A socioecological fix to capitalist crisis and climate change? The possibilities and limits of renewable energy

TLDR

Burning fossil fuels is central to capitalism’s socionatural metabolism, and the resulting anthropogenic climate change may ultimately bring about capitalism’s end. The paper investigates whether a societal shift toward renewable energy as the dominant global supply could serve as a socioecological fix to current crises. It proposes an integrated socioecological fix that blends Harvey’s spatial fix with neoliberal environmental fixes, enrolling new nonhuman elements into capital circuits. The transition could temporarily stabilize capitalist crises through its capital intensity and spatial reach, but would trigger powerful new investment and claims on rural areas, disproportionately burdening them due to low land values and weak rights.

Abstract

Many have argued that the burning of fossil fuels is an essential component of the socionatural metabolism of capitalism as we know it, and that the anthropogenic climate change it is causing may finally bring about capitalism’s end. In this paper, I explore the potential for, instead, a societal shift towards renewable energy sources as the dominant components of global energy supplies to provide a socioecological ‘fix’ to current forms of crisis. In so doing, I develop a notion of an integrated socioecological fix that combines the central elements of Harvey’s ‘spatial fix’ and of neoliberal environmental ‘fixes’ that maintain accumulation by enrolling new elements of nonhuman nature into circuits of capital. I argue, first, that the capital intensiveness and spatial extensiveness of any such transition could provide a global-scale, if temporary, socioecological fix to capitalist crisis tendencies; and, second, that the creation of global scale geographies of renewable energy production, distribution, and consumption would necessarily involve powerful new rounds of investment in, and claims on, rural areas. These impacts would likely fall disproportionately on rural areas, where land values are lowest and existing users often have less power and fewer formal land rights.