The Green No Deal – a review of ‘The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives’ and ‘The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet’

Brett Christophers (2024). The Price Is Wrong Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, Verso

Ernest Scheyder (2024). The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives, Ithaka

Is land – which to some cultures is the original mother, to be revered and cared for – just another commodity which can and should be exploited in the interests of human ‘progress’? Is energy another such commodity as well? Industrialized cultures don’t put it like that, of course. They talk about ‘natural resources’, ‘environmental economics’, and ‘Green New Deals’ in which all humans have access to well-paid employment and also to ecologically and sustainably produced energy from renewable sources, discounting the fossil-fuel and material dependence embedded in their infrastructure.

The 2019 US Congress House Resolution 109 – Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal¹⁾ says that such goals should be accomplished “… through a 10-year national mobilization (referred to in this resolution as the “Green New Deal mobilization”) that will require the following goals and projects… meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources, including— (i) by dramatically expanding and upgrading renewable power sources; (ii) by deploying new capacity; and (D) building or upgrading to energy-efficient, distributed, and “smart” power grids, and ensuring affordable access to electricity…”

Cover of The War Below. Source: National Book Foundation

The War Below and The Price Is Wrong are two very different books which canvass why it ain’t going to happen, from two very different but complementary perspectives. Scheyder, the author of the War Below, a journalist by trade and a senior correspondent for Thomson Reuters specializing in critical minerals and the clean energy transition offers a very readable account of his visits to current and proposed mining sites (mostly in the USA) where the minerals used to make new energy technologies (such as lithium ion batteries for electric cars) are located. In these places he talks to everyone with an interest in the project, whether they are for it as a good business proposition, or against it because of the damage to land, water, air and living communities (human and non-human) it will or could involve. Plus the damage to Earth Mother as a whole. He also delves into the back stories of the corporations involved with the mining projects, and their recent developments. Even better, for those with an interest in this subject, he keeps updating the situation for the key projects on the Reuters site.²⁾

Anyone who thinks that a transition to 100% clean energy could be swift, simple and not socially and environmentally problematic needs to read this book for a reality check. All the existing ‘clean’ and ‘renewable’ energy technologies rely on the mining of finite mineral resources. That mining, and the transportation and processing of the minerals, currently requires large amounts of mainly fossil fuel energy. Greenhouse gas emissions are involved at every step of the way. Once the solar panels or wind turbines are installed, however, the energy use emissions drop to almost zero. So – clean energy problem solved?

Not so fast. This is where it is also important to read Brett Christophers’ work on the way in which electricity markets in most countries are currently optimized to favor high returns to investors. This is regardless of the source of the energy produced, its impacts on the climate, and its affordability for the majority of consumers. The Price is Wrong is not as easy to read as The War Below, and those without some prior knowledge of the global political economy of capitalism may find it hard going. I have such knowledge, but I still struggled at times to keep up with the complexity (some would say deviousness) of the way in which electricity markets have been constructed by a series of neoliberal governments, all around the world, to maximize returns to investors, regardless of the consequences to life on Earth.

There is a lot of detail in The Price Is Wrong, as it covers fifty plus years of history and a lot of different national markets. But the trend is the same in all places. Renewable and low-carbon infrastructures have not been and never will be constructed at the scale necessary to protect the climate, while also delivering affordable electricity, so long as the decisions on how to produce electricity, how much of it to produce, where to produce it, and how to best distribute it, are made primarily by capital markets. In every state which Christophers studied, renewable energy projects were only successful if they received state (i.e. public, taxpayer-funded) support of some kind. The mechanisms vary from state to state, with direct subsidies, feed-in tariffs set by the state, government investment and other means being used to assist new projects. When such assistance ceases, or is not available, the returns on the projects become so unappealing to investors that private capital will not back them. Exactly how this works differs from state to state.

At the conclusion of The Price Is Wrong Christophers canvasses the idea (derived from the seminal work of Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation) that energy – like land, labor and capital – is a ‘fictitious commodity’. That is, it is not something which is a product produced by human effort for sale in a regular consumer market. I am still thinking through the implications of this, but it seems a helpful concept for analyzing why markets for energy – like markets for land and labor – end up enriching the few while depriving and/or exploiting the many. For the details on exactly how this can and does happen in the early 21st century, Scheyder and Christopher’s books are excellent (if depressing) guides.

¹⁾https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text

²⁾See, for example, his September 2024 update on the proposed lithium mine in Nevada (Biden administration nears approval for ioneer’s Nevada lithium mine https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/biden-administration-moves-closer-approving-ioneers-nevada-lithium-mine-2024-09-19/.