are seen to be the promising investments, the money will flow. However, it needs
a strong steer, as Kirsty Hamilton’s work with financiers, aimed at establishing what
it would take to really shift investments into renewable energy, makes clear. Long
(long-term time-frames so commitments are not reversed by change of government
or political expediency), loud (strong price signals) and legal (regulation and legal
lock-in) were the key messages that came through about what would be required
to bring about such a shift in strategy (Hamilton, 2009). And powerful though
these actors are, governments for the most part have not been bold enough to
chart a clear course out of fossil fuels. Witness, for example, the deletion of text
at Rio + 20 calling for reductions in fossil fuel subsidies that currently stand at
around US$600 billion a year.
In terms of the analysis here, the key point is that finance, as one powerful
fraction of capital whose interests might yet be delinked from the idea that the
interests of capital in general, in most cases continue to view their interests as best
served by an accumulation regime largely dependent on fossil fuels. In this sense,
the strategies described above build on a longer history of attempts by activists to
engage financial actors as a way of breaking up the bloc of industrial power
traditionally opposed to action on climate change (Leggett, 1996; Paterson, 2001).
Theories of change
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born;
in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
(Gramsci, 1971)
We are entering the declining decades of the fossil fuel era, that brief episode of human time
when coal miners and oil workers moved an extraordinary quantity of energy . . . up to
the earth’s surface, where engines, boilers, blast furnaces and turbines burned it at an ever
increasing rate, providing the mechanical force that made possible modern industrial life . .
. electrical power and communication, global trade, military run empires and the opportunity
for more democratic forms of politics.
(Mitchell, 2011, p231)
6
It is clearly too early to call time on the current fossil fuel energy regime and assume
the confidence to attribute it the characteristics of a temporary, transient phase in
the history of socioecological evolution, as Tim Mitchell does in the quote above.
Or to have the luxury to look beyond it, sure that a new energy order is in the
process of being born out of the current interregnum (to borrow a phrase from
Gramsci in the quote above), even if we are not yet sure what form it will take.
While the ‘morbid symptoms’ produced by the old order are clear for all to see,
the new order still lacks a powerful author. Gramscian scholars often refer to such
a moment as an interregnum: a period between the decline of one order and the
rise of another. Likewise, claims in some quarters that the ‘liberal–productivist’
model is experiencing a ‘great crisis’ (including tightly interwoven financial,
social and environmental aspects) which ‘marks the end of a capitalist model of
80 Peter Newell
a strong steer, as Kirsty Hamilton’s work with financiers, aimed at establishing what
it would take to really shift investments into renewable energy, makes clear. Long
(long-term time-frames so commitments are not reversed by change of government
or political expediency), loud (strong price signals) and legal (regulation and legal
lock-in) were the key messages that came through about what would be required
to bring about such a shift in strategy (Hamilton, 2009). And powerful though
these actors are, governments for the most part have not been bold enough to
chart a clear course out of fossil fuels. Witness, for example, the deletion of text
at Rio + 20 calling for reductions in fossil fuel subsidies that currently stand at
around US$600 billion a year.
In terms of the analysis here, the key point is that finance, as one powerful
fraction of capital whose interests might yet be delinked from the idea that the
interests of capital in general, in most cases continue to view their interests as best
served by an accumulation regime largely dependent on fossil fuels. In this sense,
the strategies described above build on a longer history of attempts by activists to
engage financial actors as a way of breaking up the bloc of industrial power
traditionally opposed to action on climate change (Leggett, 1996; Paterson, 2001).
Theories of change
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born;
in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
(Gramsci, 1971)
We are entering the declining decades of the fossil fuel era, that brief episode of human time
when coal miners and oil workers moved an extraordinary quantity of energy . . . up to
the earth’s surface, where engines, boilers, blast furnaces and turbines burned it at an ever
increasing rate, providing the mechanical force that made possible modern industrial life . .
. electrical power and communication, global trade, military run empires and the opportunity
for more democratic forms of politics.
(Mitchell, 2011, p231)
6
It is clearly too early to call time on the current fossil fuel energy regime and assume
the confidence to attribute it the characteristics of a temporary, transient phase in
the history of socioecological evolution, as Tim Mitchell does in the quote above.
Or to have the luxury to look beyond it, sure that a new energy order is in the
process of being born out of the current interregnum (to borrow a phrase from
Gramsci in the quote above), even if we are not yet sure what form it will take.
While the ‘morbid symptoms’ produced by the old order are clear for all to see,
the new order still lacks a powerful author. Gramscian scholars often refer to such
a moment as an interregnum: a period between the decline of one order and the
rise of another. Likewise, claims in some quarters that the ‘liberal–productivist’
model is experiencing a ‘great crisis’ (including tightly interwoven financial,
social and environmental aspects) which ‘marks the end of a capitalist model of
80 Peter Newell