Petro-privatisation
Hands off our commons
The most profitable company in the world is Saudi Aramco, the state-owned fossil fuel company producing 12 million barrels of oil every day. Saudi Aramco earned $120.608B in the 12 months leading up to May 2024 despite worsening climate breakdown, increasing public awareness, a COP conference held in the Middle East and the policy push to decarbonise our economies.
Why haven’t fossil fuel companies been gutted? Why haven’t speculators disinvested? Why isn’t climate policy actively incentivising decreasing societal value?
Because fossil fuels are the material lifeblood of our economies and as long as those economies are maintained for growth then fossil fuel production will grow, too—until either climate breakdown disrupts access to resources and supply chains or until it no longer makes financial sense to spend the energy to pull fossil fuels out of the ground. For the moment, renewable energy is only adding to overall energy consumption as fossil fuel consumption increases globally every year, meaning we are experiencing an energy addition, not an energy transition. And that’s despite renewables being the cheapest form of energy available. For investors, however, renewables just can’t pull in the big quarterly returns our financial systems and growing economies have become accustomed to. It is yet another reason why a fossil-free energy system would throw our globalised industrial system and its accompanying shadow systems (like the financial system) into total disarray—renewables are incompatible with an exponentially growing, centralised system whereby an elite class monopolise the means of production and break up working class power.
I like to think of money as natural abundance (resources) that have been transformed into wealth. This is petro-privatisation, the material transformation of the commons into private resources—state owned or not. This kind of working definition is important when the mainstream narrative treats the economy as if it were independent from the material world, as if money grows on digital trees and can be endlessly expanded with no cost to the planet. The cost is evident and degrowth scholars have been warning for years now that it is impossible to dematerialise our economies. Simply, the more private money in the world, the less natural abundance in the world. It’s the enclosure of the commons in a bank vault.
It’s why figuring out financial infrastructure that have lower returns is actually incredibly beneficial in the long-run because it means the overall rate of petro-privatisation will be smaller, ensuring the conservation and even restoration of the commons/natural resources/rewilded abundance/natural world. It means the impact on our “ecosystem services” will be less overall. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean renewable energy in the current system is low impact: right now, because the value of the natural world is negligible in comparison to oil fields, fossil fuel infrastructure and server farms, reports are coming in all over the world of forests being cut to make way for solar or wind energy. It’s like we just can’t learn our lesson.
Humankind is an alchemic species. We transform the world around us and are transformed by it in kind. It’s why the idea of new social infrastructure as a trellis around which society grows is so exciting—our visions do not have to be top heavy. Yet, we are enveloped in a crisis of imagination whereby proposed solutions ascribe financial value to ecosystems in order to know that they are worth saving, and our energy solutions damage the few remaining wild spaces we have left. It’s petro-privatisation in action yet again, but under the guise of a transition. When our entire society is built around the transferral of common good to private riches through the material transformation of the natural world, swapping out one form of energy for another or changing the title deed is not going to be enough. Public ownership is critical, as is decarbonised energy, but only in the context of a human system which puts far less burden on the earth’s system and is geared to providing some of that alchemy in reverse. Imagine if we could provide housing, education and decarbonised energy to societies dependent on fossil fuels in order to free up people’s time and labour and facilitate their rewilding of natural spaces, stewardship of their corner of the world, and overall care of one another?
We cannot just take, we must also give, and by doing so expand the definition of public to include all of the material realm upon which we depend. Nothing truly belongs to us—we belong to the world.
The older I get, the more my vision of the future changes from Star Trek Luxury Space Communism, to Mad Max Gasoline Apocalypse. People like yourself are the reason that I still have any kind of shred of hope left for humanity. I'm on track to change careers and hopefully make some kind of difference in the blink of an eye that we're here. I'm grateful that I've found communities of people who understand the direness of our situation, as well as people who have dedicated their lives to understanding how there can be an ethical transition away from a deadend consumerist culture. Can't wait to read the book, you have a poetic way with words.
Well said and written Rachel. Please can you add food production to the mix? We could feed ourselves with regenerative agricultural methods and provide meaningful employment in doing so for many many people. But we need land and it’s getting impossible to access it for food growing. I’m thinking that our main hope will be that the land grabbers will start again to think about leasing it to food producers. But it will probably take a crisis to make this happen.