Capital and Climate Change

If capital could speak, what would it say about climate politics? Probably one of the first noises it would make at the moment would be a complaint about the diverse pressures mounting to keep fossil carbon in the ground and out of the atmosphere (Bassey, 2010; Cooke, 2010; Martinez, 2010; Walsh and Stainsby, 2010). As several contributors (Caffentzis, 2010; Keefer, 2010) to Kolya Abramsky’s important collection remind us, coal and oil have been crucial for at least a century and a half to accumulation and to corporate control over workers and the land. They fuel the machines that increase labour productivity, break worker resistance, and enable trade to span the world. They have been fundamental to the growth of urban industry and to the suburbanization that later became a sponge for absorbing surplus capital, as well as to the construction of the ‘machines on the land’ — vast industrial monocultures — that feed cities and factories alike. Underpinning the price stability of nearly every other commodity, fossil carbon is indispensible to the military forces, ‘economies of scale’, and long supply chains that characterize centralized control over resources. Fossil fuels’ high energy