What is the just transition to solve the climate crisis ?

 

Michel Bauwens /Blogger Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

 

7th December 2015/P2P Blog

“Relying on green capitalism to implement a prevention program using the usual market-driven mechanisms is a recipe for disaster. Global carbon emissions continue to climb while market-led renewable energy growth is much too slow to replace fossil fuels in such a short window.”

This is an excerpt from an interview of biochemist David Schwartzman by Jacobin magazine. The interview is worth reading in full.
Here is the question dealing with the transition strategy and how a certain amount of oil expenditure may still be needed to fund the transition to full renewable energy:
* What should the climate justice movement be doing differently?
“More attention and energy should be focused on framing. For example, today key players in the present climate justice movement present misleading prescriptions for change like the slogan “keep the oil in the ground.”
This prescription ignores energy poverty and presents an unrealistic framework for change. Instead the movement should argue first for rapid phasing out of the fossil fuels with the highest carbon footprints (coal, natural gas, and tar sands oil), and using the minimum necessary amount of conventional liquid oil reserves to replace all fossil-fuel consumption with a sufficient global wind and solar power infrastructure. Yes, keep most of the oil in the ground, but not all.
What is sufficient in this regard? An amount that is capable of terminating the energy poverty that now affects the majority of the world’s people, while simultaneously facilitating climate adaptation, the sequestering of carbon from the atmosphere into the soil and crust, and bringing (and keeping) the atmospheric carbon dioxide level below 350 parts per million.
We will likely need more energy capacity than we currently have to realize these objectives. At present, primary global energy consumption is equivalent to 18 trillion watts. Meeting the requirements listed will require at least double this consumption level in the twenty-first century (although efficiencies gained by solarization will ultimately lower this level).
Some climate justice activists accept the collapse of civilization and call for a radical reduction in global energy consumption regardless of its impact on humanity. For example, Derrick Jensen — an extreme anti-extractionist — calls for an immediate shutdown of all oil wells (taking “keep the oil in the ground” literally).
This strategy is extremely problematic. It prevents a solar transition with the capacity to both eliminate energy poverty and work through the climate crisis. Only a global clean energy infrastructure supplying more energy than is produced now can allow for ongoing climate adaptation and the sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere back into the soil and crust.
A global wind and solar transition replacing unsustainable energy supplies must be parasitic on these supplies, just as the industrial fossil-fuel revolution was parasitic on biomass (plant) energy until it replaced the former supply with sufficient capacity. Liquid oil, which has the lowest carbon footprint of the fossil fuels, is the preferred energy source to make this renewable energy transition.
A rapid phase-out starting with the most carbon-heavy fossil fuels, coupled with a full transition to a global wind/solar power infrastructure, should be a global objective. If it begins robustly in the near future, this could keep overall warming below 1.5°C.
With the creation of a cooperative global regime on climate change, each nation will have an opportunity to fully benefit from this transition, while contributing resources compatible with their naturally existing oil, wind, or solar resources.”

Two criticisms of Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalist Theses: underemphasizing finance and overemphasizing InfoTech

 

Michel Bauwens/P2P Blog/

16th November 2015

Blogger Ref  http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

From an extensive and must-read review by Ann Pettifor:


* On the illusory naturalism of Kondratieff cycles
“My main beef with Mason’s book is that rather than define this period as one that was man-made – designed largely by the genius John Maynard Keynes and his Cambridge colleagues – Mason defines this period as a “Kondratieff upswing on steroids”.
Once again the implication is that this period of full employment, of science-led innovation, high productivity…high wages, consumption keeping pace with production, benign inflation and marginal speculative finance (p 86-7) is described as something beyond human agency – akin to the cycles of the moon.
Neoliberals too like to dismiss this age as beyond our present-day ken. Neoliberals too would like us to feel impotent in the face of day’s rapacious financial capitalism. But as the Golden Age proved, we are not impotent. And we are not the subjects of periodic, abstract cycles. The Golden Age was constructed, designed and implemented by a group of economists who congregated at Bretton Woods in 1944 and that were led by John Maynard Keynes and his American competitor, Harry Dexter White. (The striking thing about the conference was that only one banker was allowed to attend – and only because President Roosevelt regarded him as tame enough not to present a threat to the proceedings.)
Keynes and colleagues were confronted by a form of capitalism that had wrought massive destruction of lives, livelihoods and nations. They were surrounded by the wreckage of war, but were not intimidated by the scale of the challenge they faced in confronting, subordinating and managing global finance capitalism.
Nor should we be. We are not, as Mason suggests, the passive subjects of inexorable and inevitable cycles or Kondratieff waves of capitalism. We are masters of our own destiny – if only we (and professional economists) had the courage to identify, name, subordinate and manage the global finance sector – as Keynes and others have shown we can. ”
* Mason is over-emphasizing infotech and underestimating the role of finance
“While Mason does of course discuss the finance sector, he makes infotech the main driver of the changes we are witnessing today.
I beg to disagree. Far from ‘mutating’ in cycles of 50 to 500 years, the finance sector is today growing exponentially before our very eyes, with only the occasional financial crisis to arrest that growth. This is partly thanks to the rise of infotech, but infotech in the service of finance, not as its driver.
The last financial crisis (2007-9) turbo-blasted the sector into a new fantastic growth phase. Not only was Haute Finance bailed out, it also insidiously attached itself more fully to states – and wrested guarantees and protection from these governments, their taxpayers and their central banks.
And while this particular group of capitalists may worship at the shrine of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand, they nevertheless demand and expect taxpayer-funded guarantees and protection from the discipline and losses imposed by market forces.
Despite its detachment from the “real” economy of production, the global finance sector has succeeded in capturing, effectively looting and then subordinating governments and their taxpayers to the interests of financiers. Bankers and financiers now effectively control the public utility that is our monetary system. They can gamble and speculate on global markets without fear of losses or the fear of being disciplined by ‘the invisible hand’. They know their institutions are Too Systemic, or Too Big To Fail.
They are today’s Masters of the Universe – and they do not feature largely in this book.
Like so many others Mason takes the structure of the internet as a model for the evolution of capitalism and speculates that capitalism will evolve into a system in which hierarchies are flattened, machines are free and we’re all far more collaborative.
But Mason’s techno-utopianism is fundamentally about the production side of the economy. Yet, as he well knows, there is more to the economy than production. There is consumption – and Mason’s view of today’s sharing, networked and connected world may just as well be defined as collaborative consumption.
And then there’s the rentier sector of the economy – earning rent from assets (particularly financial assets like debt) effortlessly.
The last two sectors are not fully addressed in the wide sweep of this book.”