e.g. a village or community, a development project

Recall that for some people, the problem is opposite. You know what social or political issue you want to work on but struggle to articulate a defined research question

Industry lobbying for classifying natural gas as a renewable energy source

Interesting that this maps Neil Brenner's notionof planetary urbanism quite closely, not as conceptual claim but as a rights-based claim

Very intrigued about the ways legal archives might illuminate coal industry dynamics. Also interested in this kind of shareholder activism, contra Marty Lipton who was defending companies against hostile takeovers (in defense of employees and longer term vision) versus Benjamin Graham. Unsure if those positions are mutually antagonistic.

Unlike economists who are interested in the abstracted balances of trade flows, here Tilford Gaines is specifically interested in volumes of energy available and the investment requirements needed over a 15 year horizon. So it's a kind of applied economics that is concerned with the practicalities of supplying enough in the context of energy shortage (1973 oil embargo)

Panic versus scandal

Precisely the governance that Friedberg is referring to

CF industries where there is a real conflict of interest between firms that have to work together, e.g. contractors and project developers.

???

I.e. price competition drives env damage and competition between env goals

??

Always this BS - just as if climate scientists were making bank.

!!

Same guys as above. Also, yet another 'refutation by a single study' argument.

Discuss

Is amazon specialized? Is Facebook specialized? Google? Unilever?

So, with Friedman he needs to insist on a strict separation between economy and politics, and yet it only concerns certain kinds of political issues, i.e. it doesn't include everything involved in making the world safe for capitalism.

Yet this person thinks that absent these social objectives, finance don't wield any political power. As if merely making as much money as possible was apolitical in its means and consequences.

What is higher quality capital? Do you get $100 in your bank account and wonder if it's good quality money? Point: Capital is not just cash. It's $$ with expectations attached.

Anti-Jewish dog whistle anyone?

Is this person really arguing that pumping out GHGs is not political? That it's just neutral economic activity?

! Actually this has a history, at least w/r/t employee pensions. There was fight over whether pension management should only consider financial returns. Even though pensions are meant to provide for a life in decades to come so if they're destroying the world people will live in it kinda defeats the purpose.

This is basic arbitrage theory

Contrast the very successful efforts by tobacco to eliminate regulation in much of the developing world, where cigarettes cost ~$1.40/pack which is as cheap as possible with a small margin and a strategy to sell as much as possible

Similar to oil. 'How to make money on declining sales'. A business model that sees higher returns per unit, so less volume + higher margin, in which regulatory pressure supports a higher price. Shell has been very clear about this.

What is an activist shareholder? Does it specifically refer to ethical or political demands?

Discuss

Follow through on the link

According to this definition Uber is terrorist

How you measure things is directly and irrevocably related to how you construe value.

Nice definition of capitalism, except capitalism is not just an ideology

I don't like this language

Discuss Also the idea that government should be run like business

EPA writes rules that interpret the law based on executive direction i.e. within a presidential administration. These are frequently challenged in the courts by pro-environment and pro-business groups, and in-coming administrations can rewrite those rules but it is sometimes difficult.

Seems unrealistic in some respects. Conservatives have pushed hard to gain entitlements for hard skills, e.g. big factories in red states, and this seems like a deft political strategy. That doesn't mean soft skills aren't important, but the tendency to deindustrialize the work force also creates a left-liberal vulnerability where privilege is also associated with the risk of being economically superfluous.

Predictability as risk guarantee

This understood as government noninterference in people's choices but also pretending that corporations and private persons were somehow equivalent.

For example, if you don't like the terms of service for Apple, you have exactly one choice. Don't use Apple.

I.e. a major revision of the role of the state in governing the market, i.e. market correction, rejecting state socialism (large scale social planning projects, welfare, 'cradle to the grave') but also revising the way free market would be governed since laissez faire had so many awful consequences e.g. highly predatory of disadvantages people (why are there no banks in poor neighborhoods? bc banks don't make money on small transactions and tiny accounts. So how do poor people manage their money? through predatory lending and services companies with very high fees. The atm with draw fee example.

Note these resources

Note the 'on the record' status - many discussions are Chattam House rules when means you can't attribute anything said to particular people (closed door knowledge sharing) you can look up the details of chattam house rules if you wish.

It does not make sense to invest now in something that produces only a small gain and will need to be transitioned out of in the near future, such as natural gas electricity generation.

Killed by the recent supreme court decision

Some people feel that Cedric Robinson's conceptualization of racial capitalism is not sufficiently nuanced. See also Michael Ralph's 'forensics of capital' - and take his courses in the Social and Cultural Analysis program!

The idea here is that some whites or non-black POC are 'blackened,'

I don't know, this seems kind of weirdly culturalist

Do you find this to be convincing? There seems to be something tautological or incomplete about this explanation - what do you think?

Discuss

Who is this?

Unpack

Here they are arguing that four distinct literatures on environment, government and society are relevant.

Nice definition of political ecology

CF the WWF presentation

What does this mean?

Debate

Polanyi called the dream of a self-regulating market a utopian ideal

We were discussing how labor and environment are treated similarly by capital because they are both key sources of surplus

Polanyi argued that as capitalist production ravaged land and social relations, people would push back against it in all kinds of specific ways. This is part of his argument for why nationalist and fascism arose as a rejection of international finance.

This is an important term, we will need to unpack it

I.e., reaction against the economic orthodoxy 1930-1970, which defined the large social states after WWII with large social protection mandates such as welfare or broad middle-class focused economic policies.

Important list

Locke as key political theorist for early modern capitalism esp second treatise on government

For Lacan, the phallus is a symbol that has no inherent power; its power is simply attributed to it by its worshippers. And its critics are as enraptured by the phallus as its worshippers

"class processes"

What could they mean as a class process?

Lets break this down - owners of the means of production, labor, managerial class.

Let's think about this question carefully

What JK Gibson Graham call "distribution of surplus"

sauvage = "wild" salvage, to salvage i.e. to bring to salvation

What if you used solar installation to force landlords to change specific policies, e.g. by creating a minimum standard they needed to comply with (no outstanding complaints, building maintenance etc)

Note this and following 'analytical approaches'

What do all these provisions mean?

Seems important

Because we know that production is the key part of the capitalist process, we can always ask "when do we get to learn about how the commodity is actually produced?"

Unpack this

This helps show how standards/certification structures the decisions of producers - is it worth the hassle? Is fair trade a waste of time? Even while the way they produce tea doesn't change much from one way to the next.

Environment is front and center to its self presentation

What are they doing in their self presentation? (what is the intended and unintended effect of their speech act?)

"75% recycled" - below: because they are making a social argument in favor of aluminum on its environmental benefits

What's striking to me is this stuff - the jobs that come up in relation to environment - has little to do with the kinds of issues we care about

What are they required to disclose?

Important paragraph

low tar = low carbon?

Note methodology. But method refers more broadly to the kinds of questions you're asking, why you're asking them, and what kinds of evidence are appropriate for investigating them

Quite an interesting list of specific studies. Note how many confront environmental issues

This is very significant. It is not just an occasional effect either. Efficiency improvements by themselves are unlikely to lead to substantial environmental benefits.

Note these questions

What do you think?

I am always impressed at what a cursory statement authors give regarding actual environmental problems.

Wow. This should definitely pique your interest.

What?

So this is like a model of how society (social relations) are reproduced. If you're going to talk about change you need to understand how continuity or stability happens.

Lots of big words, I know. Parsing sentences like this will be rewarding, though, so I encourage you to consider what's going on here.

The rest of the article is an explanation of this sentence. Pay attention to the key terms.

What does this mean?

Contrasting origin stories associated with spiritual landscapes, including land formation processes; origin stories that get circulated into nationalist territorializing narratives

insane multitemporal dynamics

Complexities around mineral deposition that leads to very old resource formations as a distribution of harm

Cultural-geological-archaeological resource work to assess the very 'alive' Aboriginal land stories that embody and encode significant land/climate/environment information re long term histories, including ebb and flow of settlement tied to regional changes. Ongoing struggles with state and mining companies

decolonization as repositioning the human vis-a-vis earth processes/formations, coming to terms with the violence of extractivism, which is socially necessary at some level; constantly foregrounding indigenous communities and concerns, incl multigenerational

Does Kant say this to ape, to monkey to imitate

So it's like a a novel expression of possibility that serves to redefine how we judge what else we cast our eyes on

I see a piece of art and all of a sudden it's the standard by which everything else looks pale (eep!)

I am struck by the way this mimics the debates around property at the time (and earlier) in which a freeholding is that piece of land a freeman may dispose of at will. K is saying I may think freely. Property (of one's person) is the essential metaphor of sovereign right (Locke's treatises - himself a fully invested slaveowner). Slavery and indigenous dispossession (land) are the mode of provisioning that enables the english (at least) to conceive of personal autonomy as a kind of fragmented autonomy. Later that is replaced by markets.

You're associating the transcendental and the paradigmatic, which is really interesting. And race becomes the paradigm for differentiating people very early on, but really taking on importance in the 1500s when the Spanish take the new world and the portugese take the old world (africa) putting them at the center of the slave trade. So you have native/(European)/enslaved, but European doesn't exist yet as a category, rather it's the outcome of the process of conquest and enslavement. Christian is probably the closest concept to European in operation. Native Americans had souls in 1620. And the fact of being saved was maybe more important than the fact of being killed or killing.

ok, we're on the same page, and thank you for this specificity because Agamben here is confirming my thoughts with his reference to ensemble and problematic context in this text I'm unfamiliar with.

I mean, we would say this is something like context, environment or milieu, a 'condition' that's not a given state of affairs but a problematic situation or a predicament. The emphasis on relation (through structuralism or new materialism) does poorly in defining something like a problematical state of affairs, where many relations (absent presences) are in play.

I 'already know' that I'm the one the police are hailing, interpellating