After the Thaw
What the BREAK–DOWN editors have been reading over the past fortnight
Welcome back to the BREAK–DOWN’s fortnightly round-up of the best ecosocialist writing and thinking. But before we get into the links, a reminder of what we have published since the new year. First up, an excellent essay, both a study of the politics of water provision and a reflection on the work of the Canadian geographer Karen Bakker, from Sammy Feldblum, which you can read now on our website. As Feldblum writes,
If only it were as simple as de-privatization. States and corporate actors alike depend on a modernist, humanist conception of water, one which “defines water as a resource, to be put to instrumental use by humans, via centralized, standardized hydraulic technology,” which produces water as a commodity, and which maximizes either supply or profits. The twin facets of global water crisis—an inability to extend water systems to the world’s poor and a degradation of environmental water quality—emerge from this conception. In contrast, her prescriptions depend on the foregrounding of social and ecological relationships in water governance: communities ought to “be viewed as the ultimate locus of legitimacy in decision making, giving them radically democratic, collective control over infrastructure networks and the ecosystems in which they are embedded.” Scarcity, in this conception, becomes not a biophysical fact but a “a symptom of imbalance between different socionatures.” Against that, nested, multi-scalar systems of communal governance would allow for movement beyond privatization and “enough water for everyone’s needs (but not everyone’s greed).”
We also published a new interview, which seems to have upset the Anglofuturists on X, with the historian of technology David Edgerton. It’s fair to say that Edgerton doesn’t pull his punches.
You can watch the rest of the interview on YouTube, or listen to it in full on Spotify.
Now, to the reading.
The End of the World As We Know It
For the London Review of Books, my BREAK–DOWN colleague, Geoff Mann, has a stunning essay on visions of the end of the world. I’m going to save the usual bumpf from me, and instead implore you all to read it if you haven’t already:
Questions of meaning and mattering are unavoidable in a life lived in the shadow of end times. It isn’t significant whether or not they really are the end times; living with the sense of an ending doesn’t require confirmation that the feeling is justified any more than anticipation today is diminished by its disappointment tomorrow. If we believe we are on the road to cataclysm, what happens to politics?
Anyone who has been involved in climate politics will have run up against these questions many times over. In the wealthier parts of the world, those involved believe that doom or any form of negativity is demobilising. Every article, every book, every speech has to at least end with hope, optimism: ‘Yes we can.’ The only way to build a movement is to tell people it can or even will succeed – otherwise they will give up. However, anyone who has been involved in climate politics and who has any knowledge of current climate science assessments, or grasps just how tiny an impact is made by most of our ‘wins’, also knows that hope and optimism can be hard to muster. Nevertheless, the general sense is that we must not ‘give in’ to despair or doubt, indeed that it would be a moral failure to do so.
Read the rest on the LRB website. For more on this, read Mikkel Krause Frantzen’s recent essay on care in the climate endgame on the BREAK–DOWN website.
More on More and More and More
This week has seen the publication of two excellent review-essays—both appreciative although with differing levels of scepticism about some of the book’s key claims—on Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s book, More and More and More, which came out in English towards the end of last year. The book’s main thesis is that, unlike the conventional account of “energy transitions”, in which wood was replaced by coal which in turn was replaced by oil as the key energy source, that they accumulate (“more and more and more”) in what is better thought of as a “material symbiosis”. The questions this poses for the climate movement are stark: if there has never been an energy transition, what hope is there for the one we all hope to is to come? And, as Thea Riofrancos writes in her review of Fressoz’s work for the Baffler, “‘Phasing out fossil fuels’ sounds anodyne—but anything approximating it would pose an existential threat to some of the world’s largest companies and investment institutions.”
There’s a certain realism here that can, perhaps, shade into pessimism. It is this, rather than the reality of the power of capital or the stakes in any future transition, that Matt Huber, in Jacobin, looks to push back on. As he writes:
This all leads one to the conclusion that Fressoz really has no politics at all. There is clearly never going to be popular support for this dour degrowth perspective that insists we are inevitably trapped in an industrial system that can only consume more (and more) fossil fuels, for all of eternity (or, more accurately, for Fressoz, until we reach what he ominously ends the book with, the “greater perils” of climate breakdown), and the only option is degrowth.
My aim is not to offer false hope, but rather to simply point out that the socialist project has always been rooted in a kind of optimism in the human endeavor. It is ultimately based on a wager: if we struggle, and wrestle control of production away from the depredations of capital, there is nothing we can’t do. An energy transition is not only possible; it’s only the beginning of what we can accomplish.
Sinophilia
Everyone is talking about China (as Adam Tooze recently announced, “China is the climate crisis and its solution”, a statement you could, for many, generalise and it still would hold). So, it’s little surprise that magazines are taking an extra interest (hold tight for an announcement about our own China issue coming later this year). For Wired magazine’s China issue, friend of the BREAK–DOWN, Jeremy Wallace tracks their renewables boom.
As the oversupply of Chinese panels has spilled into the international market, the bizarre dynamics have spread with them. Just as in Shandong Province, negative prices for electricity have also become common in Germany, thanks to Chinese panels. Or take Pakistan. Around 2022, a global spike in natural gas prices made the Pakistani electrical grid even more expensive and less reliable than usual. But instead of just suffering or firing up diesel generators, millions of Pakistanis installed solar panels to free themselves from the grid. The country imported so many Chinese solar panels that the grid as a whole began to fall into what is called a death spiral. Customers started opting out, leaving the grid to charge ever higher prices, which led even more people to flee, and so on.
Imperial Ambitions
It feels a little odd pegging any one of these links on a current news item because, well, there’s just so much of it at present. But, among the thousands of other huge events, Trump’s threat to seize Greenland (currently off, but who knows what’ll happen by the end of the day) have been taking up a lot of air time. Is it critical minerals? Is it defence? Or a little of both, or merely Trump’s “art of the deal” once again? BREAK-DOWN contributor Lukas Slothuus however thinks it’s something else entirely.
There are many reasons why the Trump administration might want to dominate the Arctic, not least to gain relative power over Russia and China. But natural resource extraction is unlikely to feature centrally.
What’s more, the US already has military bases in Greenland, following a defence agreement with Denmark. As such, it’s more likely that recent US moves are yet another chapter in the return of the country’s imperialist ambitions.
You can read Lukas’s essay here, and his contribution to Issue #1 on the petrol-pump politics of the far right Sweden Democrats, plus Jacob Bolton’s brilliant analysis of the geopolitics of a shrinking Arctic, on the BREAK–DOWN website.