Green capitalism,climate change and the technological fix: A more-than-human assessment

Abstract

Green capitalism is an approach that attempts to use free-market mechanisms to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Its advocates argue that the market supplies the best means to innovate technological solutions that can compete with existing polluting practices. Using a relational, post-anthropocentric and materialist ontology, this article analyses the micropolitics underpinning the capitalist market economy in terms of production and market assemblages and the affective forces within them. This novel approach reveals previously overlooked more-than-human affects within these capitalist assemblages. These affects generate the unintended and inevitable consequences of a capitalist economic framework: growth, waste and inequalities. Based on this micropolitical assessment, the article uses the example of the electric car to conclude that green capitalism is inadequate to address the climate crisis, and offers an alternative approach.

Introduction

Following recent dire warnings from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), policy-makers in most jurisdictions have acknowledged a need for urgent action to address anthropogenic climate change (Rhodes, 2016, Spash, 2016). However, with greenhouse gas emissions strongly associated historically with industrialisation and economic growth (Lane, 2019, pp. 282–283; Paterson, 2020, p. 400; Smith, 2016), this poses a conundrum for governments with ideological commitments to a capitalist economy wedded to growth and exploitation of natural resources (Guerrero, 2018, pp. 38–39; Marsden & Rucinska, 2019). Many have responded by embracing what has been described as ‘green capitalism’: an ideology and economic perspective that regards the market economy as the optimal solution to environmental challenges (Tienhaara, 2014; Zysman & Huberty, 2014). This proposition has been operationalised in two ways. First, by establishing a market in greenhouse gas emissions via instruments such as carbon pricing and ‘cap and trade’ emissions trading schemes (World Bank, 2021). Second, by promoting technological innovation to cut emissions or to sequester atmospheric carbon (Lovins & Cohen, 2011; Prudham, 2009). These green capitalist moves aim to innovate a new climate-friendly industrial revolution that will in turn fuel economic growth and future prosperity (Tienhaara, 2014, pp. 191–192).

While there is powerful evidence that the rise in pollution by the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet is a result of the expansion of the capitalist economy since the industrial revolution (IPCC, 2013; Stock, 2020; Urry, 2009), it is also true that were such technologies to prevent or even reverse further increases in these gases in the atmosphere, this would limit the rise in planetary temperatures that is driving climate change. This article does not challenge the potential of technologies to reduce climate-changing emissions, but questions assertions that capitalism is the right economic and social model solely to achieve the radical shifts required to deliver a carbon-neutral global economy.

This question is of direct significance for environmental sociology’s analysis of policy options to counter anthropogenic climate change; for post-anthropocentric approaches in the sociology of science and technology; and for critical sociological analysis of neoliberal capitalism and associated issues of social justice and social inequalities. To address these issues, this article supplements analyses of capitalism informed by the emphasis on human practices (Lettow, 2017) within critical/neo-Marxist theory (Baer, 2012; Bernstein, 2001; Smith, 2016) with a ‘more-than-human’, relational and critical micropolitical analysis. Such an approach adopts a post-anthropocentric ontology (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013, p. 104), which cuts across nature/culture dualism to acknowledge the capacities of all matter (both human and non-human) to affect and be affected (van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2010). This recognition of what Bennett (2010, p. 2) calls ‘thing-power’ is particularly apposite for analysis of a sociological topic in which so much non-human matter – greenhouse gases, climate, technology, physical resources, consumer goods, energy, means of production and marketplaces – are caught up.

This analysis will reveal hitherto unremarked more-than-human affects associated with supply and demand within capitalist production and markets, suggesting novel insights into the dynamics of growth, wastefulness and the production of social inequalities within a capitalist economy. It begins by assessing green capitalism’s ‘policy assemblage’ (Fox & Alldred, 2020b; McCann, 2011; Ureta, 2014) to determine the underlying precepts of green capitalist ontology, but crucially also what this ontology ignores: the more-than-human affects underpinning capitalist production and markets. A further micropolitical analysis then assesses how these more-than-human affects produce both capitalism’s intended and unintended capacities. These latter unintended consequences of capitalist production and market assemblages are illustrated with assessments of the micropolitics of growth, waste and inequalities produced in the contemporary shift to electric cars.

Green capitalism and the technological fix

The term ‘green capitalism’ – which in the literature has encompassed a variety of disparate threads (Tienhaara, 2014, p. 188) – is used here specifically to reference the proposition that a ‘free’ or neoliberal market is the best means by which to assure a sustainable future for humans and for the planet. This liberal (or neoliberal) environmentalism (Bernstein, 2001) aims to replace natural capital (such as rainforests) with ‘human ingenuity and technological development’ (Whitehead, 2014, p. 263). It has been an approach to environmental policy favoured by many right-of-centre political parties in the West (Dawson, 2010, p. 316; Prudham, 2009, p. 1597; Watts, 2002, p. 1316), though it has also been embraced by others, including parts of the labour movement (Sweeney, 2015) and UN climate change policy-makers (Bernstein, 2001). While often silent over the negative effects of a market economy upon the environment, in its more strident manifestations proponents argue that the capitalist market economy is the only means whereby the environment may be saved from human depredations (Lovins & Cohen, 2011, p. 7). Critics have responded to such claims that green capitalism can successfully address anthropogenic climate change by noting capitalism’s inherent drive for growth and accumulation (Prudham, 2009, p. 1596); its dependence on exploitation of natural resources (‘extractive capitalism’) and associated North/South injustices (Dawson, 2010, p. 328); while also noting that it is an exercise in greenwashing the negative consequences of neoliberalism (Croeser, 2021).

Green capitalism has offered two qualitatively different analyses of the impact of a market economy. The first of these argued that climate change represents a catastrophic failure of markets, in which producers of greenhouse gases (primarily nations in the North) can avoid the full global consequences of resultant climate change, while affecting parts of the world not responsible for their production (Stern, 2007). This failure may be addressed through regulation of markets, taxation and international collaboration around three initiatives: effective carbon pricing/trading, technological innovation toward low-carbon solutions, and use of incentives and disincentives to change market behaviour by consumers and businesses (Stern, 2007, pp. xviii–xxi). These measures, Stern claimed (pp. xviii–xxi), could reform the market economy to make it ‘environment-friendly’.

The second manifestation is more bullish about market mechanisms. Advocates have promoted a neoliberal environmentalism, in which technological innovation drives future economic growth (Lovins & Cohen, 2011; Perez, 2016, p. 193; Zysman & Huberty, 2014). They fully acknowledge anthropogenic impacts on the environment, including climate change, but argue that a market economy holds the best hope of reversing these impacts through ingenuity and entrepreneurialism, while ensuring the continuity of the economic growth that they argue has been the engine of both national and individual prosperity since the industrial revolution (Prudham, 2009, pp. 1596–1597). Green capitalism is consequently marked out by ‘the increasing incorporation and internalization of ecological conditions into the circuits of capital accumulation’ (p. 1596). Zysman and Huberty (2014, p. xiii) promote the notion of ‘green spirals’, in which new environmentally-friendly infrastructure and energy technologies create new markets, which in turn encourage further technological innovation. These spirals are the basis for policy in developed and developing countries, and can offer new sources of productivity and production (Zysman & Huberty, 2014, p. xiv).

Measures such as carbon pricing to incentivise low-carbon technological innovation and emission trading schemes (ETS) that enable corporations to trade carbon credits (Environmental Defence Fund, n.d.) have been adopted or are in the process of adoption in jurisdictions including the EU, Canada, China, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the USA (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, 2021; European Commission, n.d.). However, politicians of both right and left persuasions have also embraced the latter, more upbeat version of green capitalism and its technological fix: promoting technologies such as renewable sources of energy and the development of electric vehicles as the means to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the IPCC’s target date of 2050 (Blakeley, 2021). Supporters of this technological solution to climate change believe that – within a capitalist market framework – these innovations will out-compete and thus replace existing polluting technologies, thereby reducing net carbon emissions to zero to meet global targets. The role of governments, they contend, is to foster such technological development through research funding, fiscal policy and infrastructure investment (Smith, 2016; Wilberforce et al., 2019, pp. 67–68).

The following sections develop and then apply a critical, more-than-human ontology, to analyse this technological fix for climate change.

A more-than-human approach for assessing green capitalism

The ontology that this article will employ to explore green capitalism’s capacity to meet net-zero emission targets draws on the posthuman feminist, new materialist, affective and non-Western ontologies in the humanities and social sciences that have emerged in what has been described as a ‘turn to matter’ (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Lemke, 2015; Tompkins, 2016). These perspectives recognise materiality as plural and complex, uneven and contingent, relational and emergent (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 29), and consider that the world and history are produced by a range of material forces that extend from the physical and the biological to the psychological, social and cultural (Barad, 1996, p. 181; Braidotti, 2013, p. 3).

These more-than-human approaches may be characterised as relational and contingent (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 29), post-anthropocentric (Braidotti, 2011, p. 327; St Pierre, 2014, p. 3) and monist (Connolly, 2010; Fox & Alldred, 2018). On the first of these, new materialisms consider materialities such as human bodies, animals and inanimates not as essential entities with pre-existing and fixed attributes, but as fully relational, with contingent and variable capacities and dispositions that emerge only when assembling with other materialities (Bennett, 2005, p. 445; DeLanda, 2016; Deleuze, 1988, p. 125).

Second, a post-anthropocentric perspective de-privileges humans and human agency, and instead treats all matter (both human and non-human) as ‘affective’ – that is, possessing capacities to affect or to be affected by other materialities (Deleuze, 1988, p. 101). This shift opens up the possibility to explore how things other than humans (for instance, a tool, a technology or a building) can be social ‘agents’, making things happen. Human agency is no longer the prime mover, nor is it the principal concern. Braidotti (2013, p. 60) has suggested that this move also establishes an ethics that encompasses not only human culture but also other living and inanimate things, indeed, the entirety of what is conventionally called ‘the environment’.

Finally, the monist or ‘flat’ ontology of these approaches dissolves distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ realms, along with a range of dualisms, including human/non-human, animate/inanimate, mind/matter, and – perhaps most significantly for the ensuing exploration of capitalism – between agency and structure (van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2010). Interactions between matter are suffused with a ‘philosophy of immanence’ (Connolly, 2010, p. 178), in which the unfolding, becoming world is not dependent upon the mechanisms, systems or structures invoked in some sociological accounts (Scambler, 2007). Methodologically, this shifts the focus of sociological concern toward the endless quotidian interactions between human and non-human matter (Coole & Frost, 2010, pp. 26–27). In place of structures, systems or mechanisms at work ‘beneath the surface’, there are an endless cascade of events comprising the material effects of both nature and culture that together produce the world and human history (DeLanda, 2016, pp. 13–16; Fox & Alldred, 2018; Latour, 2005, p. 130).

More-than-human approaches are particularly well-suited to analyse phenomena such as climate change and environmental sustainability that cut across a nature/culture divide (Lockie, 2012; Yuill et al., 2019, p. 126). They have been applied previously to explore human/environment assemblages and ‘affective atmospheres’ that enable human health and well-being (Bennett, 2010; Bell et al., 2018; Duff, 2011; Foley, 2011; Foley & Kistemann, 2015). More generally, these approaches have been put to use to analyse sustainability (Fox & Alldred, 2020b; Lockie, 2012) and different climate change policies (Fox & Alldred, 2020a). This latter approach understands policies as assembled from a variety of human and non-human agencies (Prince, 2010, p. 173) in ways that are inherently dynamic and unstable (McCann, 2011, p. 145; Ureta, 2014, p. 305). Methodologically, it unpacks a specific policy assemblage (for instance, that of ‘green capitalism’) in terms of the human and non-human materialities it includes, and the principal affects between them. It then compares and contrasts these components with a comprehensive model of the event (in this case, anthropogenic climate change), modelled according to a wide-ranging review of current scientific and social scientific evidence, to reveal what materialities have been excluded from that particular policy.

According to this assessment methodology, green capitalism engages micropolitically with a partial ‘climate change assemblage’ that comprises the following materialities (in no particular order):

material resources (‘the environment’); consumers; market economy; capital; industry; existing energy technologies; innovative green technologies; entrepreneurs; means of production; profit; growth; developing and developed nations and governments; energy; greenhouse gases; the Sun; climate

The principal affect (inherent force) driving this assemblage is the capacity of entrepreneurial efforts to transform raw materials such as steel and electronics into innovative technologies such as solar panels and wind turbines. These ‘green’ innovations will subsequently reduce climate change emissions by out-competing existing energy production technologies in the global marketplace.

A constructive critique of this green capitalist policy assemblage suggests that, on the one hand, this assemblage does indeed enable technological innovation within a market environment to reduce and remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The development of wind and solar energy technologies has increased the proportion of energy generated from renewable sources massively since 2000, while costs of these forms of energy generation are now lower than both oil and natural gas (Kåberger, 2018; Paterson, 2020, p. 401). Meanwhile, a range of carbon capture/storage technologies have been devised, though it is questionable whether these can be developed commercially for large-scale sequestration of atmospheric carbon (Wilberforce et al., 2019, p. 68).

On the other hand, this policy has been criticised for specific shortcomings, sustaining a view of ‘the environment’ (including the global climate and dependent biosphere) merely as a resource base for capitalist production and for humans to utilise and consume (Whitehead, 2014, p. 264): any benefits for the natural world are entirely incidental (Jessop, 2012, p. 18).

Critics of green capitalism have also argued that the policy has a fundamental blind-spot: that it is capitalism’s market economy that – over the past 250 years – has driven the exponential industrial expansion and growth in energy consumption that have generated the greenhouse gases responsible for anthropogenic climate change (Baer, 2018, pp. 26–28; Harris, 2014, p. 45; Keen, 2021, p. 1162; Smith, 2016). Furthermore, Smith (2016, p. 49) suggests that sustainable capitalism is ‘misconceived and doomed from the start’, because private sector businesses’ economic priority of maximising profit is inherently in conflict with efforts to save the planet, and cannot be systematically aligned. Others have noted that in a green capitalist perspective, inequalities in wealth and well-being associated with capitalist accumulation – both within nations and between global North and South – remain unaddressed (Baer, 2018, pp. 35–38; Schlosberg and Collins, 2014). By contrast, neoclassical economics has been far more sanguine over the capacity of a capitalist economy to manage the climate crisis while sustaining growth (Keen, 2021).

The remainder of this article steps beyond both neoclassical and critical analytical perspectives, to instead evaluate green capitalism from a more-than-human, materialist and micropolitical perspective. The following section begins this evaluation by asking: what does capitalism actually do?

The more-than-human micropolitics of capitalism

According to Marx (1887/2011, p. 187), capitalism generates surplus value via two socioeconomic transactions. First, a production transaction uses human labour to add value to matter (pp. 186–187). The second transaction takes place in a market environment, where this added-value commodity is exchanged for the money/material resources that provides the capitalist with a return (surplus value or profit) on their investment (p. 168).

Marx’s analysis foregrounded human practices (Lettow, 2017, pp. 113–114), with non-human matter such as raw materials and means of production treated as the backcloth to these practices. By contrast, a new materialist and micropolitical perspective can enable analysis of these transactions as ‘more-than-human’ engagements between human and non-human matter, within actual physical manifestations of production and exchange such as a factory and a marketplace (DeLanda, 2006, pp. 17–18). The added value of this post-anthropocentric analysis is to lay bare the range of more-than-human affects (capacities to affect or be affected) that assemble these engagements: picking up aspects of these impersonal and micropolitical flows of power and resistance within production and exchange assemblages not captured by an anthropocentric approach, or glossed over if power is treated as top-down or ‘structural’ (Fox & Alldred, 2018, pp. 323–324).

Marx’s summaries of capitalism’s two transactions supply a starting-point to re-analyse production and markets in terms of assemblages and affects. Factory production can be summarised as an assemblage that comprises at least (and in no particular order) the following human and non-human materialities:

workers; raw materials; means of production (buildings, tools, technology, energy, knowledge); wages; managers; owner or shareholders

While in practice, this assemblage will contain many other additional materialities, the principal affect assembles workers, means of production and raw materials (from physical matter through to information) to establish new capacities in the latter. For instance, in a blast furnace assemblage, the physical affect of heating iron ore and a source of carbon such as coke to high temperatures produces ‘pig iron’ – the precursor of materials including cast and wrought iron and steel (along with significant generation of greenhouse gases). The commodities or services produced by the affects in production assemblages possess capacities distinct from their raw materials, furnishing what Marx (1887/2011, pp. 42–43) called additional use-values (a measure of their qualitative and quantitative utility) and exchange-values (their quantitative market value against a standard such as money).

At its simplest, a market-event may be summarised as an assemblage comprising at least (and in no particular order):

commodity; trader; customer; competitor traders; competitor customers; money/material resources; market environment

A market assembles commodities, traders and customers within a specific place and time, ranging from a town marketplace to a commodities trading floor in a financial institution. This spatiotemporal convergence establishes the principal affect of a market assemblage: the exchange of material goods for money or other resources (DeLanda, 2006, p. 17), while also enabling customers to acquire goods required to meet their personal or commercial needs (p. 36). If these goods are traded at above the costs of production (raw materials, means of production and labour), this affect thereby closes the circuit of capitalist human practice with which Marx (1887/2011, p. 168) was primarily concerned: the use of labour to generate surplus value or ‘capital’. Staying with the previous example, refined iron or steel will be purchased by industrial consumers, who in turn will use this as a raw material for a further production assemblage to fashion disparate commodities such as rail track, cutlery or weapons, to be marketed and sold to end-users in due course.

These more-than-human production and market affects define the material arrangements (assemblages) of bodies and other matter in a capitalist economy. However, the two affects thus far described do not fully capture the more-than-human micropolitics of capitalist production and markets. Post-anthropocentric analysis of production and markets in terms of assemblages, affects and capacities also reveals that – alongside the foundational affect that links a trader, a customer and a commodity – there are other market-trading affects that establish further interactions between competitor traders, between competitor customers, between commodities, and between marketplaces themselves. These latter affects have been summarised in classical economics as the ‘laws of supply and demand’ (Moore, 1925). According to these ‘laws’, as the price a commodity realises in a marketplace increases, supply of a commodity will also increase, while demand for that commodity will reduce. If prices then fall as new cheaper commodities enter the marketplace, demand will also increase. Over time, supply and demand establish equilibrium in both prices and quantity sold (Moore, 1925, p. 370).

Within a monist ontology, these ‘laws’ are instead revealed as complex flows of affect between human and non-human materialities within production and market assemblages. These flows, as DeLanda (2006, p. 36) notes, are beyond the intentionality and immediate control of human actors. For instance, there are two complementary more-than-human exchange affects between money, commodities and consumers. The first is the affective capacity of a commodity or service to meet a human need/want (for instance a need for sustenance or medication). ‘Supply’ is the quantity of this affective capacity available to acquire within a marketplace, and will depend upon production affects in multiple, independent and spatially and temporally distant production assemblages, over which no one producer has control. The second is the affective capacity of money or other economic capital (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 47) to acquire this commodity/service. ‘Demand’ is the quantity of this affect available in the same marketplace. It derives from complex affects determining availability of consumers’ economic capital (for instance, the wages gained by workers in multiple production assemblages or the availability of credit contingent upon broader economic circumstances), and is again beyond the control of individual human actors within production and market assemblages.

It is these affects that determine the flows of commodities through production and market assemblages, and foundationally impact what these assemblages actually do in practice – in other words, the micropolitics of capitalism’s capacities. These capacities (which are in themselves further affects) generate a number of unintended outcomes, which I consider in the following paragraphs.

First, the more-than-human affects associated with supply and demand create uncertainty among both consumers of commodities and the businesses and workers that produce them. In a competitive market, supply frequently outstrips demand. This circumstance presents producers with unattractive alternatives: either to sustain surplus value per unit of commodity by maintaining commodity prices while accepting erosion of market share as other traders sell more competitively; or alternatively, to trim margins to remain competitive, while attempting to sustain profitability by continually attempting to extend market share and market reach through growth in production and sales (Wrenn, 2016, p. 63). Most businesses will be forced to choose the second option to avoid gradual decline and eventual demise.

Waste is a further unintended but inevitable by-product of the more-than-human supply and demand affects imposed upon traders/producers (Wrenn, 2016, p. 66). If producers attempt to sustain their commodity’s prices but accept a loss of market share, this produces waste in the form of unsold commodities or idle means of production (Wrenn, 2016, p. 65). Alternatively, if a producer increases production to sustain market share in the face of over-supply, without increased demand more and more unsold products will be wasted, while also wasting workers’ labour-power, as their exertions generate less surplus value per unit sold than previously (Horton, 1997, pp. 128–129). In extremis, an excess of supply over demand may lead to loss of business viability for one or more competing producers, generating further waste of material resources as means of production (premises, tools, technologies, etc.) fall out of use, and shareholders’ investments lose part or all of their value.

Third, this analysis of the more-than-human affects in market and production assemblages also explains the social and economic inequalities that have been widely observed as a feature of a capitalist economy (Coburn, 2004, p. 44; Skeggs, 2019). More-than-human supply and demand affects establish both the prices at which goods may be bought and sold, and the exchange-value of workers’ labour in different occupations or localities – depressed by labour surpluses (Wrenn, 2016, p. 70; cf. Marx, 2011, pp. 700–701), or elevated by a shortage of particular skills. The former establishes benchmark prices, independent of the capacities of different customers to pay these prices. The latter affects establish income inequalities, for instance between manual and professional workers, and between workers in developed and developing countries. Together, these supply and demand affects generate, sustain and gradually exacerbate the material inequalities between rich and poor, global North and South.

This exegesis of the micropolitics of more-than-human affective flows within capitalism’s production and market assemblages supplies the starting point for a new materialist assessment of green capitalism. To explore the more-than-human affects of green capitalism, the following section considers the emergence and development of one technology heralded as contributing to the reduction in greenhouse gases required to meet net-zero emissions: the electric car. It analyses the production and market assemblages surrounding this technology, and how the more-than-human affects associated with supply and demand contribute to the intended and unintended consequences of green capitalist micropolitics.

What can a green technology do? Case study of the electric car

Electric vehicles have been in existence for almost 200 years (Wilson, 2018), with electric trains, trams and trolleybuses powered by overhead cables or conductor rails commonplace in the global North from the 1880s. However, early efforts to innovate electric cars (ECs) in the 1900s were hampered by electric motor and battery technology, and were swiftly eclipsed by the development of the internal combustion engine (ICE) (Standage, 2021). The latter enabled higher speeds and longer ranges than battery-powered vehicles, at a price point around a third that of an electric car (Wilson, 2018). Despite sporadic efforts to develop electric alternatives to fossil fuel powered cars, it is only in the 21st century that innovations in battery, fuel cell and electric motor technology coupled with environmental concerns have led to renewed interest in mass commercial development of ECs (Berdichevsky et al., 2006; Hong & Kim, 2018).

The premise underpinning the following review is that the growth in EC manufacture and sales in the new millennium has been achieved principally through entrepreneurial activity within a competitive market, though some incentives to producers and consumers have been provided by governments to support their innovation (Meckling & Nahm, 2018; Nunes et al., 2022). As such, it supplies a relevant case study of a green capitalist ‘technological fix’ for climate change, based on the previous more-than-human assessment of capitalism. To explore this in the following sub-sections, I identify the various affects assembling EC technology, as a means to answer the post-anthropocentric and critical question: what can an EC do – socially, economically and politically?

A green technology can supply novel capacities

In the contemporary period, the principal innovative affect driving the development of an electric alternative to the ICE has been environmental: supplying private car owners with the capacity to avoid dependence upon fossil fuels (Bilbeisi & Kesse, 2017; Dijk & Yarime, 2010, p. 1372). A further affect is associated with the relative costs of electricity and fossil fuels, enabling considerably lower running costs of ECs, though this benefit is currently offset by their higher purchase price in comparison to ICE vehicles (Moloughney, 2014).

In the era of concern with anthropogenic climate change, these novel affects have enabled early innovators of a new generation of electric cars to achieve a return on their investment in raw materials, plant and labour, though with very high start-up costs. These innovators included Nissan, which marketed the compact hatchback LEAF in 2011, and Tesla Inc., which from 2009 entered the market with a sports car and a subsequent sedan/saloon in 2012 – both aimed at high-end consumers: a market in which there was less price sensitivity. Development of these ECs has been intimately associated with the innovation of new battery technologies, enabling greater range and swifter charging (Berdichevsky et al., 2006; Bilbeisi & Kesse, 2017). I discuss battery technology in greater detail later in this section.

A green technology can compete

In terms of the analysis developed earlier in this article, the core affect in the EC production assemblage turns out a novel product whose physical capacities are greater than those of its component elements. Its environmental and economic capacities meanwhile establish an affect within the market assemblage that enhances its exchange-value, allowing EC manufacturers to realise a return on their material investments in the production assemblage. However, as noted previously in this article, other more-than-human affects associated with supply and demand also operate within this capitalism assemblage. The short history of Tesla Inc.’s EC business illustrates how these more-than-human affects transcend the intentionality and strategies of human actors, to alter the dynamics between suppliers and buyers in a free-market environment and driving down a product’s exchange-value.

Tesla Inc. was established in 2003 as a company whose business strategy included innovating a range of congruent energy generation and storage solutions (Bilbeisi & Kesse, 2017), including the battery pack for Tesla cars (Berdichevsky et al., 2006). ¹ From its outset, the company was unusual in owning its entire supply chain – from manufacturing to distribution (Bilbeisi & Kesse, 2017). As an early innovator, and with demand spiralling as concern over fossil fuel induced climate change grew, it was able to market its high-end sports car Roadster and sedan/saloon Model S with virtually no competition (Nissan’s LEAF was a compact EC, firmly aimed at a family market).

Wrenn (2016, p. 63) has suggested that during the innovation phase of a technology such as the EC, more-than-human supply and demand affects benefit start-ups such as Tesla; during the following market consolidation phase – as rivals enter the market – these affects threaten an innovator’s market share, forcing them to either trim margins or accept dwindling sales. As a corporation with no previous history of car making, Tesla gained an initial advantage over established motor manufacturers, whose business models and manufacturing plant were given over to sustaining market share for their ICE models (Riley, 2019). But, as these potential rivals played catch-up for a share of the electric car market, the more-than-human affects associated with supply and demand squeezed margins, entirely beyond Tesla Inc.’s control. In a move to head off competition, it launched its Model X SUV in 2015, followed by the Model 3 mid-range car (2016), both at a competitive price point approximately half that of its previous luxury models. This strategy gained the company a 65% share of the US market by 2021 (Investopedia Team, 2021), way ahead of competitors such as the Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi technology and platform-sharing consortium (Gibbs, 2022) and the Chinese car manufacturer Geely (Riley, 2019). However, Tesla only turned a profit on its EC business in 2020 (Katje, 2021).

A decade on from Tesla Inc.’s entry into the EC market, most of the major car manufacturers are now investing massively in plants to build ECs ($34 billion in the case of Volkswagen Group), with some declaring their intentions to cease building fossil fuel vehicles entirely by 2030 or earlier (Chavez & Campbell, 2022; Riley, 2019). With these manufacturers now boosting production of electric cars, projections suggest that Tesla will be pushed into fourth place in terms of sales volume by 2025 (Riley, 2019). According to this modelling, the Volkswagen Group (which includes the luxury Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini and Porsche brands) will top the electric car market with sales of 1.4 million vehicles, directly competing within Tesla’s niche luxury market. Other leading manufacturers including Toyota, Ford, General Motors and Hyundai are all projected to sell similar volumes (around 400,000 cars) as Tesla by 2025 (Riley, 2019), while volume manufacture of ECs may push prices as low as $30K (Chavez & Campbell, 2022). While demand for ECs will continue to grow over coming decades, these more-than-human supply and demand affects will inevitably threaten the viability of some manufacturers, as has been seen in other industries such as personal computers (Thompson & Strickland, 1997).

A green technology can be wasteful

Ortar and Ryghaug (2019) have suggested that innovation of the EC risks being driven entirely by the objectives of multinational car manufacturers intent on sustaining their market share as consumer sentiment shifts from the ICE to ECs and price parity between these alternatives is achieved. As noted earlier in the article, waste is a further consequence of the more-than-human supply and demand affects in the capitalism assemblage, during both innovation and consolidation phases.

During the innovation phase, the proposed rapid global transition from ICE to electrically-powered vehicles over the next 30 years will generate vast quantities of wasted energy and matter, as consumers replace polluting vehicles with ECs, and plant devoted to ICE manufacture is scrapped to make way for EC production. Though the EC market has only just begun to consolidate, evidence from other industries suggests that waste will continue to be a by-product of EC production (Ayres et al., 1992). As supply of ECs increases over demand, the more-than-human affects in market assemblages will squeeze prices and hence profit margins. If car manufacturers choose to sustain surplus value generated per EC sold, they will see market share decline and produce go unsold, as other traders sell competing products. Alternatively, if they trim margins to sustain market share, profit margins will decline, making the production assemblage less efficient in creating value (Wrenn, 2016). Both phases generate waste; in extremis, dwindling margins or loss of market share may lead to bankruptcies, mergers and takeovers among manufacturers, with further waste of products and physical means of production.

While waste will be an outcome of all capitalist enterprises, it is a specific issue for green technologies such as the EC. Though ECs address one aspect of climate change (reduction in greenhouse gas emissions), it is problematic if this reduction is offset by squandering energy and resources through waste. As Ayres et al. (1992, p. 91) note, waste is inevitable so long as industries depend upon virgin raw materials extracted from the Earth’s crust, with all such materials eventually returning to the environment in a degraded form (waste). EC technology depends heavily upon extraction of metals such as lithium, cobalt, manganese and nickel (Richter, 2022, p. 6). While arguably some of this material waste can be re-used or recycled, waste remains a foundational problem for a putative ‘green’ technology such as the EC. Issues of waste are illustrated most notably by the battery packs used to motivate ECs.

The present generation of ECs depend upon lithium-ion battery (LIB) technology. LIBs have a relatively short life-span – 8 to 10 years in an EC, followed by a possible second life of up to 10 years as stationary energy storage (Ahuja et al., 2020, p. 239). Unlike conventional lead/acid batteries used in ICE electrical circuitry, LIBs pose an environmental hazard if not recycled safely at the end of their life (Vaughan, 2019). Estimates of spent LIBs by 2030 range from 11 to 16 million tonnes per year (Ahuja et al., 2020, p. 238), and this figure will rise exponentially as ECs progressively replace ICE vehicles. Presently, recycling LIBs can only recover half of the materials in the battery cells (Richter, 2022), meaning there will be a requirement over the next 30 years for progressively greater lithium mining extraction to meet a continued and growing need for new supplies of this indispensable component of EC technology (Narins, 2017, p. 321), along with the other metals noted above. ² This lack of an adequate recycling model for EC batteries further challenges the potential of capitalist affects to address environmental sustainability adequately (Del Pero et al., 2018, p. 534; Richter, 2022), and may require ‘robust and innovative regulatory interventions’ to ensure ECs do not generate a new environmental waste crisis (Ahuja et al., 2020, pp. 247–248).

A green technology can exacerbate social inequalities

The dynamics of the more-than-human supply and demand affects within EC production and market assemblages have a number of unintended impacts upon social inequalities. As already noted, these affects have led most major car manufacturers to shift their business models to focus upon EC production, for fear of losing market share in what appears to be an inexorable market dynamic. They are gambling on the willingness of more affluent workers and businesses to trade the current higher price points of ECs (in comparison with equivalent ICE-powered models) for the environmental benefits and the lower running and maintenance costs of electric vehicles (Sovacool et al., 2019, p. 210). However, lower-paid workers may be unable to afford the shift to ECs until there is a more established used market (Bauer et al., 2021, p. 10; Bienias et al., 2020). Instead, they will be forced to buy used vehicles from the remaining stock of ICE cars, and will consequently be disadvantaged by higher running costs, and – in some jurisdictions – higher taxes and pollution charges levied by governments on ICE vehicles.

Other consequences of the move to ECs also enhance social inequalities. The emphasis in green capitalist policy upon a wholesale shift from ICE-powered to electric vehicles has sidelined the potential to enhance shared and public transport alternatives to private car ownership: options that outside major cities are predominantly used by poorer citizens (Bauer et al., 2021). Meanwhile, the success of the switch to electric-powered vehicles will depend upon adequate provision of charging points. While home owners whose properties have direct road frontage can install private charging facilities, this is not an option for many in urban areas who use street parking or live in high-rise units; these latter must rely on expensive public charging points (Bauer et al., 2021, p. 6), of which there is already a shortage (Ortar & Ryghaug, 2019, p. 3). It is questionable whether private enterprise can meet this need for adequate and geographically disseminated charging facilities without public sector intervention.

These consequences of a switch to ECs driven by more-than-human supply and demand affects also reinforce inequalities between developed and developing nations. Evidence suggests that while nations in the global North are embracing the EC revolution, many poorer citizens in the global South will continue to depend upon a dwindling supply of polluting ICE vehicles exported from the North (Collett et al., 2021, p. 1). While a shift to electric power will gradually filter through to the global South as ECs fall in price, uptake of this technology will require parallel investment in charging point infrastructure, as well as assuring nations’ abilities to meet the need for dependable and higher levels of electricity generation (Collett et al., 2021, p. 2), particularly from renewable and nuclear energy sources. Meanwhile, as Sovacool et al. (2019, p. 213) note, another significant impact upon the global South of the North’s switch to ECs may be increased mining of lithium and other mineral reserves in countries such as Bolivia and Colombia.

Discussion

Using the relational and post-anthropocentric ontology of the new materialisms, the case study of the electric car (EC) has revealed some novel features – both of capitalist production and market assemblages in general, and of so-called ‘green capitalism’ in particular. On a positive note, the analysis has demonstrated how affects in the production and market assemblages of capitalism can innovate technologies that do not generate greenhouse gas emissions and compete with existing polluting technologies. However, the micropolitical analysis also disclosed more-than-human affects associated with the dynamics of supply and demand, previously overlooked in both classical and critical political economy. These affects within the assemblages of capitalism, which operate beyond human intentionality and immediate control (DeLanda, 2006, p. 36), establish three features of capitalism that are unintended and endemic: competition and growth, waste and socioeconomic inequalities. In these concluding remarks, I will argue that these latter features are inimical to the objectives of policies to mitigate anthropogenic climate change, and consequently undermine the premise that green capitalism supplies an adequate means to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

First, the case study revealed how the more-than-human affects of supply and demand drive competition and growth, as rival producers attempt to sustain or expand market share and reach (Wrenn, 2016, p. 63). While this process provides consumers with choice and often lower price points, the uncertainty for manufacturers that competition generates dampened investment in further innovation – in the case of ECs, superior alternatives to electric batteries such as fuel cells (Thomas, 2009, p. 6020). Furthermore, the inherent need for incessant growth in supply in a market economy poses a significant hurdle for a green capitalist model of climate change mitigation. As noted previously, there has been a remarkably close relationship in industrial nations between increasing output and the production of greenhouse gases (Baer, 2018, pp. 29–30; Keen, 2021, p. 1162). If global production continues to grow between now and 2050, the task of de-carbonising the atmosphere through technology is made far harder (Paterson, 2020, p. 400).

Second, competition inevitably leads to waste, as rival businesses attempt to sustain market share. All wasted resources (goods, labour, means of production) have an energy cost attached to their production and maintenance, and undermine the already momentous challenge to green the entirety of the global economy’s energy demands (Paterson, 2020, p. 400). The case study of the EC has revealed the dependence of this technology upon extractive capitalism (Connolly, 2017, p. 15), in terms of its use of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). With LIB recycling no more than 50% efficient (Richter, 2022), the transition to ECs over the coming decades will require battery manufacturers to continually and increasingly extract virgin resources of lithium and other metals, while the non-recycled component of used LIBs will be a further environmental pollutant (Ayres et al., 1992, p. 91).

Finally, the case study of the market-driven development of the EC explicated how more-than-human affects generate, sustain and even deepen social inequalities, both within and between nations. Innovating low-carbon ‘green’ consumer technologies such as ECs or high-efficiency domestic appliances will sustain and potentially exacerbate inequalities, not only because of the differential capacities of rich and poor to replace existing polluting and expensive-to-run cars, windows or heating systems with green alternatives, but also because energy costs consume a higher proportion of lower income households’ disposable income (Department for Energy and Climate Change, 2014, pp. 7–8). Globally, capitalism has achieved much of its success by colonising the global South (Hickel, 2021, p. 1109), and there is no reason to believe that purveyors of green capitalism will not continue to regard low-wage economies and extractible resources in the global South (Perez, 2016, p. 201) as opportunities to maximise value-creation in the manufacture of green technologies, while access to green technologies such as private ECs or solar panels will remain beyond the ability to pay for most of their citizens (Collett et al., 2021, p. 5), further broadening North/South inequalities.

These insights supply environmental sociology with a toolkit of concepts and an analytical framing within which to evaluate green capitalism and the assertions of politicians and entrepreneurs who have promoted a technological fix for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. They broaden and deepen previous sociological critiques of green capitalism based implicitly or explicitly within critical or neo-Marxist perspectives (Baer, 2018; Jessop, 2012; Prudham, 2009). Crucially, the more-than-human approach taken here has the capacity to identify not only the intentional micropolitics of capitalist production and markets, but also those affects that are beyond the intent or control of human actors. As such, it reveals precisely how a green capitalist technological fix not only diminishes the efficiency of a shift toward renewable energy and carbon capture, but also squanders the short window of opportunity open to limit global temperature rises to the targets set by the IPCC. Moreover, the problematic features of incessant growth, waste and inequalities within a capitalist economy cannot simply be resolved by well-meaning green entrepreneurs. Rather, they are inherent aspects of the micropolitics of capitalist production and markets.

The relational, post-anthropocentric and monist analysis of capitalist micropolitics developed in the early sections of the article also supplies environmental sociology with an opportunity to move beyond critique, to suggest an alternative to green capitalism’s technological fix. Neo-Marxist scholars have argued that the only way to successfully reverse anthropogenic climate change is to replace capitalism with an alternative eco-socialist or communitarian socioeconomic system (Baer, 2012; Kovel, 2008). This radical proposition must, however, be tempered by Paterson’s (2020) argument that the climate crisis is too urgent an issue to defer until a new world order has been established.

The alternative is a pragmatic (small ‘p’) approach that acknowledges that a market economy may indeed facilitate some aspects of emissions reduction (for instance, the use of smart energy management in domestic and commercial buildings; installing solar panels). But at the same time, this pragmatism shifts the emphasis in the rest of the economy toward efforts to rapidly transition to renewable energy and biodiversity, and reverse ecological breakdown. In common with what has been called a ‘de-growth’ paradigm (Koch & Buch-Hansen, 2021, p. 1220), this strategy aims to reduce the ecological impact and inequalities of capitalism by scaling back ecologically destructive or unnecessary production, improving well-being, and using fiscal policy to reduce inequalities nationally and globally. Such an approach, which has gained support from IPCC Mitigation Group III (Gills & Morgan, 2021, p. 1313), does not put an end to the growth and waste of a market economy at a stroke, but is politically achievable and incremental. It encourages collaborations between citizens, universities, technology companies and other commercial interests, government agencies and not-for-profit organisations to work with local and national policy-makers and national treasuries toward an internationally-shared and achievable programme.

From the perspective of the micropolitical analysis developed in this article, this alternative to green capitalism needs to tackle head-on the more-than-human affects in the capitalism assemblage that generate the side-effects of uncertainty, growth in supply, waste and social inequalities. By undermining these affects, the unfettered dynamics of capitalist production and markets can be tempered, while ideologies promoting globalisation and neoliberalisation are replaced with a more managed approach to economic development. In place of a free-market approach, government-funded R&D to develop innovative patent-free green technologies in collaboration with universities and engineering firms, and joined-up policy and governance can ensure that the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 underpins fiscal, social and natural environment policy-making.

Linked to a general emphasis on reducing, reusing and recycling materials, specific initiatives include a network of non-commercial electric vehicle charging points; the installation of community heating schemes; subsidies to citizens to support higher standards of home insulation, and investment in green public transport. Such action can be extended beyond national borders, by supplying aid and expertise to assist global South nations to introduce green policies and infrastructure, and scale up their own scientific and technological development free from a new environmental colonialism by the global North.