Glass Half Full: Building a Decarbonized U.S. Power Sector -

Addressing climate change and protecting our environment – Victorian Socialists

The climate crisis is driven by the profit motive. We need a shift to 100 percent publicly owned renewable energy and an end to old-growth logging.

Why unilateral decarbonisation can pay for itself

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly warming our planet, with potentially severe economic, social, and health consequences. Conventional estimates of climate damages suggest that while coordinated global efforts are desirable, unilateral action is rarely cost-effective due to a classic free-rider problem. Why should a country bear the costs of reducing emissions when the benefits are shared globally? This column re-evaluates this view in light of new climate damage estimates based on global temperature variation, showing that the economic case for unilateral decarbonisation is far stronger than previously thought.

Make power affordable and sustainable – Victorian Socialists

Energy is essential infrastructure. We’re fighting for a public takeover to immediately cap electricity and gas bills, and transition to renewables sources.

Best of times, worst of times: record fossil-fuel profits, inflation and inequality

The 2022 oil and gas crisis resulted in record fossil-fuel profits globally that rehabilitated the oil and gas industry, obstructed the energy transition and contributed to inflation, but their magnitude and beneficiaries have been insufficiently understood. Here we show the size of profits across countries and their distribution across socio-economic groups within the United States, using company income statements, comprehensive ownership data and a network model for propagating profits via shareholdings. We estimate that globally, net income in publicly listed oil and gas companies alone reached US$916 billion in 2022, with the United States the biggest beneficiary with claims on US$301 billion, more than U.S. investments of US$267 billion in the low carbon economy that year. In a network of U.S. shareholdings with 252,433 nodes including privately held U.S. companies, 50 % of profits went to the wealthiest 1 % of individuals, predominantly through direct shareholdings and private company ownership. In contrast the bottom 50 % only received 1 %. The incremental U.S. fossil-fuel profits in 2022 relative to 2021 were enough to increase the disposable income of the wealthiest Americans by several percent and compensate a substantial part of their purchasing power loss from inflation that year, thereby exacerbating inflation inequality. These profits also reinforced existing racial and ethnic inequalities and inequalities between groups with different educational attainments. We discuss how an excess profit tax could be used to both lower inequality and accelerate the energy transition as increasing geopolitical tensions and climate impacts threaten continued volatility in oil and gas markets.

Green economic planning for rapid decarbonisation

Sustainable futures require deep social and economic transformations to address climate change adequately. The current landscape of intergovernmental and market-based coordination is not delivering...

The shale revolution helped make America’s economy great

But will the country’s oil riches discourage a similar revolution in renewables?

The future is made of energy | Orca Notes

A megatrend way bigger than decarbonization is probably the key to abundance and sustainability both.

Super-rich get ‘double dividend’ from causes and costs of climate crisis, report finds

Oxfam says investing by rich in disaster recovery widens inequality and gives incentive to delay climate action

The New Geopolitics Of The Green Transition

The only path forward for tackling the climate crisis hinges on cooperative industrial strategies to coordinate clean energy investment and infrastructure development.

AI boom means US is now ‘investing more’ in fossil-fuel power than China - Carbon Brief

The “data-centre boom” is driving a surge in gas investment in the US, pushing its fossil-power spending ahead of China, according to the IEA

Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

The critique of economic growth, once a fringe position, is gaining widespread attention in the face of the climate crisis.

Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insurer

Action urgently needed to save the conditions under which markets – and civilisation itself – can operate, says senior Allianz figure

The ‘wicked trinity’ of late capitalism: Governing in an era of stagnation, surplus humanity, and environmental breakdown

Scholars within the fields of political ecology, environmental political theory, and international political economy tend to evaluate the prospects of state-led environmental transitions in general terms – enquiring as to the capitalist state’s inherent properties and their environmental implications. Less attention has been paid to how the state’s green capacities are conditioned by contemporary evolutions in the form and pace of capital accumulation. Capitalism’s directional pattern of historical development poses unique challenges for green state projects. Its drive to raise labour productivity metabolises nature on a growing scale, while generating conditions of overproduction and rendering a progressively larger portion of the population superfluous to the production process.Thus, the question is not simply whether the state can rise to the challenge of climate change, but rather how states are scrambling to govern the intersecting crises of climate catastrophe, economic stagnation, and surplus humanity. This ‘wicked trinity’ compounds the tensions at the heart of the capitalist state, resulting in an increasing inability to perform its role while sustaining its liberal form. This governance trilemma is illustrated by the case of the solar photovoltaic boom, where the spectacular increase in the productivity and scale of solar panel manufacturing have generated oversupply and falling profitability. States have reacted by indefinitely providing subsidies, financing automation technologies thatexacerbate labour superfluity, and relocating solar panel manufacturing to places with authoritarian labour regimes. The case of photovoltaics is a microcosm of the general predicament faced by states as they struggle to govern capitalism’s secular developmental tendencies.

Green New Deal: The enormous opportunity in shooting for the moon.

Massive electrification and the opportunity of American abundance when we decarbonize.