“Malm opposes any history that treats the rise of fossil fuels as natural or inevitable. His account is about labor and the contingencies that allowed fossil fuels to emerge as an indispensable tool in capital’s struggles to control it.”
“In one of the book’s most evocative asides, Malm points out that though the English word power describes both energy currents and hierarchical structures between people, there’s no similar drift in French, Spanish, or German, the languages of other centers of capitalist development. “Why” he asks, “did the two poles collapse into one in English?””
“owners turned to mechanical solutions to help control workers and rescue profits, and it was amidst this pushback that steam power took irrevocable hold.”
“The choice between steam and water power was made, crucially, as cotton barons also weighed the relative benefits of urban and rural factories. That decision proved less simple than it might seem, too. On one level, rural spaces insulated owners from growing labor unrest; workforces were isolated, and the damage when they rebelled more contained. But those workforces were also less expendable than in cities, where owners had large labor pools to draw from. And the incentives rural mill owners devised to retain workers—nice houses, cows and gardens, schools—meant they had more sunk capital than urban owners. When workers went on strikes that broke machines, shattered windows, or damaged roads, rural operators bore the entire cost. Such costs made water power more and more untenable.”
“As industry gravitated towards urban set-ups, coal allowed capitalists to remake space to even better suit their needs.”
“Coal could be counted upon to produce a steady stream of energy, and its intensity was more manipulable, allowing owners to maintain (and raise) production rates within the shortened workday. In this way, Malm argues, coal gave capital an unprecedented ability to remake not only space, but time according to its needs—and in the process became an inextricable part of the way it grows. Power became dual: Power became capital’s ability to leverage fossil fuels to manage unruly workers while constantly seeking out new profit; power became fossil capital.”
“Half of CO2 emissions between 1751–2010 were produced after 1986 in an exponential growth spiral that saw post-2000 emissions triple those from the 1990s; this took place, furthermore, in an era of hyper-mobile capital far beyond the scope of anything nineteenth-century British capitalists might have dreamed.”
“Globalized fossil capital is first and foremost defined by the ability to move across national borders at will to find what it needs.”
“Malm breaks the process into three phases: expansion, intensity, and integration.”
“Expansion is any initial investment undertaken to build up energy grids, usually undertaken by state governments under pressure from TNCs that can easily take their capital elsewhere.”
“Intensity refers to the fact that the nations with the most attractive workforces—i.e. poor countries—generally have less efficient energy grids, because their tax base limits what they can buy and build; hence foreign companies that follow cheap labor into poor countries generally increase emissions even if their production rates stay the same.”
“And integration describes emissions related to the construction and operation of the trains, buses, trucks, planes, and cargo ships used to shuttle people and goods back and forth between various homes, factories, logistics hubs, and stores; not to mention the necessary highways, rails, airports, and so on.”
“These cycles tend to get locked into feedback loops that only deepen capital’s reliance on fossil fuels. And when labor mucks up those cycles, as it still sometimes manages to do, the workarounds generally involve more fossil fuels.”
““CAPITAL is not being endowed with a will and a mind, a cabal, an almighty conspiracy,” writes Malm. “It is a blind process of self-expansion…More often than not, the products are unintended.””
“A successful planning agenda would need to be massive and comprehensive in a manner historically unprecedented save for World War II. It would have to (just for instance) maintain or take back public control of energy grids, end fossil fuel subsidies, set new taxes, establish public investment banks, direct research efforts, issue contracts, create jobs programs, build infrastructure that bundles power sources to create more reliable energy flows, sequester global fossil stock, regulate the financial industry, and set sharp emission reduction targets that acknowledge differential historical responsibility for climate change and actually get met. Most governmental bodies haven’t shown anything close to the political will necessary to do any of this; most are still actively abetting fossil capital’s continued expansion.”
“In another evocative bit of etymology towards the end of Fossil Capital, Malm notes that apokalyptein, the Greek source for the English apocalypse, means to lift a veil. That strikes me as the only real option in the face of climate crisis: to keep resisting while keeping our eyes trained on the fossil capital that’s put us here, making sure it does anything but stay passive, neutral, and out of sight.”