Energy prices are the new black, part 1

Dear readers,

There is a war – but the central political issue in the coming years will not be "security policy" in the narrow sense, military escalation be damned.

There is a climate emergency – but the central political issue in the coming years will not be "climate policy" in the narrow sense, emergency and Paris Agreement be damned.

The central political issue in the coming years, perhaps this decade, will be energy prices. (See here (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) for part 2.)

Escaping the impasse

I confess: over the past few weeks and months I've thought myself into a climate-strategic impasse, diving deep into another round of my political depression. To be sure, I continue to believe in my “sublimation-society hypothesis” (part 1; part 2), and in the almost necessarily brutal and ignorant reaction of German mainstream society to the actions of a radicalising climate movement - in short: more information about the climate crisis does not lead to adaptation, but to psychological repression (sublimation), because adaptation is too expensive; those who repress do not like the repressed to return; the climate movement, however, wants exactly that; the movement will therefore more and more become the target of ignorance, irrationality and brutality, no matter what it does; there will still not be any relevant emissions reductions because there simply will not be majorities for it in this the global North - and remain convinced that we as a climate movement should adapt our strategies to a situation in which we are increasingly confronted with irrationality. But these adaptations would all be merely defensive, like the urgently needed massive expansion of anti-repression structures, which would have been very useful over the Easter weekend in Frankfurt/Main, when state police decided to detain almost 200 comrades from the "Uprising of the Last Generation" (a group similar in tactics and strategy to Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil and similar campaigns around the world) for the entire weekend.

But honestly: what's the point in telling a "we're basically all fucked, and not in a fun way"-story? To qoute British Marxist Raymond Williams: the job of radical intellectuals (or in my case: storytellers) “is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing”. A future in which the EU becomes more and more of an amorally affluent hellhole, with ever-higher border walls and ever-stronger fascist movements; in which the climate movement takes ever harsher beatings no matter what it does; in which even the best strategies fail because of the irrationality of mainstream society - sure, this may be exactly the future we are heading towards, and it is extremely important that we as a movement, and as societies, are aware of these dangers, and reflect on what to do about them.

But we're not there yet, at least, we have yet to reach the end of the line, the Grand Hotel Abyss. And that means that it just might be possible to still pull the emergency brake; to reroute the train; or at least (here the metaphor starts wobbling a bit) to try to make sure that the descent into the abyss isn't quite as steep.

We've been here before

Luckily, this is not an entirely new situation. At the beginning of the last decade, after the COP15-flop, the (then much smaller, in fact barely visible) climate movement sank into the deep so-called "post-Copenhagen depression". Most of us had lost faith in "climate politics" (back then existing merely at the international level), also in view of the ignorance with which Northern societies were treating the climate crisis was already back then, and the realisation that there would probably never be social majorities for radical climate policies in the global North (because our relative prosperity is based on activities that exacerbate the climate crisis). But even then it was clear to us that there are indeed policy fields in which "climate policy" is actually pursued, i.e., which, in contrast to the policy field "climate", have a direct and measurable influence on greenhouse gas emissions, because they at least in a mediated influence the central factor that determines the amount of emissions: Is the economy growing, or is it not?

One of these policy fields, which I also turned to at that time, is energy policy. Together with agricultural and transport policy, energy policy is the field in which the most "political leverage" vis-a-vis the growth (or not) of greenhouse emissions can be exercised, but in which we could also observe exactly the same tendencies back then as we see today: Many political and corporate leaders talked about protecting the climate (Merkel, Obama, etc.), but in practice acted in such a way that the top policy goal was not the radical expansion of renewables , but an "all of the above"-energy policy, where renewables were (partially) expanded, but the "shale / fracking revolution" was also pushed forward, nuclear phase-outs were postponed, and the brilliant system of Germany's feed-in tarriffs for renewables was dismantled. At the same time, in Germany, the new anti-coal movement joined the recently (2011) successful anti-nuclear movement, which in turn had links to the protagonists of a "citizens' energy transition" dating back to the 1980s, and various actors spoke of an "energy transition movement" that could at least potentially be much larger and more powerful than the climate justice movement, which (because of the clash with mainstream interests it involved) was settling into its existence as a minoritarian struggle.

So I became interested in "energy struggles," social struggles over the control of and production of, access to, and price of energy, and wrote a paper in 2012 in which I developed the hypothesis mentioned above:

In every phase of capitalist development there is a central social variable which is the expression of the dominant social relation (wage, money, nature); influences more than others the distribution of social surplus value; and whose 'correct' setting plays a central role in the constitution of social alliances and ruling coalitions. In the coming post-earth capitalism, this role will be played by energy prices.

However, 2012 was followed by the Greek/Euro crisis, then the so-called "migration crisis", the racist Pegida-movement arose, and I thought to myself: at best, I had once again been ahead of my time (I had already argued in 2007 that there would soon be "green capitalism", and boy was I wrong), at worst, I was completely off the mark.

And now? Are energy prices the new black?

There is a war, and alongside the discussion about heavy arms deliveries to Ukraine, Germany is mostly talking about fuel and gas prices, right-wingers, centrists and some old-school lefties all shout: "the fuel price is too high!" This is how Tobias Hans (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) (photo) tried to avoid being voted out of office as Prime Minister of the Saarland (one of Germany's 16 federal states, Bundesländer): "Good morning. I have just driven past a gas station, and it's really crazy: Diesel costs 2,12€. I think we've really reached a point where we have to say, 'We have to act here. Of course it has something to do with the Ukraine crisis ... but the problem is simply that the state is currently enriching itself from these increased energy costs, and that's why we need a limit on fuel prices: €2.129 for a liter of diesel, that's really no longer affordable for a lot of people." Mehmet Oz (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) is trying to increase his rather slim chances of success in the Republican primaries in Pennsylvania, USA: "Gas is up to almost 5 bucks per gallon. That's crazy, it's offensive. Since I've been on the campaign trail, I'm filling my tank almost every other day: $300 a week, not to mention how much I'm spending on groceries. The cost of living is skyrocketing, and Joe (Biden) is nowhere to be found. It doesn't make sense." And Marine Le Pen (who luckily wasn't elected to the French presidency for the 2nd time) promised, if elected, to "cut the VAT on energy ... 'so that the French can continue to put gasoline in their cars ... and feed themselves.'"

So, in the next few weeks, I'll be thinking more about the issue of energy prices, and what left-wing and socio-ecological strategies can look like in relation to that. This will be a bit of thinking-in-progress, because I don't know yet where these thoughts will take me. The 2012 paper at least culminated in this impressive non-conclusion, "What does this mean for us?. Don't know yet..."

I hope to get a little further with your help this time. At least out of the impasse. That at least would be something.

See you in 2 weeks.

Yours truly, Tadzio