Whose Planet? Whose Technology? Green Keynesianism And The Privileges Of Petromodernity

A critical politics of environmental technology and innovation must move beyond simplistic binaries that peg all technology and all innovation – or even, for that matter, all entrepreneurship – as inherently good or bad. Chapter 6 looks at a number of recent and ongoing proposals for technologically mediated environmental transformation, including Bill Gates Breakthrough Energy Coalition. At the core of these green Keynesian proposals lies strikingly similar visions of a sustained abundance of cheap energy, unburdened by CO2 emissions or any of the other pernicious externalities that are destabilizing the biosphere. The demand for this abundant energy, which powers the very industrial economy that is causing so much environmental harm, is never meaningfully addressed. While the sociotechnical capacity exists to transform the world in any number of ways, realizing more emancipatory (socially and environmentally) visions may require that we ‘kill the investor’; liberating our imaginations, our sciences, technologies and innovations from the narrowing and involutive logic of capital.