From Marx to the Modern Eco-Crisis Navigating the Sustainability Debate with Matt Huber

Navigate the fragmented yet fervent world of eco-socialism with us and our returning guest, Matt Huber. Together, we peel back the layers of this movement's evolution, discussing key junctures, figures, and the diverse ideologies from bright green optimism to de-growth and capital-as-power theorists. We'll take you on a journey through the historical threads that shape the current eco-socialist tapestry, revealing how the pivotal 1970s changed our approach to economic growth and environmental policy. This isn't just a retrospective; it's an ongoing debate with real-time strategies for a sustainable future, as we dissect the ecological crossroads at which we stand.

Join the conversation with Matt and me as we tackle the challenges of integrating labor with environmental activism and the practicalities of agriculture sustainability. We'll confront the romanticization of labor-intensive farming and delve into the environmental movement's relationship with labor disputes, examining how forging new alliances is essential for a green energy transformation. Our candid exchange sheds light on the diverse perspectives within the eco-socialist movement, highlighting both the unifying visions and the contentions that drive this complex dialogue.

Finally, we scrutinize the role of renewable energy sources and the nuanced considerations surrounding nuclear power in our quest for a low-carbon world. We address the inherent unpredictability of wind and solar, the promise of geothermal systems, and the comparative safety and minimal waste of nuclear options. This episode isn't just an exploration of pathways to ecological harmony; it's an invitation to consider all available options, including the often-controversial nuclear energy, as part of an effective transition away from carbon-based sources.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:34

Hello, welcome to VarnVlog. And Matt Huber has returned so we can talk about the controversies of eco-socialism, of which there are many. And I think very recently, in July-August of this year, monthly Review put out its de-growth response issue, where John Bellamy Foster apparently has finally picked sides, I guess kind of. But we've also seen an increasing distance between John Bellamy Foster and Jason Moore, as I saw when I interviewed Jason and frankly got more than I was expecting on the Foster Moore-Sato split. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit. You know, last time we talked about the relationship of unions to the ecological movement and how important they really were as far as like actually getting stuff done for environmental change and the integration with that into labor.

Speaker 1: 2:52

But I wanted to go into, you know, the kind of three, I think, now that it's been phrased as there's three phases of eco-socialism, but the current phase actually itself seems to be at least three different schools of thought. So, if not more. So I roughly break it into you and some of the bright greeners I don't think you're quite as optimistic as, say, lee Phillips. But and then John Bellamy Foster, cohe Sato, de-growth, and then the capital of seeing people. That's kind of my rough spectrum. Although, when I talk about de-growth too even though it's like super hot right now and everyone can't shut up about it I don't know what it means because, as we were talking a little bit before the show, there's at least three different things going on that get called de-growth. I'm just going to throw out books so that people kind of know how I'm linking them. There's a Jackson Hinkel school and his books, not Jackson Jason.

Speaker 1: 4:09

There's this sort of mechanism guy who I think is Jackson is yes, man, those names are too close, jason.

Speaker 2: 4:19

Michael Jackson.

Speaker 1: 4:21

Yeah, Jason and eco-socialist get more distinct names from other things that are still adjacent to Marxism. He's sort of the MMTD growth school. I guess there's whatever Sato and Bellamy Foster on and I'm not sure you can totally say they're copacetic, but they're close.

Speaker 2: 4:45

Yeah, foster, recently got mad at Sato.

Speaker 1: 4:49

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:50

So they're starting to split up a little.

Speaker 1: 4:53

Right and then which is probably why I'm going to see less Sato in the monthly review and then there's like the half-first socialism slash. There's a few other people associated with it who are more explicit and don't seem to give as shit as much as maybe the center group as being actually Marxist.

Speaker 2: 5:21

So yeah, they attack Marxism in their book.

Speaker 1: 5:25

Right. So to get back to the beginning, though, I think to understand how we got here, we got to go through the dreaded 70s, which comes up on my podcast a lot, apparently the 70s and when Marxism, and actually most of everything, seem to have lost its mind. So do you agree with the three generations of equal socialism framework?

Speaker 2: 5:53

anyway, like Well as far as I can tell, that whole framework was invented by John Bellamy Foster, I think, to kind of tell a story in which the phases lead up to the metabolic rift school, so it's kind of like it was all leading up to their perspectives. To me seems a bit teleological so, but I do see kind of phases. I think in the 70s there was I think Foster does cover that there was this idea that Marxism was inherently not environmental, so it needed to be kind of greened, and then and they explicitly thought it was from the outside it had.

Speaker 1: 6:54

We have to fight Marxist permetheism, but we got to enforce it on Marx because it's not in Marx. Marx is bad Right, Marx, dirty Ricardian Right.

Speaker 2: 7:07

Right, right, right. And then Foster comes around to say, no, marx is good, right, if we dig deep enough into Volume 3 and then into all these sort of His dissertation, all his different writings, you can see this deeply materialist, deeply ecological thinker, which fair enough. And then out of that you get very many different schools, like James O'Connor, whose second contradiction of capitalism, which I think is trying to say hey guys, we need a Marxism that can speak to new social movements you really framed it in that sense like these new social movements, and if we need a kind of different theory of capitalist crisis to take into account the ecological crisis.

Speaker 1: 7:54

I mean even the phraseology very much screams. I am responding to 70s Maoism because primary and secondary contradiction talk is very much a 60s, 70s Maoist framework.

Speaker 2: 8:05

Yeah, that's interesting. I'd love to know. He wrote another famous book in the 70s called Fiscal Crisis of the State. I really should dig deeper about what his sort of organizational roots are, but to me when you read, he has a book of essays on ecological Marxism and it's just, it's very clear, he kind of lays it out. Traditional Marxism was good for understanding class struggle and production and party formation and unions, but to study environmental crisis we need a kind of new theory of crisis, we need a new theory of contradiction, and then that theory can then be taken up by this kind of, by these new social movements that everyone thought were kind of the labor movement socialism it's kind of dead. Now we need the new social movements, right, and I don't think they really knew yet that we were just in a long period of defeat and just sort of capital was triumphant, right, and so they were just like let's get on to the new thing, right. So, yeah, so I mean there's many different directions you can go there's.

Speaker 1: 9:24

I guess the only perspective I would add that I remember often being brought up as a kind of distinct school is the Paul Birkitt response. And then we get to, I guess, around 20 teens. This current wave of the metabolic rift within the metabolic rift school, is that like the call it.

Speaker 1: 9:52

The emergence of metabolic rift into capital-as-seen thinking. Versus what? Again, john Bellamy, foster versus Koh-Hu Hay, seytos or Saitos, particular form of degrowth. Some of the arguments and maybe I will get pushback from people who've been on the show before but seem to me largely semantic, are not even semantic. They're like optimal framework discussions. They don't really clearly necessary, like whether or not we're talking about the capital-as-seen or the anthropocene does have implications for the way we think, but they don't. It neither suggests a way of understanding socialism inherently nor a set of policies inherently.

Speaker 1: 10:50

So, yeah, so you've been kind of pulled these days from Mr yes, labor is important to the environmental moment to Mr hey, degrowth debate. You are against it, even though you're not totally. Anyway, I've read enough of your stuff to know that you A lot of your disagreements on the framework has to do with the framework and then other implications. So what is your thought? Let's kind of get into this. So we have that new left piece that we're the new left things that we're talking about by the time we get to the metabolic risk school. How seriously do you take in metabolic risk school?

Speaker 2: 11:42

Well, by the way, I would. Paul Birkitt definitely aligned himself very early on with Foster and the aughts, but I find his book Marx and Nature to be so much more sort of broader, and it kind of is an ecological reading of all Marx's political economy, like value and rent, and it's got a great reading or critique of the Gareth program in there.

Speaker 2: 12:11

Yeah, it's really expansive and I really that's one of my favorite books in the kind of canon of ecological Marxism. To me the metabolic rift school I think tries too hard to find To again dive really deep into Marx to kind of find his ecological perspective in this idea of a metabolic rift which you just mentioned once in volume three. And of course, to be fair, he mentions metabolism a lot. It's very clear that this idea of metabolism between society and nature is pretty important to him and he's a very materialist thinker.

Speaker 2: 12:53

But to me, all the focus is trying to put all this attention on this is the ecological Marx. It's focused on metabolism, but again, I would agree with Birkitt that we actually what we need to do is think much more broadly about how we can think ecologically about Marx's more general categories, like the one I've been kind of banging around is we need a theory of surplus value generation and exploitation that takes into account ecology and takes into account ecological relations, and we need to look at class struggle and the productive forces, the relations of production. All these kind of classic Marxist categories need to be thought through ecologically, as opposed to going deep into the notebooks or going deep into volume three to find oh, here's where Marx's ecology is here as opposed to trying to think through, to be frank, his more important arguments, his more important categories, his more important theories. I think they all have lots of deep ecological implications that we need to flesh out.

Speaker 1: 13:59

Yeah, I think that is I mean. Recently I stumbled into debates about meanings of labor and the Gerta critique, which Maybe Labor Day, labor Day debates yeah. Any time that I get into labor creates all our value. And then I read that text and I'm like clearly he says it doesn't, except when he kind of implies that it doesn't. And he says he doesn't again, and then I'm like oh yeah, the key is wealth, right. Right.

Speaker 2: 14:29

He really distinguishes value from wealth and he right. In volume one but also in the critique of Gerta program. He wants to make clear that when we're talking about wealth, which is this material stuff and use values, obviously labor and nature co-create wealth Right.

Speaker 1: 14:47

Yeah, use values do require labor, but they're not. It's like A child requires two sets of DNA to be born. So there's that and there's also the whole. There's other implications too. Like wealth can be invested but unvalorized, and like you can hold wealth and not ever touch it at all, actually Not even use its use values. It's basically hoarding its use values, and a Birket makes a lot of what this actually means for ecology, which was kind of why I was arguing it.

Speaker 1: 15:37

But I, you know, correcting a dumb DSA sign doesn't really it's not high on my priority of life. But you know, and as far as like labor creates all value, as far as slogans go, it's always been a weird one for me, because I'm like, well, if we're talking strict Marx, it's not true. If we're talking like broad, it's kind of true, but you kind of have to be a Marxist to understand it anyway, and at that point it's not true anymore. So I don't know why that somebody, people, die on this hill. But I don't really care. If you think it's effective, I'm not going to be like, oh, you shouldn't use that sign. That's according to the growth of critique. Yeah, subsection two, but I do think it matters when we go to understand what Marx had to say about ecology in so much that there is a lot of ecology in Marx and I think you and I would both agree there's some right. It's not the primary thing he's worried about, I think.

Speaker 2: 16:48

Yeah, you know yeah, I'm teaching capital volume one right now, which for the fifth time and most fun thing I do as a professor, and right now we're on chapter 15, chapter on large scale industry and machinery, and it's really frustrating, but the whole, the whole chapter is about.

Speaker 2: 17:08

To me it's actually quite ecological because it's all about energy and like machines and like thermodynamics and stuff like that. But there's like I forget I think it's like three or four pages at the end of that chapter on agriculture and it's like the most truncated, like just brief and like, oh, by the way, this machinery had impacts on agriculture. And then at the end he has this line about how you know this development of machinery and agriculture, like the spoils, the original sources of wealth, of soil and the worker, and that one quote is just like it's glommed onto by the entire ecosystem. So it's like, look, he says capitalism destroys the soil, destroys nature. And it's like one paragraph in a long, long, long, long, long chapter that you could not say is like about our culture, about the soil, or about, or, or. The agriculture in the soil is really formative to what he's talking about, but it certainly gets a lot of attention, those, those couple pages.

Speaker 1: 18:09

Yeah, I go through my annual recitation. Actually, usually, because of the nature of running a loosely left wing and I say that very loosely left wing ish podcast, I have to go through my annual recitation of the of the Devartorah, aka Capital, volume One, and it's, it's interesting what you notice once you've read it like 10 times, and then what you notice like people hook up to it. It's not to be fair to the eco socialists, they're not the only ones who seem to find like a quote in that book and build their entire politics off of a quote in capital. Yeah, but yeah, you know, and I guess that in some ways is better than the other thing we're going to talk about, which is which is the, the new left slash, maybe also some of the new Marx lecture. New Marx lecture, if I like, fuck up the German.

Speaker 2: 19:11

I don't know how to say that either.

Speaker 1: 19:17

Actually I learned how to speak German 25 years ago, but I have. I learned it in Bavaria, not in, not a standard German, and I have lost all my pronunciation and it shows like it's just. I can still read it, but like when I'm trying to like, say this stuff, I'm like, but I just say it like a drunk Englishman. So to get back to a point, the, I do think there's this way of digging down, but I kind of like at least they're digging down on a quote in capital, as opposed to the people who dig down on a letter Marx wrote on the back of a napkin, like that may have had his notes on some other guy once.

Speaker 1: 20:07

And I came up in the in the odds and when I first got into Marxism, a lot of I encountered because it was freely available on the internet was a lot of this new not new Marx lecture, but new left critique. That was also like that, like they take a line from the Grunerisa and build an entire politics out of it. Thank you, tony Nuguri. But so I don't want to just come down on the Ecosocials, but it does seem from my perspective Marx is not the uber destructivist Promethean that he is portrayed as. But I don't really see the primary focus in Marx are, like the almost primary focus of Marx being ecology, the way some of the Ecosocialists want to argue, and I don't really understand why they feel like they need to argue it that way, like yeah it's, yeah, I think I think Cydos most forceful and trying to say that like that metabolism and the metabolic rift is like actually the central aspect of Marxist political economy.

Speaker 2: 21:27

And you know he's looked at more notebooks than me, so maybe yeah, but that to me seems pretty pretty off, yeah.

Speaker 1: 21:37

On my Patreon. I actually have been reading slowly with my cohost the first Ceddo book in English Well, which is his book in German that Karl Marx is Ecosocialism and I find the scholarship impressive. But the central claim that this is really what capital is about and if Marx had lived a little longer, this is what capital would have been in the map. As a side note, marx lived a fair amount of time after Capital Volume One was published.

Speaker 2: 22:21

So yeah, revising Capital Volume One too.

Speaker 1: 22:24

Yeah, so the idea to me that like he didn't have a chance to just go back and put all the cool stuff about soil in there and make it the number one thing, seems like a kind of a stretch. Yeah, but do you want to? You want to go over your understanding of Ceddo's argument?

Speaker 2: 22:43

So again, a lot of it, I think, hinges on what you said before, which is this effort to really take down this idea that Marx was a Promethean thinker and that we just need to develop the productive forces and dominate nature and then socialism will be achieved. As a side note, I just I think what people don't recognize is that Marx was in angles, for that matter. They were living through like a world historical transformation in our productive capacity and our, you know, relation to nature in terms of production, called the Industrial Revolution. And it seems pretty clear you can call it Promethean, but it seems pretty clear that they saw this sort of revolution in the mode of production based in large scale machinery and tech and automatic machinery. They saw that as something that was absolutely world changing and that created conditions for socialism and the abolition of poverty that didn't exist for most of history. And so you know, in our, in our sort of 21st century glasses, we kind of look at any sort of idea that like large scale technology kind of creates a post scarcity world, makes it possible, we look at that as like Prometheanism or whatever. But to me it was just like for them it was like they just saw these, these just incredible changes in terms of, you know, people, urbanization, large scale productive capacity and okay so.

Speaker 2: 24:30

But your question about Sido is so he does try to show that like, yeah, if you look early in Marx, you see he is this bad Promethean. He talks about, like you know, developing the productive forces and dominating nature. But once you get deeper into the Marx of the 1860s and then particularly after, after capital which he does kind of try to trot out these notebooks is that you find that Marx became much more interested in metabolism and then the metabolic, the metabolic relation between nature and society and production, and what he finds in his study of Leibig and soil sciences. He finds that actually there are some really severe limits to agricultural's capacity to kind of overcome certain issues of fertility and so forth, and that technology actually can't overcome these limits right. And therefore Marx became a much more, you know, post limits to growth, 1970s type thinker to kind of recognize that there were these real serious ecological limits in the soil, in the fertility, that really couldn't be overcome. And so therefore, that he became an ecological thinker that acknowledges limits and then you can do a through line. I mean, that's pretty much any degrowth that you're going to talk to today says you know, the first thing you need to, you need to recognize is that these limits right, that these bio, physical, planetary boundaries that cannot be superseded, and we must acknowledge that they're there.

Speaker 2: 25:58

And the problem with Cytos argument is that Marx did recognize that these limits existed in soil fertility in the 1860s. But when Marx died in 1883 about you know, 30 years later, a little bit less, 20 something years later the scientist Haberbosch came up with this way to create nitrogen out of the air in factories and create this thing called synthetic chemical nitrogen, which just completely shot through all those limits that Marx and Leibig were worried about and actually many others were starting to get really worried about in the 1890s. And there's these guano wars and all this kind of stuff. But essentially the Haberbosch process just destroyed those, those limits and basically, after World War two we started to do something that humanity had never done in history, which is we were able to grow crops on the same fricking soil year after year without worrying about the fertility being exhausted from overuse, and so and that's just because we take this external chemical stuff and we inject it in the soil and kind of keep the fertility going.

Speaker 2: 27:05

So and to be fair, like you can raise a lot of ecological questions about this chemical fertilizer and whether or not sustainable and all these things, but the fact is that if Marx sort of discovered these limits, they weren't limits, we overcame them. And in fact if you read a lot of other Marxist thought, it's very much, and you can look in the grundries you can find I think there's a line about capital always is finding barriers and it overcomes these barriers right, and so Marx writes a lot about how capital sees limits and then it overcomes them through going through crisis, through technological innovation, all these kind of things. So to me, like the idea that there are these fixed static limits or planetary boundaries or whatever you want to call them, is like very antithetical to how Marx thought about the world and particularly about how he thought about capitalism.

Speaker 1: 28:07

So yeah, I think it's interesting when we talk about, like, liebig and soil depletion, which is I don't know there's or something of the first seto book and, like you said, it's not. It's not that it's completely unrelated. We do have to find a way to, like, deal with the fall out of overuse of nitrous and fertilizers, but, like we know that theoretically Not just theoretically it's actually also a matter of just like finding a suitable replacement that doesn't cause red algae blooms.

Speaker 2: 28:51

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 28:53

That this is handleable, because we've handled it multiple times. Like you know, I don't want to give libertarians Too much credit for anything, but they aren't wrong about that. The way in which, like I don't know, ecological collapse and over complexity does seem to lead to innovation and I think this is a person who, as a side note, kind of takes Joseph Tainer seriously about complexity. But like we, we do, we can't. I Think this is a way to building towards another question how much do you think the general atmosphere of the 70s for which, like that super racist population bomb book and people think I'm being unfair that book is racist.

Speaker 2: 29:43

Oh God yes.

Speaker 1: 29:48

The, the, the way, like the beginnings of what we would later call anarcho primitivism, like an almost new romanticism that talks about the Everybody, from the socialist world to the capitalist world, talking about austerity in some form or another, including the Soviet debt crisis, not just the Western ones. How much of the, how much of the fact that the eco socialist mo you as we know it Really? I mean it's not to say that there wasn't environmental work done and like actually existing socialist countries, a AS countries.

Speaker 1: 30:31

And I'm putting in quotation marks to avoid the battle, but whether or not that's a valid term, I See you out there watching and listening. I know what you're gonna say. We're not. We're not dealing with that right now, but I know that they did stuff to deal with the environment. I know they also had environmental disasters. They also have also at other times have fairly progressive environmental policy.

Speaker 1: 30:59

But eco socialism as we understand it Does seem to come out of that 70s milieu and develops Through the 90s of the children, of those of the new.

Speaker 1: 31:11

And this is the part that I think that actually John Bellamy Foster kind of betrays, without realizing it, that like it's a clear generational story, like we're the students of these people and we kind of split two ways those of us who were, yes, yes, we have to impose this on marks, and those of us who are like, oh, it's already in marks, like, and then you know that produces a whole array of thinking of which we both talked about Paul, paul Birkett, superfan.

Speaker 1: 31:43

And then it gets us into the current debates with a, with a few, you know a few kind of exceptions. I mean, there's people like a Lee Phillips who I Don't always agree with at all but who Very much does kind of take a green permithiasism as a baseline, yeah, and Talks about growth. I have argued with him, not because I Disagree with some of his policies, I'm just like. But when we're talking about Growth in the terms of productive capacity to build up Resources, it's actually a completely different thing than we're talking about growth of GDP to keep an economy on the probability side. Those are separate things and we just happen to use the same word for them, yeah, so it's confused in the way we talk about it.

Speaker 2: 32:40

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 32:42

So so I have argued with Phillips, but you seem to be kind of. You've been associated with him a lot yeah recently, and not to slander Lee, because I know him. But I think that's not. I think that's just because you've both been arguing with a particular type of degrowth right. But how much do you think the 70s informs everybody else on the Eco socialists left?

Speaker 2: 33:15

First, I mean I should. I am friends with Lee and I agree with them on lots of stuff. I'm probably less willing to sort of full-throated, be like Promethean in the sense of like our goal is to like, dominate and subdue nature. I think he's more like in that vein and I'm very much in the vein that. You know what I've embraced the term, which is really a slanderous term, but eco modernism, which has very bourgeois Elements, but to me, like Marx, marxism and I was explained this before is is a modernist perspective. It's about that. You know, like industrial Industrialization, create that, created these material conditions of that didn't exist in history. Okay, I've said that before.

Speaker 2: 34:10

So the 70s, again, I think you did have this, this real crisis moment, both in the economy and in the energy system. You know, hey, you had an energy crisis. You had a sense that, like the, the, the post-war Boom and a fluence was was basically coming to an end and it was coming against what people assumed were very natural, like natural limits, right, like they were. You know, the energy crisis was constructed as something that had to do with a Geological scarcity of energy, which it really shouldn't have, because I had nothing to do with that, but a lot of people you know. Then you mentioned Aurelac and the definitely racist book, the population bomb, and. But then you know the limits to growth and there was just a sense that, like you know, post-war era was fun, but now it's time to tighten our belts and it's time to kind of accept that you know that we all have enough right and we need to sort of do more with less right. That seemed to be the, the message from Whether you know, it's the kind of like neoliberals who are trying to say we need like budget restraint in the, you know, in the in the spending, and we need to like crush these unions that are greedy and they're pushing prices up and they're causing inflation. We need to, you know they need to tighten up. And then also, because of this environmental crisis, we also need to accept that we just we have it too good and we need to do more with less. And and so everyone kind of converged on this kind of austerity Mindset, I would say, and and it all just sort of complimented one another.

Speaker 2: 35:59

And out of that morass came a very influential school of economics called ecological economics, which basically was a full-throttle critique in an attack on Neoclassical economics and particularly Keynesian economics, which had, as you said, had really Put all its energy into Understanding the economy as this monetary system that you can measure in terms of GDP growth and that you can smooth out cycles with fiscal spending and all this kind of stuff, and these, if Biophysical, they call themselves bio, physical or ecological economists. They were like you guys are completely Misunderstanding the nature of the economy itself. You think it's only about money and markets and you're you're losing your, you're forgetting that it's fundamentally a physical economy that's rooted in energy and Energy systems. And you know, they came up with these ideas in the midst of an energy crisis. So it made a lot of sense and and they um, they even started to debate, if you can believe it, they started to propose Energy theories of value and they were critiquing labor theories. They were going against the kind of orthodox Marxist labor theory.

Speaker 2: 37:12

Value and this kind of energeticism Was always sort of rooted in the idea that fossil fuels are fixed, there's a fixed amount of them and we're just like you know, we're burning all this stuff up and pretty soon we're gonna reach the Entropy limits of these fossil fuels and we're gonna kind of, so the civilization is gonna have to go through a kind of basic collapse or just sort of down, downscaling or what is? Foster recently Cited a book that I think it's called a prosperous way down, right, it's like. It's like this assumption that because fossil fuels are abundant and because we rooted everything on fossil fuels and because we we can't figure out a way to get off of fossil fuels, we're gonna have to come up against these entropy, entropy limits and and and have to deal with it. So very pessimistic. And then it's interestingly, it's the same ecological economist who became the basic people who started shouting about peak oil in the late 90s and the early 2000s and you know, sort of it's become a kind of With these people. It's like become a boy cries wolf situation where they're always like here it is the moment where we're running out of energy and the entropy is about to collapse all around us.

Speaker 2: 38:39

But in any event, incidentally, it's, it's the ecological economist who really people like Herman Daley and then and many, many others, who who really influenced what now, I think, has become a school of ecological economics, which is degrowth, which again is is is not necessarily talking about entropy and energetic limits to growth, like those folks were, but are just saying that, like you know, obviously, when we look at Planetary boundaries and things, that it means we have to kind of reduce, we have to. You know, it's ultimately comes down. We have to do more with less, right, we have to reduce our material throughput, which has become a kind of weird way in which degrowth there is kind of justify. Okay, you want to degrow, well, what do you want to degrow?

Speaker 2: 39:29

And then they say, well, we don't want to degrow GDP because that's called recession and that's bad. Right, we want to degrow something called material throughput, which is the sort of a Sort of abstract, kind of computational understanding of all the different energy and materials that flow through an economy at any given time. And we want to kind of look at that aggregate measure and reduce it. Right, and we also, they have said, like Jason Hickl has said, we do want to reduce Energy consumption in rich countries. Only, right, we're only gonna degrow in the global north. But in any event, all these people really have their roots in that kind of ecological economics moment in the 1970s, I would argue so.

Speaker 1: 40:16

Yeah, yeah, we were talking about fair, about how energy accounting reminds me of the first attempts of it, which is Technocracy Inc. Which which, for people who don't know, was another quote utopian movement. It kind of still existed up into the odds and stuff like this, the Venus project, but that's like a weird late form when there it was a techno utopian Jetsons like future, but where everything is done on energy accounting Instead of labor accounting and they were kind of. They kind of disappeared in the 40s because they see, I mean in the 40s and 50s in the States, because they seemingly got wrapped up in anti-communism, because they sounded kind of communist to you, to people but I had to plant.

Speaker 2: 41:13

They were big on planning right right.

Speaker 1: 41:15

Everything was planned the Instead of, you know, money or labor tokens, it was going to be net energy tokens and they thought that you could develop. But, unlike the grovers, they thought you really could develop massive industrial production right based off of energy accounting and that as long as you weren't exhausting your resources and cut everything out of net Neutral in terms of energy accounting, you could grow other stuff. And I mean, you know, I mean I'm bringing up as a as kind of a when it seems like some of this ecological economics came as a kind of backlash to you, can't even as them. And I know today, since we live in neoliberalism, everybody forgets that canesianism and Marxism were historically opposed. Did they only became copacetic after. You know the Chicago school people and the in the neo-Austrians one.

Speaker 1: 42:13

But and I say that because, like someone like Jason Hinkle will say, he's, you know, an MMT or a Marxist, and also as an MMT or that means he has a direct relationship to Cain's right and he kind of sees the mechanism of energy growth can be done through monetary and fiscal policy together, which fine, and and you know, look, you and I wouldn't disagree that we need to develop a whole lot of the planet more Equitably and get rid of this uneven development problem. I mean, that's not like something we would, we would have a problem with. I just you would say. You would say I believe and I'm let you respond to this that we don't have to do it by by those clear kind of just blanket Prohibitions. In the same way, yeah, we don't have to like reduce energy consumption here.

Speaker 2: 43:11

To bring it up there yeah, and I may have said this the last time I talked to you, but it's Energy is is really an infrastructural problem, right, you know, like the, the the degrowthers talk about, well, the Global north needs to degrow their energy consumption at because of justice, right, justice for the global south, because we consume too much energy and we need to kind of Degrow so that the global south can grow their energy.

Speaker 2: 43:40

But it's not like us decreasing energy just can be transferred to the global south, because the problem with the global south is what they they don't have, like basically modern energy infrastructure, like an electricity grid and, you know, pipeline networks and Transportation, fuel depots and stuff like that and that, and essentially what they need is like a, you know, a More Marxist idea of like developing the productive forces so that they can actually have reliable electricity and and that just takes investment, right, doesn't take Moving energy, moving like calories, from the north to the south and not this, like you know, transferable commodity, like bananas or something. Oh, we should not talk about bananas, you be careful with that so it's.

Speaker 2: 44:37

You know so and and also that you know, okay, if we're, if we're gonna be on carbon-based energy forever, then you can make a case. Well, yeah, we need to degrow energy use because carbon Combustion is bad and it's cooking the planet and and therefore I I'm on board. But Everyone understands that the goal is to decarbonize the energy system and make it not run on carbon. And if we were to do that, then it's it's not entirely clear why we need to reduce it, right, and so the whole Quantitative reduction focus of degrowth is not clear if we just make our focus on Decarbonization and and you know, and decarbonization is not degrowth, it's actually a process of developing the productive forces to to invest in technologies that Generate energy without carbon, which there are many, and many of them Are not particularly profitable to capital right now.

Speaker 2: 45:39

So one of the problems is it's a classical kind of Marxist problem where the social relations of production do not allow certain low-carbon technologies to be developed because the market says they're not competitive in the market, um, so so uh, the whole to me, like the whole quantitative focus on we need to reduce and degrow is sort of a distraction from the real problem for us is, that is one of lack of control and power over investment, over the allocation of social resources, and that's what we need. And if we were able to have power over investment and over what, how productions organize, then we would be able to decarbonize and reorient infrastructure and technology in ways that could solve these problems. But we just are stuck in a world in which all the means of production is our control by capital, and they aren't that interested in solving social problems, they're interested in profit and everyone's shouting about degrowth. But really what we need to do is take power and control over over over production away from them.

Speaker 1: 46:54

Yeah, well, this is. This is actually something I think a lot about. One of the interesting kind of paradoxes that I've seen in the way a lot of people at least like Hinkle frames were growth is that it both depends on a super, on an international or super national enforcement mechanism, because I don't know how the hell you're going to do that, and yet also basically assumes simultaneously about national developmental barriers that we currently have.

Speaker 1: 47:30

Like that. Like that element of it is very strange to me. It's like it both goes beyond current national boundaries because it would have to to work, and yet also assumes and accepts national boundaries and national and our current national developmental elements as something we would still have. When you have the capacity to force states to to lower their energy uses, like that. Like that to me is is a very strange. Like it sounds intuitive at first, but when you think about what it's actually demanding as far as like how you organize an international program, even if it's like between, between the current existing nations but they're all treated as equals relative to their population or or anything like that, like it still doesn't make sense to me that you would assume these same frameworks and some of these, some of these schemas don't we mentioned half Earth socialism, which is, I think, a more explicitly anti Marxist one, but they still kind of do the same thing where it's like well, we need to take the stuff away from this part of the world and move the dispart world. And then the other thing they argue is like over a feature of the population would be engaged in agriculture and I'm like well, that means you're out subsistence agriculture and that's stupid. Like, and I'm not a get, like people have asked me like, are you against people being an accurate no? I mean like if you want to go have a garden, great, but like that's different from trying to produce. You know, in an ideal society maybe we'd all work on the farm for an hour a day.

Speaker 1: 49:10

I don't know Right. But but do I? Would, with 50% of our of our labor activity, go into food? That doesn't make sense when you don't have to. It does imply something pretty bad has happened, including a fairly massive population. To be frank, I can't see how else I would work. Yeah, it was, it's not. It's it's not. The same argument is like arguing with the primitive. Primitive is from the 90s and the odds, but it's not that far different from them. For those of you don't know, primitive ism would require us to go back to hunter gathering, which would require, by almost any day, 98% die off of the population for the, for their models of of human develop to be viable. And, and I don't know, I don't even like implicitly implying super genocide. So like are hoping for it, are saying it's inevitable. These all seem like the foster degrowth.

Speaker 2: 50:19

He explicitly called for substituting for fossil fuel, replacing fossil fuel with labor, which and he was saying this in reference to agriculture and to me when you, when you start to push these degrowth people, they all agree that you know what a lot more people got to be farmers in our future. Socialists and and I don't think they really quite understand I mean, in the United States 100 years ago there was probably 3035% of the population in our culture and now it's like 1.5%, right, it's just we've just completely gone away from a sighting which people need to be working the land to produce the basic material basis. So if your political program is about enrolling millions of people to work the land, like you really have to think about, like, how you're going to mobilize that kind of enthusiasm for that kind of program. Right, and you know you can talk about everyone can garden for an hour, but people also don't.

Speaker 2: 51:27

One thing I've been hammering on recently is people don't really understand like our food system is really rooted in, basically like a small set of grain staple crops, right, I think the world agriculture is based on basically wheat, rice and corn and that's, you know, mass industrial scale production of those crops are what underlies everyone's subsistence in food, and it's cool that you want to garden and grow some carrots and tomatoes and vegetables and that's fun and all, but like the basic food staple crops are what are what everyone's you know? I read something recently like two thirds of calories on the world that are consumed today are those three crops, right? And so you don't see people gardening wheat and corn and rice, because ever, yeah, so the so you better figure out how you're going to grow those crops, or some substitute, some grain substitute, to kind of think about how you're going to provision a society, right? Billions of people on the planet right now. And and these people that they have no answer, they just have this idea of sort of like people working in vegetable gardens.

Speaker 1: 52:45

Yeah, I have a. I have a vegetable garden. Oh, I bet.

Speaker 1: 52:48

Yeah, we do too, we all do, and I'm also big on, like you know, biodiversity and crops and stuff that I think Lee and I have actually maybe thought about this. But one of the things that I will point out, that's like dude, if I tried to live, even if I tripled the land I currently own right which, by the way, you're gonna have to trip a land to court for everybody on the planet, which I don't know how you're going to do Maybe if you do some South Korea style, like I do have my whole breakdown urban, like, urban, suburban differences through like intense housing and rural areas, but you know that's also a massive amount of building and these people want to do that. So but maybe if you I actually just you can't live off of a garden, I guess, is my point like, like and we can't go back to some sense and just cropping that. That I mean, for one, we haven't done that and this is longer than the industrial revolution since we gave up that and most of the planet. And two, when I was reading that like 50% of people going into agriculture and replace that with labor, I was like, well, doesn't that egg it into your soil?

Speaker 1: 54:15

Problems B, so we're going to exhaust the soil doing that? I don't see how we don't. Well, we can use rotational crop techniques, not at that scale too. We want to talk about geography again. There's a weird magical equalization of geography when you talk about this too, because I'm like you, can't grow wheat. Rice are.

Speaker 2: 54:44

Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1: 54:45

You know, everywhere on the planet, like, there's specifically certain places. United States happens to be one of them, russia, ukraine happens to be another. But, for example, china can't actually, and never has been able to actually produce enough rice by itself to feed its population. It's always had to trade because its soil is just not productive enough for the kinds of populations it tends to produce. That's like a known thing and it's a big deal overcoming that.

Speaker 1: 55:20

That was one of, you know, for better or worse, one of Mao's accomplishments, but the transition to it, even if you assume the best, was brutal. Like, and I'm just like, why would an earth, would you want to do that? Like you know when we could foreseeably, for example, being invested, being investing in, you know, agricultural efficiency in ways which would allow us to spare more land for other stuff, not even development. Just like you know, if we're not consuming stuff for capital, like rewilding stuff, you think you care about that. You know it just seems weird to me. When I hit that vision, I was like this doesn't even seem particularly green if I think about it hard, right, right, like. Also, do you guys know how?

Speaker 1: 56:22

Like, as a person who was born in the South and studied the change of the Southern landscape.

Speaker 1: 56:30

Plantation cropping completely stripped the Southern landscape, to the point that I mean both the weird pines and the cubs who, and all the things we associate with the South, are basically things that were brought in to quickly, like revamp and save the soil, because literally they couldn't keep it down because of the kinds of mass agriculture, agriculture they had to do with, you know, a high labor base, that labor base being slaves, but nonetheless so. It just seems to me like, if you know anything about the historical development of agriculture, this is a bad idea. The other thing you've had to fight and this is not from the Marxist degruff people and not even necessarily from the half-Earth people, but from people defending them is this idea that labor is inherently anti-environmental and dismissal of the stuff that you like discovered, as if that stuff was just superficial to environmentalism. Why do you think this is so popular? There is a very strong, not just anti-capitalist but anti-work in a bad way, strain in environmentalism and it does seem to dip into certain kinds of degrowth.

Speaker 1: 58:04

The devil is with me. Some of the defenses I've seen of degrowth actually come from these kinds of arguments.

Speaker 2: 58:12

I think it's because, for better or worse, a lot of the environmental movement developed into a movement that aimed to shut down and block various destructive industrial facilities or infrastructures, some of it very righteously. So you can think about standing rock and trying to shut down that pipeline, but there's countless other pipeline struggles. Or you can think about the old Earth-firsters in the Pacific Northwest trying to shut down logging operations, because so much in nowadays in Europe you have people, activists, trying to shut down coal mines and things like this. It's just obvious that that kind of activism is going to antagonize the industrial workers and sometimes the unions that represent those workers in those sectors. You get an antagonism where the unions are going to say we need this stuff for jobs. The environmentalists are going to say we need to shut this shit down and just repeat that over and over again.

Speaker 2: 59:33

I went to a socialism conference recently where I was like if we want to solve climate change, it's about energy systems, electricity systems. We should probably listen to the workers and the unions in those systems. The industrial union should be leading in our climates. I just said, if you're a Marxist, the workers who do the work, they have the knowledge, they have the skills to guide us to understand how to change and transform these systems. I got attacked from all these basic people that were so invested in these anti-pipeline struggles that was what socialism was to them that they couldn't see that there could be this perspective that saw the industrial unions and the workers in these sectors as they have to be a key agent of change if we're going to solve this. Like we were saying before, if we're going to solve climate change, it's actually going to require we can't just block fossil fuels. We can't just be shut and shut down. We have to actually build totally new energy systems and infrastructures. Again, like I said, decarbonize all these systems and also, by the way, as you were just saying in relation to South Korea, like re-structure our cities and do more dense housing and public transit. That's going to be a shit ton of building.

Speaker 2: 1:01:06

Who does building but industrial workers and electricians and other types of workers and unions that have been painted as the antagonists of the environmental movement? But it's those workers who would have a lot to gain if we actually had environmental politics. That was really about building a new world as opposed to just shutting down the world they don't want to see. So you're starting to see this kind of emergent. Some people it can be lame like supply side liberalism or whatever that. Ezra Klein called it, a liberalism that builds, because you're seeing a new kind of environment.

Speaker 2: 1:01:49

Even Bill McKibbin wrote an article that we need to get over nimbyism and we need to build for him solar panels and we need to build transmission lines, we need to build, build. And so people are starting to come around to this idea that actually solving climate changes is about building. And if they come around to that, then I think this sort of antagonism with workers in the environment might be overcome, because I think who's going to see more benefit in a politics of building than the building trades? There's going to be sort of natural alliances that can be forged in that kind of context. But on the other hand, we do live in, kind of we still live, I think, in a period where who's going to do the investment, who's going to do this kind of burst of investment and maybe the inflation reduction act is that, but I'm not so sure. I think it would need to be a much more public investment, kind of New Deal-esque type of boom of infrastructure building that we haven't seen in this country for decades.

Speaker 1: 1:02:58

I mean the UAW strike actually indicates this, because one of the vision lines even within the UAW strikers is how they should relate to electric vehicles. It does kind of hurt a lot of workers' bottom lines. It doesn't have to and it wouldn't necessarily, but on current conditions a lot of this stuff, a lot of this green stuff, has been and someone's been hostile to the working class as it's come in with de-unionized jobs and stuff like that. If you've ever heard about the solar sector, you kind of know a little bit about this.

Speaker 1: 1:03:33

Green energy, unfortunately, because it's came in the 90s and aughts tends to have shittier working conditions than people who negotiated their contract traditions and starting in the 50s, and that's a problem for us who care about the environment a good deal. But it's not a problem that is inherent to green development. That is literally a class, political, economic problem. It is not a hard limit. It does not have to be that way.

Speaker 2: 1:04:13

I would say that I think it's unfortunate that if you're talking about, if you only think green energy is solar and wind farms.

Speaker 1: 1:04:24

You're kind of in trouble anyway, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:04:26

Well, you're in trouble from a talk about entropy and thermo, that you're in trouble from an energy perspective, but those types of installations are just sort of naturally not conducive to labor organizing because they are temporary jobs. They are building something that is a construction job and once you build it actually I use this example there's this solar farm they're building in Texas. They got a good union contract to build it. I think it was something like 1800 construction jobs to build it. But then when the solar farm is finished, it actually is going to have two or three permanent jobs, two or three. So it's not like a power plant or like a factory, if you will, that has long term. You know union jobs that would be there forever. It's just temporary, transient, precarious type of work. That said, I do think you know if who knows if this will work.

Speaker 2: 1:05:33

But Biden wants to also onshore a lot of manufacturing of the components like solar and wind and batteries. So obviously manufacturing and factories are, could, can be quite conducive to labor. Organizing can produce kind of concentrated workers that can organize and build power in one place over a long term period. So that could, I think, be more, have more potential. But like this idea that like you go to someone who's worked in a coal fired power plant for their whole life and you say like you'll be fine, you'll, you just move to the solar industry, which means like building temporary solar construction. It's just not the same type of job, it's going to be a shitty job.

Speaker 1: 1:06:26

Yeah, that's a. I think people miss that when you talk about, you know, this current investment round. I think you're also just right, from an entry perspective, over reliance of solar and wind as a problem. I mean it just is a problem. If you know anything about physics, it's going to be a problem. The I think, part of, I think the elephant in the room on this is the nuclear energy words. And while I do realize before people at me there are tons of problems with nuclear energy although you can't at me anymore I'm not on Twitter anymore, ha but you can at me on blue sky or something but before people at me, I realized the problems with long term, with long term overuse of nuclear power. But we are seeing, in Germany particularly, that the ways people have handled reducing nuclear power is just to outsource their carbon you know, extraction and burning to another country or to I mean, they're literally building coal plants in Germany.

Speaker 2: 1:07:50

Yeah, they're insourcing it. It's absurd. I mean like they were tearing down a wind farm to build a coal mine. I believe that it was a coal mine that they're opening back up to, and they had to tear down wind farm to do it.

Speaker 1: 1:08:05

I mean, that's, that's you know. Thank you as paid, a green alliance. But that to me just seems like, even if you're skeptical of nuclear power and, like I said, I do understand that there are going to problems with the waste. I understand that there's limited amounts of fissile materials in the world. I get it.

Speaker 1: 1:08:31

If your, if your responses do Nothing, I actually don't think I don't know what people suggest we do in response to this, because it's like we know that we can't yet produce enough wind and solar. I am like you, I'm not a non-carbon energy skeptic, but I am sort of like we talk about wind and solar, I go like well, I know you guys keep on telling me that everything's eventually going to get super efficient and things have gotten a lot more efficient they have in the last 10 years particularly. But there's no way that that will ever be as efficient as you'd like it for the dreaded second law of thermodynamics readings. And unless you can convince me that cell technology can do magic, we have to have some other things. There are other. I mean, if you're in certain areas, there are things you do geothermal I don't know how people feel about hydroelectric. I don't know if that's cool anymore or not. I came from a place with a lot of hydroelectric power, so you know it's pretty much tapped out.

Speaker 2: 1:09:53

You know we've basically harnessed all the hydro we can harness.

Speaker 1: 1:09:57

Yeah, there's not any more places. We could build lakes where it would work.

Speaker 2: 1:10:01

Yeah, it's very geographically specific. Geothermal is traditionally been very rare places where you can do it, but there's very yeah, iceland's a big one but there's a new kind of breakthrough in what's called enhanced geothermal and there's a lot of optimism that perhaps we could do it in many more places. And, by the way, they're basically using the same technology as fracking to harness geothermal in this new way of drilling down, and so that's very exciting. And geothermal, if you can do it, it can provide 24 seven electricity. So it's called firm power, and so that's that's what you want renewable firm power. It would be amazing. But, as you suggested, it's not even.

Speaker 2: 1:10:58

The laws of thermodynamics is basically the fact that the weather changes. That you know. Solar and wind are reliant on the weather and the weather is unpredictable. And you know, one example I often I've been using lately is last December there was a big Financial Times headline like the UK is generating 67% of its energy from wind power and you're like, wow, that's amazing. And if you read the article like deep down, they're like, by the way, three weeks ago they were generating 2% of their energy from wind, because two weeks ago the wind wasn't blowing right and it's in. People will tell you. You know, oh, we have storage. You know the batteries are so cheap now, but the batteries really provide power for about four hours. There's no what's called long duration storage. That's kind of you need something that will provide power in the winter when it's not very sunny and it's not very windy, sometimes for weeks at a time, and basically there aren't a lot of really great options for long duration storage that they figured out right now. So essentially what that means is that when it comes to no low carbon or zero carbon electricity sources, we're basically looking at hydro, tapped out, but good, I mean, where we have it, it's great and geothermal if we can expand it, that would be awesome. And then you have nuclear, which is again proven. It's actually. You know.

Speaker 2: 1:12:33

You brought up the waste issue, which it's been. You know people worry about the waste, but the fact is the waste has never really led to any sort of any sort of verifiable death or sickness ever, because we've actually highly regulated and figured out how to contain that waste. And but in the other really important thing and this is more thermodynamics is that you know, it's really amazing that, like just these tiny little uranium pellets create so much energy by the fission process and the waste they create is so small that literally all the nuclear waste that's ever been created by power plants could be stacked. Maybe I forget how much I used to know this figure, but it's like you know. You stack it like maybe 25 feet high in a football field and it's that's all the waste ever created, right? And if you compare that to the amount of like toxic coal ash that's produced from one single, you know, coal fired power plant, it's just millions of tons every year of coal ash and not to mention pounds of emissions churning out. And so you know the waste.

Speaker 2: 1:13:48

Also, you would like to find, like long term storage for it, because right now we just store it on site in these very impenetrable steel casks which are, again, totally safe, and we figured out how to do it and no one's worried about it. But the Fins, the Finland is figuring out they're going to put this stuff deep, deep in the geological storage. And you know you, you have sort of existential questions about how do you, how do you store that stuff? And, like if some other human civilization were to find it, how do you communicate it's? It's not very good, you don't want to touch this stuff and stuff like that. But much of the discussion of nuclear waste is sort of hypothetical. You know, it could be a real problem if it ever spilled or ever did, but it hasn't because we figured out how to deal with it. And and, by the way, solar and wind they create a lot of waste too, because it's all this sort of heavy metal, toxic stuff that has to be thrown away when those, when those components are done.

Speaker 1: 1:14:51

So anyway, don't get me going on nuclear.

Speaker 2: 1:14:56

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:14:59

I am. I think that's that is. You know, that's one of the things that distinguishes you from a lot of degrovers. I don't know that all the grovers are anti nuclear In fact I don't suspect they are.

Speaker 2: 1:15:15

But a lot of them.

Speaker 1: 1:15:17

Okay.

Speaker 2: 1:15:18

If you can find me a pro nuclear degrother, I'd love to meet that person.

Speaker 1: 1:15:24

You know, and you know, as I've indicated, I I am not super enthusiastic about long-term nuclear. But when we talk about nuclear right now I'm just like no, we got to do it, like yeah, we got to do it. In the last couple years I've just seen how France has handled the situation and how Germany has in France, wins. So it's, it's, it just seems. I know that I mean to address people's concerns other than the things we talked about, like misunderstanding nuclear issue failures. There's a psychological issue here because failures were nuclear catastrophic but there's literally only been like four.

Speaker 2: 1:16:21

I've only really been one. Oh, you didn't, and it was. It was the AS, the AS regime as you referred to before yes, yes, too nervous. Wait, sorry, what did you say? Is there, is it?

Speaker 1: 1:16:40

AES, aes, yeah, yes, yeah, it's a Soviet one. Um, actually existing socialism is the is the polite term that we use for states that call themselves socialists or did call themselves socialists. The yeah, I mean the Chernobyl. I guess Fukushima is far more complicated, because you have the problems of the tsunami. Yeah, so let's see through my island. Nothing, I guess. I didn't really actually go badly. So, yeah, you got one, maybe two. So, whereas dustbite coal power plants are astronomically high, but they're diffuse and hidden. So, and particularly for those of you who really care about this stuff, it's really bad in the developing world. I've lived near some of these places where they're not using modern coal technology, or not as modern as we are, and the air quality is bad.

Speaker 2: 1:17:54

So I studied a couple of years ago. Fossil fuels kill about nine million annually and, you know, even with Chernobyl, I forget how many but it's in the low thousands that they can verify died right, and there's just not a lot of other deaths you can find attributed to nuclear power. But fossil fuels it's just this, like you said, a slow drumbeat of of of you know, asthma and other heart disease that come from air quality issues, from this stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:18:34

Yeah, it's, it's, it's bad and it's a lot. It's slightly better here because we have better scrubbers, but it's still bad. Plus, we're just going to run out of it and you don't want to pump it into the environment Like it's. There's a bunch of reasons why we should be decarbonizing as best we can.

Speaker 2: 1:18:58

You did mention there is a problem with nuclear, with what you just mentioned, which is that we could run out of uranium. Right, there's a fixed amount of uranium and so I haven't quite gone into the thorium rabbit hole and alternatives. And obviously if we can get fusion power, that's a whole nother world. But I do think that's a legitimate concern, like we could. You know we could run out of uranium and so you do have to think about that at least.

Speaker 1: 1:19:32

Yeah, but again this seems far off from degrowth. So if I was to to reframe this debate where I could, you know, bring us all back together in a happy kubai-la-ya land, which the internet has made impossible for anything ever. But maybe climate change will reverse the powers of the internet.

Speaker 2: 1:20:00

We'll see.

Speaker 1: 1:20:02

I would say like instead of pro-growth, you know, and that's kind of Lee Phillips' move and degrowth, eco-socialism. I'm just like can we just talk about like different, like the whole growth metaphor is a problem in and of itself. Like can we just talk about like a different economy period?

Speaker 1: 1:20:28

and a different relation to ecology emerging from that, and maybe we also don't have to find every justification for that in an obscure notebook by Marx. Like maybe we just do it. I don't know, Not to be to begrudge my Marxology bros, as I if anyone who watches the channel, it's actually one of them quite a bit of the time but for stuff like this I just don't think we need it. It's just not necessary. Like we can still accept a lot of what Marx has to tell us about class structure and I'm not saying this from, like this old eco-socialist. We got to bring it in. It's just kind of neutral to this. So, with that said, where would people find more of your work, Matt?

Speaker 2: 1:21:20

If you Google Matt Huber Syracuse you'll get my faculty webpage with. I try to update it frequently with all the writings I put the more public writing up top and the peer reviewed paywalled corporate academic journal stuff below that. And obviously I wrote this. It's not a new book anymore but Climate Change is class four which you can find on Verso books and I'm maybe not for long but still on the, the, the hellscape we call X now.

Speaker 1: 1:22:00

And I'm at at Matt Huber 78 on that, if you're going to waste your life on a hellscape that's called X that apparently lately can't even stay up and functional. And I don't say this as part of the woke anti Twitter mob. I just hate what it does to my psychology and find almost any other social media better, although not by a lot. But if you're going to do it, follow Matt, because I actually really enjoy your reading and I that you and Jason Moore and then you two fighting with people is basically how I keep up with what's going on in the social sphere, so it's like okay, I think both of us like to fight with people.

Speaker 2: 1:22:51

I think that's fair.

Speaker 1: 1:22:52

Yes, although, uh, I like many people your Twitter persona. You're not snarky or mean, I will say that, but you do. You do pick a lot of fights. As a person who also picks fights but is kind of snarky, mean, I appreciate that about you, the. But if you were to listen to say, jason Moore more likely to pick fights. I like Jason. I really enjoyed the interview, but I was not expecting the long discursive bias differences with John Bellamy Foster before I even asked much so. So people check out that episode if you want to check out Matt. Matt, do you appear on podcasts out of the mind? I know you do, but you can plug them if you'd like.

Speaker 2: 1:23:43

Yeah, you know I've been on left reckoning quite a few times. I love those guys. For for if the listeners aren't alienated. I was on one called a decouple, which is a pro nuclear podcast so you can look up and I talk about the Tennessee Valley Authority and electricity deregulation and all these kind of interesting politics. Another one I was on to talk about similar issues with electricity was the Bunga Cass, which is a yeah, I enjoy.

Speaker 1: 1:24:20

Alex O'Chillie and I like to be snarky together back when I was on formerly known as Twitter.

Speaker 2: 1:24:33

Yeah, you can have some snark, yeah, and I also should mention that the Jacobin show got you know rest in peace, which I was on several times and then very sad it doesn't exist anymore.

Speaker 1: 1:24:45

But yeah, yeah. As a person who who both enjoyed the Jacobin show, but also feels the need to constantly call Jacobin Geronjin because I'm an asshole.

Speaker 2: 1:25:08

Oh, study ropes, Pierre. What are you people doing?

Speaker 1: 1:25:13

You're pure, if you're not, if it's not the mountain, I don't care. No, oh man, obscure Finch Revolution jokes that are also digs, anyway. So, but yes, the Jacobin show was. I actually really enjoyed that show when it was on. So people just check out Matt's work, I guess, is my point. And if you're on, if you're on the ex landscape, his, his, his account is when to follow. Sorry, matt, though I'm not going back for it. All right, and on that note,