§1. Energy is political infrastructure

European energy prices have more than doubled since 2021. German and French industrial output is contracting, and companies are leaving. Workers across the continent face rising costs, falling reliability, and political decisions they were never consulted on. These are not primarily technical problems. They are class problems. Understanding why requires concepts that have not been seriously engaged with by the Marxist left.

Exosomatic energy, devolution, and the compensation mechanism

Endosomatic energy is energy produced within the body: eating, metabolizing, and moving. Exosomatic energy is energy produced outside the body and harnessed for use. The sources that tend to get named are fire, wind, water, fossil fuels, and nuclear fission. But we should emphasize that it also includes the bodies of other living beings. A draught horse, a dairy cow, a service worker, and an enslaved field laborer are all sources of exosomatic energy for whoever commands their labor. Plants are the upstream foundation of this whole living-energy system: photosynthesis is what converts solar input into chemical energy in the first place, and everything else in the living category — animal labor, human labor, and directly-used biomass like wood, charcoal, and biofuels — is downstream of that conversion. The fuller argument will be developed in a separate essay, Living and Non-Living. For this essay, the main class question is between non-living exosomatic energy (fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar) and living exosomatic energy in its labor-extraction form: human and animal bodies put to work. The history of industrialization is, among other things, a history of gaining access to ever more concentrated forms of the former.

Metropolitan societies are built around the assumption that enormous quantities of non-living exosomatic energy are cheaply and reliably available. Infrastructure was built and production processes designed around that assumption. Industrial agriculture that feeds billions depends on fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers, diesel-powered machinery, and refrigerated logistics chains that span the globe. Urban and industrial design requires energy-intensive materials (steel, concrete, glass) and energy-dependent systems for heating, cooling, water, and sewage. Hospitals, schools, and all forms of transportation presuppose a constant, reliable energy supply. Modern naval fleets, air forces, and armoured logistics are inconceivable without dense, reliable energy, which is why states treat energy security as a matter of national survival. None of this became trivial because of human ingenuity in the abstract. It became trivial because abundant cheap energy made it so.

The volumes are worth registering concretely. Simon Pirani, in his work on the global history of fossil fuels, draws on IEA energy balances to document what cheap energy has made possible:^[1] fossil fuel consumption grew by more than half between 1990 and 2015 alone; global electricity generation quadrupled between 1971 and 2011; road transport energy use more than tripled over the same period; world motor vehicles went from 50 million in 1950 to 780 million in 2000; annual distance flown rose from 40 billion kilometres in the early 1950s to over 6 trillion in 2014; global crude steel output went from 192 million tonnes in 1950 to 1,670 million in 2014; world ammonia production (the basis of synthetic fertilizer) went from under 5 million tonnes per year in 1950 to 178 million in 2010; US military fuel consumption per serviceman per day went from 3.8 litres in the Second World War to 57 in 2007. None of these volumes are choices that can be reversed by individual decisions or moral pressure. They are locked into infrastructure: the built environment, the agricultural system, the logistics chains, the military apparatus. The highways that received $70 billion in US federal spending while rail transit received $795 million (1956–70) did not produce automobile dependence as a preference — they produced it as a material fact. What appears as 'consumption' is overwhelmingly non-discretionary, determined by builders who design homes before occupants arrive, by manufacturers who set indirect energy inputs, by employers who determine commute distances, and by decades of capital investment in long-lived infrastructure that locks patterns in for generations. And it is a class problem because the infrastructure that locks these volumes in was built largely for investors and large corporations, with the rest of the population accommodated to it after the fact.

This explains a long-standing puzzle in economics. In the 1950s, the economist Robert Solow built a model decomposing economic growth into contributions from labor and capital inputs. The model became the standard framework — and it ran immediately into a problem. Most of the growth Solow tried to explain could not be accounted for by either labor or capital. In his original 1957 paper,^[2] only 12.5% of US output growth was explained by these two factors; the remaining 87.5% had to be assigned to an unspecified residual that economists eventually labelled 'total factor productivity' or 'technological change.' Generations of growth economists have tried to fill in what's actually in this residual, with limited success. Three independent research programs converge on the answer: the residual is essentially the contribution of energy throughput via machinery.^[3] Production tracks energy consumption almost perfectly. 'Technological progress' is, to a large extent, the substitution of fossil energy for human labor through machines that could not be designed, built, or operated without it. Note that the correlation is between monetary GDP and energy, and GDP is itself a contested measure that counts destruction as production and inflates metropolitan output with imperial drain — so what the correlation tells us is what this kind of economy requires, not what human welfare requires. A society organized to deliver useful work rather than to circulate capital through throughput would not produce the same curve. But within the current arrangement, the implication holds: energy contraction would trigger a structural crisis.

The correlation also means that state investment in energy infrastructure generates economic effects that consistently exceed the direct energy return, because the spending cascades through the same energy-GDP link: every dollar that builds energy capacity generates downstream activity through the energy it produces and through the industrial demand the construction itself creates. This dual mechanism operates across infrastructure spending generally — the $70 billion in US highway spending restructured the entire economy around automobile dependence and oil consumption, not just the transport sector — and §4 develops its implications for why capital backs energy systems that biophysical metrics judge failures.

These volumes are also not distributed evenly. Per-capita energy consumption in North America was 40–50 times higher than in Africa and developing Asia in the 1960s, and the gap has widened since. Pirani's Nigeria energy balance is the starkest illustration: in both 1971 and 2011, more energy left the country as crude oil exports than was consumed domestically, where biomass (wood, charcoal, dung) remained the overwhelming domestic energy source. The extraction relationship is maintained through a vast interlocking institutional architecture of trade agreements, structural adjustment conditionality, the currency hierarchy, and the coercive capacity that enforces them. When energy becomes more expensive or less available, this relationship does not disappear — it intensifies, because the populations that bear the cost of continued metropolitan consumption are those with the least power to refuse.

What would happen if non-living exosomatic energy actually became scarce or prohibitively expensive to produce? Not, as is sometimes imagined, a graceful reversion to coal or wood or human and animal labor. The volumes documented above cannot be replaced that way. No amount of coerced labor can substitute for the 178 million tonnes of ammonia that synthetic fertilizer production requires, or maintain the steel-and-concrete infrastructure every modern city depends on, or keep the refrigerated logistics chains running that feed urban populations. The primary consequence would be systemic devolution: sanitation, medical capacity, food distribution, transport networks, and the built environment they all depend on would degrade — not because no one wants to maintain them, but because the energy required to fight entropy across the accumulated stock of civilization would no longer be available.

Devolution would also trigger financial crisis. Modern accumulation depends on continuous turnover: manufacturing consumer goods, building and maintaining housing stock, running the logistics chains that connect production to consumption. The cycles capital requires — the continuous reinvestment, the churn of materials through production, the financial instruments that depend on throughput — seize up when energy becomes structurally more expensive. Capital cannot circulate at the rate the system demands.

At the margins, the system would also extract more from living bodies — longer hours, worse conditions, intensified animal agriculture, and expanded coercive labor regimes. This is the compensation mechanism. But it cannot close the gap. It is a crisis response that deepens the crisis, because the labor-intensive production it reverts to is slower, less productive, and incompatible with the accumulation rates the financial system is built around.

The conditions for all of this are not hypothetical. As the rest of this essay will argue, between rising energy costs, failing infrastructure investments, and a 'green transition' that cannot deliver reliable power at the scale required, the prospect of structurally less available and lower-quality energy is real — though the more likely main outcome over the next decades is continued fossil fuel use and environmental degradation rather than abrupt collapse.

Three concepts for what follows

Before proceeding, three distinctions need to be introduced. They recur throughout, and the mainstream framing tends to obscure distinctions my argument requires.

Dispatchable vs intermittent generation: dispatchable means you can turn it on when you need it: gas, coal, nuclear, hydro. Intermittent means output depends on conditions you do not control: wind and solar. Intermittent does not mean useless. But it means that at the level of the whole system, you need overbuilding, storage, grid reinforcement, backup capacity, and more complex maintenance cycles. Reliability is not a preference. It is an operational constraint: electricity must be available when demanded, at a frequency and voltage the grid can handle, across seasons, and through shocks. Conventional generators (gas, coal, nuclear, hydro) provide this stability physically: their spinning mass absorbs sudden frequency deviations, and their electromagnetic properties regulate voltage. Inverter-based renewables do not provide these services by default — they can be engineered to do so, but this requires grid-forming inverter technology, updated grid codes, and substantial battery storage, none of which are included in the cost of the panel or the turbine.

System costs: the cost of a solar panel or wind turbine is not the cost of the energy it produces. System costs include grid expansion, storage (hourly, daily, seasonal), backup capacity (dispatchable plants kept on standby), overbuilding (because capacity factors are low), and shorter replacement cycles. These costs are real, large, and systematically underrepresented in public debate. The metric that does the most work in concealing them — the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) — also fails on a second dimension. Even where LCOE is accurate, lower cost does not translate into higher profit in unbundled electricity markets, because competition, the cannibalization effect (rising renewable energy (RE) penetration depressing the wholesale prices from which RE earns revenue), and revenue uncertainty make profitability unknowable in advance. JPMorgan's head of energy strategy calls LCOE "a practical irrelevance" for the financiers who actually decide whether projects proceed.^[4] Typical RE project returns are 5–8%, against 15%+ for oil and gas — which is why no major RE build-out anywhere has proceeded without state guarantees. LCOE's legitimation function is to make the market-led approach appear technically rational: if renewables are 'cheapest,' the build-out should be market-led, and the state's role is merely to de-risk. This forecloses the prior question — whether an energy system with these material characteristics is the right one to build at this scale in the first place.

Material and supply chain constraints: wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, transmission lines, and electrified transport require enormous quantities of steel, copper, aluminium, cement, lithium, cobalt, and rare earth metals — a single onshore wind turbine requires roughly 1,500 tonnes of iron, 2,500 tonnes of concrete, and 45 tonnes of plastic; a single EV battery requires processing roughly 225 tonnes of raw materials.^[5] Producing these materials is itself heavily energy-dependent: steel smelting, aluminium refining, and cement production are among the most energy-intensive industrial processes on earth, and mining lower-grade ores requires progressively more energy per unit of metal extracted. Materials availability is therefore a derivative of energy availability, a circularity that transition plans rarely acknowledge.

There is a further dimension that Robert Biel calls secondary materialization^[6]: the total material actually processed across the full value chain per unit of useful output. When technology appears to dematerialize production, purification processes are rarely accounted for. Solar-grade silicon requires six-nines purity, and the Siemens process that achieves it discards three to four moles of silicon tetrachloride waste for every mole of silicon deposited. Cobalt has an ore-to-metal ratio of roughly 860:1 globally; rare earth elements like dysprosium can reach 27,000:1. When these upstream ratios are applied to a full system including grid-scale storage, the total material throughput per unit of firm power delivered can be an order of magnitude higher than the construction-phase figures suggest. The relevant questions are therefore not only whether reserves exist, but also how fast mines can be permitted and built, what ore grades are available, what energy inputs mining requires, how supply chains behave under competition between states and firms, and what the total material throughput of the system actually is when the upstream chain is honestly accounted. Even a single new mine can take over a decade from planning to production. Mining timing alone clashes with the political timelines that dominate 'net zero' talk.

The apparent cheapness of renewables and their material inputs is not a natural property of the technology. It is produced — through the externalised system costs just described, unequal exchange and imperial labor arbitrage in mining and refining, degraded ecosystems absorbing the waste, and the cost-of-capital differentials the currency hierarchy generates. These are the same mechanisms that determine where the material burden of the build-out actually lands. Cheapness and materials requirements therefore, do not correlate with price: a technology can look inexpensive on LCOE while imposing vast material requirements on populations whose labor and ecosystems have been priced into invisibility. When the dominant narrative treats "renewables are now the cheapest option" as a settled empirical fact, it is taking the output of a specific imperial arrangement and presenting it as a property of physics.

EROI and similar biophysical measures are imperfect — §4 takes up the critique — but they at least point at something price does not: the net energy an arrangement actually delivers to the people who depend on it. Price-based reasoning has a track record. The same logic that crowned gas "cheaper" than nuclear — a verdict 'green' NGOs campaigned on for decades — helped close long-lived, reliable generation in the name of a market abstraction. In Europe this played out through the German nuclear phase-out and Russian gas dependency discussed in §3; in the United States it played out through the shale "revolution," which drove wholesale gas prices low enough to push a substantial share of the nuclear fleet toward early retirement on the same "too expensive" logic. Both regions are now paying the bill.

§2. The 'transition' promise vs the system reality

Public discourse about the 'energy transition' is often framed as a straightforward substitution problem: replace fossil fuels with wind, solar, and some storage; electrify transport and heating; keep everything else more or less the same. The politics then becomes a matter of will, morality, and targets. Anyone who hesitates is either a fossil shill or a coward.

This framing is wrong — and wrong in a way that the historical record makes clear. Fressoz demonstrates that there has never been an energy transition in the substitution sense.^[7] Every new energy source has added to rather than replaced its predecessors: global coal consumption is higher today than at any point in history; the world burns three times more wood than a century ago; oil consumption continues to rise. The reason is not institutional inertia alone but material symbiosis: each energy source depends on the others, both as energy inputs and as material inputs to its infrastructure. Oil infrastructure requires coal-fired steel (pipelines, rigs, refineries, engines — each tonne of inter-war oil generated 2.5 tonnes of induced coal consumption). Coal and mineral ores are mined with diesel-fuelled machinery and moved by trains and ships. Wood extraction now requires oil (chainsaws, roads, fertilizers for industrial plantations). And 'renewable' solar panels and wind turbines require all of the above: steel towers, copper wiring, concrete foundations, coking coal, and the entire fossil-powered mining and refining chain. A 'transition' that sees fossil fuels decline in relative terms but stagnate in absolute consumption solves little if our aim is decarbonization.

If Fressoz is right — and the data is difficult to argue with — then 'transition' is the wrong word for what is happening. What we are witnessing is an addition: a capital-intensive overlay of new energy infrastructure on top of existing fossil systems, which continue to operate and in many cases expand. The word matters because 'transition' forecloses the questions that need asking. It makes the issue appear to be one of pace — are we transitioning fast enough? — rather than one of form: is substitution happening at all, and if not, what is actually driving the build-out? §4 takes up that question. For the rest of this essay, I will use 'build-out' rather than 'transition' to describe what is actually being constructed.

The problem with fossil fuels is real enough. But the build-out is a systems and logistics question before it is a moral or technological one, and therefore a question about class power: who pays, who decides, who bears the risk when things go wrong. The logistical constraints that any serious plan would have to address are multiple and reinforcing.

The scale problem

Despite decades of build-out, all the wind and solar capacity in the world produced roughly 4,600 TWh of electricity in 2024 — less than a quarter of the approximately 19,000 TWh by which global electricity demand has grown since 1990.^[8] Until 2025, the annual increase in wind and solar generation did not even match the annual increase in electricity demand, let alone begin to replace existing fossil generation. We have been running to stand still — and not quite managing it.

What would it take to change this? Most people assume energy demand is driven by current activity — factories running, vehicles moving, lights on. Garrett, Grasselli and Keen show that this is wrong.^[9] The dominant driver is the accumulated stock of everything civilization has ever built: every road, building, pipeline, server farm, harbour, and logistics chain requires continuous energy input just to not degrade. Concrete cracks, steel corrodes, roofs leak, systems fail — entropy is constant, and fighting it requires energy whether or not anyone is 'using' the building. Because this stock only grows — we keep building, and almost nothing is demolished at the rate it is added — the energy required to maintain civilization grows with it, regardless of how efficiently we produce new things. Garrett, Grasselli and Keen find this relationship is remarkably stable across nearly four decades of data. The implication: to merely stabilize carbon emissions at current rates — without reducing them — would require building roughly one gigawatt of non-carbon energy capacity per day, sustained indefinitely. That is the equivalent of commissioning a large nuclear plant, or several hundred wind turbines, every day, with no end date. And efficiency gains cannot change this: by enabling further growth, they increase the stock that must be maintained, raising total energy demand rather than reducing it — Jevons' paradox derived from thermodynamics.

The storage and redundancy problem

Because wind and solar are intermittent and relatively low-yielding, a system built around them requires massive overprovisioning plus storage to cover seasonal mismatches in supply and demand. Grid-scale electricity storage remains a financial and logistical near-impossibility at the required scale. Without it, what is called a 'transition' becomes either rolling blackouts or a costly overlay.

The April 2025 Iberian blackout demonstrated what happens when system costs are not paid. At 12:33 on April 28, an overvoltage cascade collapsed it within ninety seconds, leaving the peninsula without power for up to sixteen hours. The ENTSO-E Expert Panel's investigation found that the problem was not renewables as such but the reactive-power support, grid codes, and control infrastructure that had not been put in place to absorb them.^[10] The pattern is the one §1 identifies: the costs of making the system work are real, large, and systematically deferred — and when they come due, they fall on the people who had no part in the decisions.

The materials and mining bottleneck

Behind every wind turbine, solar panel, battery, and high-voltage cable is a long supply chain that starts in a mine. The constraints there are even less tractable than the storage and grid problems above. Planning, permitting, and building even a single mine now takes an average of 16 to 18 years from discovery to production — and that timeline is getting longer, not shorter. Since richer ore deposits are being depleted, the energy-materials circularity §1 identifies operates here directly.

But the materials problem extends beyond the build-out itself. Even if the electricity grid were fully decarbonised, four industrial sectors remain essentially dependent on fossil fuels: steel (three-quarters of world production uses coal — over a billion tonnes), cement (carbon intensity has increased 1.5% per year over the last decade, with emissions tripling since 1990), plastics (production quadrupled since 1990; substitute materials often have higher carbon footprints), and fertilizers (the Haber-Bosch process requires natural gas as both feedstock and energy source). Together these account for over a quarter of global emissions — enough on their own to put the Paris Agreement targets out of reach.^[11] 'Green steel' announcements involve a few million tonnes against 1.7 billion consumed; full hydrogen substitution for steelmaking alone would require roughly 4,000 TWh of electricity — equivalent to the entire annual electricity production of the United States. If 'green' electricity powers the same grey world of steel, cement, plastic, and industrial agriculture, warming will be slowed but not stopped.

The build-out and permitting bottleneck

Energy systems are built slowly, even when capital fractions agree. Building involves land, local resistance, long planning cycles, specialized labor, and state capacity that many countries have actively hollowed out for decades. The build-out, therefore, runs into a political contradiction: it is sold as urgent, but implemented through institutions designed to avoid conflict by delaying decisions. The hollowing-out of state capacity serves capital: it keeps planning, procurement, and infrastructure under private control and prevents democratic deliberation over what gets built, where, and for whom. Rebuilding the capacity to plan and execute energy systems at scale is itself a class-political task — one that would require confronting the interests that profit from the current arrangement.

The European Court of Auditors' 2026 special report on critical raw materials for the energy transition — the EU's own internal audit body assessing the Critical Raw Materials Act — found^[12] that the 2030 targets are essentially unsubstantiated, the underlying data has "significant shortcomings," and domestic production is blocked by structural barriers the Commission cannot remove. The report's single most striking finding is that the EU-27 lost roughly half of its primary aluminum processing capacity between 2019 and 2023 — while formally committing to reach 40% domestic processing of strategic materials by 2030. The EU share of global mineral exploration spending has been 2-3% for decades. Global average time from mineral discovery to mine production is 15.7 years, with documented Swedish cases reaching 30+. Six months after the May 2025 deadline, six member states still had not submitted the exploration programs the regulation required. Of 26 critical materials needed for the energy transition, 10 have zero recycling in the EU, and 7 more are between 1% and 5%. The regulation's processing target is 40%; the current baseline is around 24%, on a declining trajectory. The extraction target is 10%; the current baseline is already around 8%. The targets are barely above the status quo, and even those are unlikely to be met.

Even if the owning classes wanted a workable transition and had the state capacity to execute it at scale, there are logistical barriers that are very difficult to surmount. These are the starting conditions that any serious plan must address. The dominant narrative does not address them — and there are structural reasons why not.

Why the left cannot see this

None of the constraints above are secrets. They are documented in industry reports, peer-reviewed journals, and the EU's own audit findings. Yet the dominant narrative systematically underplays them, treating the question as one of political will rather than logistical possibility. The cost metrics most widely cited — by NGOs, by green parties, and consequently by the left — are designed to make intermittent generation look cheap by excluding the system-level costs it imposes, while making alternatives look expensive by generalizing from worst-case projects.

The concept of 'energy transition' itself has a history worth knowing. Fressoz traces it from atomic-era Malthusianism (the term was coined in 1967 by nuclear scientists arguing for breeder reactors) through the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (whose logistic-substitution models treated energy succession as quasi-automatic) to its appropriation by the fossil fuel industry as a procrastination device. Exxon's research director Edward David said in 1982 that the transition was already underway and would arrive in time; meanwhile, keep pumping. The IPCC's own Working Group III has been structurally shaped by this: its scenarios systematically exclude GDP reduction even for rich countries, and its expert panels have included employees of Total, Exxon, ENI, Saudi Aramco, and Ford. "Transition," as Fressoz concludes, "is the ideology of capital in the twenty-first century. It turns evil into cure, polluting industries into the green industries of the future, and innovation into our lifeline."^[13] The left reproduces this ideology when it treats the build-out as a matter of political will rather than as a systems problem embedded in class relations. 'Degrowth' does not resolve this either: the build-out itself requires massive energy and material inputs, and a politically viable voluntary contraction of rich-country consumption is not on offer at anything like the necessary scale or timescale.

The ideological work operates on three levels simultaneously. First, justification: LCOE provides the technical alibi (§1). Second, foreclosure: the 'transition' framing makes alternatives unthinkable — you cannot be against 'the transition,' so the only permissible question is speed, never form. Public ownership of energy generation, which Christophers argues is the rational response to RE's structural unprofitability,^[14] is excluded before debate begins. Stuart Kirsch calls these formulations "corporate oxymorons"^[15] — phrases that attach a positive cover term to a practice the cover term contradicts. "Sustainable mining" and "clean coal" are the original cases; "responsible sourcing," "ethical cobalt," and "green steel" are the contemporary versions. Each is designed to make the substantive question — should this be done at all, in this form, at this scale? — unaskable. Third, accommodation: green movements and identities provide genuine satisfactions — community, moral coherence, a sense of being on the right side — that make contesting the class-serving function of the build-out too costly for participants. The three modes reinforce each other.

But if rapid substitution is implausible and planned contraction is materially incoherent, what actually happens? The logic of §1 applies: without reliable, dense sources of non-living exosomatic energy, the devolution and compensation dynamics described there start operating. Most rich, ageing populations will not accept the decreases in living standards this implies. The most likely consequence is therefore continued fossil fuel use for far longer than advertised, combined with selective enforcement of climate targets to serve other political agendas — much as 'balancing the budget' has been selectively invoked for a century to justify cuts to social spending.

Even if the rollout could be made to deliver what its proponents promise, we would still need to ask: how do we build working-class power during this process, anticipating the shifts in how societies are organized that are inherent in the technologies and logistics chains involved? The next two sections take up both questions — first through the German case, then through the class consequences.

§3. Where this is already happening: the German case

Germany is the clearest case of what happens when the §2 constraints collide with an actual political economy. The collision became visible through three interrelated shocks. First, the US/EU sanctions against Russia and Russia's response to them caused heavy cost increases and logistical disruptions across European energy markets. Second, the destruction of the NordStream pipelines put the German mercantilist export model — built on cheap Russian gas — in serious trouble. Third, these shocks exposed the 'green' build-out as considerably more costly than advertised: as the share of intermittent renewable generation grows, system and end-user electricity costs rise steeply.

The consequences are already visible. Since 2022, the EU broadly and Germany in particular, have forced industries to use less energy and pay more for it. Economic output fell sharply, and many companies began considering relocation even before the US Inflation Reduction Act gave them additional reasons to leave. A deliberate reduction in industrial energy use might be defensible if it resulted from broad public deliberation about the trade-offs involved. But there has been virtually no such debate. The Greens and the Merkel government framed the nuclear shutdown as a moral necessity after Fukushima, not as a choice with costs. When that gas disappeared, the resulting energy price shock accelerated deindustrialization in ways that were entirely foreseeable but never discussed as a possible outcome.

The Schröder government (SPD-Green) committed to a nuclear phase-out in 2000. Merkel's government briefly extended nuclear lifetimes in 2010, then reversed course after Fukushima in 2011, reinstating and accelerating the shutdown. The Scholz coalition maintained that decision to the end. This was only politically viable because of two things: long-term gas contracts with Russia, and an EU energy classification system that treated switching from nuclear to gas and 'biomass' as environmentally neutral. That classification was lobbied for by the German gas industry, with Gerhard Schröder moving directly from the chancellorship to the board of Gazprom's Nord Stream subsidiary. Now that the nuclear plants are gone and the Russian gas they were meant to be replaced by has been cut off, Germany is filling the gap however it can — including by restarting lignite coal plants and razing villages and farmland (and in the case of Lützerath, an existing wind farm) to expand the Garzweiler open-cast mine. The Merz government's 2025 energy cooperation agreement with France — formalizing dependence on French nuclear imports — has since reduced the pressure, but only by outsourcing the problem.

Meanwhile, interest rates have risen significantly as quantitative easing has been wound down, and natural gas and grid costs remain elevated. Offshore wind has been hit particularly hard: it is extremely capital-intensive, so rising interest rates feed directly into higher project costs. Tenders across Europe have been failing or receiving zero bids since 2024. And the misleading cost metrics discussed in §2 mean that the scale of these problems is systematically understated in public debate. The cumulative effect is that almost all wind turbine manufacturers are currently in financial trouble — even as demand and interest in 'renewables' have gone through the roof.

These decisions affect the material conditions of working-class life across Europe and beyond. Yet no one seriously consulted energy workers' organizations on the Energiewende's design or timeline, and German unions had no serious input into the nuclear shutdown or what replaces it. State managers, industry lobbyists, and green NGOs made the decisions, and workers are living with the consequences. The organized left, including the unions, did not see this coming in time to intervene. That has to change.

§4. Class consequences: domestic discipline and imperial extraction

§3 raises a question. Why would substantial capitalist fractions back an energy system that is less reliable than the one it replaces? Unreliable energy production is already a reality in parts of the United States. The EU's 2022 emergency regulation required member states to cut electricity consumption by 15% — rationing by another name. When supply falls short, the fallback is rolling blackouts, and as the Texas and California cases show, those blackouts do not hit all postcodes equally.

One reason is that the material footprint of energy production — whether fossil or 'green' — is so large that longer, more complex production and value chains create more opportunities for surplus value extraction. Even when individual parts of the chain are barely profitable, the system as a whole sustains itself because the full value chain requires large amounts of capital, generating substantial revenues and rent income.

The US shale industry illustrates the mechanism in its purest form. Hughes analyzed production data from 65,000 wells across 31 shale plays^[16] and documented that shale wells deplete 80–95% of their production within three years. A conventional oil field declines by around 5% per year after peak production. A shale gas field declines 27–52% per year. This means that maintaining production at a constant level requires drilling thousands of new wells every year, at a cost Hughes estimated at $48 billion annually across the major plays. The value of the gas produced was $32.5 billion. The industry was spending more to maintain production than the production was worth.^[17]

This looks like a failure. It is not. It is capital doing what it always does — circulating. Each new well consumes steel pipe, cement, sand, water, diesel, and labor. It feeds steel mills, trucking companies, sand mines, water treatment facilities, and oilfield service firms. It generates financial instruments: the lease obligations, joint-venture contracts, and reserve bookings that drove drilling beyond what prices justified also generated the collateral, the equity offerings, and the debt that kept Wall Street engaged. The shale treadmill was sustained for over a decade not by positive energy returns but by cheap credit — the Federal Reserve's post-2008 zero-interest-rate environment made it possible to roll over debt indefinitely, and the 'held-by-production' lease structure forced operators to drill whether or not it was profitable, because the lease expired if they stopped. Chesapeake Energy, the second-largest US natural gas producer, went bankrupt in 2020. The wells kept producing.

The takeaway is not that shale was a Ponzi scheme, although it was this in the narrow financial sense for many operators. It is that the material inefficiency itself was the source of the accumulation opportunity. An energy source that depletes slowly, requires little ongoing investment, and produces reliably for decades is a poor vehicle for continuous capital circulation. An energy source that depletes rapidly, requires constant reinvestment, consumes enormous quantities of industrial inputs, and generates complex financial instruments at every stage is an excellent one — regardless of whether the net energy delivered to the economy is greater or less than what a conventional well would have provided. The treadmill is not a bug; it is a mechanism through which capital finds outlets for investment, maintains throughput across industrial supply chains, and generates the financial assets the credit system requires.

But the capital-circulation argument understates the case. Infrastructure spending of this kind generates economic multiplier effects across registers that no single metric captures. The direct supply-chain multipliers are visible: $48 billion per year in drilling activity sustains steel, trucking, sand, water treatment, and financial services far beyond the wellhead. Between 2009 and 2019, net fixed investment in oil and gas extraction represented more than two-thirds of total US net industrial investment, and increases in oil and gas accounted for 40% of cumulative growth in US industrial production over the same period.^[18] The energy-GDP link §1 identifies adds a second register: whatever gas the wells do produce enables downstream economic activity, because production tracks energy throughput. State subsidy of infrastructure consistently generates these layered returns — the highway system restructured the American economy around suburban development and oil consumption; agricultural subsidies generate multipliers through the cheap food that lowers wage costs across all sectors. In each case, the subsidy "pays off" at the system level even when the direct return on the subsidized activity is negative, because the downstream restructuring dwarfs the initial outlay.

There is a third register that exceeds both: the shale boom made the United States a major gas producer and then a major gas exporter. This geopolitical fact gave Washington both the motive to challenge European dependence on Russian gas and the capacity to fill the market that sanctions and the destruction of NordStream created — a restructuring of the entire European energy order whose consequences §3 documents. How do you price the capturing of a continent's gas supply? You cannot. COVID-era demand disruptions similarly created market-restructuring opportunities that would not have existed without the installed shale infrastructure. The "return" on shale investment includes German deindustrialization, the LNG import terminals, and peripheral populations outbidding for energy they had contracted for — effects of a completely different order than what any energy ratio or cost-benefit analysis measures. This is why declining EROI does not trigger the crisis the biophysical economists predict. They are measuring one dimension of a process that operates across at least three: direct energy return, economic multipliers through the supply chain, and geopolitical position. The relevant threshold is not the EROI at which civilization collapses, but the point at which the multiplier and geopolitical effects of compensatory spending cease to outweigh the declining energy return — and that is a financial, political, and imperial threshold, not a physical one.

The same logic applies to the 'green' build-out. Wind and solar farms are capital-intensive to construct. Turbine blades last 20–25 years and cannot be recycled at scale. Solar panels degrade and must be replaced. Batteries have finite cycle lives. Grid infrastructure must be rebuilt for distributed generation. The entire chain — from mining through refining, manufacturing, installation, grid connection, storage, maintenance, and eventual replacement — constitutes an enormous capital-absorption mechanism. If it also produces energy, so much the better. But from capital's perspective, an energy system that requires continuous high-throughput investment is structurally preferable to one that, once built, simply works. This is because the investment is the accumulation, and accumulation is what the system exists to do.

However, the renewable energy technology case differs from shale in a way that deepens the analysis. Shale absorbed surplus capital through market dynamics: the constant financial-market deal flow described above. RE machinery cannot do this: returns are too low and too volatile to attract capital without state guarantees.^[19] The surplus-absorption function therefore requires a three-step state-mediated process: first, the state constructs RE as a viable asset class through feed-in tariffs and contracts for difference — what Birch and Muniesa call "state-backed capitalization devices"^[20] that transform sunshine and wind into predictable revenue streams. Second, the state socializes the risk through tax credits, guaranteed price floors, and socialized grid connections. Third, surplus capital flows into the state-guaranteed asset. The result: institutional investors do not build RE — they acquire it after the state has de-risked it. IRENA data shows institutional investors account for less than 1% of direct RE project investment but nearly 25% of RE asset acquisitions.^[21] Utilities are divesting RE portfolios to infrastructure funds — BlackRock, Brookfield — because the assets have migrated from energy-delivery objects to financial instruments: valued not for electricity produced but for durable rent extraction from state-guaranteed revenue streams. Gabor names the structural limit: "derisking and capital discipline are fundamentally at odds"^[22] — the state can mobilize capital but cannot direct the pace or composition of decarbonization, and the ratchet ensures that once RE assets are structured as financial instruments, the constituencies they create resist any restructuring toward public ownership.

There is a further mechanism here. In a functioning market, rising energy scarcity would produce price signals that incentivize conservation (negative feedback). But energy hedging neutralizes that signal: if you have hedged against the price rise, the profit from the hedge offsets the cost, and the conservation incentive disappears.^[23] Finance capital does not merely fail to respond to scarcity signals; it profits from them, converting the information that should trigger system correction into an accumulation opportunity. The derisking architecture transfers risk from capital to the public; hedging converts the remaining risk into revenue. Together, they ensure that no price signal, however stark, reaches the actors who could change the trajectory.

This is a type of form-switching: when one extraction architecture meets resistance or hits limits, the system reconfigures rather than collapses. Fossil extraction faces ecological limits and a legitimation crisis; the system responds by constructing a new institutional architecture (the RE build-out) that maintains the accumulation logic while changing the form. Each step is individually rational; the cumulative result is that the new arrangement becomes self-reinforcing regardless of whether it delivers energy.

Why the build-out takes a derisking form in Europe, a state-led industrial form in China, and a resource-extraction form in the periphery is not accidental — it reflects the configuration of power in each case. Where financial capital dominates access to the state apparatus, the build-out is structured as a derisking operation. Where industrial policy capacity remains intact, and competing powers press for technological autonomy, the build-out takes a state-directed form — though still serving accumulation. Where coercive capacity is concentrated in metropolitan actors and local populations lack the organizational capacity to resist, the build-out reproduces the extractive form: mines, refineries, land grabs, enforced through the mechanisms that have always secured resource access.

The US Inflation Reduction Act and the EU Green Deal are moves in inter-imperial competition — bids to control the next energy-technology regime's supply chains, not just climate policy. Both came late: China had spent over a decade building dominance in solar manufacturing, battery production, and critical mineral refining before the US and EU responded. The consequence is that Western build-outs now depend on supply chains controlled by a geopolitical rival, and the scramble to reshore them runs directly into the permitting, materials, and cost constraints outlined in §2 — likely slowing execution further while raising costs. The vulnerability is not hypothetical: in April 2025, China placed seven rare earth elements used in permanent magnets (and therefore in wind turbines) on an export control list. By September, Chinese authorities had approved 19 of 141 EU permit applications, with 121 "urgent" requests still pending. As of December 2025, the EU had not filed a WTO complaint — an implicit acknowledgement of limited leverage. The EU's stated alternative — diversifying supply through "strategic partnerships" with third countries — is not delivering either.^[24]

Chinese state capital does not behave like a unified imperial project. Ching Kwan Lee's seven-year ethnographic comparison of Chinese state mining capital and Western private mining capital in Zambian copper found^[25] that, where the host state had political capacity (the Patriotic Front government, an organized labor movement, an active resource-nationalist current), Chinese state capital was systematically more willing to bargain and accommodate than Western private capital was — building local smelting capacity at Zambian request, complying with windfall profit taxes that private firms evaded, refraining from layoffs during the global financial crisis, granting permanent employment to subcontracted workers after strikes. The mechanism: Chinese state capital pursues multi-dimensional objectives (resource security, political influence, profit) that depend on host-state cooperation, which makes it more place-bound and bargainable than profit-only private capital. The same Chinese state capital in the DRC, where the host state lacks political capacity and corrupt elites mediate concession sales, behaves indistinguishably from extractive private capital — and produces conditions Siddharth Kara documents in detail.^[26] In Ecuador under Correa, the same Chinese state capital operated as a lender-financier, mortgaging future resource revenues for present social spending and leaving Ecuador over $17 billion in debt to Chinese state banks by 2017. The same actors produced three different forms because the mediating configurations varied. This is not a defense of Chinese state capital — the DRC outcome is as bad as anything Western capital has produced — but it is a warning against importing a "Chinese empire" framing that the empirical record does not support, and an illustration of what the framework's mediating-factors argument predicts: the same global logic takes different institutional forms depending on local conditions of state capacity, labor organization, and elite political configuration.

Capital's enthusiasm for the rollout cannot be read as evidence that substitution will work on its own terms. Capital is enthusiastic about it for the same reason it was enthusiastic about shale: because it absorbs investment. Whether it delivers reliable, affordable energy to working people is a different question, and one that capital's investment decisions are not designed to answer.

Capital, scarcity, and the design of energy systems

Energy systems follow the same logic that capital applies to scarcity in general. John Bellamy Foster, drawing on the Earl of Lauderdale's 1804 observation, describes the mechanism^[27] as an inverse relationship between public wealth (freely available use-values — commons, clean water, fertile soil, stable climate) and private riches (scarce, commodified, monetarily valued). Capital does not merely fail to account for the destruction of freely available resources — it profits from the destruction, because the destruction creates the scarcity on which exchange value depends. Degraded soil requires purchased fertilizer. Depleted aquifers require purchased water rights. Polluted waterways require purchased treatment. The price signal runs in the wrong direction: destruction is individually profitable even when it is systemically destructive.

This mechanism has been institutionalized in the policy framework that governs contemporary "sustainability" discourse. Ecological economists once distinguished between strong sustainability — the position that natural and manufactured capital are not interchangeable, that a polluted river cannot be "offset" by manufactured goods — and weak sustainability, the position that they are fungible, and that activity is sustainable as long as the total stock of capital (natural plus manufactured) remains constant or increases. The mining and energy industries adopted weak sustainability after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit, and it has since become the framework underlying virtually all corporate sustainability reporting and most international environmental policy. Under weak sustainability, the destruction of public wealth in Lauderdale's sense is legitimately offset by the creation of private riches: the river can be polluted as long as the monetary value of the resource extracted equals or exceeds the monetary value of what was destroyed. Weak sustainability is the Lauderdale mechanism rendered as a policy framework, and corporate "sustainable mining" claims rest on it.

The same logic operates in energy systems. An energy source that delivers abundant, reliable power for decades with minimal maintenance — a well-sited hydroelectric dam, a long-lived conventional oil field, a properly maintained nuclear plant — is a form of public wealth in Lauderdale's sense. It provides use-value abundantly without generating continuous monetized throughput. From the standpoint of the people who use the energy, this is ideal. From the standpoint of capital seeking investment outlets, it is a problem: there is nothing to sell, nothing to finance, nothing to replace. The shale case is the clearest illustration.

This is not a claim that capital consciously chooses inefficient energy systems over efficient ones. Efficiency matters at the firm level: operators want the most productive wells, the cheapest panels, the highest-yield turbines. But at the system level, the interlocking path-dependencies of capitalist production (cheap food to manage pauperization, chemical agriculture to manage cheap food, fossil fuels to manage chemical agriculture) lock the system into high-throughput energy. Every time a problem is encountered, it tends to be "solved" by applying more of the methods causing it. What determines which energy infrastructure gets built is not net energy efficiency but which configuration generates the most investment opportunities, the most financial instruments, and the most industrial throughput.^[28] A joule delivered through a system that requires $48 billion per year in continuous reinvestment circulates far more capital than a joule delivered through a system that was built once and runs for forty years.^[29] The 'threat' to civilization is real — declining net energy means less useful work available for everything that is not energy production — but the threat to capital is the opposite: capital thrives on the throughput that declining efficiency demands. The two can coexist for a long time, which is precisely what makes the situation dangerous. The system can degrade the energy base while remaining profitable, because profitability tracks capital circulation, not net energy delivered.

This is not new. Combined Heat and Power provided 30% of US electricity in 1930 and was more efficient by every measure — more energy was delivered per unit of fuel burned. Private utilities drove it down to 4% by 1975, because decentralized generation competed with the capital-intensive central stations they had built. Even within fossil energy, capital chose the less efficient but more capital-intensive option when the alternative threatened throughput. The current build-out continues the pattern.

What should we optimize for in energy systems? Rather than capital throughput, we should optimize for net energy delivered per unit of ecological disruption and logistics chain simplicity. This would mean preferring high-efficiency, low-maintenance, and long-lived systems even when they generate fewer investment opportunities. This is a genuinely different design criterion, and it is one that the left has not articulated clearly because it remains trapped in either the biophysical-economics framing (civilizational collapse from declining EROI) or the green-transition framing (substitution through investment). Neither sees the class content of the energy system's design: that the system is built to circulate capital, and that a system built to deliver energy to people would look structurally different.

Domestic discipline and imperial extraction

Unreliable and expensive non-living exosomatic energy disciplines workers directly: it raises the cost of subsistence, increases dependence on employer-provided transport and services that workers can no longer afford independently, and it makes the withdrawal of labor more costly to those who attempt it.

But there is a further dimension. The substitution of mechanical energy for human labor described in §1 has not only increased productivity — it has changed what capital needs workers for. Automated manufacturing requires fewer hands, but the sectors that cannot be automated — agriculture, construction, care, logistics, meatpacking — still depend on large, cheap, disciplined workforces. What has changed is not the need for labor but the terms on which it is made available. The US has simultaneously the most militarised border in the OECD and roughly 10–11 million undocumented workers — a figure that has remained stable for over a decade. This is not a mistake: it is a labor regime in which border militarisation produces deportability, and deportability produces discipline. Workers who can be expelled at any moment cannot organize, cannot demand safety standards, and cannot refuse wage theft. The border does not keep them out. It keeps them precarious.

At the same time, accumulation has shifted away from channels that require mass purchasing power. As financial returns — asset appreciation, rent extraction, fee income — become a larger share of total profits, capital's incentive to maintain workers' living standards as consumers declines. The post-war welfare circuit bound metropolitan workers to the system partly because their consumption was needed to absorb output. When accumulation runs increasingly through financial circuits rather than through selling goods to workers, that binding mechanism weakens — and the political willingness to maintain wages, public services, and social infrastructure weakens with it. The build-out, if it proceeds, will deepen both dynamics: RE infrastructure is capital-intensive to build but requires relatively little ongoing labor compared to fossil extraction, while the financial architecture through which RE assets circulate (the derisking mechanism described above) is a pure case of accumulation that does not depend on mass consumption.

AI and machine learning extend this trajectory into cognitive labor such as analysis, decision-making, coordination, customer service, logistics management, even coding and legal review. Previous waves of automation displaced physical tasks while leaving cognitive work as the refuge for displaced workers (mechanization → factory work → service economy). AI closes more of those escape hatches simultaneously, because it reaches into domains that were previously thought to require human judgment. Whether this triggers a Jevons-paradox effect for employment — productivity gains absorbed by expanded production, creating new tasks that maintain headcount — as every previous automation wave has done, remains an open question. Historical precedent suggests caution about predicting mass unemployment: each wave created employment that forecasters did not anticipate.^[30] But even if total employment holds, two mechanisms reduce worker power independently of headcount. First, the composition shifts toward lower-leverage positions: gig work, precarious service labor, and platform-mediated tasks where the worker is individually dispensable. Second, as automation reduces the number of workers per task, each individual becomes more replaceable even where the task requires specialization, because the pool of qualified candidates exceeds the shrinking number of positions. The reserve army argument, traditionally applied to unskilled labor, increasingly operates within skilled and cognitive work.

Each round of AI substitution also compounds the energy dynamic. Data centers and training runs are enormously energy-intensive — current estimates place AI-related electricity demand growth at rates that challenge the RE build-out's capacity to supply it. Automation that eliminates human labor in the core simultaneously increases the nonliving energy claim, sharpening the scissors dynamic §1 identified.

Furthermore, the material requirements of AI infrastructure — semiconductors, rare earths, cooling systems, undersea cables — reproduce the extraction geography described below: metropolitan automation is materially underwritten by peripheral mining under the conditions the next paragraphs document.

But at the extraction and refining end of the value chain, §1's compensation mechanism operates directly. When high-capex production cannot keep pace — and the ECA report above documents that it cannot — the gap is filled through coerced extraction where it can be, and the premium on such extraction rises with the shortfall. The US Department of Labor's 2024 report flags twelve critical minerals produced through child or forced labor: aluminum, cobalt, copper, indium, lithium, manganese, nickel, silicon, tantalum, tin, tungsten, zinc — effectively the entire critical minerals list.^[31] In the DRC, artisanal mining accounts for 15-30% of cobalt output, employing around 255,000 people (including an estimated 40,000 children at wages of one to two dollars per day). Kara calls this "a penny-wage way to boost production."^[32] In Xinjiang, Uyghur forced labor supplies a significant share of global polysilicon. In Indonesian nickel parks, forced overtime and wage deductions placed nickel on the US forced labor list in 2024. The geography is not incidental — these are the locations where supply can be secured at the cost levels the build-out requires.

This mechanism has historical precedent. When rubber demand outran plantation supply at the turn of the twentieth century, Leopold's Congo Free State met the shortfall through mass forced labor that killed five to ten million people — in essentially the same geography as current cobalt extraction. Nazi forced labor and the Soviet gulag served the same function at an industrial scale in the mid-twentieth century: political systems responding to resource bottlenecks by choosing coerced labor over capital investment. The cleanest modern quantitative case is Chinese coal during the 1990s and 2000s industrialization push: as energy demand surged, small "township and village mines" expanded rapidly with fatality rates six to seven times higher than the large state-owned sector, and the Chinese state's repeated attempts to shut them down consistently failed because local government revenue depended on them.^[33] Fatality rates only began to fall after sustained, decades-long state intervention against the market logic that drove their expansion. The current version of this mechanism operates at lower visibility, but through the same logic — and it is elastic. The COVID-19 pandemic was the cleanest natural experiment: industrial mines in DRC suspended operations, demand for cobalt rose as the world moved online, prices at the top of the chain rose while wages at the bottom collapsed, and thousands of children left school to dig for cobalt to keep the supply flowing. The coerced channel did not contract under the shock — it absorbed it. As the build-out's promised timelines diverge further from its actual logistical feasibility, this is one of the mechanisms through which the shortfall will be partly closed.

The political consequence is that different populations are being moved in different directions simultaneously. Metropolitan energy workers face displacement as capital-intensive systems require fewer hands. Peripheral mining communities — in the DRC, Chile, Indonesia — face intensified extraction under worsening conditions: deeper inclusion on worse terms, not exclusion. Populations near new mining and refining operations face dispossession that can reach eliminatory intensity: land clearance, water contamination, militarised security perimeters. And deindustrialising regions in the core — the Ruhr, parts of northern England, Appalachia — face managed decline in which populations are neither exploited nor expelled but abandoned, their economic function withdrawn without replacement. The build-out does not produce a single class consequence. It produces a differentiated pattern of inclusion, intensification, abandonment, and displacement — distributed along lines the imperial geography has already drawn.

The imperial dimension does not require looking to distant cases. When European buyers scrambled for LNG after the NordStream destruction, they outbid Asian buyers — with immediate consequences for energy access in South and Southeast Asia, where populations were simply priced out of energy they had contracted for. The same mechanism is operating now as conflict around the Strait of Hormuz drives global energy prices upward: European and North American purchasing power, backed by financial infrastructure and currency hierarchy, commands supply while peripheral populations absorb the shortage. No policy declaration is required — the mechanism operates through price signals that reflect purchasing-power differentials built into the imperial geography, and it intensifies under scarcity for the reasons §1 identified.

The rollout reproduces this geography through additional mechanisms. Financing costs alone can raise the effective price of identical RE hardware by 80% between a low and high interest-rate environment.^[34] Hirth and Steckel^[35] quantify how decisive this is: at a weighted average cost of capital (WACC) of 3% — typical for Germany or Japan — a carbon price of USD 50 per tonne produces roughly 40% renewables in the optimal electricity mix. At 15% — realistic for much of the Global South — the same carbon price produces almost no renewable deployment at all. The variation in country-specific WACC is more important for solar investment decisions than variation in solar radiation.^[36] The entire carbon-pricing mechanism — the centerpiece of mainstream climate policy — is neutralised by the cost-of-capital differential the imperial geography produces. And the WACC differential is itself partly constituted by inherited infrastructure gaps: metropolitan RE projects piggyback on grid networks, backup generation, balancing markets, and dispatchable capacity built over decades of fossil-powered industrial development. Investors price in the absence of these in the periphery — grid instability, offtaker default risk, construction delays from inadequate roads and ports — which is partly why the WACC is higher. The financing premium does not merely sit on top of inherited disadvantage; it is partly constituted by it. Far from leveling the playing field, the rollout layers new mechanisms of exclusion on top of old ones.

Talk of 'saving the planet' often proceeds as if the planet were not already structured by imperial hierarchies, as if 'green' capital will suddenly stop doing what capital always does. A half-achieved rollout does not mean less extraction. It means extraction shifted: from fossil deposits to mineral deposits, and from the imperial core to the periphery, all enforced through the mechanisms that have always secured resource access: military intervention and arms deals, structural adjustment and debt leverage, compliant local elites backed by foreign capital, and trade agreements that lock peripheral states into extraction.

The centrality of energy cuts both ways, though. Workers who build, maintain, and operate energy infrastructure have enormous potential leverage precisely because everything else depends on what they do. Refinery workers, grid maintenance crews, power plant operators, pipeline and cable workers, logistics drivers are all strategic positions in the class structure, and any restructuring of the energy system will not happen without their labor. The question is whether they will organize to exert power over the terms of that restructuring, or whether they will be managed, bribed, or discarded in the course of it.

§5. What does this analysis make visible?

If the analysis above is broadly right, it changes what the left should be arguing about — and where. Three sites stand out.

Where leverage exists — and where it doesn't

Timothy Mitchell showed that the physical properties of energy sources create different configurations of worker leverage.^[37] Coal's concentrated workforces, fixed rail routes, and manual loading at every port created multiple chokepoints where organized labor could intervene. Oil's liquidity and pipeline transport reduced those chokepoints — and the Marshall Plan promoted European oil dependence in part to undermine coal miners' bargaining power. The wind, solar, and battery rollout is structurally worse for labor leverage than either because generation is spatially dispersed, construction is project-based and temporary, manufacturing is largely offshored, and installed systems require few workers. The strategic positions are not in generation but in the bottlenecks: grid maintenance and expansion, battery manufacturing, critical mineral refining, and the logistics chains connecting them. These are the chokepoints where organized workers could exert power — and they are precisely the positions capital is working hardest to automate, offshore, or casualize.

What ecological movements provide — and what they accommodate

The accommodation function §2 identified — green identity's genuine satisfactions making structural critique too costly — is the problem that organizing must navigate. Making ecological organizing genuinely disruptive would mean providing those same satisfactions while refusing to accommodate the institutional form the build-out is taking. What that looks like in practice — in climate coalitions, in tenant organizing around energy costs, in union responses to 'green' restructuring — is an open question. It will not be answered by adding class analysis to a climate march. It requires organizations capable of holding both: ecological urgency and refusal to let that urgency be channelled into accumulation opportunities for financial capital.

What a post-capitalist energy system would optimize for

The left has historically resisted scarcity arguments, and for good reason: Malthusians have used them for centuries to justify starvation policies toward the poor. But the response cannot be to ignore material constraints altogether. Energy is not one commodity among others; it is the substrate on which all other production depends. And the problem the essay has identified is not scarcity in the abstract but a specific structural condition: energy systems designed to circulate capital rather than to deliver energy, embedded in an imperial geography that determines who gets access and who does not.

Biel sketches the likely outcome^[38]if this is not confronted: what he calls "cold imperialism," in which RE-powered enclaves in the core maintain a predictable energy supply while the periphery from which critical minerals are extracted is governed through increasingly repressive means. "It is absolutely impossible to reproduce capital purely within the gated enclaves: some 'exchange' with a periphery has always been needed." This is the §4 argument extrapolated forward: a half-achieved build-out does not produce a post-carbon world; it produces a stratified one, with the build-out's material requirements enforced through the same mechanisms that have always secured resource access. Biel's complementary insight is that the relationship between human capacity and resource depletion is reciprocal: the more grassroots capacity (self-organization, institutional experimentation, decentralized initiative) is restricted, the more the system must fuel itself through unsustainable extraction. A post-capitalist energy design criterion would therefore optimize simultaneously for low physical input, logistics chain simplicity, and high human capacity: not just efficient energy delivery but energy systems whose supply chains are short enough to be democratically governed and compatible with decentralized, self-organizing social forms. Socialist and communist parties never integrated any of this into their programs. They either assumed growth would continue indefinitely or declined to explain why it could not. The design criterion outlined above is where that integration would have to start.

§6. Discussion questions

This text is a call for discussion, not a finished program. If you think I am wrong, I hope you will prove me wrong in a way that clarifies the constraints and trade-offs we face.

On logistics

What is the minimum level of reliable energy that a democratic, egalitarian society would require — and why? Consider not just electricity but what energy availability determines: the kinds of housing, healthcare, sanitation, food production, and transport infrastructure a society can build and maintain, and what happens to all of these when energy becomes less available or less reliable.

On class and strategy

Can capitalism function without access to fossil fuels? If energy becomes structurally more expensive, which populations are most exposed to devolution and which to intensified extraction, and what forms of organization could resist before either is presented as inevitable?

If the build-out is structurally worse for labor leverage than fossil systems, what does organizing look like in the bottlenecks that remain — grid infrastructure, battery manufacturing, critical mineral refining? Are there existing examples to learn from?

The essay argues that what kind of energy system gets built matters more than who owns it. What would applying the §4 design criterion mean concretely — for which technologies we prioritize, which we abandon, and what we demand?

If total material throughput per unit of firm power delivered — not LCOE — were the metric, which energy technologies would a socialist program prioritize, and what political obstacles stand in the way?

If energy hedging neutralizes the scarcity signals that should trigger conservation, what does that imply for demands around financial regulation — and can such demands be meaningful without challenging the property relations that make hedging profitable?

On imperialism

The essay argues that when energy becomes scarce, metropolitan purchasing power outbids peripheral populations automatically — no policy decision required. If this is right, what forms of organization could challenge a mechanism that operates through price signals rather than visible coercion?

Every energy technology requires extractive supply chains. What would it mean to take that seriously rather than treating it as an embarrassing footnote? Is there a position that is honest about the trade-offs without collapsing into either green consumerism or fatalism?

What would supply-chain solidarity between energy workers in the imperial core and mining/refining workers in the periphery look like in practice — not as a slogan but as an organizational form? Are there existing models?

On organization and propaganda

The essay argues that green movements provide genuine satisfactions — belonging, purpose, moral coherence — that make them resistant to class critique. If that is right, what would it take to build ecological organizations that are genuinely disruptive rather than system-compatible? Where has this been attempted, and what happened?

What are the two or three things about energy that we should be able to explain in any context — in unions, in tenant organizing, in student movements — that would change how people think about the build-out?

How do we engage with ecological crisis without ceding the analysis to technocrats, the moral ground to NGOs, or the narrative to catastrophists?

I know of community energy cooperatives, municipal utilities, and off-grid projects that claim to do energy differently. Are there cases where decentralized energy organization has demonstrably reduced material throughput rather than merely changing who owns the same infrastructure? What made them work or fail — and what would it take to learn from them seriously rather than treating them as feel-good footnotes?

I'd very much appreciate comrades' thoughts — especially where you disagree.

1. Simon Pirani, Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (London: Pluto Press, 2018).

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2. Robert M. Solow, "Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function," Review of Economics and Statistics 39, no. 3 (1957): 312–320.

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3. Reiner Kümmel and Dietmar Lindenberger, "How Energy Conversion Drives Economic Growth Far from the Equilibrium of Neoclassical Economics," New Journal of Physics 16 (2014): 125008; Robert U. Ayres and Benjamin Warr, The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Material Prosperity (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009); Steve Keen, Robert U. Ayres, and Russell Standish, "A Note on the Role of Energy in Production," Ecological Economics 157 (2019): 40–46.

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4. Brett Christophers, The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet (London: Verso, 2024). The JPMorgan strategist is Michael Cembalest.

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5. Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (New York: Penguin Press, 2020).

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6. Robert Biel, The Entropy of Capitalism, Studies in Critical Social Sciences 39 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

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7. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (London: Allen Lane, 2024).

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8. Ember, Global Electricity Review 2025 (London: Ember, 2025); Energy Institute, Statistical Review of World Energy 2024 (London: Energy Institute, 2024).

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9. Timothy J. Garrett, Matheus R. Grasselli, and Steve Keen, "Past World Economic Production Constrains Current Energy Demands: Persistent Scaling with Implications for Economic Growth and Climate Change Mitigation," PLoS ONE 15, no. 8 (2020): e0237672.

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10. Specifically: renewable generators were operating in fixed-power-factor mode, absorbing reactive power in proportion to their active output rather than responding to voltage fluctuations, so they did not help bring voltage down as it rose; several conventional generators that were online failed to deliver the reactive-power output their operational procedures required; shunt reactors had to be switched manually and some had already been disconnected during earlier voltage oscillations; and the overvoltage protection settings on several inverter-based generators had been set below the voltage limits required by code, so when voltage spiked those units tripped pre-emptively in a cascade rather than riding through.

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11. Fressoz, More and More and More.

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12. European Court of Auditors, Special Report: Critical Raw Materials for the Energy Transition (Luxembourg: ECA, 2026).

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13. Fressoz, More and More and More.

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14. Christophers, The Price is Wrong.

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15. Stuart Kirsch, Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and Their Critics (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014).

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16. J. David Hughes, Drill, Baby, Drill: Can Unconventional Fuels Usher in a New Era of Energy Abundance? (Santa Rosa: Post Carbon Institute, 2013).

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17. The biophysical picture is equally stark: Hughes estimates the energy return on energy invested (EROI) for shale gas at roughly 5:1 or less — each unit of energy invested in extraction delivers only five units back, compared to 25:1 or higher for conventional wells and 100:1 for legacy fields.

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18. Yergin, The New Map.

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19. Christophers, The Price is Wrong; Bethany McLean, Saudi America: The Truth about Fracking and How It's Changing the World (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018), provides the shale comparison.

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20. Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa, eds., Assetization: Turning Things Into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).

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21. IRENA and CPI, Global Landscape of Renewable Energy Finance 2023 (Abu Dhabi: IRENA, 2023), Box 2.3.

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22. Daniela Gabor, "The (European) Derisking State," Socio-Economic Review 21, no. 1 (2023): 379–404.

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23. Biel, The Entropy of Capitalism, ch. 4.

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24. Seven of fourteen partnership countries are classified as low-governance by the World Bank (DRC, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Rwanda, Zambia, Serbia, Congo). Between 2020 and 2024, EU imports of critical materials from these fourteen countries fell for 13 of the 27 materials tracked by the European Court of Auditors, including cobalt (−66%), graphite (−34%), and lithium (−18%). These figures establish state incompetence and window-dressing around 'strategic security' more than they tell us about the build-out as such; the energy-independence concerns they point to run through the whole essay but are not its main subject.

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25. Ching Kwan Lee, The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

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26. Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2023).

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27. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010); James Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth (Edinburgh: Constable, 1804).

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28. This is not planned obsolescence – the familiar practice of designing products to fail so consumers buy again. Planned obsolescence operates at the product level; what is described here operates at the level of system architecture. Capital does not need to make wind turbines or shale wells worse than they could be. It needs only to select the system design that generates more continuous investment demand over one that, once built, delivers energy reliably without requiring further capital input.

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29. The biophysical economics literature (Hall, Cleveland, and others) treats declining energy return as a civilizational threat: shrinking energy surplus, complexity becoming unsustainable. This framing has two problems. First, it treats energy as a flat metric, as though a joule is a joule regardless of what institutional form delivers it. Second, it measures only the direct energy return when the effects of energy infrastructure spending operate across incommensurable registers – supply-chain multipliers, the energy-GDP link, and geopolitical position – as the shale case demonstrates. The pattern extends beyond non-living energy. The US food-subsidy architecture (PL-480, the Farm Bill, GATT-era trade rules) is subsidized living-energy infrastructure in §1's terms, and its multiplier and geopolitical returns dwarfed the direct agricultural output: contractual dollar dependence, leverage to block land redistribution in India, peripheral food-import dependency classified as "aid," and the global animal-agriculture circuit that absorbed grain surpluses while driving peripheral land conversion. EROI does not register any of this because it defines "energy" as non-living throughput and "return" as the energy delivered. The biophysical economists are right that declining EROI means less net energy for society; they are wrong to predict crisis on a predictable schedule from that fact alone.

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30. David Autor (2015), "Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation," Journal of Economic Perspectives 29(3): 3–30.

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31. US Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor (Washington, DC: DOL, 2024).

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32. Kara, Cobalt Red.

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33. Hunan TVMs averaged 32 deaths per million tons of coal, unregistered mines 60, against contemporary British or US rates of well under one. One Shanxi official described TVMs' economic function as a "blood transfusion" into local government finances.

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34. IEA, World Energy Investment 2024 (Paris: IEA, 2024).

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35. Lion Hirth and Jan Christoph Steckel, "The Role of Capital Costs in Decarbonizing the Electricity Sector," Environmental Research Letters 11, no. 11 (2016): 114010.

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36. Janosch Ondraczek, Nadejda Komendantova, and Anthony Patt, "WACC the Dog: The Effect of Financing Costs on the Levelized Cost of Solar PV Power," Renewable Energy 75 (2015): 888–898.

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37. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011).

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38. Biel, The Entropy of Capitalism, ch. 7.

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