climate

Today’s economic orthodoxy is rooted in neoclassical economics. It treats a lack of public finance as a natural constraint, downplaying the state’s role in shaping the economy and obscuring how money is actually created.[1] In reality, though, the only true constraints lie in the availability of real resources—workers, materials, infrastructure—to meet our collective needs.

These estimates rely on production functions and assumptions about capital that carry through all the problems Robinson identified. In doing so, they offer the illusion of precision while quietly embedding deeply questionable assumptions about technology, efficiency, and pricing that lead ultimately to needlessly inflated headline costs. By collapsing everything into a single variable, these models omit vital questions of coordination and resource planning. They

Export earnings are often volatile, especially for countries dependent on raw materials whose prices fluctuate on global markets. Foreign investment, meanwhile, can be highly selective and short-term, chasing speculative returns rather than long-term development. And borrowing, particularly from institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank, is rarely unconditional. Positioned on the margins of this system, many countries find themselves trapped in recurring cycles of debt, austerity, and underdevelopment.

The “Asian Tigers”—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—and more recently China, did not passively wait for foreign capital. Instead, they followed state-led strategies: implementing long-term industrial policies, investing in infrastructure and education, protecting key sectors during early stages of development, and actively managing trade and capital flows. Their governments treated development as a national project, not something to be outsourced to international markets.

If this chaos has an upside, it is that it presents an opportunity to build an alternative—and radically more just—financial architecture, and to confront the economic orthodoxies that needlessly constrain what is considered possible.

Mainstream climate politics has so far put nearly all its time and energy into correcting the “market failure” of climate change, from attempting to reflect the “social” cost of emissions with a carbon price, to creating markets where none existed and forcing actors to participate. It by now goes without saying that despite some minor improvements at the local or regional level, these efforts have achieved little. This is not to say, however, that they have not been material. To the contrary, in providing the illusion that something is being done, market-based climate policies have had considerable material impact by delaying more effective action.

the belief that those in the luxury cabins would never willingly let the ship sink.

And yet, as Quinn Slobodian has identified, this “new populist right” is in many ways not new. Instead, this new right is simply a warped version of what came before, retaining rather than rejecting neoliberalism’s core tenet: protecting capitalism from democracy.

We are in strange territory. The political no-man’s land of market-based liberalism has proven infertile terrain from which to build responses to challenges from climate change to economic stagnation, and as a result, remarkably fertile terrain for the outgrowth of the new right’s politics and imaginaries.

American crude oil production reached a fresh all-time high of 13.2mn barrels a day in September, according to figures released last week, more than any other country and accounting for about one in eight barrels of global output.

The US accounts for 80 per cent of the expansion in global oil supply this year, according to the International Energy Agency.

“The US presenting itself as a climate champion at COP is largely a facade, considering it is the biggest oil and gas producer in the world,” said Raena Garcia, senior fossil fuels campaigner at Friends of the Earth.

“I think what we see in the US is the recognition that a balance has to be struck here,” said Darren Woods, Exxon chief executive, who this week attended the UN climate summit for the first time.

The most unlikeable among them aren’t totally unredeemable. For the most part, they are smart, reasonable people taking desperate actions inspired by desperate circumstances.

The movement’s dogmatic commitment to nonviolence, he argued, was based on a cherry-picked reading of history. Malm accused advocates of both strategic and principled nonviolence in the climate movement of having ignored violent flanks that complemented the effective civil disobedience movements of prior generations. “The civil rights movement won the [Civil Rights] Act of 1964,” he wrote, “because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power.” (His emphasis.)

Earth First!, ALF, and ELF—now even more marginal than in their modest peak in the 1990s and 2000s—mingled “punk and hardcore with dumpster diving and veganism, spiritual voyages and holistic meditation with squatting and guerrilla gardening, fanzines and herbs,” Malm wrote. “All those thousands of monkeywrenching actions achieved little if anything and had no lasting gains to show for them. They were not performed in a dynamic relation to a mass movement, but largely in a void.” When the climate movement finally “took off,” it did so “because it had no connections to the ecosystem of EF!, ALF and ELF.”

The film offers a relatively happy ending that will alarm more conservative viewers. There’s no hero cop, for instance, who shows the crew a righteous path away from property destruction. And they don’t regret their actions.

It’d be ludicrous, Malm acknowledged, to expect saboteurs to systematically dismantle the fossil fuel economy one homemade incendiary at a time. In this and other work, he’s emphasized that only states can do that. Both he and the film’s protagonists, accordingly, articulate eco-terrorism as a kind of DIY market signal meant to force states’ hand into doing something they otherwise wouldn’t

Activists arrested at a music festival protesting a proposed police training facility in Atlanta—to be built on a razed forest—are being slapped with terrorism charges; one land defender was already killed.