Tom wrote: > Although I can't eliminate uncertainty and won't try, I suspect there is > indeed a "fundamental and unsolvable" problem with so-called renewable > energy sources that arises from the nature of "embodied energy."
Do you mean unsolvable under capitalism or unsolvable under any other possible social arrangement? > Currently, the cost of wind and solar infrastructure depends on cheap > inputs of fossil fuels in their manufacture and construction. Wind and > solar built by wind and solar would be much more expensive than wind and > solar built by coal and petroleum. However, if that problem was solved it > would give rise to yet another problem: the low cost of renewable energy > inputs would then be available to subsidize unconventional fossil fuel > extraction just as today the availability of cheap natural gas makes tar > sands oil economically feasible. Tom, This strikes me as odd. I understand the issue of scale, which you adequately raise. A procedure that dominates locally does not necessarily scale up globally. But stating things this way does not account for the cumulative punch that a new method of production gathers once it establishes itself locally. Let me use a historical analog to wrap my mind around this: Producing textiles with the aid of spinners is one thing, but making spinners with the aid of machines is not to be taken for granted. Mechanizing the making of spinners must prove to be more efficient (in the capitalist sense) than manufacturing (in the literal sense) the spinners. And then mechanizing the making of spinner-making machines would be a higher round altogether, and so on, which must -- similarly -- demonstrate its superiority in practice. Clearly, as mechanization expands concentrically, it has to overcome specific obstacles each time. However, there's a certain virulence here: Each time mechanization advances locally, the marginal product of (living) labor (power) tends to increase. Thus, it becomes increasingly expensive to have workers do what machines can do at a lower cost. Thus, once mechanization sets in, it becomes a sort of a juggernaut that keeps swallowing the farther links of the increasingly "roundabout" (Allyn Young) production processes. It all hinges on the nonrivalry of machines and machine complexes, industrial plants, etc. (so-called "scale economies"), which -- as Marx notes -- allows for labor cooperation to expand spectacularly. (Cooperation = the sharing of means of production by workers.) Now, it is not at all clear to me why renewable energy sources are not akin to mechanization. The key to understanding this is, IMO, the fact that the definition of wealth (use value) is an arena of the class struggle. People are pushing back against the prevailing definition of wealth under the aegis of capital, a definition of wealth that shortchanges labor and the natural conditions for life in the planet. This is something we owe to the environmental movement. If this persists, oil production and consumption are going to become increasingly costly for the capitalists as much as they are already costly for the rest of us. Thus, renewable sources become cheaper by comparison, not only as inputs in other processes, but also as inputs in the production of its own inputs, which turns the process into a juggernaut similarly to mechanization and automation. No? Tom replies to raghu on the commensurability of labor and environmental costs: > No [I am not assuming that they are commensurable], I am assuming that > it is currently very difficult to estimate the magnitude of these costs and > that this difficulty is made worse by the impulse to do the accounting in > monetary units, which essentially ratifies the fetishization of the social > relations underlying the commodity form. I agree with Tom that these costs are very difficult to estimate. However, I think they are commensurable in principle. Cf. my discussion with Fred. The natural environment is all about us, about what it means to us. With our actions and omissions, we are making it clear how much we value a product we may call: "sustainable interaction with the rest of nature." And doing it with money is fine as a starting point. Except that we should push politically, so that money (or any other financial claim for that matter) increasingly internalizes these costs and makes it less necessary to impute them. >From another post, Tom: > surplus value but in my view is compatible with it. My premise is that what > Marx called "surplus value" is what neoclassical welfare economics calls > "externalities" in the form of "uncompensated services" and "uncharged > disservices" and that a fuller appreciation of the accumulation process can > be gained by looking beyond the extension and intensification of direct > labor services. Yes, absolutely. IMO, the clearest way to note this is by tracing the modern literature on growth accounting, from Denison to Solow to Griliches to Jorgenson, etc. FWIW. Disclosure: I have not read Sachs' paper. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
