Hard to understand when the level of labor productivity growth would be sufficient? I think Marx had a bit more optimistic take on how that 'frenzied drive' does make possible different kind of society (based on free time, etc). Compare with this:

Well even though the absolute pop number won't peak soon, the rate is in deep decline - and that does help! But, yeah, surely not enough.

New post up:

“In reality, machinery embraces a host of possibilities, many of which are thwarted, rather than developed, by capital” (159).

It’s not the fossil petro state vs the green electro-state, but a rivalry between two fossil states (the US predominantly oil-gas, China predominantly coal).

Call it the Christophers law (@brettchristophers.bsky.social). www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Thanks to @camillaroyle.bsky.social for arranging this. socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/tak...

One of my favorite finds in the archives - an internal Ford Administration report (1975) on inflation and the 1973-74 oil shock by Alan Greenspan. Classic scarcity-mindset. We simply can't afford nice things.

"...Marx redefines freedom as existing apart from social labor. This freedom can only be gained as the consequence of capitalism's ever-greater economic & productive power" (p. 79). (1/3)

This brilliant definition of neoliberalism, often attributed to Adolph Reed alone, comes from this 2015 Socialist Register article co-authored w/ Mark Dudzic. socialistregister.com/index.php/sr...

Here's me literally hand scrawling page numbers on the print out of the article for review.

What is wild about this chart is not only how long it took electricity technology to show up in productivity gains, but also how short lived it was. www.ft.com/content/8e9a...

"Changing society's relation to nature more broadly remains a worthy project" (206). This by @ueberdruss.bsky.social is a brilliant Marxist analysis of energy history that deserves its place alongside Malm, Mitchell and other classics of the last couple decades.

I'm also frankly surprised but delighted to see him citing (implicitly) Marx's Grundrisse and the concept of "the general intellect" here. I did not know he was a "fragment on machines" guy. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/o...

Warms my heart to see Bernie Sanders take exactly the right (and socialist!) line on AI technology.

“It all makes for a gloomy outlook. Already, more than 40 Chinese solar firms have gone bankrupt, been acquired or delisted from stock exchanges since 2024. One-third of the workforce of the country’s five biggest solar-industry firms has been laid off, according to Reuters…”

Boarding a plane shortly for a trip to Spain for 2 events in Barcelona and 1 in Valencia. 🇪🇸☀️

And this simplistic narrative clean=cheap really understates the very costly investments we will need to fully decarbonize. Nowhere in the world currently runs on “solar & storage” for good reasons. This advice=lying to voters on a much more complicated effort. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/o...

NYT letters. 1 more or less supportive, but 3 of 4 very critical (unsurprisingly). Gist is climate crisis is real & we have a moral duty to lead/explain to voters. I would hope in the year of our lord 2026, ppl realize politics isn’t won by asserting moral principles.

A follow up post fleshing out why the core thesis of the essay and the book remain the same. I think many Green New Deal supporters underplay the extent in which their own movement was culpable in poisoning the issue. It had a lot of potential!

I went on the "History Behind the News" podcast to talk about oil and American capitalism (the topic of my first book "Lifeblood" - a nice refresher for me on my many years becoming an oil expert!). podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

I know some are very angry, but this is pretty cool.

I will say I think this new headline is a better summation of the piece. I actually care a lot about climate change! (I do not think we should “forget” it!).

A great proposal from the Center for Working Class politics: The leading subsector of US manufacturing is "transportation equipment." So, "For a relatively modest investment we could electrify our entire public municipal vehicle fleet. And make them all right here in the USA."

The FT lays it out clearer than most as usual.

What this very sad country needs more than anything else is a political movement that can restore ordinary peoples' faith in collective agency, the public good and that politics can actually improve things.

There's a rampant conspiracy theorizing on the Left these days on how the Iran war is destroying the petrodollar and thus the dollar system more broadly. Not really!

"‘Green jobs’ is a somewhat nebulous term, and it would appear that there is little concrete evidence of what these jobs actually are."

If you think we can somehow extricate ourselves from synthetic nitrogen dependence, this amazing book will disabuse you of that notion.

He does lose me here. This is the typical left line anti-industrial ag. But the methods he promotes here would require far more labor & land in a context where ag land use is a major cause of both the biodiversity & climate crisis. Also we can make nitrogen w/out fossil fuels.