Is the phrase “a just transition to renewable energy” self-contradictory? That is, is the modern,... more Is the phrase “a just transition to renewable energy” self-contradictory? That is, is the modern, abstract energy denoted in the phrase (and many others like it) inherently unjust and unrenewable? It might help social science energy research climb out of the rut in which it is currently stuck to take this perhaps surprising question seriously. It can open fruitful new avenues of inquiry to grasp abstract energy not as a universal, non-political resource shuttled here and there across an unchanging landscape – as is common today across the social sciences, state and international institutions and NGOs – but as an ongoing colonial process of reorganizing human and nonhuman territories into hierarchies favorable to capital accumulation. After all, it is only by repatterning entropy boundaries and flows that the abstract energy developed during the 19th century is able to serve the digital and other industrial machines that are used to bring more workers under the compulsions of capital, accelerate turnover, appropriate feedstocks and contain resistance. For grasping this process, the thermodynamics that theorized abstract energy is one indispensable, well-grounded idiom. But it is not neutral. In any democratic discussion about energy futures, it needs to be made vulnerable to translation into other energy languages in which plural energies of the commons are not subordinated to the singular energy hegemonic today in official circles. A regime of mutual, multi-directional translations, when combined with historical inquiry, exposure to alternative experience and democratic struggle, is a promising methodology for scholarship about livable energy futures.
One of the big sources of confusion at this November’s global climate summit in Belem, Brazil is ... more One of the big sources of confusion at this November’s global climate summit in Belem, Brazil is likely to be the launch of a new institution called the “Tropical Forest Forever Facility” (TFFF). The TFFF claims to be a new hope for tropical forests worldwide – a historic “breakthrough” and “paradigm shift.” But even the briefest serious analysis of the TFFF shows that, even more than its predecessors, it needs to be opposed from the start. No possible design for the TFFF has any chance whatsoever of helping to save tropical forests. On the contrary, the TFFF would be certain to cause even more forest destruction, while adding to South-North injustices and further undermining the struggles of forest peoples and the interests of the global public.
Confronting Penelope Fitzgerald’s subtleties of style and construction,
critics of her novels of... more Confronting Penelope Fitzgerald’s subtleties of style and construction,
critics of her novels often resort to phrases like “distillation,”
“economy,” “tamped-down force,” “muted power,” “the unsaid speaks,”
“magical” and “how is it done?” But the brimming sense of life that
Fitzgerald shares in her brief pages reflects not so much magic as a
lifetime of hard thought about power, voice, representation, gender,
and recognition. Recent work in postcolonial studies, political ecology,
philosophy of mind, anthropology, feminist theory, and translation studies
can help achieve a better understanding of how she does it.
We tend to think of “criminal economies” as involving, for example, drug or human trafficking, mo... more We tend to think of “criminal economies” as involving, for example, drug or human trafficking, money laundering, or illegal arms trading. But there are other criminal economies of similar scope, including some related to what is called the “green economy.” For instance, carbon offsets regularly involve evictions, extreme violence and systematic international fraud. This article from the Instituto de Ecologistas del Tercer Mundo and Accion Ecologica explores the relationship between the carbon economy, criminality, and violence in peoples’ territories.
Se tiende a denominar como economías criminales a aquellas vinculadas al narcotráfico o al tráfico de personas entre otras, sin embargo, existen también otro tipo de crímenes como algunos relacionados a la “economía verde”.La economía del carbono forma parte de estos. Las compensaciones de carbono se imponen en las comunidades en ocasiones con extrema violencia, con desalojos, hay fraudes que las sostienen y están en conexión con actividades ilegítimas e ilegales. En este artículo se explorará la relación entre la economía del carbono, la criminalidad, y la violencia en los territorios.
This exploratory working paper attempts to place the energy-intensive project of mechanizing ... more This exploratory working paper attempts to place the energy-intensive project of mechanizing interpretive labor known as artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of the longer trajectory of post-18th century industrialization and the capitalist appropriation of human and nonhuman work.
Insisting on the material nature of mental work, the physical nature of information, and the political nature of thermodynamics, the working paper proposes viewing AI, like more conventional forms of industrialism, as a set of entropic, globally-distributed machines for labor exploitation concentrated in private hands and dependent on specific geographic patterns of colonialism and ecological fatigue.
In particular, it examines the contradictory relations through which interpretive ‘dead labour’ crystallized in AI machine networks and platforms recruits, partners with, and degrades enormous quantities of both ‘living labour’ and thermodynamic energy in order to perform its repetitive tasks.
As in the the 19th-century industrial revolution, the geography of this process is better understood by treating energy not as a singular resource extractable from various zones and then used up in other zones of an essentially invariant landscape, but as the political reorganization of entropy gradients and exchanges across the borders of nonequilibrium systems.
The working paper aims to open up fresh lines of inquiry into of the ‘digital natures’ that AI shapes and the living labor that helps constitute it.
Law and Political Economy Project blog, Yale Law School , 2023
For decades, students of environmental law were taught that global warming was a problem of unpri... more For decades, students of environmental law were taught that global warming was a problem of unpriced externalities. Smart policy entailed sending price signals to market actors that nudge them to reduce emissions and direct growth in a “green” direction. Thirty years later, as we barrel towards catastrophic warming, the lodestar of green capitalism looks more like an illusion. Nevertheless, many of the models and methods of 1990s environmental economics continue to circulate unquestioned, in law school classrooms and beyond.
At the centre of today's "green" capitalism are what are known as "offsets." The idea is that regulators shouldn’t force you to reduce your emissions if you can convince them that you’ve found a cheaper substitute for doing so. Or that you shouldn’t have to stop depleting biodiversity or water sources on one site as long as you can also do something else somewhere else that “balances out” the damage and costs less.
Because offsets require the legal creation – and exploitation – of new sacrifice zones, they entail a new type of frontier colonialism. Predictably, this approach has been a disaster for the environment. Less noticed is the extent to which offsetting has warped the entire aim of environmental law, argues this contribution to the Law and Political Economy Project's blog housed at Yale University Law School.
Este artículo resume y sintetiza un diálogo sobre la necesidad de resignificar las propuestas dom... more Este artículo resume y sintetiza un diálogo sobre la necesidad de resignificar las propuestas dominantes para una transición energética.1 Estas iniciativas, coincidieron los participantes, sólo están profundizando los problemas ambientales y los conflictos sociales en los territorios de América Latina.
This article summarises and synthesises a recent dialogue on the need to re-signify dominant prop... more This article summarises and synthesises a recent dialogue on the need to re-signify dominant proposals for an energy transition. These initiatives, participants agreed, are only deepening environmental problems and social conflicts in Latin American territories.
Just as what is regarded as labor, land, health and mobility have changed under neoliberalism, so... more Just as what is regarded as labor, land, health and mobility have changed under neoliberalism, so too has what is regarded as climate. Under previous phases in capitalism, climate was construed as part of a nature external to, yet interfacing with, society – as a condition for accumulation; as a resource; as an object of conservation; as a computer-modellable system. The neoliberal state builds on these conceptions in reconstructing climate also as rentable and marketable units. A thorough grasp of the exploitative and neocolonialist politics that this innovation perpetuates and deepens requires dialogue with indigenous peoples, peasants, workers and their collective history. Neoliberalism's Climate Larry Lohmann The Corner House “The climate system is natural capital ... capital created by nature, not us ... an asset that is ... valuable because it generates a flow of services over time.” Geoffrey Heal (2015) Is it useful to label the current political era “neoliberal”? Those o...
When a particular commodity market cannot be regulated, the attempt to regulate it can do no more... more When a particular commodity market cannot be regulated, the attempt to regulate it can do no more than create an illusion of regulatability. Deflected into a cul de sac, official action to correct abuses sustains the underlying problems, or makes them
En sus distintos capítulos se analizan las sórdidas expresiones de los absurdos económicos, socia... more En sus distintos capítulos se analizan las sórdidas expresiones de los absurdos económicos, sociales y ambientales del manejo capitalista de sus propios residuos. Una irracionalidad que se muestra desde el origen y multiplicación de una economía que multiplica mercancías para que se conviertan en desechos; que se aprovecha para extraer plusvalor del propio manejo de basura; que niega derechos al pueblo pobre que recicla y limpia la escoria estructural; y que se brinda para gestiones municipales que traten el tema bajo una condescendencia funcional al poder
Missing the point of development talk Reflections for activists
SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:2283.957632(9) / BLDSC - British L... more SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:2283.957632(9) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
Includes bibliographical referencesAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:228... more Includes bibliographical referencesAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:2283. 957632(28) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo
Uploads
Papers by Larry Lohmann
resource shuttled here and there across an unchanging landscape – as is common today across the social sciences, state and international institutions and NGOs – but as an ongoing colonial process of reorganizing human and nonhuman territories into hierarchies favorable to capital accumulation. After all, it is only by repatterning entropy boundaries and flows that the abstract energy developed during the 19th century is able to serve the digital and other industrial machines that are used to bring more workers under the compulsions of capital, accelerate turnover, appropriate feedstocks and contain resistance. For grasping this process, the thermodynamics that theorized abstract energy is one indispensable, well-grounded idiom. But it is not neutral. In any democratic discussion about energy futures, it needs to be made vulnerable to translation into other energy languages in which plural energies of the commons are not subordinated to the singular energy hegemonic today in official circles. A regime of mutual, multi-directional translations, when combined with historical inquiry, exposure to alternative experience and democratic struggle, is a promising methodology for scholarship about livable energy futures.
critics of her novels often resort to phrases like “distillation,”
“economy,” “tamped-down force,” “muted power,” “the unsaid speaks,”
“magical” and “how is it done?” But the brimming sense of life that
Fitzgerald shares in her brief pages reflects not so much magic as a
lifetime of hard thought about power, voice, representation, gender,
and recognition. Recent work in postcolonial studies, political ecology,
philosophy of mind, anthropology, feminist theory, and translation studies
can help achieve a better understanding of how she does it.
Se tiende a denominar como economías criminales a aquellas vinculadas al narcotráfico o al tráfico de personas entre otras, sin embargo, existen también otro tipo de crímenes como algunos relacionados a la “economía verde”.La economía del carbono forma parte de estos. Las compensaciones de carbono se imponen en las comunidades en ocasiones con extrema violencia, con desalojos, hay fraudes que las sostienen y están en conexión con actividades ilegítimas e ilegales. En este artículo se explorará la relación entre la economía del carbono, la criminalidad, y la violencia en los territorios.
Insisting on the material nature of mental work, the physical nature of information, and the political nature of thermodynamics, the working paper proposes viewing AI, like more conventional forms of industrialism, as a set of entropic, globally-distributed machines for labor exploitation concentrated in private hands and dependent on specific geographic patterns of colonialism and ecological fatigue.
In particular, it examines the contradictory relations through which interpretive ‘dead labour’ crystallized in AI machine networks and platforms recruits, partners with, and degrades enormous quantities of both ‘living labour’ and thermodynamic energy in order to perform its repetitive tasks.
As in the the 19th-century industrial revolution, the geography of this process is better understood by treating energy not as a singular resource extractable from various zones and then used up in other zones of an essentially invariant landscape, but as the political reorganization of entropy gradients and exchanges across the borders of nonequilibrium systems.
The working paper aims to open up fresh lines of inquiry into of the ‘digital natures’ that AI shapes and the living labor that helps constitute it.
At the centre of today's "green" capitalism are what are known as "offsets." The idea is that regulators shouldn’t force you to reduce your emissions if you can convince them that you’ve found a cheaper substitute for doing so. Or that you shouldn’t have to stop depleting biodiversity or water sources on one site as long as you can also do something else somewhere else that “balances out” the damage and costs less.
Because offsets require the legal creation – and exploitation – of new sacrifice zones, they entail a new type of frontier colonialism. Predictably, this approach has been a disaster for the environment. Less noticed is the extent to which offsetting has warped the entire aim of environmental law, argues this contribution to the Law and Political Economy Project's blog housed at Yale University Law School.
The blog contribution can also be viewed at https://lpeproject.org/blog/offset-frontiers-fossil-capitalism-and-the-law/.