Notes from the Editors
A quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, global average temperature has risen by 1.5°C above preindustrial levels for over a year, placing the whole world on the edge of a dangerous precipice. To make matters worse, the policy of energy transition (replacing fossil fuels with alternative energies) and the accompanying target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, constituting the dominant approach to climate change for more than three decades, is now being openly discarded by the ruling capitalist powers with nothing to replace it. This has gone hand in hand with the takeover and destruction of the United Nations climate talks by fossil fuel interests supported by the G7 (the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Canada), with COP28 in Dubai and COP29 in Baku both presided over by present/former oil company executives. The dramatic shift in policy, we are now told, is simply an unavoidable fact of realpolitik and economic growth imperatives. Increased energy demand for economic development and perpetual warfare has trumped the concern over the future of the earth and its inhabitants.
This is the startling message conveyed by Richard Haass and Carolyn Kissane in an article titled “The Energy Transition That Couldn’t” in Project Syndicate in December 2024. A leading figure in U.S. geopolitics, Haass was a member of George H. W. Bush’s National Security Council at the time of the Gulf War and former director of policy planning for the Department of State under George W. Bush during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. From 2003–2023, he was president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main geopolitical planning body in the United States. Today he is senior counselor for the investment bank Centerview Partners and has been a principal figure in U.S. negotiations with respect to the Ukraine War. Kissane is Associate Dean at the Center of Global Affairs at New York University (NYU) and founding director of the Energy, Climate, and Sustainability Lab at NYU. Kissane herself is designated as a “Life Member” of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a corporate friendly analyst who frequently writes for Barron’s (Richard N. Haass and Carolyn Kissane, “The Energy Transition That Couldn’t,” Project Syndicate, December 17, 2024).
In their December 2024 article, Haass and Kissane present themselves as experts in Henry Kissinger’s sense of conveying the consensus of those in power. The energy transition policy, they explain, has been a failure, inaccurately describing what is actually happening, since capitalist corporations and governments have seldom decisively supported “de-fossilization,” while production (extraction) of fossil fuels and their consumption is now growing by leaps and bounds. Not only are “technological advances like hydraulic fracturing (fracking)” supplying oil and natural gas more cheaply and allowing the United States to become the leading oil and natural gas producer as well as consumer, changing the global energy map, but “emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, electrified transport, and hyperscale data centers are also driving energy demand.” Fossil fuels still constitute 80 percent of global energy, and oil and natural gas consumption have risen by 14 percent since 2013. “Premature embrace of the energy transition” and the fight against climate change, Haass and Kissane argue, weakened both economic growth and NATO’s energy security, causing the last vestiges of an energy transition policy to be abandoned in the corridors of power. They offer, in support of their thesis, the observation that the complete absence of “energy transition” from the final draft of the 2024 UN climate conference in Baku marked a “paradigm shift” away from energy transition to energy coexistence, that is, from a policy of eliminating fossil fuels, to one in which fossil fuels would remain the basis of the energy future.
One can chart Kissane’s evolution in this respect over 2023–2024. In November 2023, she was still supporting “energy transition” in traditional capitalist terms. By July 2024, she was arguing that AI, with Google alone increasing its energy consumption by 48 percent in five years, meant that the world was, if anything, headed deeper into “the energy addition phase of energy transition,” and needed “to move to the substitution phase.” A few months later, in December 2024, she was insisting, with Haass, that the attempt at an energy transition was over. Here she was following the same trajectory that separated COP28 in Dubai in 2023, which still explicitly supported an energy transition, from COP29 in Baku in 2024, which effectively abandoned it. The only climate policy that Haas and Kissane say is worthy of support today is the capitalist friendly carbon capture and sequestration strategy currently tied into big government subsidies to corporations, but which the scientific consensus says is incapable of doing the heavy lifting in combating global climate change (Carolyn Kissane, “Oil Companies Can’t Be Wished Out of the Climate Conversation,” Barron’s, November 29, 2023; Carolyn Kissane, “Energy Security and Climate Goals Are Clashing in the AI Era,” Barron’s, July 24, 2024).
Haass and Kissane are simply voices of capital on the abandonment of the energy transition, which they now say could not be achieved. As an indication of the dramatic shift taking place, U.S. multinational corporations are now racing to abandon energy transition and net zero policies/programs as fast as possible. Between December 2024 and January 2025, only weeks after COP29, the six largest U.S. banks, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and J. P. Morgan all withdrew from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a UN-backed coalition of banks, launched in 2021, ostensibly aimed at net-zero carbon emission by 2050. Each of these banks is among the twenty largest global lenders to fossil fuel companies (David Hollerith, “JP Morgan Completes Wall Street Retreat from Key Climate Alliance,” Yahoo Finance, January 7, 2025).
One reason for the ongoing shift away from energy transition policy by Western-based governments and corporations has to do with the New Cold War on China and China’s enormous competitive leadership in clean energy technology. Although still challenged by the need to move away from coal-fired plants (an area where it has had limited success so far), China’s carbon emissions are expected to peak in 2025, and, in the context of its ecological civilization policies, it has been moving faster to address environmental problems than any other country. In contrast, the West’s focus on backing the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, its economic and military support for Israel’s genocidal war against the entire Palestinian population in Gaza (with repercussions in terms of a regional war in the Middle East), and its increased military aid to Taiwan (part of China) have all added to its hunger for fossil fuels, which are seen as the key to both its capital accumulation and its imperial dominance. There is no way out of this trap for humanity, except one that transcends the current global imperial order (Scott Scheffer, “People over Profit: How China Tackled Climate Change,” Struggle/La Lucha, December 4, 2024, struggle-la-lucha.org; Lauri Myllyvirta, “Analysis: Clean Energy Was Top Driver of China’s Economic Growth in 2023,” Carbon Brief, January 25, 2024).
John B. Cobb Jr., one of the great ecological philosophers/theologians of modern times, died on December 28, 2024, at age 98. Cobb combined the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, aspects of postmodern thinking, and Chinese culture, including Chinese Marxism, to create a unified and forward-looking vision of ecological consciousness, known as process philosophy. He was coauthor with Herman Daly of For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Beacon, 1994). In 2005, he founded, with MR author Zhihe Wang, the Institute for Postmodern Development of China, and served as its first president. In 2015, he was a founding board member of the Institute for Ecological Civilization. His China and Ecological Civilization: John B. Cobb, Jr. in Conversation with Andre Vltchek (Badak Merah Semesta, 2019) showed the penetrating nature of his thinking in this area. MR editor John Bellamy Foster met Cobb during a trip to China. Commenting on Foster’s The Ecological Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 2009), Cobb wrote that it “demonstrates that Marx addressed the ecological issues with keen insight and that the historical materialist ecological tradition is alive and relevant today.” Cobb’s enduring influence is that of a remarkably ecumenical critical thinker, one who promoted a distinctive theory and practice of human ecological transformation.
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