Likewise, the drive for the creation of a railway infrastructure was the need to
enable exchange on an increasing scale. Marx called the railways the ‘crowning
achievement’ of the industrial economy for their ability to connect a single inter -
acting economy, just as the steamer enabled the multiplication and intensification
of the capitalist economy incorporating ever more parts of the globe, providing
the basis for a ‘gigantic export boom’ in which world trade increased by 260 per
cent between 1850 and 1870 (Hobsbawn, 1997, pp48–49). Central to the expansion
of manufacture and trade were improved systems of transport and the ‘new sources
of energy and raw materials opened up in response to the appetites of industry’
(Cox, 1987, pp143–144). Thus, an expansion in productivity and technological
development under capitalism increased the quantity of energy throughput that
was required to expand the accumulation of capital, and the operations of capitalist
production became dependent on a constant supply of raw materials that could
sustain its operations on an ever-greater scale. Whereas previous modes of pro -
duction primarily operated within the ‘solar-income constraint,’ which involved
using the immediate energy captured and provided by the sun, by mining the earth
to remove stored energy to fuel machines of production, capitalist production broke
‘the solar-income budget constraint, and this has thrown [society] out of ecological
equilibrium with the rest of the biosphere’ (Daly, quoted in Clark and York, 2005,
p406).
For Huber, then, ‘fossil fuel represents a historically specific and internally
necessary aspect of the capitalist mode of production’ whereby the late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century ‘energy shift’ from biological to fossil modes of energy
– at the time meaning coal – coincided with the dramatic social shift toward the
general ization of capitalist social relations (Huber, 2008, pp105–106). This helps
us to understand energy as a ‘social relation enmeshed in dense networks of power
and socio-ecological change’ (Huber, 2008, p106), such that changes to those
relations of power will inevitably be required to displace an energy order. At the
pinnacle of the networks of power resting on this base of production in the
nineteenth century was the British state, which assumed a central role in under -
pinning an expanding world economy and liberal world order on its own terms:
the Pax Britannica (Cox, 1987).
There is a sense here in which the embrace of new energy sources was born
of both the frustration with the limits of existing energy systems (to the ambitions of capital in terms of productivity and labour costs) and the abundant
availability of an alternative. Whereas in the current situation the interests of capital
in general are, for the most part, well served by an ongoing dependence and even
expansion of fossil fuels as discussed below, even in the face of pressures to leave
large reserves of them ‘in the ground’. There is a degree of carbon ‘lock-in’ (Unruh,
2000) that has resulted from the creation of trading and transport infrastructures
dependent on and requiring the type and scale of energy inputs that arguably only
fossil fuels can supply. Anticipation of a new wave of accumulation will be vital
to future shifts from one energy source to another.
Green transformations in capitalism 73
enable exchange on an increasing scale. Marx called the railways the ‘crowning
achievement’ of the industrial economy for their ability to connect a single inter -
acting economy, just as the steamer enabled the multiplication and intensification
of the capitalist economy incorporating ever more parts of the globe, providing
the basis for a ‘gigantic export boom’ in which world trade increased by 260 per
cent between 1850 and 1870 (Hobsbawn, 1997, pp48–49). Central to the expansion
of manufacture and trade were improved systems of transport and the ‘new sources
of energy and raw materials opened up in response to the appetites of industry’
(Cox, 1987, pp143–144). Thus, an expansion in productivity and technological
development under capitalism increased the quantity of energy throughput that
was required to expand the accumulation of capital, and the operations of capitalist
production became dependent on a constant supply of raw materials that could
sustain its operations on an ever-greater scale. Whereas previous modes of pro -
duction primarily operated within the ‘solar-income constraint,’ which involved
using the immediate energy captured and provided by the sun, by mining the earth
to remove stored energy to fuel machines of production, capitalist production broke
‘the solar-income budget constraint, and this has thrown [society] out of ecological
equilibrium with the rest of the biosphere’ (Daly, quoted in Clark and York, 2005,
p406).
For Huber, then, ‘fossil fuel represents a historically specific and internally
necessary aspect of the capitalist mode of production’ whereby the late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century ‘energy shift’ from biological to fossil modes of energy
– at the time meaning coal – coincided with the dramatic social shift toward the
general ization of capitalist social relations (Huber, 2008, pp105–106). This helps
us to understand energy as a ‘social relation enmeshed in dense networks of power
and socio-ecological change’ (Huber, 2008, p106), such that changes to those
relations of power will inevitably be required to displace an energy order. At the
pinnacle of the networks of power resting on this base of production in the
nineteenth century was the British state, which assumed a central role in under -
pinning an expanding world economy and liberal world order on its own terms:
the Pax Britannica (Cox, 1987).
There is a sense here in which the embrace of new energy sources was born
of both the frustration with the limits of existing energy systems (to the ambitions of capital in terms of productivity and labour costs) and the abundant
availability of an alternative. Whereas in the current situation the interests of capital
in general are, for the most part, well served by an ongoing dependence and even
expansion of fossil fuels as discussed below, even in the face of pressures to leave
large reserves of them ‘in the ground’. There is a degree of carbon ‘lock-in’ (Unruh,
2000) that has resulted from the creation of trading and transport infrastructures
dependent on and requiring the type and scale of energy inputs that arguably only
fossil fuels can supply. Anticipation of a new wave of accumulation will be vital
to future shifts from one energy source to another.
Green transformations in capitalism 73