Durante los últimos dos siglos, millones de personas dedicadas:revolucionarios, activistas, politicos, y teóricos— han sido incapaces de frenar la desastrosa y cada vez más globalizada trayectoria de polarización económica y degradación ecológica. Quizás esto se deba a que estamos absolutamente atrapados en formas erróneas de pensar sobre la tecnología y la economía, como muestra el discurso actual sobre el cambio climático.

El aumento de las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero no solo genera el cambio climático. Nos están generando cada vez más ansiedad climática. Los escenarios apocalípticos están capturando los titulares a un ritmo acelerado. Científicos de todo el mundo nos dicen que las emisiones en diez años deben ser la mitad de lo que eran hace diez años, o nos enfrentamos al apocalipsis. Los escolares como Greta Thunberg y los movimientos activistas como Extinction Rebellion están exigiendo que entremos en pánico. Y con razón. Pero, ¿qué debemos hacer para evitar un desastre?

La mayoría de los científicos politicos, y los líderes empresariales tienden a confiar en el progreso tecnológico. Independientemente de la ideología, Existe una expectativa generalizada de que las nuevas tecnologías reemplazarán a los combustibles fósiles aprovechando energías renovables como la solar y la eólica. Muchos también confían en que habrá tecnologías para eliminar el dióxido de carbono de la atmósfera y para la "geoingeniería" del clima de la Tierra. El denominador común de estas visiones es la fe en que podemos salvar la civilización moderna si cambiamos a nuevas tecnologías. Pero la "tecnología" no es una varita mágica. Requiere mucho dinero lo que significa reclamos sobre mano de obra y recursos de otras áreas. Tendemos a olvidar este hecho crucial.

Yo diría que la forma en que damos por sentado el dinero convencional "para todo uso" es la razón principal por la que no hemos entendido cómo las tecnologías avanzadas dependen de la apropiación de mano de obra y recursos de otros lugares. Al hacer posible el intercambio de casi cualquier cosa:tiempo humano, artilugio, ecosistemas, lo que sea, para cualquier otra cosa en el mercado, la gente busca constantemente las mejores ofertas, lo que en última instancia significa promover los salarios más bajos y los recursos más baratos en el Sur global.

Es la lógica del dinero la que ha creado la sociedad global absolutamente insostenible y hambrienta de crecimiento que existe en la actualidad. Para lograr que nuestra economía globalizada respete los límites naturales, debemos poner límites a lo que se puede intercambiar. Desafortunadamente, parece cada vez más probable que tengamos que experimentar algo más cercano al desastre, como una falla en la cosecha semi-global, antes de que estemos preparados para cuestionar seriamente cómo se diseñan actualmente el dinero y los mercados.

¿Crecimiento verde?

Considere el problema final al que nos enfrentamos:si nuestro moderno, global, y la economía en crecimiento puede ser impulsada por energía renovable. Entre la mayoría de los campeones de la sostenibilidad, como los defensores de un Green New Deal, Existe una convicción inquebrantable de que los ingenieros pueden resolver el problema del cambio climático.

Lo que generalmente divide las posiciones ideológicas no es la fe en la tecnología como tal, pero qué soluciones técnicas elegir, y si requerirán un cambio político importante. Aquellos que permanecen escépticos ante las promesas de la tecnología, como los defensores de la reducción radical o el decrecimiento, tienden a ser marginados de la política y los medios de comunicación. Hasta aquí, es poco probable que cualquier político que defienda seriamente el decrecimiento tenga futuro en la política.

El optimismo generalizado sobre la tecnología a menudo se denomina ecomodernismo. El Manifiesto Ecomodernista, una declaración concisa de este enfoque publicada en 2015, nos pide que adoptemos el progreso tecnológico, que nos dará "un bien, o incluso genial, Antropoceno ". Sostiene que el progreso de la tecnología nos ha" desacoplado "del mundo natural y debería permitírsele continuar haciéndolo para permitir el" rebrote "de la naturaleza. El crecimiento de las ciudades, agricultura industrial, y energía nuclear, dice, ilustrar tal desacoplamiento. Como si estos fenómenos no tuvieran huellas ecológicas más allá de sus propios límites.

Mientras tanto, Los llamamientos a favor de un Green New Deal se han expresado durante más de una década, pero en febrero de 2019 tomó la forma de una resolución a la Cámara de Representantes de Estados Unidos. Un aspecto fundamental de su visión es un cambio a gran escala hacia las fuentes de energía renovable y las inversiones masivas en nueva infraestructura. Esto permitiría un mayor crecimiento de la economía, está argumentado.

Repensar la tecnología

Entonces, el consenso general parece ser que el problema del cambio climático es solo una cuestión de reemplazar una tecnología energética por otra. Pero una visión histórica revela que la idea misma de tecnología está inextricablemente entrelazada con la acumulación de capital, intercambio desigual y la idea de dinero para todo uso. Y como tal, no es tan fácil de rediseñar como nos gusta pensar. Cambiar la tecnología energética principal no es solo una cuestión de reemplazar la infraestructura, significa transformar el orden económico mundial.

En el siglo 19, la revolución industrial nos dio la noción de que el progreso tecnológico es simplemente el ingenio humano aplicado a la naturaleza, y que no tiene nada que ver con la estructura de la sociedad mundial. Esta es la imagen especular de la ilusión de los economistas, que el crecimiento no tiene nada que ver con la naturaleza y, por lo tanto, no necesita tener en cuenta los límites naturales. En lugar de ver que tanto la tecnología como la economía atraviesan la división naturaleza-sociedad, Se piensa que la ingeniería se ocupa únicamente de la naturaleza y la economía se ocupa únicamente de la sociedad.

El motor de vapor, por ejemplo, simplemente se considera una invención ingeniosa para aprovechar la energía química del carbón. No niego que este sea el caso, pero la tecnología del vapor en la Gran Bretaña industrial temprana también dependía del capital acumulado en los mercados globales. Las fábricas impulsadas por vapor en Manchester nunca se hubieran construido sin el comercio atlántico triangular de esclavos, algodón en bruto, y textiles de algodón. La tecnología de vapor no era solo una cuestión de ingeniería ingeniosa aplicada a la naturaleza, como toda tecnología compleja, también era crucialmente dependiente de las relaciones globales de intercambio.

Esta dependencia de la tecnología de las relaciones sociales globales no es solo una cuestión de dinero. En un sentido bastante físico, la viabilidad de la máquina de vapor dependía de los flujos de energía del trabajo humano y otros recursos que se habían invertido en fibra de algodón de Carolina del Sur, en los EE.UU, carbón de Gales y hierro de Suecia. Tecnología moderna, luego, es un producto del metabolismo de la sociedad mundial, no simplemente el resultado de descubrir "hechos" de la naturaleza.

La ilusión que hemos sufrido desde la revolución industrial es que el cambio tecnológico es simplemente una cuestión de conocimientos de ingeniería, independientemente de los patrones de los flujos de materiales globales. Esto es particularmente problemático porque nos hace ciegos a cómo tales flujos tienden a ser muy desiguales.

Esto no es solo cierto en los días del Imperio Británico. Para este día, technologically advanced areas of the world are net importers of the resources that have been used as inputs in producing their technologies and other commodities, such as land, labor, materiales and energy. Technological progress and capital accumulation are two sides of the same coin. But the material asymmetries in world trade are invisible to mainstream economists, who focus exclusively on flows of money.

Irónicamente, this understanding of technology is not even recognized in Marxist theory, although it claims to be both materialist and committed to social justice. Marxist theory and politics tend toward what opponents refer to as a Promethean faith in technological progress. Its concern with justice focuses on the emancipation of the industrial worker, rather than on the global flows of resources that are embodied in the industrial machine.

This Marxist faith in the magic of technology occasionally takes extreme forms, as in the case of the biologist David Schwartzman, who does not hesitate to predict future human colonization of the galaxy and Aaron Bastani, who anticipates mining asteroids. In his remarkable book Fully Automated Luxury Communism:A Manifesto, Bastani repeats a widespread claim about the cheapness of solar power that shows how deluded most of us are by the idea of technology.

Naturaleza, he writes, "provides us with virtually free, limitless energy." This was a frequently voiced conviction already in 1964, when the chemist Farrington Daniels proclaimed that the "most plentiful and cheapest energy is ours for the taking." More than 50 years later, the dream persists.

The realities

Electricity globally represents about 19% of total energy use—the other major energy drains being transports and industry. En 2017, only 0.7% of global energy use derived from solar power and 1.9% from wind, while 85% relied on fossil fuels. As much as 90% of world energy use derives from fossil sources, and this share is actually increasing. So why is the long-anticipated transition to renewable energy not materializing?

One highly contested issue is the land requirements for harnessing renewable energy. Energy experts like David MacKay and Vaclav Smil have estimated that the "power density"—the watts of energy that can be harnessed per unit of land area—of renewable energy sources is so much lower than that of fossil fuels that to replace fossil with renewable energy would require vastly greater land areas for capturing energy.

In part because of this issue, visions of large-scale solar power projects have long referred to the good use to which they could put unproductive areas like the Sahara desert. But doubts about profitability have discouraged investments. Una década atrás, por ejemplo, there was much talk about Desertec, a €400 billion project that crumbled as the major investors pulled out, one by one.

Today the world's largest solar energy project is Ouarzazate Solar Power Station in Morocco. It covers about 25 square kilometres and has cost around US$9 billion to build. It is designed to provide around a million people with electricity, which means that another 35 such projects—that is, US$315 billion of investments—would be required merely to cater to the population of Morocco. We tend not to see that the enormous investments of capital needed for such massive infrastructural projects represent claims on resources elsewhere—they have huge footprints beyond our field of vision.

También, we must consider whether solar is really carbon free. As Smil has shown for wind turbines and Storm van Leeuwen for nuclear power, the production, instalación, and maintenance of any technological infrastructure remains critically dependent on fossil energy. Por supuesto, it is easy to retort that until the transition has been made, solar panels are going to have to be produced by burning fossil fuels. But even if 100% of our electricity were renewable, it would not be able to propel global transports or cover the production of steel and cement for urban-industrial infrastructure.

And given the fact that the cheapening of solar panels in recent years to a significant extent is the result of shifting manufacture to Asia, we must ask ourselves whether European and American efforts to become sustainable should really be based on the global exploitation of low-wage labor, scarce resources and abused landscapes elsewhere.

Collecting carbon

Solar power is not displacing fossil energy, only adding to it. And the pace of expansion of renewable energy capacity has stalled – it was about the same in 2018 as in 2017. Meanwhile, our global combustion of fossil fuels continues to rise, as do our carbon emissions. Because this trend seems unstoppable, many hope to see extensive use of technologies for capturing and removing the carbon from the emissions of power plants and factories.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) remains an essential component of the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change. But to envisage such technologies as economically accessible at a global scale is clearly unrealistic.

To collect the atoms of carbon dispersed by the global combustion of fossil fuels would be as energy-demanding and economically unfeasible as it would be to try to collect the molecules of rubber from car tires that are continuously being dispersed in the atmosphere by road friction.

The late economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen used this example to show that economic processes inevitably lead to entropy—that is, an increase in physical disorder and loss of productive potential. In not grasping the implications of this fact, we continue to imagine some miraculous new technology that will reverse the Law of Entropy.

Economic "value" is a cultural idea. An implication of the Law of Entropy is that productive potential in nature—the force of energy or the quality of materials—is systematically lost as value is being produced. This perspective turns our economic worldview upside down. Value is measured in money, and money shapes the way we think about value. Economists are right in that value should be defined in terms of human preferences, rather than inputs of labor or resources, but the result is that the more value we produce, the more inexpensive labor, energy and other resources are required. To curb the relentless growth of value—at the expense of the biosphere and the global poor—we must create an economy that can restrain itself.

The evils of capitalism

Much of the discussion on climate change suggests that we are on a battlefield, confronting evil people who want to obstruct our path to an ecological civilization. But the concept of capitalism tends to mystify how we are all caught in a game defined by the logic of our own constructions—as if there was an abstract "system" and its morally despicable proponents to blame. Rather than see the very design of the money game as the real antagonist, our call to arms tends to be directed at the players who have had best luck with the dice.

I would instead argue that the ultimate obstruction is not a question of human morality but of our common faith in what Marx called "money fetishism." We collectively delegate responsibility for our future to a mindless human invention—what Karl Polanyi called all-purpose money, the peculiar idea that anything can be exchanged for anything else. The aggregate logic of this relatively recent idea is precisely what is usually called "capitalism." It defines the strategies of corporations, politicos, and citizens alike.

All want their money assets to grow. The logic of the global money game obviously does not provide enough incentives to invest in renewables. It generates greed, obscene and rizing inequalities, violencia, and environmental degradation, including climate change. But mainstream economics appears to have more faith in setting this logic free than ever. Given the way the economy is now organized, it does not see an alternative to obeying the logic of the globalized market.

The only way to change the game is to redesign its most basic rules. To attribute climate change to an abstract system called capitalism—but without challenging the idea of all-purpose money—is to deny our own agency. The "system" is perpetuated every time we buy our groceries, regardless of whether we are radical activists or climate change deniers. It is difficult to identify culprits if we are all players in the same game. In agreeing to the rules, we have limited our potential collective agency. We have become the tools and servants of our own creation—all-purpose money.

Despite good intentions, it is not clear what Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and the rest of the climate movement are demanding should be done. Like most of us, they want to stop the emissions of greenhouse gases, but seem to believe that such an energy transition is compatible with money, globalized markets, and modern civilization.

Is our goal to overthrow "the capitalist mode of production"? Si es así, how do we go about doing that? Should we blame the politicians for not confronting capitalism and the inertia of all-purpose money? Or—which should follow automatically—should we blame the voters? Should we blame ourselves for not electing politicians that are sincere enough to advocate reducing our mobility and levels of consumption?

Many believe that with the right technologies we would not have to reduce our mobility or energy consumption—and that the global economy could still grow. But to me that is an illusion. It suggests that we have not yet grasped what "technology" is. Electric cars and many other "green" devices may seem reassuring but are often revealed to be insidious strategies for displacing work and environmental loads beyond our horizon—to unhealthy, low-wage labor in mines in Congo and Inner Mongolia. They look sustainable and fair to their affluent users but perpetuate a myopic worldview that goes back to the invention of the steam engine. I have called this delusion machine fetishism.

Redesigning the global money game

So the first thing we should redesign are the economic ideas that brought fossil-fueled technology into existence and continue to perpetuate it. "Capitalism" ultimately refers to the artifact or idea of all-purpose money, which most of us take for granted as being something about which we do not have a choice. But we do, and this must be recognized.

Since the 19th century, all-purpose money has obscured the unequal resource flows of colonialism by making them seem reciprocal:money has served as a veil that mystifies exploitation by representing it as fair exchange. Economists today reproduce this 19th-century mystification, using a vocabulary that has proven useless in challenging global problems of justice and sustainability. The policies designed to protect the environment and promote global justice have not curbed the insidious logic of all-purpose money—which is to increase environmental degradation as well as economic inequalities.

In order to see that all-purpose money is indeed the fundamental problem, we need to see that there are alternative ways of designing money and markets. Like the rules in a board game, they are human constructions and can, en principio, be redesigned. In order to accomplish economic "degrowth" and curb the treadmill of capital accumulation, we must transform the systemic logic of money itself.

National authorities might establish a complementary currency, alongside regular money, that is distributed as a universal basic income but that can only be used to buy goods and services that are produced within a given radius from the point of purchase. This is not "local money" in the sense of LETS or the Bristol Pound – which in effect do nothing to impede the expansion of the global market—but a genuine spanner in the wheel of globalization. With local money you can buy goods produced on the other side of the planet, as long as you buy it in a local store. What I am suggesting is special money that can only be used to buy goods produced locally.

This would help decrease demand for global transports—a major source of greenhouse gas emissions—while increasing local diversity and resilience and encouraging community integration. It would no longer make low wages and lax environmental legislation competitive advantages in world trade, as is currently the case.

Immunizing local communities and ecosystems from the logic of globalized capital flows may be the only feasible way of creating a truly "post-capitalist" society that respects planetary boundaries and does not generate deepening global injustices.

Re-localizing the bulk of the economy in this way does not mean that communities won't need electricity, por ejemplo, to run hospitals, computers and households. But it would dismantle most of the global, fossil-fueled infrastructure for transporting people, groceries and other commodities around the planet.

This means decoupling human subsistence from fossil energy and re-embedding humans in their landscapes and communities. In completely changing market structures of demand, such a shift would not require anyone—corporations, politicos, or citizens—to choose between fossil and solar energy, as two comparable options with different profit margins.

To return to the example of Morocco, solar power will obviously have an important role to play in generating indispensable electricity, but to imagine that it will be able to provide anything near current levels of per capita energy use in the global North is wholly unrealistic. A transition to solar energy should not simply be about replacing fossil fuels, but about reorganizing the global economy.

Solar power will no doubt be a vital component of humanity's future, but not as long as we allow the logic of the world market to make it profitable to transport essential goods halfway around the world. The current blind faith in technology will not save us. For the planet to stand any chance, the global economy must be redesigned. The problem is more fundamental than capitalism or the emphasis on growth:it is money itself, and how money is related to technology.

Climate change and the other horrors of the Anthropocene don't just tell us to stop using fossil fuels—they tell us that globalization itself is unsustainable.

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