The Dialectics of Liberal Environmentalism

How We Lost Control

Dear reader, my intention with this substack is to produce in public a coherent book on petrohistory, but what you’re getting here is far from the fully realized work. To support this project, buy a paid subscription now, and I’ll send you a “free” copy of the book in a few years, when it’s ready. The below is just a first incarnation of a more fully-realized work.

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Environmentalism has failed as a movement. The evidence for this is: Here We Are, staring into a maw of destruction. Here we go, living the consequences. Let the sacrifice generations begin. (See Tangent One.)

That doesn’t mean it has to keep failing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.  And yet its central figures take the fact of their failure not as a cue to shut up, but rather to try and speak louder. For lack of an alternative, they say.  What they have achieved is only the transformation of greenhouse emissions into an issue that competes against more pressing issues like structural racism, economic injustice, and class warfare. As a political force, environmentalism hasn’t come close to organizing the mass power that would be needed to challenge petrocapitalism. That would mean joining forces with the global Left, and that’s off the table. It could have been an option, but the fathers of the Environmentalists had already ruthlessly destroyed it under cover of the Cold War.

So all we have is what was. Maybe nothing would have succeeded. I don’t know. All we have is the history of a movement that seems to have been set up to fail. Apparently, I find that history interesting enough to merit five thousand words. (But not ten!) When doing the history of an idea, no one can pretend to be comprehensive, so I don’t even come close. Just a few thoughts.

Since 1988, the corporate response to global warming has been a master class in dialectic cultural manipulation. The most visible part of that story is Denialism. But the oil cartel could never seriously have hoped that denial of reality would somehow colonize reality itself; it couldn't deny the issue away. Never a feasible strategy in the long run. They were the best informed on the science at every point. #ExxonKnew. They knew that denialism alone was never a long-term guarantee against future profits.

But denialism had a function beyond mere delay: to define the terms of the debate. They always preferred to face antagonists from their own class: in this case, scientists. Denialism created a dialectic terrain between the insiders who Believe in Science and the outsiders who Deny It. A stable climate would require dismantling petrocapitalism from the bottom up. But the only debate was over whether global warming was real. Whether it was a thing. If fossil carbon has any conative force in the atmosphere at all. When it was always obvious that it does.  

Because the main argument that needed to be made was about a phenomenon that could be measured and understood, it became inevitable that the natural leaders of the movement should be scientists, and writers whose main promise to the reader was their ability to accurately communicate what the scientists said. The climate beat gives a legitimate niche for white male aspiring journalists, something that doesn’t step on too many toes. As I once tried to be. I welcome the exceptions: the Slothrops in this Zone.

But the only adequate responses to global warming lay outside the class interests of the scientists and their employers. Unlike more tractable problems like the ozone hole, the accumulation of carbon in the biosphere poses a fundamental challenge to the very foundations of petrocapitalism. Any adequate response to carbon dioxide specifically or biosphere collapse generally would be, by definition, revolutionary.

Finally, the Denialism movement has mostly washed up on the shores of undeniable reality. Outside of cranks on twitter, no one can legitimately argue that global warming isn’t happening, or that it isn’t “caused by fossil fuels.” And yet we are still stranded on this same discursive terrain. This requires socialists and allied forces to remain contentedly inside their corporate big tent. Denialism has created the environment in which any radicalism within the climate movement is circumscribed.

The failure of environmentalism only had to last so long. It matters less now than it did. Now, we have less control over the process of erathication. But during key decades in the 20th century, the conversation did have to stay within certain boundaries. Nowadays, the system is self-policing, self-regulating. Even if the environmentalist movement is allowed some real victories in the near term, the process of warming has already begun. The earth will bake, to some degree or another. The function of a system is its result. If erathication was the goal of the daemon Druj all along, then she wins.

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It is well known that modern environmentalism grew out of the conservation movement, which itself grew out of the hunting clubs of the colonialist empires. The preceding dialectic was colonialism/anti-colonialism synthesized into conservationism along with neocolonialism. There was certainly difference between the Sierra Club and the Safari Club, but there was overlap, too. Both were unquestionably bastions of white supremacy and privilege. But even conservationism traces its roots back to an older struggle to conserve oil for profit. Seeds of the environmentalist ethos that ended up evolving can be found within the intraindustry effort to replace the Rule of Capture with unitization. (See Tangent Two.) Like everything of its era, the Rule of Capture ended during Wartime.

Because this is a history of an idea, the early landmarks are three books: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson published 1962, Limits to Growth by The Club of Rome published 1972, and Gaia by James Lovelock published 1979. The three books follow the dialectic: an authentic challenge to pollution, a corporate response, and then a synthesis of the two into a corporate environmentalism, which remains in force today.

Silent Spring

Rachel Carson was not an op. It’s impossible to doubt her sincerity. She showed people that synthetic toxins threatened all living systems. Action, reaction.

Following the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, the oil cartel was confronted with a powerful movement fueled by good ideas, and it responded. It took them a decade to regain control of the situation. The first ten years of the environmentalist movement were its most successful and culminated in The Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act, and related legislation. Intellectually, the dissident environmentalist movement produced now-minimized or distained writers like Barry Commoner, who you will be lucky to find in the back stacks of your local labyrinthine used book shop. The Closing Circle.

That movement had people power, especially in organized labor. Workers understood that “the environment” was liberal speak for the conditions of labor. They wanted their kids to grow up in a clean place. So the corporations began to move to outsource labor.

The cartel should have seen it coming, but I’m not sure that they did. From the wild days of Petrolia, drilling and pumping and trucking oil and petrochemicals has been a big toxic mess, a blight on the immediate landscape, and created wildly unstable economic conditions that favored pathological risk-takers. I don’t think Dad Joiner would have been surprised to hear that oil would someday destabilize the entire earth-system. Their religious fundamentalism made them particularly prone to apocalyptic thinking.  

Perhaps the cartel did see it coming, but weren’t yet in a position to do anything about it. They were focused on other things.

Carson was a human observing and reacting to one particular chemical input inside a complex system already strained by other types of petrochemical pollution. She could extrapolate about what another chemical dump might do to the ecosystem, what other agents of degradation may have already taken root driving the nonhuman living systems of the earth into chaos. But she couldn’t predict the future. DDT and atmospheric carbon are very different problems.

It was easy to figure out that spraying DDT—a poison marketed as a poison— was going to do harm. But the key truth that Carson popularized was a vision of the global interconnection of life. That the entire biosphere was interconnected, and that it was impossible to predict the outcomes of our industrial experiments. This was a message that the world was ready to understand. By the time she was writing, the ruling class was ten years into its ongoing obsession with cybernetics, which was basically a way to think dialectically but without Marxist ideological commitments. Whereas dialectical materialism is for understanding history, cybernetics was about controlling it: the study of how to control complex systems.

Cybernetics disappeared as a discipline because it got absorbed into everything: computers, obviously, but also psychology, mathematics, biology, ecology, and economics. It was a technology of thought that could be applied to a lot of different things. It was a technique, and therefore a tool, that could be used for good or ill by many different ideologies. But the Science of Control was always hubristic; humans will always be but one of many inputs into any complex system. Better to think dialectically.

Which is what Barry Commoner did, publishing in 1971. He observed that sometime around World War II “human beings broke out of the circle of life, driven not by biological need but by the social organization which they have devised to ‘conquer’ nature; means of gaining wealth that are governed by requirements conflicting with those which govern nature.” He argued “a high rate of profit is associated with practices that are particularly stressful toward the environment, and that when these practices are restricted, profits decline.” Because at the time, there was money to be made in replacing natural materials with synthetic ones: Soap was replaced by detergents, cotton with rayon, manure with fertilizer, everything solid with plastic, and calcium with Strontium-90. Each of these replacements increased the profits made by its industry. There was more money to be made in detergents than in soaps, even if they were used for the same thing in the same quantities. The extra profit came from externalizing a cost. The problem is profit itself..  

That means that the problem is not the growth of the human population, but the growth of profits and wealth of the Owner class. The very act of getting exponentially rich degrades the ecosphere. Commoner notes that “While it is true that the Soviet Union and other socialist states, just like capitalists, have emphasized continued growth of the productive system, the theory of socialist economics does not appear to require that growth should continue indefinitely.” The private enterprise system is incompatible with a healthy ecosphere. There was once a second way, and even a third, they were mercilessly destroyed by a rogue American War Machine. But perhaps we can bring them back.

The Limits to Growth

People were bound to notice this ascendant synthetic regime and be furious about it; Carson was not the first, just a particularly notable example, and an excellent writer. To protect their profits, the chemical and oil cartels needed to come up with some response.

It was clear that they needed a two-pronged approach. Not only would they deny and attack their accusers, they would also redefine the opposition and place it on their own terms. They knew that if they could control both sides of the conversation, they could control the complex system of the discourse and stabilize it into a self-regulating system that maintained their status quo by just making minor adjustments to the relative public positions of the two opponents, Industry and Environmentalists.

And so, Rockefeller started writing grants. One of these grants was to Aurelio Peccei to organize The Club of Rome, which in turn hired a group of cyberneticists at MIT, including a married couple, Donella and Dennis Meadows. This led to the 1972 publication of The Limits to Growth by The Club of Rome. The marketing guys had seen the success of Silent Spring as a book, and so released it as a trade book rather than a white paper.

Aurelio Peccei had flirted with antifascism during the war as a member of one of the rare non-Communist underground resistance groups. After the war, he got himself hired at Fiat, which, of course, had been a pivotal node in Mussolini’s war machine, and needed to launder its reputation back into a peacetime, Marshall Plan company. The man to do so was Aurelio Peccei, and he made a lot of money doing it. Needless to say, the automotive industry during this time was a great place to meet Americans.

Adriano Olivetti, head of the eponymous typewriter company, always saw Fiat as Olivetti’s antagonist, though they weren’t direct competitors. Like Peccei, Olivetti had fought the fascists during the war, but unlike Peccei, he maintained his lifelong commitment to socialism. After the war, he built his company into a worker-led utopia of technological and aesthetic achievement, so successful that he bought out his American competitor, Underwood, with the intention of organizing a socialist workforce within American factories. Then he was killed on a train in 1960. The man who drove him to the train station was a board member who had fought for Mussolini and had public ties to the Marshall Plan and to Fiat. They also killed his chief engineer, Mario Tchou, who was trying to beat IBM to market with a desktop computer.

After Adriano was killed, Fiat executives took over Olivetti/Underwood. And so began the slow decline of the company; it backed out of the computing effort entirely, and by the era of electric typewriters, they were making bulky, ugly machines that were easily outcompeted by IBM Selectrics, except, apparently, for my parents decided to buy a giant humming Olivetti Praxis which was a strain for anyone to lift. The guy who they brought to oversee that long, slow decline was Dr. Aurelio Peccei, who had already made his pile at Fiat.

Apparently, this job of destroying my favorite typewriter company left Peccei with plenty of time for an “adventure of the spirit,” as he called it. In 1965 he gave a speech at an organization called ADELA (“an international consortium of bankers aimed at supporting the industrialization of Latin America”). That speech caught the attention of Dean Rusk, which led to a grant from David Rockefeller to fund The Club of Rome. The actual authors of Limits to Growth are mostly Americans. Limits to Growth sold better than Silent Spring. It is a substantive empirical book, with actual data in it, such as was available at the time.  

The “Limits” framing of the issue was only one of many possible ways to understand environmental degradation. Limits launders the morality of any chemical dumps that stay within or under the limit, and only starts calling emissions harmful when they cross a threshold of “sustainability,” meaning the maintenance of the homeostasis of the overall ecological system. Contrast this with Commoner’s model, which understood that industrial capitalism made its margin on externalities, and so as the machine ran, it was constantly and rapidly accumulating harm.

Instead, the Meadowses ran a series of basic computer models that showed that exponential graphs go up exponentially, and then asserted that somewhere along that trajectory there had to be a limit. Remember how limits work in math: an asymptotic curve gets infinitely closer to the limit without ever touching or crossing it. An entirely abstract vision, infinitely impossible to replicate in material reality, in the growth curve of the capitalist effort. As the curve gets closer and closer to its limit, it never actually changes direction. This is a vision of change without a change, a limit without a reversal. The rocket keeps going up, and up, and up…

The Club of Rome left unstated their assumption that capitalism required perpetual growth. This reflected their historical moment: a furious expansion that had continued from the early days of Colonialism, accelerated in Wartime.

You cannot cross a limit. This was an unexamined truism. We could grow up to this limit, always safely but never absurdly displaced into the future–and no more. And then we’ll stop. But what will stop us? The Club of Rome writes “We have almost no knowledge about where the upper limits to…pollution growth curves might be.” I also have no knowledge about what could possibly stop companies from dumping chemicals into the environment. I guess we’ll just stop it because it will be the sensible thing to do. The authors didn’t really need to tangle with any of this to present their empirical case.

At the asymptotically steep end of the curve lies phenomenal price hikes, radically enriching the sellers. Supply and demand. Scarcity benefits the seller. At the End of the World, everything is more expensive; it is a profit opportunity to make up for decades of operating losses. Declare the End of The World in your own day and reap those rewards in your own lifetime. Hopefully the world won’t end, and you’ll have had years to charge $6 a gallon. But if it does, at least you weren’t a liar. There was much incentive to emphasize scarcity. Around the same time, the cartel was realizing that its preexisting narrative of cornucopian oil only served to depress prices. The narrative needed to change for there to be an “oil crisis.”

By declaring that there existed limits to growth, Rockefeller was essentially able to set the limit’s value at any given time. Today, you’ll hear about “planetary boundaries.” At the time, in the sixties, there was a political contest about who got to decide where the line should be drawn. The Capitalists got themselves in a position to win every time. Private property will be with us until the bitter end, if it they aren’t challenged and defeated.  Contrast this with China, which at least has the nominal public power to check unrestrained profit seeking.

For the Club of Rome, planetary boundaries, limits, and thresholds all exist, but the substance that crosses them is not really pollution—that was the focus of Carson’s environmentalist movement. That concern needed to be displaced by the threat of resource depletion. The Club of Rome is worried that the oil might run out some day, not that we will poison or insulate our animal selves to death first, smothering ourselves in carbon. But now we know what will win that race. This is a conservationist paradigm, with all that implies. Today, we know we needed a revolutionary paradigm.

As mentioned, in hindsight, The Limits to Growth looks like a set-up for the planned oil crisis in 1973. This crisis, which was carefully orchestrated by the oil companies in collaboration with their host countries in the Middle East, is the hinge upon which petrohistory turns. As Commoner writes in his 1975 book, “For years, the United States and most of the world used energy as though it were a freely given resource, its availability and uses understood as well as those of water or air. Suddenly [in 1973] the availability of energy can no longer be taken for granted; it has become a huge problem, strongly affecting almost every aspect of society.” One of its chief effects was to redistribute wealth from people to oil investors.

However, that change was not driven by material conditions in the oil industry. The total quantity of oil available to American consumers fluctuated by only +/- 1.5% in the early seventies. The crisis did not meaningfully affect the availability of oil, but it did affect the price of energy and therefore the perception of its value. Even at the time, this ruse was transparent to Commoner: “Clearly there is no need to act as though we are now running out of oil, for we are not.” At the risk of stating the obvious, higher prices helped the oil companies consolidate their political influence.

Cancel James Lovelock

The first Gaia book came out in 1972. James Lovelock perhaps holds the record for being the subject of the most nauseating hagiographic profiles in magazines. I started making a bibliography of them to give you a flavor, Tangent Five. These journalists knew that he was a British intelligence agent and a corporate consultant who worked for Royal Dutch Shell, duPont, Hewlett-Packard, etc.. They just don’t see anything compromising in those relationships; they think it’s cool. They call him “The real-life Q from the James Bond films” (See Tangent Four).

I don’t doubt Lovelock’s intelligence or even his sincerity. He didn’t see any contradiction between his ideas and his employers. They were on the right side in the Cold War, champions of Freedom standing up to the Soviet menace. If that wasn’t Lovelock’s attitude, I can’t imagine why he worked for MI5 his whole life.

Leah Aronowsky’s article shows that Royal Dutch Shell paid for Gaia from the beginning. It grew out of the research Lovelock did for Shell, which showed that the ecosphere was constantly releasing gasses into the atmosphere, not only oxygen but also methane and carbon monoxide and dimethyl sulfide. He saw all these outgassings as regulatory mechanisms within an interconnected, fundamentally stable eco and climate system. From this observation, he generalized his argument that every living thing on earth forms a stable complex system that most people call “the environment.” Aldous Huxley suggested that Lovelock appropriate the Greek earth goddess, Gaia, to attach to his theory of a cybernetic ecological system. When Lovelock appropriated the word, he stripped it of any spiritual meaning. He laundered a goddess into a marketing tool. How is this different from our use of Druj? Only that I want to strive for a pre-modern, literal conception of the goddess of decay.

Rather than an object of spiritual adoration, Gaia named an obsession with negative feedback loops, which offered the planet a near-miraculous capacity to self-regulate and self-correct. Therefore, there is a certain amount of environmental damage that our corporate partners can enact and it won’t hurt anything in the long run, because Gaia will “learn to cope.” That was borne out of Lovelock’s study of dimethyl sulfide, which is the visible component of petroleum smog. Smog was exerting a measurable cooling effect in its local climate that temporarily overpowered the early signals of global warming. In tracing dimethyl sulfide inthe marine environment, Lovelock found that certain types of algae emit it. Therefore, not all the dimethyl sulfide in the world could be attributed to the products of his employer; the chemical was a natural component of life which could be metabolized by the earth system. Coped with. Stable-system logic: if humans were cooling the climate with extra dimethyl sulfide from smog, the warming effects of another chemical in smog, carbon dioxide, would cancel it out, maintaining climatic stasis despite widespread industrialization. Dimethyl sulfide was “a regulatory response of the ecosystem to combustion emissions for it tends to neutralize the effect (temperature increase) of the perturbing stimulus (the accumulation of carbon dioxide) thereby restoring the status quo” (Aronowsky). At least, when this was proved untrue, he could admit that he was wrong.

Left unemphasized, but assumed: A stable system can counter the effects of a disruptive force like pollution or a sudden increase in carbon dioxide up to a certain usually unknowable threshold past which the input overwhelms the regulatory system and pushes the everything over into a cascade of disruption until it re-stabilized in a different stasis. His emphasis was on the edenic state prior to the tipping point when the planet “learns to cope” with pollutants. The failure of the climate to conform to this original vision of Gaia turned into a lifelong intellectual struggle that he addressed different ways at different times, culminating in his funniest ideas at the end of his life. when he believed that sentient AI would take over control of the economy and gently guide us into decarbonization, thereby saving humanity from itself. It began and ended at a faith in a technological miracle that would turn the machine around before it breached the tipping point.

In essence, Gaia is another threshold idea, a variation on the theme set by Limits to Growth. Once there’s a concept of a threshold of allowable pollution, the conversation could turn to the tendentious business of setting those thresholds in policy, and in that realm, the companies could count on their partners in Government.

Lovelock’s emphasis on the resilience of homeostasis goes back to preceding Cyberneticists like Gregory Bateson. Cybernetics assumed that any disruption would eventually settle down into a new stable state, following a process that looks like entropy but never quite gets to the bottom of the energy gradient. And so, for them, it was much more important to study the stable-state system. Which is natural for their time and place, during the most lucrative part of the American Century.

But Lovelock (and the Cyberneticists) were supporting a regime that explicitly intended to cross every limit, to sprint across any threshold of pollution or depletion. They offered a mild criticism of growth while also normalizing the steady state of industrial accelerationism. Because there was no choice, other than Communism, and that was the enemy. At least for Real Life Q from James Bond.

Lovelock got his first Gaia payday not from Shell, but from duPont during the Ozone Layer debates. “DuPont recruited Lovelock to appear as an expert witness during a series of US congressional hearings on a proposed ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).” Dupont lost the battle on the Ozone Layer, but won the war; CFCs were one among thousands of products that Dupont sold and the lost revenue was easily replaced.

Lovelock publicly claimed credit for healing the ozone hole, since he had invented the mass spectrometer, the instrument that scientists used to detect and measure CFCs in the atmosphere. This helped everyone forget that he had testified, and strategized, for duPont. I don’t know if he ever argued that he had to work with duPont to get them to do the right thing. Nonetheless, the ozone hole was key victory to legitimize the moderate-capitalist wing of the environmentalist movement, consolidating its reach within the machinery of American Empire—the Military-Industrial-Nonprofit Complex. This was the ascendant corporate environmentalism that received the 1988 hearings on global warming at which James Hansen got famous.

Carbon is fundamental to profit-seeking enterprise in a way that CFCs are not. The movement as it existed in the late eighties was entirely unable to deal with this reality. Right when humanity needed it most, the environmentalist movement was utterly incapable of putting up a meaningful resistance to imperialism. By 1988 erathication was baked in—overdetermined—not by the physical reality of carbon, but by ideology: by the gulf that separated environmentalism from antiimperialism and labor power, by the close links between environmentalism and the oily forces of Druj.

And so, the dialectic went from Silent Spring to Limits to Growth, synthesized into corporate environmentalism. Now we start with that final term, corporate environmentalism, which is opposed by corporate denialism, which both synthesize in the physical reality of living in an age of perpetual catastrophe, of living on a warming, chaotic world that will be well beyond the control of the white men who set up this regime.

There could have been a more effective opposition; there was once another way. But for fifty years, America spent all its productive energy into destroying it. Not only communism; America was genocidal towards any anti-colonial nationalist third world leader who wanted to use a portion of their own country’s wealth to uplift their own people. Intolerable to Dulles. Lumumba, Nasser, Sukarno were not Moscow’s puppets. Moscow lacked the resources and reach to meddle in anyone’s national politics beyond defending their key regions in Eastern Europe. But the Americans felt that they had to destroy not only these men but their vision of postcolonial prosperity. Actions have consequences. And a key consequence of the Cold War was the absence of any force able to avert erathication, to confront capital, to prevail at COPs, to demand climate justice or reparations.

A sad story, it is true, but one which we’ve got to cop to. It is still possible to reinvent environmentalism into a movement that can truly be the allies of antiracist, anticapitalist and anti-imperialist struggles. Failing that, we have failed, and that was always an option.