One way of conceptualizing this history of dynamic non-equilibrium, which seems to have a promising but surprisingly overlooked potential for our purposes, is the theory of long waves of capitalist development. The dents in the curve may hold the secrets to its direction. 3 But the process of growth proceeds through upsetting contradictions rather than an even, incremental addition of output, which impel the expansion and renew the momentum again and again, and it might be these contradictions and the convulsions they generate that do most to produce and reproduce the fossil economy on ever greater scales.

2 To be sure, growth as such rarely ceases rather it sticks to a secular trend, the many deviations and fluctuations moving around an upward curve.

It moves in spurts and slowdowns, creates and destroys, accelerates and decelerates, clears the ground of established structures for the building of higher stages and tumbles, without fail, into depressions. Capitalist growth is a singularly turbulent process. The easiest way to describe the correlation of the two would be to conceive of capitalism as a smooth, linear curve of perpetual expansion, emitting a stream of CO2 just as steadily enlarged. This observation, however, does not solve the question of how exactly capitalist growth has been linked to fossil fuel consumption over the course of its history it merely poses it. The more growth you have, the more forceful the push will be, and the stronger the blast. If one of the handles is the ceaseless growth that defines capitalism, the other is made up of coal and oil and gas out of the nozzle comes a blast of CO2 that fans the flames of the fire of global warming. By this step - surely one of the most fateful in its history - capitalism sired a peculiar formation I describe as the fossil economy, most simply defined as an economy of self-sustaining growth predicated on the consumption of fossil fuels, and therefore generating a sustained growth in CO2 emissions. It then adopted fossil fuels, coal first of all. Originally - and this holds however one wishes to date the birth of this mode of production: to the fourteenth, sixteenth, or late eighteenth century - capitalism relied on what would today be called renewable energies: wood, muscle, wind, and water. The latter have grown in tandem with the former, not coincidentally but constitutively. Only those who most stubbornly hold fast to their ideological blinders would today deny that there is a link between capitalism and emissions of carbon dioxide.

Fossil capital by andreas malm