PDF Book -- “Energy War” (Stan Goff)

  Energy War -- Exterminism for the 21st Century

  by Stan Goff

  From the introduction:

  Politically determined patterns of energy production and consumption are bringing the increasingly destabilized trends of international political economy into collision with the inherent limitations of the planet’s energy substrates in extremely significant yet unpredictable and dangerous ways.

  That relation between social power and the biosphere is not a one-way determination. The escalating disunion between the demands of world capitalist accumulation and the material availability of industrial energy is a recursive relation. Diminishing availability is factored directly and consciously into the decision-making processes of the world’s most influential political actors. So there is a powerful dialectical dynamic at work between social power and the material environment. That dynamic can metaphorically be described as a runaway train. Where that train might be headed is one of the speculations of this book. The other contention of this book is that this train has an engine, and that to stop the train, we will have to stop the engine and the people who are protecting and operating it.

  The Energy War -– which I argue has already started -– will take many forms, strategically, but also many forms culturally and ideologically. It was the patron saint of of dying British imperial rule, Winston Churchill, who said that, “In war every truth has to have an escort of lies.” That escort appears as the production of knowledge and culture -- certain kind of knowledge, and a certain kind of culture, that together constitute an ideology. And I use the term perjoratively.

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