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industrial revolution
The Fire This Time: Capitalism and the Limits of Survival
Can capitalism survive the climate crisis it helped create? Or must we finally admit that it’s the system itself that’s killing us?
Jul 17, 2025
The world is burning, both literally and figuratively. Temperatures are shattering records. Wildfires sweep across continents. Glaciers melt while droughts deepen. Inequality balloons. Billions go hungry while billionaires build bunkers. And through it all, one system marches forward, extracting, exploiting, expanding.
Its name is capitalism.
And the question we must now face, urgently, collectively, without illusion, is this: Can capitalism survive the climate crisis it helped create? Or must we finally admit that it’s the system itself that’s killing us?
This isn’t just a theoretical question. It’s a matter of survival.
Contrary to what some economists would have us believe, capitalism didn’t arise through peaceful trade or natural evolution. It was forged in conquest, enclosure, slavery, and plunder.
Capitalism is not broken because it has failed to innovate. It’s broken because it has succeeded, at concentrating wealth, externalizing costs, and turning the Earth into a profit machine.
In early modern Europe, peasants were forced off common lands so the wealthy could raise sheep for profit. The so-called “Enclosure Movement” turned shared resources into private property, creating the first landless laborers, people with no choice but to sell their labor to survive.
From there, capitalism scaled outward. Empires expanded, fueled by the theft of land, labor, and life. The Atlantic slave trade, the colonization of the Americas, and the pillaging of India and Africa were not side effects, they were the fuel that powered capitalist growth.
Later came the Industrial Revolution, mechanizing exploitation, churning out commodities, and giving birth to the cult of “growth.” What had once been measured in survival and sustenance was now measured in productivity, output, and profit.
By the 20th century, capitalism had globalized. And by the 21st, it had digitized, financialized, and fully detached from the ecological limits of the planet.
The Myth of Green Capitalism
Today, we’re told that capitalism can fix the very crises it’s caused. Silicon Valley technologists, global financiers, and political centrists speak of green growth, decoupling, and innovation. Solar panels, electric vehicles, carbon markets, environmental and social governance portfolios, these are the new gospel.
But while emissions rise, forests fall, and temperatures climb, the promises feel increasingly hollow.
Capitalism is not broken because it has failed to innovate. It’s broken because it has succeeded, at concentrating wealth, externalizing costs, and turning the Earth into a profit machine.
The logic of endless growth is fundamentally at odds with a planet that cannot grow. And no amount of green branding can change that.
In places like Rochester, New York we see both the consequences of capitalism and the seeds of resistance.
The private utility company, Rochester Gas and Electric, is facing a people-powered campaign for public takeover after years of rate hikes and service failures. Community land trusts are reclaiming housing from speculative markets. Regenerative farms are feeding neighbors instead of shareholders. These are not utopias, they’re struggles. But they are real, local, and rooted in solidarity.
They remind us that the fight for climate justice is also a fight for energy democracy, housing justice, and food sovereignty. It’s not about tweaking the system. It’s about transforming it.
Gandhi’s Warning and Vision
Over a century ago, Mohandas Gandhi warned of where industrial capitalism would lead. In Hind Swaraj, he rejected not only colonial rule, but the Western model of “progress” itself. He saw clearly that a civilization based on speed, greed, and machinery would eventually consume itself.
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs,” he wrote, “but not every man’s greed.”
Gandhi’s vision wasn’t a return to the past, it was a radical call for restraint, community, and moral clarity. He called for economies rooted in place, not profit. He believed wealth should be held in trusteeship, not hoarded for personal gain. And he insisted that any real revolution must begin within the soul.
Capitalism is not compatible with climate justice. It never was.
To many, this sounded naïve. Today, it sounds prophetic.
The reckoning is now. A dead planet can not turn a profit. Capitalism gave us vaccines, satellites, supercomputers. But it also gave us rising seas, poisoned air, and mass extinction. We cannot separate the gifts from the costs. And we can no longer pretend that reform is enough.
Yes, we need innovation. Yes, we need policy. But we also need imagination. We need the courage to envision systems not based on extraction, but on care. Not on growth, but on balance. Not on domination, but on solidarity.
We need, as the late David Graeber wrote, a world where we treat each other as if we actually matter.
The road ahead will not be easy. It will be full of contradictions, compromises, and uncertainty. But we must begin with honesty: Capitalism is not compatible with climate justice. It never was.
And we cannot build a livable future with the same tools that built the crisis.
It’s time to stop asking whether capitalism can be fixed, and start building the alternatives that already exist in our communities, our movements, and our collective memory.
There may still be time.
But not much.
And history, like the atmosphere, is watching.
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The Power of Presidents—Even Trump—Is Nothing to the Power of Clean Energy Revolution
Ten years from now, Donald Trump will be remembered ruefully as our country’s very own King Canute, who used the full force of presidential power in a failed, futile effort to halt the tides of technological change.
Jun 20, 2025
He lived over 1,000 years ago, but King Canute’s life still has some important lessons for our own time. After conquering England, Denmark, Norway, and part of Sweden, he forged a vast North Sea empire that made him, by the year 1030, the greatest of all the Viking kings. At that peak of power, he ordered his courtiers to place a throne on the seashore. There, according to a contemporaneous account, he shouted at the rising tide: “Thou, too, are subject to my command, as the land on which I am seated is mine and no one has ever resisted my commands with impunity. I command you then not to flow over my land, nor presume to wet the feet and the robe of your Lord.”
But the tide, of course, kept rising and waves soon washed over the legs of his royal person. Stunned and chastened, Canute leapt backwards, saying, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings.”
In our time, specifically on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump, who had vanquished his rivals, took office with full control of Congress, making him an exceptionally powerful president. On that day, he ordered his courtiers to set up an executive desk at the Capital One Arena in downtown Washington, D.C. There, before waves of cheers from MAGA-capped supporters, he commanded that the U.S. quit the Paris climate accord, announcing: “We are going to save over a trillion dollars by withdrawing from that treaty.”
In March, despite Donald Trump’s many prohibitions, wind and solar surged to 25% of the U.S. electrical supply, and when combined with other forms of “clean energy” like hydropower, already generated 51% of the country’s total electricity output, surpassing fossil fuels for the first time.
Retiring to the Oval Office, he then signed another executive order eliminating “the electric vehicle (EV) mandate” by ending “unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government-imposed market distortions that favor EVs over other technologies.” More broadly, that decree also removed any barrier to the development of “domestic energy resources—with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower… and nuclear energy resources.”
Like King Canute before him, President Trump was attempting to do nothing less than command the tides to recede. Not the ocean tides, of course, but the no less powerful tides of economic and technological change. For the United States, and indeed the world, is at the cusp of a new industrial revolution in the way we live and work that will, within the coming decades, do nothing less than save humanity from the rising threat of global warming.
America’s Energy Transitions
To grasp the full import and unstoppable power of this impending change, let’s take a moment to place our current era in its historical energy context. Over the past 500 years, as I argued in my book To Govern the Globe, human life has been transformed by three great revolutions in the basic energy infrastructure that drove the global economy and shaped all human life on this planet.
Starting in the 16th century, European nations forged the world’s first maritime empires through technologies that maximized the power of nature’s raw energy. In the era’s first technological advance, Portugal’s agile sailing ship, the caravel, used multiple sails to master the winds and thereby conquer sea lanes from the South Atlantic to the South China Sea. Somewhat later, the Dutch district at Zaan (near Amsterdam) became the world’s first dedicated industrial zone, where 150 powerful windmills cut logs into low-cost lumber for shipyards that would build the world’s largest merchant fleet with 4,000 ships on the high seas. Starting in the 15th century, Portugal combined water mills with massed teams of enslaved laborers on the island of São Tomé off the coast of Africa to create a new form of agribusiness, the fazenda or sugar plantation, whose phenomenal profitability—achieved by using cruel coercion to push the energy output of the human body beyond its natural limits—soon led to the spread of slavery to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American colonies.
During the 19th century, Britain’s coal-fired industrial revolution brought an energy transition that would move the world quickly beyond the wind and muscle power of the previous four centuries. Steam engines started powering factories in 1786, riverboats in 1810, railways in 1829, trans-Atlantic steamships by the 1830s, and the British Royal Navy’s warships by the 1840s. Meanwhile, Britain’s coal production soared from just 9 million tons in 1800 to a peak of 292 million tons in 1913. By the 1850s, an armada of steam engines was transforming the nature of work worldwide—powering factories, driving sawmills, threshing grains, husking rice, pulling gang plows, and crushing sugarcane. Coal-powered construction equipment sculpted the Earth’s surface, as steam shovels (patented in 1839) moved mountains, steam dredges (1844) cut canals, and steamrollers (1867) flattened roadways. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of steam engines in the United States tripled from 56,000 to 156,000, accounting for 77% of all the power that drove this country’s first industrial revolution.
That era of coal-fired energy, for both steam engines and electrical generation, lasted for nearly a century until it, too, began to fade during the 1950s before the power of petroleum. Even on the eve of World War II, when the United States produced two-thirds of the world’s petroleum, oil accounted for only one-third of its energy supply and just 10% of that of other industrial societies like Europe and Japan. However, as American automobile ownership climbed from 40 million units in 1950 to 213 million in 2000, oil consumption surged from 6.5 million barrels daily to a peak of 20 million barrels. By the time the 1973 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo roiled American life, with gas lines of angry motorists wrapping round the block in cities across the country, oil accounted for 46% of total energy needs in the U.S., 60% in Western Europe, and an overwhelming 73% in Japan.
The Seeds of Change
After those three energy transitions over the span of 500 years, the world is now at the cusp of a fourth great transformation that will indeed prove critical for humanity’s survival. Energy from coal and oil may have freed the world from the curse of slavery and brought unprecedented prosperity to millions, but burning all that carbon also carried the threat of climate change. As early as 1896, Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius published the world’s first report on global warming, predicting with uncanny prescience that a continued increase in carbon (CO2) emissions would raise “the temperature in the Arctic regions… about 8-9°C.” Between the Rio Earth Summit that finally recognized the problem in 1992 and the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015, where 195 nations signed an agreement to limit CO2 emissions, the world started a fitful and initially unsuccessful transition to alternative energy.
At the outset, it seemed as if governments were trying to force a shift to alternative energy that carried high costs for questionable results. Solar panels were expensive then and their energy output was low. The few electric-powered cars cost a relative fortune and couldn’t go very far. By 2016, the climate issue had also become bitterly partisan, with the first Trump administration banning the federal government from any mention of climate change while trying desperately to save coal-fired electrical plants and introducing 74 executive actions to weaken environmental protections.
Now that technology has resolved so many of the cost constraints holding back the world’s transition to alternative energy, it’s possible to grasp the shape that America’s new industrial revolution is likely to take within a decade or even less (no matter who is the president of the United States).
But as had happened during the world’s earlier energy transitions over the past 500 years, technological innovation was already fusing with economic rationality to catalyze a phenomenally powerful transformation in the world’s energy infrastructure. After solar and wind power began spreading across the globe around 2000, engineering innovation and economies of scale began making alternative energy not only ever more affordable but also ever more efficient. Between 2010 and 2019, the cost of solar power fell by 82% from $0.37 per kilowatt hour to just $0.05. By 2020, the International Energy Agency, known for its rigorous analysis, reported that the world’s best solar schemes already had the “cheapest… electricity in history.”
By the time Joseph Biden took office in 2021, the tides of technological change were just starting to turn. In a bid to ride that tide, the Biden administration invested a massive $1 trillion in “clean energy”—including semiconductor manufacturing ($446 billion), clean power ($188 billion), and electric vehicles ($182 billion).
Despite all the Biden-Harris election hype about factories built and jobs created, the gains for the country’s energy infrastructure were still… well, distinctly incremental. By the end of Biden’s term in December 2024, wind and solar had inched up to just 17% of U.S. electrical generation, though they had finally passed coal, that dirty fuel left over from the horse-and-buggy era, which fell to a historic low of 15%. Simultaneously, however, natural gas surged to a record 43% of the U.S. energy supply, meaning that carbon was still king. Compared to Norway where a proliferation of 400 chargers for every 100,000 Norwegians has allowed EVs to hit 90% of new car sales, even leading American states like California still only have a pathetic 46 chargers per 100,000 population—a key reason EVs still account for just 8% of this country’s new auto sales.
But beneath such dismal statistics, by the end of Biden’s term there were also some significant signs of deep, underlying change. In September 2024, an industry group reported that solar energy, which had been four times more expensive than fossil fuels in 2010, was now less than half the cost (56% lower) than them.
Portents of a New Industrial Revolution
Despite all the political (and climate change) pyrotechnics of Trump’s tumultuous first months in office this year, those deeper processes of technological change have continued their ceaseless, mechanistic march toward transformation. Indeed, in recent months there have been some telling signs—veritable portents—that we are indeed at the cusp of a transition to alternative energy of sufficient power to drive a new American industrial revolution. Let’s read the tea leaves.
In April, the first driverless 18-wheeler “robotruck” appeared on a U.S. highway, delivering refrigerated goods along Interstate 45 in Texas. In May, Elon Musk announced the debut of Tesla’s “cyber cab” service in Austin, Texas, with 10 driverless trial cars that are expected to lead to the deployment of “hundreds of thousands of robotaxis across the U.S.” Lending substance to that claim, Alphabet’s competing Waymo taxi service announced in May that its paid driverless rides had doubled to 10 million in the previous five months, launching the company on “a path to profitability.” Within days, China’s top EV car maker BYD had dropped a “price bombshell” by slashing the sticker price on its top-selling Seagull subcompact to an amazingly low $7,700—and that, mind you, is for a brand-new sedan loaded with self-driving features and able to travel a 200-mile range on a single charge. These days in America, it would be hard to beat that price with any sort of gas-powered car, even, say, a 2012 Honda Civic with 150,000 miles on the clock.
But perhaps most important, in March, despite Donald Trump’s many prohibitions, wind and solar surged to 25% of the U.S. electrical supply, and when combined with other forms of “clean energy” like hydropower, already generated 51% of the country’s total electricity output, surpassing fossil fuels for the first time. “This is a first signal,” explained energy analyst Nicolas Fulghum, “that the U.S. is approaching a tipping point where clean power takes the lead over fossil generation, and where the importance of coal and gas inevitably starts to fade.” Indeed, just this month, the authoritative International Energy Agency announced that the “global energy investment scene is changing fast,” with two-thirds of this year’s $3.3 trillion investment in energy production slated for “renewables” (such as wind and solar), double the amount for fossil fuels.
The Shape of the Future
If that impending transformation follows the pattern of history’s past transitions, technology and the global economy are about to achieve a sudden, silent synergy that will unleash not just a tide but a veritable tsunami of socioeconomic change. To cite some past examples, within the 15 years after George Stephenson launched The Rocket, a steam locomotive with an average speed of just 13 miles per hour in 1829, Britain covered the country with 2,200 miles of rail lines, transforming English life and work. And in the 10 years after 1907-1908, when Henry Ford upgraded the mass production of his Model-T motorcar, the price for it dropped steadily from $850 to just $260 while the number of automobiles registered nationwide soared from 140,300 in 1907 to nearly 5,000,000 in 1917, putting America on the road to becoming a petroleum-powered nation on wheels.
Now that technology has resolved so many of the cost constraints holding back the world’s transition to alternative energy, it’s possible to grasp the shape that America’s new industrial revolution is likely to take within a decade or even less (no matter who is the president of the United States). After rendering high-cost fossil fuels largely obsolete by 2035, solar and wind power, backed by storage farms equipped with new safer technologies like sodium-ion batteries, will create a reliable electrical grid, cutting the country’s basic energy costs by well over half and sparking a proliferation of innovation.
In the decades to come on our interstate highways, the left lanes will undoubtedly be filled with endless packs of a dozen or more electric-powered, driverless 18-wheelers, drafting six feet apart. They will be guided by uninterrupted digital signals transmitted from fiber optic cables laid down along the median strip, slashing both fuel consumption and transport costs. Those semi-trailer platoons will be headed for massive distribution depots that are likely to ring American cities, large and small. From them, drivers will be dispatched with robot-packed loads for the delivery of foodstuffs and consumer goods direct to individual households. Those truckloads will also include things like factory-produced complete kitchens and bathrooms for on-site installation at mass-assembly construction sites—slashing costs and making housing once again more affordable for working Americans.
Since an EV is simply a steel box housing a battery, for about $9,000 an American family will be able to purchase a brand-new, self-driving sedan with a 600-mile range from a single 10-minute charge, providing maintenance-free transportation for a typical monthly fuel cost of about $35. With the electrical grid generating cheap solar power, every urban hub will be connected to its suburbs by electrical rails and to its own neighborhoods by electrified mass transit. Once downtown, commuters will move about easily, freed from the stress and cost of parking by fleets of robotaxis that will move quickly through inner-city streets no longer jammed with private cars. Their only competitor for curb space will be the flotilla of delivery vehicles whose drivers will circulate ceaselessly about the city, fulfilling same-day orders.
With the world’s lowest cost for critical inputs of energy and transportation, combined with the most extensive grid of fiber optic cables, the United States will hold the pole position in the ceaseless race for international competitiveness. Once modern history’s fourth great transformation takes hold and that new energy infrastructure is in place, productivity, profits, and global power will soon follow on a far healthier and cooler planet. With domestic transport costs but a fraction of those for international shipping, the economic logic of “nearshoring” will become inescapable, making “Made in the USA” compellingly economical and creating countless new jobs that could strain the country’s labor supply.
Oh yes, and I almost forgot: all that technology will, of course, be emissions-free and so will bring America close to net-zero carbon emissions well before the 2050 date mandated by the 2016 Paris climate accord.
America’s King Canute
Ten years from now, Donald Trump will be remembered ruefully as our country’s very own King Canute, who used the full force of presidential power in a failed, futile effort to halt the tides of technological change that, by then, will have launched this country headlong into the world’s new industrial revolution.
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No Paine, No Gain: Common Sense in the Year 2024
“We have it in our power to begin the world again.” And so we must.
Oct 24, 2024
Contributing fundamentally to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the struggles of British workers in the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Paine was the greatest radical of a truly radical age. Yet this son of an English artisan did not become a radical until his arrival in America in late 1774 at the age of thirty-seven. Even then he had never expected such things to happen.
However, struck by America’s startling contradictions and magnificent possibilities, and moved by the spirit and determination of its people to resist British authority, he dedicated himself to the American cause and through his pamphlets of 1776—Common Sense and the ensuing American Crisis Papers—he emboldened Americans to transform their colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war, defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion, and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.
As Paine saw it: Americans could show the world that humanity had no need for kings and overlords, indeed, that common people, working people, could govern themselves!
Is it any wonder then that we have reached back and recruited Paine to the cause of rescuing America’s revolutionary promise from royal wannabee Donald Trump and his MAGA and GOP (Tory) subjects who seem set upon destroying it?
Vote Democratic top to bottom on November 5th… so we can start acting anew on Citizen Paine’s radical-democratic challenge: “We have it in our power to begin the world again.”
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