Jacobin60%
We Can’t Rely on Green Capital for Decarbonization 39%
By Matt Huber59%
7/12/2026, 1:55:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 28 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, False Dilemma, and Biased Writer Voice, with Politically Left Leaning Bias as the most egregious example at 55.9% saturation with 415 hits. Analysis detected 2,210 faulty-reasoning hits from 743 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 44.5% and a BS Rank of 39% (13,420 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 61.30% of the article peer group.
Thea Riofrancos has an interview out in New Left Review where she discusses the concept of “green capital” and what it means for the Left’s climate organizing.
In the interview, she says we should “maybe . . . endorse a paradoxical position: that a stronger fraction of green capital would create better terrain for left-wing organizing than the current situation, dominated by the tech oligarchy and the war-making machine.”
Elsewhere I responded to this claim arguing that green capital is a somewhat incoherent category.
Much of what we think of as green technology is produced in China (with a certain degree of state planning and control different than many capitalist contexts), large portions of “green” investment are unprofitable without mass public support, and that capital itself — specifically financial capital — is very happy to invest in “brown” (fossil fuel) capital alongside the green.
Riofrancos had some productive responses to my claims, which led to some additional thoughts.
Insofar as we think of a green capital sector, it is one that produces commodities for sale on the market available to private market participants: e.g., solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles (EVs).
As I said on X, this stands in contrast to what I think is most consequential for actually effective decarbonization: public infrastructure investments in transit, transmission, and carbon removal, just to name a few.
Fred Stafford has often made the important distinction between electricity technologies that are merely “household consumer goods” (he also calls it “personal property”), on the one hand, and public infrastructure on the other.
It is the latter that will yield decarbonization at scale.
It is easy to imagine a world where green capital provisions private green commodities in a way that exacerbates inequality.
Call it K-shaped decarbonization: green commodities primarily for wealthy homeowners — rooftop solar, EVs, heat pumps — and capitalist offshoots of electricity deregulation such as solar independent power producers (aligned with Wall Street’s hunger for lucrative tax credits).
Green capital will yield decarbonization for the few, but real, effective climate action will need a much more robust public-oriented politics of public investment, public goods, and public ownership.
As Thea observes in her interview (which begins with mention of the K-shaped economy), much of Joe Biden’s tax-credit model of climate policy ended up disproportionately benefiting wealthier consumers: “As many have pointed out, the consumer rebates — for buying an electric vehicle or installing a heat pump in your house — were, unsurprisingly, captured by the rich.”
Dharna Noor has good reporting on this dynamic in the Guardian.
(A slight wrinkle here is that the tax credits were means-tested to avoid the richest consumers taking advantage of them.
But the general point that they disproportionately benefited wealthier professional-managerial-class types stands).
I still don’t think the strength of green capital matters much for the prospects of left climate organizing.
In fact, we could even posit that green capital’s success creates a political base among the upper-middle class who believe they’re already “doing their part” and, therefore, that broader political struggle and action is unnecessary.
But actually flattening the emissions curve toward net zero will require so much that is not profitable for capital.
An obvious example here is carbon removal, where a substance must be disposed of rather than sold.
The problem is the climate doesn’t care about your feelings — more precisely, it doesn’t care that you got an EV, rooftop solar, and a heat pump.
Climate change is a public crisis of our atmospheric commons that requires coordinated planning and long-term infrastructure investment and restructuring.
Green capital will yield decarbonization for the few, but real, effective climate action will require a much more robust public-oriented politics of public investment, public goods, and public ownership.
The New Deal is our best model for what this might look like.
In a context of working-class revolt, it harnessed the public sector to make “long-range” investments in shared infrastructure like bridges, libraries, pools — and highly relevant to climate, mass electrification.
But realizing such a vision means digging ourselves out of the neoliberal hole we’ve been stuck in for decades to once again put effective state capacity and public planning at the heart of our political economy.
(On this note, Zohran Mamdani’s moves toward centering public sector efficiency and delivery are especially inspiring.)
Biden’s approach of simply throwing tax credits at the problem and hoping green capital will save us is not enough.
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100%flagged-word coverageThea Riofrancos
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