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/338/ The Energy Theory of Everything ft. Matt Huber
🕑 Added 2023-05-09 15:12:47 +0000 UTCOn who owns the power.
Matt Huber joins us to discuss his article, "Socialist Politics and the Electricity Grid", and how organised labour is central to a politics of plenty. What is the grid and who owns it? What are the limitations of a "100% renewables" approach?
On the politics of energy, the left is divided in a similar way to the ruling class. How do we move from a strategy of 'blocking' (preventing new infrastructure) to one of 'building'? And why does a movement to limit climate change need to focus on production, rather than consumption?
We conclude by discussing the conflict between struggles around "the end of the month" (living standards) and those around "the end of the world" (climate change).
Readings & Links:
- Socialist Politics & the Electricity Grid, Matt Huber & Fred Stafford, Catalyst
- Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, Matt Huber, Verso
- On post-neoliberalism: /326/ What Did Capitalism Do Next?, Bungacast
- On de-growth: /310/ Do You Want to De-Grow?, Bungacast
- On green activism: /91/ Exhaustion Revealing ft. Leigh Phillips, Bungacast
- Matt's Twitter thread on Kokei Saito's degrowth communism
Comments
Eli A
I agree with the orientation of Matt Huber's politics and his disdain for degrowthers and push for a pro-abundance environmental movement, but I wish you would have pushed him on a point I believe Phil has made in the past: that climate change is NOT inherently a fundamental threat to capitalism and that there is no built-in reason for climate politics to be left-wing or socialist. To the dismay of many leftists, capitalist states appear more than able to rise up to the challenge posed by climate change (as evidenced by the Inflation Reduction Act being forecasted by Goldman Sachs to amount to over $1 trillion in climate spending!). It appears to me that climate change is a total dead end for left politics because climate change is one of the few issues that is actually at its core a TECHNICAL problem with TECHNICAL solutions.
Eli S
Or a really radical idea: the Left could be influenced by the working class!
Mathieu Dube
The problem with the idea of the GND is that the most known proponent of it is a scab who voted to outlaw a transport(of all sectors!!!) workers strike. So it's going to be a steep hill. Maybe the left needs to clean itself of its political careerists if it wants to have influence on the working class.
