Energy Transition

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

The largest economy in the world, the USA, consumes 25% of the world's produced oil. The whole western economy is based on this mobile source of energy. Oil is though limited, and only in abundance in a part of the world that is strenuously fought over and unstable. Within this century the depletion of easily accessible oil is inevitable, oil will increase in price as it gets more labor intensive to find it in off shore and deep water drilling. Markets and Capital is unable to make the transition away from the fossil fuel/oil economy to a green/electric economy (without a huge global economic crisis), it would/will require a heavy organisation of the state to change the fundamentals of the modern economy. But as it looks now, while the reactionary capitalists are so strong, the transition to a green economy is lagging behind the scientists' recommendations of reducing Co2 emissions before 2 degrees Celsius.

If a workers' party would take government in any western capitalist economy, the basic priorities for switching to a renewable energy sources would have to be roughly like this:

*Immediate subsidization/expansion of education sector for green technologies, R&D and organisation of the education field to the necessary needs to building a green economy.
1) Build infrastructure for an electric economy; electrical transport line infrastructure, bike paths, train tracks and electrical train infrastructure.

2) Hiring, subsidizing, and investing into the the mobility means of a green/electrical economy; train production sector (and necessary steel, copper production companies etc.), subway train companies, railway companies, trams, electrical automobile companies (the necessary investment into and political organisation of access to lithium etc.)

3) Investing and subsidizing renewable energy producing industry, expanding and multiplying: solar-, wind-, thermo nuclear-, and (to a lesser extent) hydroelectric-energy.


The funds for this are not too hard to find; military budgets would be cut, health care systems reformed/made efficient, and taxes raised on the rich. It is not a question of finance, but of political will.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I disagree, and you can call me an environmental philistine, but my take is thus:

whilst energy efficiency is clearly a pressing problem (As anybody who has read the Stern Report as a minimum, will be aware!), there is also the consideration of the workers' standard of living. To a Socialist, it is unacceptable to degrade the standard of living of the general worker to increase the energy efficiency of a particular country. That is pointless unilateralism.

The ONLY way that the world's climate problems will be solved, and energy dependence on non-renewables, is for multi-lateral, sustained and co-ordinated action from all countries in the world, or at least all the major developed countries plus all the developing countries.

Moreover, I disagree that we should get too deep into thinking about the financing of a green economy, if a workers' party were to come to power. The first thing on our minds, in such a situation, should be the abolition of money. The monetised economy means that, printing money/hyperinflation aside, the allocation of capital resources is a zero-sum project, as you elucidate: to invest in new energy, we'd cut the military, healthcare and raise taxes.

Rather, what is needed, in a revolutionary situation where a workers' government replaces the existing Capitalist state, is to accelerate teh move towards the abolition of classes and money. This will enable us to more easily co-ordinate world action towards new energy sources and further action on climate change.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

The first thing on our minds, in such a situation, should be the abolition of money.

So four hours or eight hours after the revolution?

[Book O'Dead]

Here's something a bit relevant to your proposal:


The People
May 27, 1995
Vol. 105 No. 4

SOCIALISM: TRUE EMBODIMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

By B.B.

It may not be the first thing on its agenda, but somewhere high at the top of the list of the first congress of the socialist industrial union government of North America will be placed sweeping measures to reverse centuries of plunder and destruction of the earth's resources and the attendant environmental degradation. Millions of workers who remained unemployed, underemployed or engaged in totally useless nonproductive occupations will suddenly find themselves absorbed in the tasks of rebuilding their world, one shattered by the abuses of class rule and open-ended profiteering. Their ardent efforts, freed from any restrictions imposed by private-ownership interests and operating only for the good of humankind and the world, will be in sharp contrast to the feeble and timid actions of the "environmentalists" of the capitalist system who are perennially preoccupied with garnering political influence among politicians and trying to raise the monetary funds to carry on their work.
Current environmentalists, limited in their world view and understanding of the capitalist system, imbued with notions of the "evil men" theory of history, are prone to divorce their specific environmental cause from the whole socio-economic fabric. These environmental warriors of capitalist society endlessly flounder, winning, at best, only a delaying action against the disintegrating effects of capitalism on the natural world.
However, there is one important legacy they are leaving behind for the future. It is data, mountains and mountains of exposes, reports and documentation, that amount to indictments of capitalism as the culprit for the destruction of the environment. University libraries are bulging, research establishments are filled, publishers are glutted and periodicals are saturated with data: data about endangered creatures large and small, from sea lions to snail darters, wolves and coyotes to Bengal tigers, pandas, eagles, condors, spotted owls, whooping cranes, salmon and sea horses, along with all the vegetation of their native habitats. Hardly anything seems to have escaped the scrutiny of those scientists and researchers who weigh in with pounds, kilos and tons of reports and findings that Mother Nature is in deep trouble.
The capitalist system finds all of this tolerable as long as no explicit condemnations of its operations are forthcoming. Indeed, reports and data accumulation are welcome and even encouraged by various foundations, and one can make a comfortable living because of the earth's dying. It's as though uncovering an environmental problem is equal to doing something about it; a lot cheaper, too!
Two recent examples of such documentation, blaming individuals without indicting the system, appeared recently. One, an article in The New York Times of April 7, entitled "El Dorado, Lost Again?" by Leah Martins and Patrick Tierney; the other, "The Puzzle of Declining Amphibian Populations," by Andrew R. Blaustein and David B. Wake, in the April edition of Scientific American.
The former informs us that Venezuela and Brazil are selling off vast areas of rain forest to gold-prospecting companies in the Guiana Highlands separating the Amazon and Orinoco watersheds. Gold deposits estimated at $90 billion, "perhaps 10 percent of the planet's resources," are there. European, Japanese and South African gold capitalists are destroying "one of the planet's richest rain forests" and the habitat of the last unassimilated tribal peoples, the Pemon Indians.
Yellow-Jack Resources, a Canadian outfit, has evicted native peoples from their hunting and fishing domains while the lecherous Robert Friedland, owner of the notorious Summitville gold mine in Colorado, has descended upon the Guiana Highlands (with $50 million he obtained from the Vancouver Stock Exchange) for a repeat performance of the polluted mess he left behind in Colorado, where the clean-up costs were estimated by the EPA at $100 million. Incredibly, this villain acquired a vice presidency in the Minas Guarich strip-mining company partially owned by, of all people, explorer-naturalist Charles Brewer-Carias, a renowned research associate of the University of California and the New York Botanical Gardens!
Brewer-Carias, while posturing as an environmentalist and savior of the Nanomami Indians, saw nothing contradictory in operating open-pit mines on over 12,000 acres in the environmentally protected headwaters of the Cuyumi River! Not to be outdone by Friedland, he employed unsalaried Maguiritare Indians for mining while "he destroys not only nature but also the men who work for him," according to Gergio Milano, an anthropologist and retired police official. The "innovative" Mr. Brewer also ferried University of California anthropologists to the last uncontacted cluster of aboriginal villages in the Amazon without quarantine precautions on a gold-extracting junket, according to three Venezuelan Air Force colonels.
The report goes on to urge the Brazilian and Venezuelan governments to prevent strip-mining and encourage environmentally safer measures. Fat chance! Capitalists always take the most "cost-effective" route to extract minerals and wealth from the earth. The conditions of capitalist competition force them to do so--a realization too distant for the authors of the Times report to grasp.
In the other article, from Scientific American, the authors report that the declining populations of frogs, toads and salamanders worldwide to be partially due to their high exposures to ultraviolet radiation as a result of ozone depletion in the atmosphere. These research scientists documented "massive die-off of fertilized eggs" in Cascade Mountain frogs in Oregon, and in the western toads. Their experiments on fertilized eggs hatched in controlled laboratory conditions using the same lake water that they breed in produced healthy specimens. They proved that extensive environmental destruction, acid rain and snow, fungicides, herbicides, insecticides and industrial chemicals--in other words, capitalism's infernal brew--were all contributing to dramatic declines in amphibian populations. None, they emphasized, have been more damaging than "habitat degradation and destruction [which] clearly remain the most powerful causes of amphibian disappearance around the world."
These scientists have drawn innocuous conclusions, without the essential inference that environmental degradation is inherent in capitalist development. Such an inference would, of course, have led to only one conclusion: that meaningful action to repair our world can only be taken when the competitive pressures of capitalism, indeed the capitalist system itself, is abolished and socialism established.
Upon the basis of the evidence accumulated by today's environmentalists, a socialist industrial union government will take swift, positive and massive efforts to restore the environment. The first step toward doing so, of course, will be to change the basic purpose of social production, from production for profit to production for use--inherently conservationist in its orientation.
We can expect the workers of every industry to evaluate the repercussions of the productive processes they are engaged in. Biologists, botanists and scientists throughout society will be part of this reassessment, in which the measure of production will be humanity and all living things, and the future generations of all living things.
In this sense, the possibility for a true environmental movement lies within the program of the Socialist Labor Party, for only that program can turn the accumulated mass of environmental documentation into effective action to restore the world.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

The Boss, the Left Communist said:

whilst energy efficiency is clearly a pressing problem (As anybody who has read the Stern Report as a minimum, will be aware!), there is also the consideration of the workers' standard of living

I don't see any contradiction anywhere. In fact, when large monopolies are immediately nationalised by a workers government in some advanced capitalist country, its products will be made to be efficient, last long instead of focusing merely on profit and growth. The technology exists to make light-bulbs last years, while existing corporations don't apply this and their lightbulbs only last a few months but use up way too many resources for what could be (in consideration of the stage of technology) a lot more efficient and save resources. The time when resources started to be extracted faster than the earth can regenerate itself, was 1970. 20% of the human population consume 80% of the world's goods. "We" (certain parts of the western population) need to cut back the resources "we" consume; this will be really possible only when we have real socialism and have gotten rid of capital, the profit motive. But before we live in a fully co-operative, planned, socialised and worker controlled economy/society, we need to lay the basis for a socialist economy as i have explained in this post and here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=11297).

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The Boss, the Left Communist said:


I don't see any contradiction anywhere. In fact, when large monopolies are immediately nationalised by a workers government in some advanced capitalist country, its products will be made to be efficient, last long instead of focusing merely on profit and growth. The technology exists to make light-bulbs last years, while existing corporations don't apply this and their lightbulbs only last a few months but use up way too many resources for what could be (in consideration of the stage of technology) a lot more efficient and save resources. The time when resources started to be extracted faster than the earth can regenerate itself, was 1970. 20% of the human population consume 80% of the world's goods. "We" (certain parts of the western population) need to cut back the resources "we" consume; this will be really possible only when we have real socialism and have gotten rid of capital, the profit motive. But before we live in a fully co-operative, planned, socialised and worker controlled economy/society, we need to lay the basis for a socialist economy as i have explained in this post and here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=11297).

The blog you link to says you want to target the 'Capitalist Corporation'. That's all good and well, but inevitably, in 2012 corporations are generally global. As I said in my first post, when it comes to energy, you cannot have a national solution to a global problem. There is no point nationalising a corporation in one country, it will simply move its resources elsewhere and all you'll be doing is initiating capital flight. You can't have Socialism in one Country, so really we need to think of a solution in international terms, i.e. given world/regional revolution, what would this new political situation empower us with?

The answer, as I said earlier, is not mere nationalisation resulting in efficiencies, nor cutting back on consumption (that is something that, as a Socialist, I cannot accept), but democratic planning of the developed economies, along Socialist lines, and, given world/regional revolution, a greater re-distribution of raw material, technology and expertise to developing countries, as they are the greatest polluters. Ergo, if they can industrialise along more energy efficient lines (skip the classic 'factory & exporter' stage), then we will make a great deal of progress on the energy (and by extension, the climate) question.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

The blog you link to says you want to target the 'Capitalist Corporation'. That's all good and well, but inevitably, in 2012 corporations are generally global. As I said in my first post, when it comes to energy, you cannot have a national solution to a global problem. There is no point nationalising a corporation in one country, it will simply move its resources elsewhere and all you'll be doing is initiating capital flight. You can't have Socialism in one Country, so really we need to think of a solution in international terms, i.e. given world/regional revolution, what would this new political situation empower us with?

The answer, as I said earlier, is not mere nationalisation resulting in efficiencies, nor cutting back on consumption (that is something that, as a Socialist, I cannot accept), but democratic planning of the developed economies, along Socialist lines, and, given world/regional revolution, a greater re-distribution of raw material, technology and expertise to developing countries, as they are the greatest polluters. Ergo, if they can industrialise along more energy efficient lines (skip the classic 'factory & exporter' stage), then we will make a great deal of progress on the energy (and by extension, the climate) question.

Who said that i am against international revolution? I am not.

Concerning "Capital Flight". If banks are nationalised, it will be in a crisis situation anyway, and bank withdrawals will be limited, rations put into place etc. When banks are nationalised and monopolies are nationalised, they will be under immediate control of state commissars. The important thing is to seize the means of production and extract the knowledge from the capitalists on how to operate them.

Energy: Yes, you can have a national solution to the energy dependence of the economy. The whole political point is to make western economies not have to rely on foreign resources. Renewable energy is produced nationally, and the national economy needs to be re-organised to fit the new electric, instead of oil and Co2 emitting, economy.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I didn't say you were against international revolution, I was criticising you for framing the debate in national - rather than international - terms.

How can you limit bank withdrawals? That will most probably result in the collapse of any workers' government in an instant. And what do you mean by rations? Again, something that's unlikely to be implemented if we have a genuine workers' government - no worker would vote away their savings and for 'rations'.

It would be difficult to produce, unilaterally, the required amount of renewable energy on a national scale, without the co-operation of international partners. Regardless, surely climate change is a greater motivation for energy efficiency than simply the 'green' renewable vs non-renewable debate? And if that is the case, then there can only be an international solution to the energy problem in relation to climate change, since a handful of developed countries (US, India, China, Russia) are responsible for a great deal of energy consumption and emissions, along with a swathe of developing countries.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

Sure global warming is an international problem, but like i said, the US alone consumes 25% of the world's oil production. The whole national economies need to be restructured to remove trucks with electrically run trains, cars with electric cars, continental flights with fast trains etc.

"It would be difficult to produce, unilaterally, the required amount of renewable energy on a national scale, without the co-operation of international partners"
No, not for western countries.

"How can you limit bank withdrawals?" You tell the bankers that they will be executed if they give out money over a certain limit, (and international large trade and transactions are operated by the state). This hinders capital flight. Once again, you are completely missing who these policies are directed against.

"And what do you mean by rations?" Rations are always implemented during times of low productive output so that the rich don't get it all.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I think a situation whereby the US undergoes a workers' revolution alone is highly improbable.

I'm thinking of a situation whereby a single small developed European country (i.e. the UK) undergoes a revolution. If this hypothetical nationally-confined revolution occurred (again, quite improbable!), then there is little the UK could do to effect a great change to the energy problem unilaterally.

Your ideas regarding limiting bank withdrawals are totally utopian. It would lead to Capitalist encirclement and likely invasion, or at the very least a Cuba-style blockade which would cripple the economy and paralyse the revolution. You cannot have Socialism in one country, as i've said many times.

Rations would not happen under a workers' government. Workers would not implement such a policy, and so it could only happen if the state became detached from the class, which has historically happened often when a minority vanguard takes power on behalf of the class. Moreover, if there was a workers' government, then there would be no need for rationing since there would be little/no danger of the rich having enough power to mis-direct food resources to themselves if they were not in political power.

Again, reducing consumption is thoroughly anti-Socialist. The whole point of Socialism is that the living standards of the poorest in society (within nations as well as internationally) rise, through the introduction of Socialist democracy and a new economic system.

[Lynx]

Energy consumption needs to be reduced in order to improve the standard of living of the poorest (whose energy consumption would rise). That's not anti-socialist, that's recognizing the current limits of energy production.

[The Burgundy Rose]

The largest economy in the world, the USA, consumes 25% of the world's produced oil. The whole western economy is based on this mobile source of energy. Oil is though limited, and only in abundance in a part of the world that is strenuously fought over and unstable. Within this century the depletion of easily accessible oil is inevitable, oil will increase in price as it gets more labor intensive to find it in off shore and deep water drilling. Markets and Capital is unable to make the transition away from the fossil fuel/oil economy to a green/electric economy (without a huge global economic crisis), it would/will require a heavy organisation of the state to change the fundamentals of the modern economy. But as it looks now, while the reactionary capitalists are so strong, the transition to a green economy is lagging behind the scientists' recommendations of reducing Co2 emissions before 2 degrees Celsius.

If a workers' party would take government in any western capitalist economy, the basic priorities for switching to a renewable energy sources would have to be roughly like this:

*Immediate subsidization/expansion of education sector for green technologies, R&D and organisation of the education field to the necessary needs to building a green economy.
1) Build infrastructure for an electric economy; electrical transport line infrastructure, bike paths, train tracks and electrical train infrastructure.

2) Hiring, subsidizing, and investing into the the mobility means of a green/electrical economy; train production sector (and necessary steel, copper production companies etc.), subway train companies, railway companies, trams, electrical automobile companies (the necessary investment into and political organisation of access to lithium etc.)

3) Investing and subsidizing renewable energy producing industry, expanding and multiplying: solar-, wind-, thermo nuclear-, and (to a lesser extent) hydroelectric-energy.


The funds for this are not too hard to find; military budgets would be cut, health care systems reformed/made efficient, and taxes raised on the rich. It is not a question of finance, but of political will.

i believe that we should look more into thorium reactors as opposed to renewable energy personally...

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/13/manchester-report-nuclear

the only reason the uk doesn't invest in the tech is because competition with wind mill production is not desired by the tory govt. especially as reginald sheffield, the man who builds the bloody things, is david camerons father in law...

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

i believe that we should look more into thorium reactors as opposed to renewable energy personally...

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/13/manchester-report-nuclear

the only reason the uk doesn't invest in the tech is because competition with wind mill production is not desired by the tory govt. especially as reginald sheffield, the man who builds the bloody things, is david camerons father in law...

Thanks for the links, will read. The future is inevitably renewable energy, for many reasons, the technology exists and is becoming steadily cheaper. As the technology advances, renewable energy (mainly solar) will be able to be locally, decentralised and independently supplied; this means the ridding of electric transport lines infrastructure which needs to be renewed and relies on a depleting resource, copper.
My grandparents installed solar cells in the 1980's on their house which is still heating all their water and floor heating. With the advance of the technology, that amount of resources which heated up only 1/4 of a house's energy needs, will be able to fully supply a household soon.

Private households take up roughly 1/3 of an industrialised economy's energy needs, Transport (mainly cars in capitalist society) another 1/3 and Industry also 1/3.

So private households need to become "self-sufficient" through solar energy and maybe even produce a surplus as the technology advances which could be put on the energy grid for industry and transport to use.

Industry relies on steady energy supply. It is currently mainly supplied by coal and gas. Thorium reactors would be a decent possibility for Industry's energy needs once the technology has advanced enough, but until then gas will need to immediately replace coal; as new infrastructure energy lines are built from the wind-, solar-, hydro-energy plants and future possible Thorium reactors to Industrial sites, gas will be the number one source for the transition until infrastructure is built. This is really the key, building infrastructure. In Germany we are having wind-parks produce tons of energy but the existing energy lines not being big enough to transport it and the plans for building new infrastructure lagging behind. The costs of building this new infrastructure are going over 10% of yearly GDP.

The current oil/mobile transport economy of fossil fueled cars will need to be moved towards an electrical transport economy. That means electrical transport lines built along new railway infrastructure (high speed national trains to replace continental airplanes, subways/ electric buses/ walkways/bike-paths to further replace city cars, regional fast-trains to replace the car culture etc.) which will be on a grid mainly supplied by Wind energy, hydro-electric energy (which in germany makes up 40% of energy source already), geo-thermal energy, any surpluses that the solar energy and thorium energy sources produce.

[Blake's Baby]

...

Rations would not happen under a workers' government. Workers would not implement such a policy, and so it could only happen if the state became detached from the class, which has historically happened often when a minority vanguard takes power on behalf of the class. Moreover, if there was a workers' government, then there would be no need for rationing since there would be little/no danger of the rich having enough power to mis-direct food resources to themselves if they were not in political power...

Seriously? You don't think we will have to ration access to goods during the revolution? You don't think we'll have to make choices about whether we produce to better our own lives, or produce to help the working class in those places where the revolution hadn't succeeded? You don't think we'll have to make any choices between 'capital investments' (infrastructure and means of production) and consumer goods?

Or is there some other point I'm missing?