Jason Hickel Is A Knobhead

The interesting question is whether he's a stupid knobhead or an evil knobhead

We have Professor Hickel displaying his ignorance again. At least, I hope it’s ignorance for I’d not want to accuse someone of being this stupid on purpose. This time it’s in Tribune, that home of idiot ideas that would have best been left as a stain on their mother’s sheets.

The base idea here is that climate change means that we must have a fully democratic economy with planned socialism and do so stat. All of Hickel’s - of Tribune’s - output insists upon the same end point, we must have democratic socialism stat. All such output also rests on the very quaint notion that a truly democratic socialism would have the people who write for Tribune in charge - rather than their being the first to gain 9 grammes in the back of the neck as the cellars are reopened.

But, anyway, two highlights from this for me:

First, we must reduce fossil fuels and ramp up renewable energy. For many years, economists told us that this transition would occur automatically once renewables became cheaper than fossil fuels. That happened in 2018. Today, renewables are roughly half the cost of fossil gas. But capital doesn’t care about prices. It cares about profits. Fossil fuels are around three times more profitable than renewables. This is because renewables have a low barrier to entry and are highly competitive (driving prices down), while fossil fuels are more conducive to market control and monopoly pricing. Capital, therefore, continues to produce fossil fuels and invests far too little in renewables, even while the world burns around us. We are hostage to this deadly logic.

This is argle bargle. The idea was put forward by Brett Christophers from whence Hickel has picked it up.

To understand the economics of the energy transition, we should adopt a “profit-centric” perspective, rather than a cost-centric one. Crucially, all three companies agree that hydrocarbon production in areas such as oil remains significantly more profitable than renewable energy generation. Internal rates of return (IRRs) – the standard commercial measure of an investment’s profitability – are around 15% to 20% on hydrocarbons, or higher. Typical IRRs on renewables today are around 5% to 6%, although the majors think they can do better than existing renewables companies and lift returns to about 10%.

A big part of the reason for these differences, as the energy economist Nick Butler has noted, is varying degrees of competition. The barriers to entry to the renewables business are much lower than in oil and gas, thus increasing competition and depressing profitability.

As a result, all three European majors continue to invest vastly more resources into oil and gas development than renewables development. BP, for example, will start up seven major new hydrocarbon production projects in 2022, with at least three more following in 2023 or later.

This is so stupid that even The Ecologist - yes, them - manages to see the error:

Malm and Carton say: “The only costs of solar and wind are for upfront acquisition and installation”. But this is not the case. Christophers noted, in particular, the costs of borrowing for renewable energy companies, which can be more burdensome than for fossil fuel companies.

Other costs include for transmission and distribution, involving a massive infrastructure, requiring significant costs of management and maintenance.

Even Christophers sees one hole in his own argument - capital costs. The Ecologist adds those others.

Just to make this plain. Electricity is sold at the one price. We do not get charged different amounts for a green electron than a dirty brown one (we might well do dependent upon time of day, reliability of supply, etc, but that doesn’t change this particular argument). We have one price for the output. Whoever produces cheaper will make more profit. Because that’s just how profit works - revenue minus costs is profit. Therefore either renewables are cheaper and thus they make more profit or renewables are not cheaper and they make less profit.

There is no version of this story in which renewables are cheaper and yet they make less profit.

But then Christophers is a geographer and Hickel an anthropologist. Which ain’t great places to get our economics from. Nor even our accountancy.

So that’s just stupid.

But then there’s this:

Our politicians like to say that climate is a complex problem and difficult to solve, but this is false. It is, in fact, extremely easy. We know exactly what to do, and we have more than enough productive capacity to do it. The problem is that we are subject to the capitalist law of value and thus prevented from taking the necessary steps. So, what is the antidote to capitalism? Economic democracy. We need to extend the principle of democracy into the realm of production, overcome the capitalist law of value, and organise labour around democratically ratified social and ecological objectives.

The planners will tell us what we may have. This rather misses the point of a market economy which is one in which we tell capitalists what we want by not buying what we don’t want. See the Ford Edsel and New Coke for examples.

We need a new way forward: build new mass-based political parties that can unite workers and environmentalists in a shared project of transformation, win elections, take power, and deliver on the objectives everyone wants to achieve.

Yeah, hiya Wolfie. But now consider what is going to be wholly verboeten in this new dispensation:

Yet it also requires scaling down damaging and unnecessary forms of production — not just fossil fuels, but also things like SUVs, private jets, mansions, fast fashion, industrial beef, advertising, and the practice of planned obsolescence.

Let’s stick with fast fashion. As we know consumers buy this stuff by the multiple planeloads. Given they hand over folding for it they must like, desire and value it. We could also suggest that it’s the younger among us who value it more highly. You know, mebbe.

Hickel is writing in a magazine in England. A magazine closely associated with the political party that has just announced it wants to lower the voting age to 16. An anthropologist thinks that in such a country the demos is going to vote against the fast fashion that so many obviously like and desire?

My own suggestion is that anyone who tried that - however democratically - would have just booked their 9 grammes appointment. But then what do I know, I’m not an anthropologist, am I?

Now whether Hickel is lying about all of this - lying in order to provide some sort of argument, anything at all in order to justify socialism - or is just as thick as he sounds I plump for stupid. For an evil knobhead would be able to come up with better than this - the Devil always has had the best tunes, right?

I mean, seriously. The less profitable mode of production is cheaper? And people will vote against the very things they’re currently buying by the shipload?

Still, he works in Barcelona now not London which shows that the LSE’s anthropology department has upped its standards since David Graeber.