei. The formula that once brought steam to ascendancy would have to be inverted. Capital would need to carry the people to the power, rather than placing the power amongst the people as it has been doing for the past two centuries, and never with greater vigour than in the current stage of abstract space.