Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, by Andreas Malm (2016)

Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital looks for the roots of global warming in 18th and 19th century UK cotton mills, where coal power first took hold on a mass scale, and the book asks if our fossil-fuel driven quagmire was inevitable or avoidable. He argues that it was avoidable. In a nutshell, Malm says that since the adoption of fossil fuel as an energy source was driven by an extremely small segment of the population – British capitalists in the 18th and 19th centuries – and not by humanity in general, we don't have to be where we are today. These men did what they did because they were capitalists, Malm says, not because they were acting out some essentially human trait. One of his points here is that "the Anthropocene narrative" that humans have altered the planetry courses of climate and geology because that’s what humans do is mistaken. Global warming didn't have to happen. We can find both optimism and pessimism in Malm's view: optimism, because if global warming wasn't inevitable then we can escape it; pessimism, because if the causes of global warming are intractably held in place by capitalist economies that are too entrenched to fight against, then we're in big trouble. 

Malm looks at a very specific historical moment, the switch from water to coal in powering English mills, and as a history Fossil Capital is incredibly relevant and impressive, particularly as a history of labor vs. capital during a momentous transition. But I don't totally buy his argument about the Anthropocene. The reach and power of fossil fuels in our economic and political systems are overwhelmingly massive, and while I'm perfectly willing to consider the possibility that this was not inevitable, the suggestion that we wouldn't be here now if mill owners had stuck with water power feels too narrow. Of course that's a simplification of Malm's argument, but it is the crux of his objection to the Anthropocene narrative. 

But here's a distillation of Malm's excellent historical account of the switch: A mill requires some kind of larger-than-human power to do its work steadily and continually, whether it’s crushing grain or looming cotton, so most were built with access to a reliable stream of water or wind, the motion of which drove a wheel or more complex machinery to do the requisite work. By the turn of the 19th century there were more than a thousand water-powered mills in England, with Scotland not far behind. (A natural history of glacial lakes, abundant rainfall, and hard streambeds made for a profusion of reliable, non-silting streams in this part of the world, making it ideal for water power.)

In 1784, James Watt patented a steam engine that would revolutionize manufacturing. It wasn’t the first steam engine, but it was the first to convert energy into the circular motion of a wheel rather than the up-and-down movement of a piston. As a 19th-century analyst put it, “Mills in factories of every kind are impelled by machinery which receives its motion from a wheel” (16). But water can drive wheels too, so what was the advantage of Watt’s engine?

The short answer is “control.” The fuel for the steam engine, coal, is mobile. You can take it anywhere and burn it at the pace you choose. Streams of water, on the other hand, pretty much stay in one place and are susceptible to the vagaries of nature. From day to day, year to year, a river might push your mill wheel in a torrent or a trickle – to say nothing of winter freezes and periodic flood and drought – in patterns that aren’t necessarily predictable, and predictability is very attractive to industrialists who’ve sunk piles of money into mills, factories, workers – fixed capital – and are eager for a return on their investments. You might say that coal is much easier than water to take out of the inconvenient unpredictability of nature and put within the more predictable world of human systems. Coal, it turns out, is more susceptible to discipline than water. (At least initially, a critical point worked out below.)

Malm calls solid energy sources that are consumed in their use, like coal, “the stock,” and moving, non-solid sources that are not consumed in their use, like water and wind (and now, solar) “the flow.” While the stock generally requires a larger initial investment (digging coal out of the ground and transporting it to a factory), its advantages eventually beat out such concerns. Malm divides these advantages into two categories: spatial and temporal. One spatial advantage is that once you purchase a stock fuel like coal, it’s yours and you don’t have to share it with anyone. But streams of water are shared. A factory on a river could grind to a halt if someone upriver diverted or blocked the flow, creating the need for legal wrangling and other negotiations. In other words, the flow required constant cooperation, or politics, in ways that the stock didn’t, a major point in favor of the stock. One implication here is that global warming stems in no small measure from an aversion to cooperation, the very thing we need to overcome it. 

Another spatial advantage: Because the stock is mobile and the flow isn’t, stock-fueled factories could be built anywhere – for example, in population centers with lots of cheap workers instead of in well-rivered countrysides with fewer workers who might demand higher wages. Further, urban workers, especially second- or third-generations whose parents had labored in factories, were less likely than rural ones to balk at the factory’s regimented days of grimy, indoor work. (Here I’m leaving out Malm’s discussion of the complex relationship between industrialism and urbanization in chapter 7, “A Ticket to Town.”) This amounts to a second kind of control that coal was good for: in the same way that coal could be pulled out of nature and into the disciplinary regime of manufacturing, it allowed factory owners to pick workers who could be more easily controlled.

The stock had temporal advantages, too. While the flow of a river changed with the seasons, most notably during winter freezes, coal’s viability was constant. This was also true in the smaller time window of the workday, since a river’s optimum flow might happen between 4 and 7 am, or 10 and 11 pm, times when most people don’t want to be at work. As labor got better organized in the early 19th century it pushed “time bills” seeking to limit and regularize working hours, putting river factory owners at a disadvantage because they’d be prevented from planning workers’ schedules around the unpredictable flow of water. Malm quotes “a Manchester cotton manufacturer in 1833: ‘It is obvious that the more you diminish the number of hours the more you decrease the value of a water-wheel, in proportion to that of a steam-engine’” (192). Again, in capitalists’ quest for control, the stock offered clear advantages.

Some of the book's most memorable passages are quotes from both sides of 19th-century labor disputes, like this one from the 1834 Factory Act codifying child labor:

No child can be employed at all before it is 9 years old. No child up to 13 years of age can be made to work more than 8 hours in any one day. No young person under 18 years of age can be made to work more than 12 hours in any one day, and never between half past 8 at night and half past 5 in the morning. (179)

Needless to say, factory owners fought such regulation bitterly, claiming - as they still do at seemingly sensible changes - that it would be the end of their industry.  

The legacy of Watt’s circular steam engine has given rise to another, larger circularity – the “fossil economy,” which Malm defines as “an economy of self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels, and therefore generating a sustained growth in emissions of carbon dioxide” (11). Its very success (economic growth) is also its extreme danger (CO2 emissions and global warming), and the upward trajectory of both is astounding:

Counting from 1751 to 2010, half of all CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels occurred after 1986 […] and since the year 2000, the rate of growth in CO2 emissions has been triple that of the 1990s. (328)

Of course, the benefits and costs of growth and emissions aren’t equally distributed. To get at the global scale of these inequalities, Malm points to the idea of “emissions embodied in trade,” meaning that emissions in one place, like China, are often driven by consumers in other places, like Sweden, or France, or the US. Malm asks, “why should Bangladesh be held accountable for CO2 released for the benefit of Swedish T-shirt wearers?” a question that has researchers and activists calling for “a reallocation of responsibility, a shift from production-based to consumption-based accounting, which would provide a more realistic picture of ‘how and why human actions affect CO2 emissions.’ In plainer language: do not let the well-off Westerners get off that cheaply” (331).

Such accounting isn’t likely any time soon, and neither is a switch from "stock" to "flow," because the modern stock – coal, oil, and gas – conforms to capitalist property relations in ways that the modern flow – wind and solar – does not. Corporations can own and sell the stock, while the flow “hangs like a fruit for anyone to pick” (372). Within the flow, the commodities to be owned and sold are technologies (like solar panels) rather than resources (like oil), and so their prices generally move downward. Solar panels, like laptops and phones, get more advanced and cheaper as time goes by, while the value of coal and oil increases or stays steady. The stock-based economy is enormously profitable to its beneficiaries, while a move to a more flow-centric one would be disatrous for them, and it only takes a glance at the players in the Trump administration (Pruitt and Tillerson, most obviously) to see the degree of control those beneficiaries exert over economic levers of power. Less visibly, dark money webs like the one presided over by Charles and David Koch make lawmakers – especially Republicans – pay an extremely high price for bucking the petroleum lobby line, as this recent NY Times feature explains. To put a finer point on it, as climate scientist Michael Mann has said, “We are talking about a direct challenge to the most powerful industry that has ever existed on the face of the Earth. There’s no depth to which they’re unwilling to sink to challenge anything threatening their interests. ... It’s like the switch from whale oil in the nineteenth century. They’re fighting to maintain the status quo, no matter how dumb.”

One of the great ironies of the history of fossil capital is that capitalists chose coal (the stock) over water (the flow) because it allowed for greater control – over time, over space, over workers – but in the long-term this choice has released the least controllable of disasters. The effects of global warming are so widely dispersed in space and time that it’s all but impossible to pin specific events, like flooding in south Florida or a cyclone in the Indian Ocean, on specific actions undertaken by particular people. Humans – and, importantly for Malm, a small group of them rather than humanity at large – have brought changes to the planet that profoundly outpace biological or even social evolution. We can't take in the complicated cause-effect chains that fossil capital set in motion; even imagining them is difficult. Neither have our ethics or politics provided a framework for decision-making that might rise to the occasion.