Forget the Green Technology – The Hot Money Is in Guns

December 1st, 2007

Naomi Klein gets close, but misses the mark. For those of us who understand clean, green fascism, it’s not a question of clean energy technology OR armaments and surveillance; it’s both.

You won’t have viable clean technology without a total, fascist lockdown. I’ve said it from the beginning, and I’m saying it now. The technology to build the techno green utopia has been around for easily thirty years. Sorry folks, that’s not how it went, and that’s not how it’s going to go. The primacy of new killing technologies and technologies of political control go hand in hand with the clean energy systems.

The Blackwater USA mercenaries and the Global Warming fart tax crowd are on the same team, whether they realize it or not. Control access to energy and you control pretty much everything, and collect a handsome tax on pretty much everything as a result. The more readily available the energy, the more accessible it is to everyone, the more control will be required to maintain the established order and keep people continuously paying corporations for the privilege of being able to turn on the lights and cook a meal.

The problem is not energy scarcity, but rather energy abundance, and the follow on problems that energy abundance creates for Them.

Sheesh! What do I have to do, write a book about it!? Is this clear to anyone but me?

Via: Guardian:

Anyone tired of lousy news from the markets should talk to Douglas Lloyd, a director of Venture Business Research, which tracks trends in venture capitalism. “I expect investment activity in this sector to remain buoyant,” he said recently. Lloyd’s bouncy mood was inspired by the money that is gushing into private security and defence companies. He added: “I also see this as a more attractive sector, as many do, than clean energy.”

Got that? If you are looking for a sure bet in a new growth market, then sell solar and buy surveillance: forget wind, buy weapons.

This observation – coming from an executive who is trusted by such clients as Goldman Sachs and Marsh & McLennan – deserves particular attention in the run-up to the United Nations climate change conference, which takes place in Bali next week. There, world environment ministers are supposed to come up with the global pact that will replace the Kyoto agreement.

The Bush administration, still roadblocking firm caps on emissions, wants to let the market solve the crisis. “We’re on the threshold of dramatic technological breakthroughs,” the American president assured the world last January, adding: “We’ll leave it to the market to decide the mix of fuels that most effectively and efficiently meet this goal.”

The idea that capitalism can save us from climate catastrophe has powerful appeal. It gives politicians an excuse to subsidise corporations rather than to regulate them; and it neatly avoids a discussion about how the core market logic of endless growth landed us here in the first place.

The market, however, appears to have other ideas about how to meet the challenges of an increasingly disaster-prone world. According to Lloyd, the really big money – despite all the government incentives – is turning away from clean-energy technologies, and is banking instead on gadgets that promise to seal wealthy countries and individuals into hi-tech fortresses. Key growth areas in venture capitalism are private security firms selling surveillance gear and privatised emergency response. To put it simply, in the world of venture capitalism, there has been a race going on between greens on the one hand, and guns and garrisons on the other – and the guns and garrisons are winning.

5 Responses to “Forget the Green Technology – The Hot Money Is in Guns”

  1. il says:

    “Is this clear to anyone but me?”

    Crystal!

  2. Harflimon says:

    Abundance is equal to freedom. Look at the most free people in the world these days and it doesn’t really matter what country you’re in; it just matters if you have more than enough of the things you need.

    And as we all know the last thing people with power want is more freedom for the people they hold power over. Most power comes from (false)scarcity as I see it. It’s the biggest scam out there, even bigger than the banking/money changing scam. Because if people had an abundance of things who would need billions of pieces of paper(or digits in a computer)? Really everyone from the politicians to the bankers and even the churches need scarcity to keep control over people.

    I honestly feel that most of the old power structures would collapse if every person on earth had enough food, water, and energy.

  3. Kevin says:

    @ Harflimon

    You wrote:

    I honestly feel that most of the old power structures would collapse if every person on earth had enough food, water, and energy.

    I absolutely agree with you. The problem with this idea is that a small percentage of people (6%, if you are to believe the number in Political Ponerology) aren’t satisfied with enough. For this 6%, it’s all for them, and F the rest of us. F us twice, if possible.

    I have some ideas about what I think most people would consider to be very sensible solutions. Of course, these ideas have absolutely no chance of seeing the light of day outside the fantasy world of the essay, but I’m curious to know any ideas you have for this.

  4. Harflimon says:

    What we need is a decentralization of innovation. Most new discoveries happen in corporate labs and universities around the world, where the people funding have the most authority. Now with the information revolution it’s becoming possible to cut out the governmental/corporate middle men and try to get it out to the people faster.

    That’s all idealistic of course and I have no idea how to make it happen, but it is possible that scientists and innovators will get tired of having their ideas exploited and start doing something radical. The biggest emerging market in my eyes is the information market. The big question is whether it will follow the old rules or start making it’s own.

  5. messianicdruid says:

    Workers {and innovators} of the world, disperse! Do not unite into political blocks to fight facsism, rather spread yourselves thinnly over the whole planet into every nook and cranny. Six percent cannot control the rest without assistance in standing still and in hammering one another’s chains. Anyone with ideas {innovations} must disperse them to the widest possible audience at the earliest opportunity. The motivation is the understanding that a rising tide of “enough” sets us all free. Our “longspoons” are to feed one another instead as weapons to fight over leftovers.

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