The process commonly referred to as business-as-usual has given rise to dangerous climate change, but its social history remains strangely unexplored. A key moment in its onset was the transition to steam power as a source of rotary motion in commodity production, in Britain and, first of all, in its cotton industry. This article tries to approach the dynamics of the fossil economy by examining the causes of the transition from water to steam in the British cotton industry in the (...) second quarter of the nineteenth century. Common perceptions of the shift as driven by scarcity are refuted, and it is shown that the choice of steam was motivated by a rather different concern: power over labour. Turning away from standard interpretations of the role of energy in the industrial revolution, this article opens a dialogue with Marx on matters of carbon and outlines a theory of fossil capital, better suited for understanding the drivers of business-as-usual as it continues to this day. (shrink)

Between 1971 and 1975 Australian building industry workers withdrew their labour from environmentally irresponsible projects and, in coining the term ‘green ban’ to describe their action, originated the political designation ‘green’. Alienated from the products of their own labour and committed to ideas about the social responsibility of labour, they directly confronted what Lamarche [1976] has identified as the ‘planning role’ of property capital. They hindered the means of production by withdrawal of labour and also the reproduction of the relations (...) of production by successfully challenging the legitimacy of private appropriation on the grounds of its adverse ecological effects. Green bans in New South Wales halted development worth A$5 billion and had a significant impact on environmental legislation, town planning and public attitudes. (shrink)