The planet is burning – and capitalism is holding the hose

To get to net zero, annual investment in renewables needs to be in the range of $5 trillion to $6 trillion. The International Energy Agency estimate puts it at $5.6 trillion. Currently the spend is just $2.1 trillion. However, if we add in the money wasted on the military amounting to $2.7 trillion, the combined total would be $4.8 trillion, approaching what is needed. But catastrophically, the capitalist class is prioritising the arms race, which is why military spending exceeds spending on the planet.

Capitalism has both an innate as well as an adaptive inability to manage the green transition. Innate or inbred because the capitalist purpose for being is profit and to maximise profit, cost prices must be minimised. The only costs the capitalists recognise are the ones they must pay cash for, which forms their cost price. To reduce their cost price, they necessarily exploit labour and the planet. Thus, they inevitably end up harming the planet.

In terms of adapting, two outstanding examples illustrate how sectional interests and fragmented consciousness prevents them acting in an organised manner to execute the transition. These two examples are firstly, the failure to adopt exchangeable batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and secondly, the failure to provide large-scale electricity storage to make best use of intermittent or variable solar and wind generated electricity.

There are only advantages – and many of them – to using exchangeable batteries.

1. Without batteries the cost of a basic EV could be as low as £10,000 reducing the cost barrier to purchasing these vehicles accelerating their uptake.
2. With exchangeable batteries readily available from the equivalent of a petrol station, range would no longer be an issue, the very issue the opponents of these vehicles have used to dissuade customers from buying them.
3. Using the equivalent of filling stations, the infrastructure needed to charge them could be rationalised. Instead of roads being dug up to cable in individual charging stations, only these unified charging stations need cabling in.
4. These unified charging stations can also take advantage of lower off-peak rates to charge their batteries instead of individual drivers using individual chargers 24 hours a day.
5. The time to exchange batteries will take no longer than filling up with petrol or diesel.
6. Drivers can take advantage of newer batteries as they become available with longer range.
7. Drivers will pay for the rent of the batteries only when they charge them which in any case will be cheaper than filling up with petrol.
8. The bank of batteries could be financed by the energy companies giving them an income stream thereby helping wean them off fossil fuel extraction.

So, as we can see, there really are only advantages to using exchangeable batteries.

So why has this not happened? Firstly, in the age of neoliberalism, the state no longer represents the general interest of the capitalist class. Instead, due to lobby groups and to governments being stripped of their own professional decision-making departments forcing them to rely on outside consultants, governments have ended up representing sectional interests.

This has allowed individual groups of ‘entrepreneurs’ to set policy. One of them is Elon Musk. He refused to entertain exchangeable batteries, because at the time, Tesla cars had the longest range out of all the competitive brands due to its proprietary battery technology. The result is that the bulk, but not all EVs, have built-in, difficult to replace car batteries.

How different the outcome would have been had governments enforced the rule that car batteries had to be exchangeable. Most cars sold today would be EVs. Once again, it proves that when capitalists are left to their own devices without either being regulated by governments or pressured by workers, they end up doing what is right for them but wrong for society.

Electricity storage

Which brings us to electricity storage. In 2025 wind- and solar-produced electricity exceeded 19% of global electricity production due primarily to investment in China. Renewable electricity is tripling every decade. However, the more it expands the more the need for storage increases due to the intermittent production of wind and solar power.

The two forms of storage under consideration are pumped hydro and green hydrogen, that is hydrogen produced form the hydrolysis of water. The Royal Society is one of the few organisations favouring hydrogen. The rest favour pumped hydro, or two dams separated by elevation pumping water from the lower to the higher dam when there is excess electricity, then allowing water to flow from the higher dam to the lower one to generate electricity during shortages. It’s why 94% of all installed electricity storage is pumped hydro (PHES).

While hydrogen offers some advantages, its efficiency is low when measured over the full round-trip (from producing hydrogen to burning it) and produces electricity at an efficiency of only 28 to 52%. This would require many more solar panels and wind turbines to produce reserve electricity. Electrolysis is power hungry and the Gas Plant Alternatives Tool shows the renewable energy implications of that hunger. Take, for example, our hypothetical 250-megawatt gas plant, running 60% of the time with 30% hydrogen and 70% gas. Powering electrolysis to produce that much hydrogen could take 500,000 solar panels (500 watts each), or more than 50 wind turbines (three megawatts each).”

On the other hand, PHES achieves efficiencies of up to 80%. The longevity of PHES systems can be up to 100 years or double that of hydrogen-based systems. Furthermore, the lifespan of a gas turbine is half that of a water-driven turbine. Finally, the efficiency of a hydrogen-powered turbine is only one third that of a traditional gas driven turbine. Cumulatively, the total lifecycle carbon cost when comparing the carbon produced in building dams to hydrogen plants as well as their carbon emissions during use, favours PHES.

There is one other advantage, the number of identified mountain sites which lend themselves to PHES. This can be seen in this Australian National University study. Such sites could provide sufficient capacity to meet all base loads to compensate for intermittent renewable energy production doing away with the need for fossil burning stand-by power stations.

Energy storage however needs to be part of a comprehensive network which seeks to minimise the need for storage. Here we are talking about trans-continental electrical grids. Just as PHES is a mature technology, so too is high voltage DC cables. These cables can carry electricity economically for up to 4,000 kilometres. That means a hub in central Asia can reach 8,000 kilometres with spurs in each direction, sufficient to cover multiple weather systems maximising wind generated power.

It can also cover multiple time zones maximising solar-generated power. In the case of Asia, it could provide solar power up to 18 hours per day given the nine time spans crossed. What Africa and the Americas lack in width (time zones) they make up for in length (latitude) and therefore weather systems. In short, renewable energy would become far less intermittent.

However, to implement these kinds of networks requires a transcontinental consciousness, the opposite of the superficial consciousness of the capitalist class fragmented by competition and dogged by profit-driven tunnel vision. Only emancipated workers can think this big, can truly think internationally once shorn of the national identity their capitalist masters foster on them for the purposes of control and conflict.

It appears that this year is the year of a ‘super’ El Niño which makes a bad situation worse. Overall sea temperatures have risen faster than atmospheric temperatures. From absorbing excess heat, we are now on the threshold where the oceans are no longer cooling the atmosphere but catastrophically adding to temperatures. That is why some climatologists view the warming oceans as a single giant El Niño.

This year, 2026, could very well be the breaking point. The war in the Gulf which has held back fertilisers has resulted in less acreages being planted. It creates less of a buffer against the disruption to agriculture El Niño will inevitably cause later this year. Starvation and heat stroke will stalk humanity.

The measures proposed above are not optional, they are conscious global solutions necessary to reverse global warming. But if we are to reverse global warming, we need to move society forward.  We need a collective society no longer emasculated by private property, one which recognises actual costs, the ones that affect us all, not only the ones that affect the pockets of the ruinous capitalist class.

With global warming set to reach catastrophic proportions when a ‘super’ El Niño is expected later this year, we hope that this first in a series of articles on the issue will spark debate and discussion. The Left Lane welcomes further articles on this important subject. Email us at [email protected]

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