A sweeping study of how capitalism first promoted fossil fuels with the rise of steam power - and contributed to the worsening climate crisisThe more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess? In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy - but rather superior control of subordinate labor. Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours, as it continues to do today.Sweeping from nineteenth-century Manchester to the emissions explosion in China, from the original triumph of coal to the stalled shift to renewables, this study hones in on the burning heart of capital and demonstrates, in unprecedented depth, that turning down the heat will mean a radical overthrow of the current economic order."The definitive deep history on how our economic system created the climate crisis. Superb, essential reading from one of the most original thinkers on the subject." - Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine
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How capitalism became caught up in the carbon-burning trap
"Malm forcefully unmasks the assumption that economic growth has inevitably brought us to the brink of a hothouse Earth. Rather, as he shows in a subtle and surprising reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution, it has been the logic of capital (especially the need to valorize immense sunk investments in fossil fuels), not technology or even industrialism per se, that has driven global warming." Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Ecology of Fear "Fossil Capital is a theoretical masterpiece and a political-economic-ecological manifesto. It looks unblinkingly at the catastrophe that could await human society if we fail to act on the words System Change or Climate Change. It is a book that I will return to again and again-and take notes." John Bellamy Foster, University of Oregon, author of Marx's Ecology "The definitive deep history on how our economic system created the climate crisis. Superb, essential reading from one of the most original thinkers on the subject." Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine "Will climate change make us evaluate differently the achievements of George Stevenson and James Watt, Industrial Age pioneers? For it was in Britain, which accounted for 80 per cent of fossil fuel combustion in 1825, that "the fossil economy" began. Malm's history is expansive and detailed, and often quite terrifying in its analysis. Essential reading." Herald Scotland
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How capitalism first promoted fossil fuels with the rise of steam power

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781784781323
Publisert
2016-01-12
Utgiver
Vendor
Verso Books
Vekt
855 gr
Høyde
235 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Dybde
33 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
496

Forfatter

Biographical note

Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. His work has appeared in journals such as Environmental History, Historical Materialism, Antipode and Organization & Environment. He is the author, with Shora Esmailian, of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War, and of half a dozen books in Swedish on political economy, the Middle East and climate change.