By Jonathan Michael Feldman, June 16, 2020, Revised
“Transcendence….the unique capacity of human beings for transcending the immediate situation…depends on man’s self-awareness. This is man’s essential freedom: to reflect on past and future, to symbolize, to take responsibility for designing one’s own world…The essential human freedom of taking responsibility for one’s own ‘world-formation’ or ‘world-design’ is lost when the individual is overwhelmed by a single ‘world-design’ (mundanization). This can occur for many reasons, but it is characterized, according to [Joseph] Gabel, by the common denominator of loss of a sense of dialectical flux and by a process of reification of the world-design. The chief symptom of this common denominator is the spatialization of time in the structure of the mode of being-in-the-world of the schizophrenic and in the state of false consciousness in the socio-political sphere…And Gable notes that time is a dialectical dimension not only because, contrary to space, it is impossible to conceive of it in a state of rest, but also because its progression effects a dialectical synthesis, which is constantly being recreated, from its three dimensions of present, past and future. It is a totality which can be dissociated by reification of the past or the future, and examples of this can be found in ideological thought (reification of the past), utopian thought (reification of the future) and in schizophrenia. Such dissociation in all cases produces a perception which is out of touch with reality–a false consciousness.”
Kenneth A. Thompson, “Introduction,” in Joseph Gable, False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1975: xiii-xix.
The License to Kill
Why did a Swedish court give the oil company Preem a license to kill? On June 15th, 2020 the Land and Environmental appeals court decided to approve a major refinery in Sweden (Lysekil) that would wipe out any pretensions that the country would meet its forthcoming climate goals. The refinery would be built by Preem which reports that it is “the largest fuel company in Sweden, with a refining capacity of more than 18 million m³ of crude oil every year.” Teller Report explains: “the planned expansion is expected to increase emissions from 1.7 million tonnes to 3.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year” which “corresponds to 17 percent of today’s total emissions from all industry in Sweden — or more than six times the domestic aviation’s annual emissions.”
Teller Report notes that Preem’s goal was “to increase its production and in the new plant make gasoline and diesel with lower sulfur content, an investment of around SEK 15 billion.” The planned increase in emissions would “increase emissions from 1.7 million tonnes to 3.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year.” Preem’s new plant represented a 15 billion SEK investment. In contrast, the Swedish Wind Association states “onshore wind power now costs between SEK 10 and 12 million/MW, installed and ready to deliver power to the grid.” The 15 billion SEK was worth about $1,601,057,135.83 on June 16, 2020. A typical windmill producing 2 MW electricity costs between $3 million to $4 million. Thus, one estimate is that Preem’s investment could be used to produce anywhere from 400 to 533 windmills each producing 2 MW, i.e. 800 to 1066 MW electricity. In contrast, IEA Wind reports: “In 2017, Sweden installed 199 MW of new wind energy capacity (605 MW were installed in 2016).” Analysts in the UK and USA argue that wind power makes substantive contributions to decreasing greenhouse emissions. Garvin A. Heath, a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the U.S., and his colleagues have explained that “wind energy produces around 11 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated.” In contrast, coal produces about 980 g CO2/kWh and natural gas produces about 465 g CO2/kWh .
A report in Dagens Nyheter explains that part of the motivation for sanctioning Preem relates to EU regulations. The Land and Environmental appeals court argued “that high carbon dioxide emissions were not a reason to stop Preem’s expansion in Lysekil.” The company’s activities were “covered by the EU’s emission allowance trading and with current legislation Swedish authorities are not allowed to set limits on their emissions.” Johanna Sandahl, President of Naturskyddsföreningen, argued: “Something is fundamentally wrong when we have a climate law that says that our emissions should be down to zero in 2045” and the legal framework “allows an activity that can be Sweden’s largest source of emissions.”
The license to kill was granted by a court (or through the EU regulatory system) which has no appreciation for the future and hence any knowledge of it. As we will see, this license can also be sustained by those those who have no appreciation or knowledge of the present, but only the future. History appears to unfold as if there are no contingencies, no historical evolution, no choices in the alternative ways to design the economy until there is some disruption created by a crisis, social movement or network of alternative designers.
Intersectional Cliche by the Numbers: The Dead Weight of the Past
Who are these people? As someone concerned about the overuse or overdose of intersectional analysis, it is interesting to note that older, white male Swedes are the key representatives on the board of directors. A simple analysis of Preem’s ten person board of directors provides us with some useful details on their backgrounds.
First, let us look at the race/ethnicity variable. 100% of the ten board members are white. The vast majority have typical “Swedish” last names, i.e. there are no last names associated with “new Swedes.”
Second, let us look at the gender variable. As much as 80% of the ten board members are men. Two thirds of the employee representatives are women, but all of the non-employee representatives are men.
Third, let us look at the age variable. The average age of board members is approximately 58 years old. The oldest three board members are about 68 or 69, with the youngest 35 years old.
Fourth, let us look at the ideological factor. They are all–100%–in love with oil or in love with the idea that they can bring Sweden a clean oil. This notion is schizophrenic and debated as if it were a serious idea.
What do we make of all these people? Do they represent the dead weight of the past, i.e. a Sweden that is white, male, old and in love with oil?
The Repressive Tolerant Content of their Characters
We have in total a board dominated by older, white males. Yet, of course, not all older white males are part of an industry designed to to push the planet nearer to ecocide. One has to judge persons by the content of their character. Many white, male Swedes who are older comprise the forefront of the Swedish ecological movement. Still, why does Preem so easily live up to a politically (in)correct cliche regarding who actually runs Sweden? The answer could be that oil ecocide comes out of normalized Sweden, a culture where amoral things are normalized. Herbert Marcuse referred to the concept of repressive tolerance in his essay by the same name, i.e. here we see the court tolerate the repressive character of the oil economy.
The normalization of oil is associated with people who normally run Swedish society. And the normalization of oil is associated with the kind of cliches found in other industries. For Saab Aerospace and the Swedish military, arms exports and the military economy are part of “defense,” peace building missions and gender equality campaigns. For Preem, we learn that their vision is that they are “leading the transition towards a sustainable society” by developing both oil and maybe other fuels. A war institution makes peace. A cute little bear named “Bamse” is used to name a missile system. An oil company makes sustainability. In such Orwellian nonsense corporate power utilizes progressive (or friendly) symbols to sell its product.
How is this obfuscation possible? When it comes to arms exports, the romance between feminism and weapons became accepted as part of a process of bourgeois feminism as recent research at Stockholm University shows. When it comes to oil, the entrepreneurial romance of the environmental movement and certain ecological scholars, has created a perverse result. Just as certain environmentalists embrace corporate and entrepreneurial language, so now do corporations embrace ecological language. Just as gender theorists try to appropriate feminist theory to understand security outcomes, so too have security enterprises and the military returned the favor by similarly appropriating feminism in the form of equality tropes.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with developing a feminist analysis of security issues, but that analysis won’t be worth much if it does not incorporate an anti-militarist analysis. Likewise, there is nothing wrong with linking entrepreneurship and ecological transformation–as in the Green New Deal–but that linkage won’t mean much if a deep ecological perspective (to dismantle the ecocide economy) is lost. The environmental movement argues that Preem’s claim that it is a green company is false. Yet, is this kind of argument sufficient to stop dystopian industries? Notice, the Swedish peace movement often deploys moral arguments to stop weapons exports. The Swedish environmental movement deploys a deconstruction of the morality of oil companies. Yet, these arguments don’t seem sufficient.
There is an argument that Preem will promote clean fuel and do the global community a favor. This is a kind of accounting argument that I don’t find very convincing. If Sweden invested more funding into even cleaner technologies and exported those, it might then be doing the global community an even greater favor. Basically, anything that keeps the oil producers going is not doing the ecosystem a favor. Cleaner oil is just pushing the tipping points further into the future, it does not radically reverse the trajectory of reaching ecological tipping points.
The Almedalenization of Everything
Why then do anti-militarism and deep ecological perspectives get lost? The reason is that there is a deep patronage system in which bourgeois, corporate values permeate an incestuous culture populated by foundations, political parties, journalists, academic fellow travelers and others who intermingle. This phenomena is brilliantly symbolized by the late culture of Almedalen where a social movement inspired event is now populated by corporations like Google giving out free pens and using words like “hack” and “counter-culture.” Silicon Valley may have intermingled with hippie culture, but it never intermingled with anti-militarist or deep ecological culture in any meaningful way. The hip corporate culture renders vapid much of the terrain once occupied by peace and environmental movements by its now normalized, Orwellian speech, which is taken seriously by polite journalists, cultural critics and others. Almedalen often represents the obliteration of a more radical past, by fetishizing what is in the present and future. There are always a diversity of views, but it is this presence which is like a cloud hanging over events. Thus, a host of leading figures associated with the liberal intelligentsia deconstructs the radical right but only can do so by offering peans to globalization which is linked to cosmopolitanism.
Ironically enough, the logic of accumulation (or profit making and job creation) has helped Preem carry the day. An article in Expressen explains that Preem’s plan expansion would involve creation of “more jobs and reduced global carbon dioxide emissions” in part by treating “heavy oil, a residual product of today’s production, in a more environmentally friendly way than is done elsewhere in the world” even if local carbon dioxide emissions would increase signficantly. Essentially, Preem is making a kind of green jobs argument.
On yesterday’s Aktuelt network news show one learned about claims regarding all the jobs that Preem’s ecocidal refinery would create. The oil industry can only exist because the reconfiguration of alternative designs are abandoned. Concretely, can the cultural elites really imagine a future, post-carbon world?Sometimes we see a critical discussion, but sometimes it disappears just as quickly as if in a magic trick. In any case, one often gets the idea that the Green New Deal concept had never existed. I performed some searches in Google to learn more. A search today of the two terms “Green New Deal” (a Swedish formulation of this term in 2009 never caught the imagination of the Swedish cultural elite who actually prefer the English expression) and “Dagens Nyheter” yielded only 7,980 hits. Another search today of “Preem” and “Dagens Nyheter” yieled 19,000 hits, i.e. more than twice as many. A search of the two words “Preem” and “SVT.se” yielded 31,400 hits. A search of “Green New Deal” and “SVT.se” yielded 9,980 hits. Here Preem is represented three times as frequently. The results are suggestive of an imbalance even if they are not conclusive.
These word searches offer starting inquiries only because a more thorough content analysis must be based on sentence rules, i.e. rules on how words are constructed in actual sentences in their negative, positive or ambivalent contexts. Let us think about counter-arguments. One could say that the company Preem has been around for a while and that the Green New Deal concept in Sweden maybe only dates back to 2009. Yet, if we continue to probe we see how Preem wins its public relations and media power battles by sins of omission by its nominal opponents. The oil victories don’t just occur because of greenwashing and moral duplicity.
Jobben, Jobben, Jobben: It’s Not Just Greenwashing because It’s also Jobswashing
We learn more about how the Green New Deal or green conversion option is compromised in the discursive sphere through another kind of search. When I searched these two words in Google: “Lysekil” and “jobben” (the refinery town’s name and the word for jobs in Swedish) that yielded 101,000 hits. The word “Lysekil” could refer to the town of the refinery or the refinery itself. When one searches for “Lysekil” and “Green New Deal,” that yielded only 1,780 hits. Too few make the connection of a Green New Deal to an alternative to this refinery or job creation in this town. A search of “jobben” and “Green New Deal” yielded 8,240 hits. So, the Green New Deal concept is not connected to job creation in a very significant way. In contrast, the far-right Swedish Democrats (SD) are able successfully recruit labor union members by promising them jobs and a bright economic future. While these may be false promises, they are part of a recruitment campaign that seems far more successful than the Green New Deal. How is it that the far right can do what the environmental movement can’t do?
Is it just the name of the town “Lysekil” that generates all this internet activity? Three words in a Google search without quotes: Preem raffinaderi jobben (Preem, the company; refinery; and jobs), yielded 27,800 hits. The phrase “grön omställning” (green conversion) yields 96,000 hits in Google. So there seems hope. Yet, add the word “oil industry” in Swedish, oljeindustrin, and that number drops to 8,760. A search in Aftonbladet of this phrase “grön omställning” yielded 21,534 hits. Yet add the word oil industry in Swedish, oljeindustrin, and that number drops to only 430. One gets the impression that green conversion is a “floating signifier” or is thrown around as an abstract ideal that is never meant to apply to an actual industry.
One also gets the same impression that green conversion has no specific industrial reference when looking at academic citations in Google Scholar. Here the data seem far more conclusive in betraying sins of omission. An article by Wei He and colleagues entitled, “The Potential of Integrating Wind Power with Offshore Oil and Gas Platforms,” published in Wind Engineering, Vol. 34, No. 2, in 2010 was cited only 39 times by this search engine’s estimates. A similar article entitled by Wei He and colleagues, “Case Study of Integrating an Offshore Wind Farm with Offshore Oil and Gas Platforms and with an Onshore Electrical Grid,” published in the Journal of Renewable Energy in 2013, was cited only 22 times. Magnus Korpås and his colleagues published an article entitled, “A Case-Study on Offshore Wind Power Supply to Oil and Gas Rigs,” in Energy Procedia, Vol. 24 in 2012. That article was cited only 38 times. In a rational world one would assume that the Swedish media would be chasing after these authors, publicizing their research and interviewing them on television. This is not a rational world. What is shown is a debate on whether or not Preem’s oil is clean or dirty or whether or not the jobs promised by an oil refinery are worth the price. The faulty premise of the jobs arguments are not interesting to some people.
Why don’t the names “Wei He” and “Magnus Korpås” show up in the homepage of Naturskyddsföreningen? I separately put these names together with the leading environmental organization in Sweden on Google and I also got no meaningful match. Shouldn’t green conversion possibilities for the oil industry the main event for a serious environmental movement? Or, should they simply deconstruct the oil industry as a dirty industry, playing a defensive game rather than an offensive one? Has the environmental movement not done its job properly or (more charitably) has it lacked the appropriate media power to carry forth its argument? A Google search of three words: “Greenpeace” “Green New Deal” “jobben” yielded only 298 hits. A search of these three words: “Naturskyddsföreningen” “jobben” “Green New Deal” yielded only 106 hits (the first term representing Sweden’s major environmental association). A search of “Jordens Vänner” “jobben” “Green New Deal” (the first term representing Friends of the Earth) yielded only 9 hits. In any case, as I argued in November of last year, the Swedish Green Conversion effort has been mired in various difficulties. When turning to the homepage of Naturskyddsföreningen, one searches for “jobben” and gets 51 hits. Turn to the homepage of Preem using the same term and one gets almost double the number of hits, i.e. 96 hits. Of course, one can say the first organization’s business is to protect the environment and the second one’s business is to create jobs. Think that way and all is politically lost, however. The media filters of mainstream journalism cannot explain why leading environmental groups are not turning to academic scholarship to combat the jobs arguments of Preem.
There are, however, various Green conversion efforts in Sweden, e.g. Grön omstart on Facebook has 2,939 members. Yet, despite such noble efforts the idea that green conversion represents a significant job generator never seems to have established itself. As noted, the term “Grön omställning” itself yields an impressive 96,000 hits. Yet, the idea of a “green conversion” is also minimally connected to job creation. When searching for the number of hits between “green conversion” and “jobs” in Swedish (“Grön omställning” “jobben”), that effort yielded only 8,700 hits, i.e. very few compared to the association between refineries and jobs. One gets the idea that green conversion in the Swedish media sphere has been successfully neutralized as a competitor for job creation horizons when compared to the oil industry.
What is to be done?
One is tempted to drop the discussion with the dreary yet suggestive details above. There are alternatives, however. First, one needs to organize and link ecological transformation to quality jobs that support integration (systematic social inclusion), unionized work and sustainable outcomes. This kind of political move might help transcend the fragmentation of various social movements.
Second, one needs to move from a “degrowth” concept into a concept to divest and dismantle the oil industrial complex. The inability to win the jobs argument means that the “degrowth” mantra is merely an indirect mechanism to further complicate decarbonization efforts. Instead, the key goal should be to dismantle the fossil fuels industry and create a clean energy industry not held hostage to oil interests. Or, fossil fuel companies’ assets should be converted to clean energy production after their ownership and board structures are systematically transformed. We of course need to grow mass transportation as part of green conversion as well as sustainable cities and housing. The degrowth argument represents what certain scholars would view as a form of utopian thought based on “reification of the future.” Strangely, while the oil industry works hard at obliterating our futures, parts of the ecological movement are simply ahistorical and simply project a future into being without the present that gets us there, i.e. the present represented by green conversion processes based on the retraining, technological retooling, and job creation necessary to win on the political, economic and media frontiers of change. The past is obliterated by those engaging in “social amnesia,” i.e. if you think you can get rid of the oil industry without providing alternatives to its growth, its promises of jobs, its economic impacts you’ve learned nothing from the history of environmental fights lasting forty years.
Third, one has to engage in a media mobilization that promotes this agenda without being neutral with respect to the interests of oil companies and a systematic ecological transformation. Presently, media debates often translate oil development as a jobs issue while degrowth advocates remain totally unconvincing given the threat of unemployment created by the corona crisis, globalization and automation. At the very least we should think about the social control of business and cooperative/municipal alternative job creation platforms.
