Coda: Learning to Let Go and Love Other Worlds

To the extent that investors, entrepreneurs and businesspeople – or anyone else who has internalized the smarts of smart money – act as representatives of our collectively creative capacities, then new technologies, and perhaps even new policies and forms of governance, will be oriented around greening what we have – improving our lives and our planet – without ever questioning whether it is precisely these lives in possession of this planet that need to be challenged and ultimately transformed. This chapter points towards evaluating sociotechnical systems within what decolonial scholars would call a pluriversal context, one in which modern technological knowledge is considered to be one out of many legitimate ways of knowing and engaging with the world. Is it possible that there exists a green spirit that goes beyond capitalism; that we are more and better than this relatively simplistic, inward-looking and self-obsessed logic of profit-maximization? Liberating this green spirit will require hard work, political struggle, unexpected alliances and a deep sense of humility; we face a messy and uncertain future as we engage with the long and hard work of transforming our socio-ecological lives.

Smart Money: The Cultural Logic of Cleantech Venture Investing

Just as entrepreneurialism can function as a more general subjectivity and orientation to the world that extends beyond the specific individuals at the helm of new businesses, the same is true of venture capital. Venture investors have their own set of disciplinary obligations, or fiduciary responsibilities, whose influence extends far beyond specific investors and agreements, generating a general, pervasive and commonsense understanding of what projects, what futures, and, ultimately, what natures are possible to produce in the first place. In backstage venues such as the Funders Forum, even though there were not always a lot of investors present or money to be invested, there was no shortage of money’s “smarts.” A wide array of strategic consultants took on, experimented with and rehearsed the very distinct intelligence that it takes to be a venture investor. Venture investors were exalted as ‘smart money’ in the context of strategic consultants proving to entrepreneurs, investors, and themselves that they could exhibit these same smarts – that they were smart-without-money. These scripts of smart money portray capital’s abstract and abstracting logic as an unquestionable intelligence, ultimately demanding that all cleantech innovations accept the market’s gravitational force, which works to tether the green spirit to capital.

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.

Kill the Inventor! If Capitalism Spurs Innovation, Who Is the Horse?

The saying “capitalism spurs innovation” conjures a sense that capitalism is promoting, accelerating and encouraging creative advance. However, spurs are also a disciplinary device, used to break in horses and make them comply with the will of their riders. Inventor-entrepreneurs are subjected to precisely this sort of “training,” or discipline – what Henri Lefebvre refers to as dressage. This chapter explores how dressage operates through the expectations and formal legal agreements that accompany venture investments. Though it is common to conceptualize entrepreneurs as the creative vanguard of neoliberal capitalism, here we see instead that capital, or the investors operating in its name, are mainly interested in working with “doubly free entrepreneurs” who are willing to renounce direct control over their innovations and instead become employees that are able to be fired as needed. Entrepreneurial creativity represents one small aspect of a broader, intergenerational and inherently collective capacity to create, make, maintain and imagine. Dressage speaks to a more broadly understood enclosure of this creativity, subtly reinforced through the lionization of entrepreneurship as the pinnacle of creative activity. As a result, a wide array of possibilities and potentials are actively disciplined and reduced to the potential to create (green) capital.

Introduction: From French Fries to Planetary Salvation

Let’s begin at the 88th session of the NY Cleantech Funders Forum.1 It is 9 a.m. in a windowless conference room on the 31st floor of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. Fifteen cleantech professionals—investors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, brokers—sit around a large table, at the head of which stand two entrepreneurs, ready to make an investment pitch for their product, the Vegawatt. The Vegawatt is a waste-to-energy technology targeting small, fast food restaurants. It converts used fry grease into fuel for a combined heat and power diesel generator, which in turn produces hot water and electricity. Waste in, energy out. The graphic on the first slide in the presentation shows a green electrical cord plugged into a French fry, which is positioned next to their sales line: “Out of the deep fryer, into your pocket!”...

Green Capital Denial: Insulating the Green Spirit from Capital

Planetary improvement is less about improving the planet in some objective, ‘natural’ sense as it is about improving and sustaining a very distinct mode of inhabiting this planet, of making natures and organizing lives (human and nonhuman alike). Cleantech entrepreneurs envision themselves greening the economy bit by bit, and refuse to see how the economy is actually transforming their visions and ideas, molding any new technologies or the possibility thereof into a commodity form that primarily serves the needs of capital. Through the maintenance of four conceptual and practical separations, cleantech proponents are able to gesture vaguely towards world-making ambitions, while at the same time insulating these visions from their day-to-day business activities and short-term financial projections: (1) a separation between personal and professional commitments; (2) the difference between thinking (about climate change) and doing (something profitable); (3) the difference between abstract and concrete concerns; and (4) the distinction between short-term (fundable) solutions and long-term visions. What emerges is a way of seeing the future as a forever receding horizon of possibility, whose radical transformation is preserved in people’s minds while the perpetuation of an unsustainable status quo is preserved in reality.

Making an Impact: Entrepreneurial Approaches to Environmentalism

Chapter 2 contextualizes planetary improvement within the rise of business environmentalism over the latter half of the 20th century. Through the re-appropriation of well-established critiques of the industrial economy, any lingering anti-systemic orientations (as well as any interest in appropriate technologies) are recast in terms of a creative, Schumpeterian entrepreneurialism focused on deploying clean technologies at a planetary scale. The surprisingly obtuse concept of “impact” reveals an emotional and aspirational force underlying participants’ commitment to cleantech entrepreneurialism. Impact refers both to the possibility of socio-ecological disruption, or the ability to make an impact-beyond-capital, as well as the possibility of market disruption, or the ability to make an impact-as-capital. In a series of vignettes, startup entrepreneurs, consultants, and investors explain why they do what they do, how their work is entrepreneurial, and why they have not chosen to pursue four distinctly less impactful alternatives: boring industries represent participation in the status quo of a not-clean business-as-usual; small business represents a scale of operation that is inconsequential relative to planetary-scale problems; hippies represent the irrational excesses of “too much” environmentalism detached from practical business sense; and Wall Street represents a narrow focus on money-making that blinds people to important nonfinancial considerations.

Non-disruptive Disruptions: Cleantech and the New Green Spirit of Capitalism

After overviewing the history of cleantech, Chapter One introduces the core contradiction investigated throughout the text: while the professionals I met were excited about “disruptive” technologies that might radically transform society, when it came to actually finding (and funding) commercially viable projects, disruption quickly gave way to incremental gains in already established markets. Building off of Boltanski and Chiappello’s New Spirit of Capitalism, I argue that planetary improvement represents a new, green spirit of capitalism that mobilizes a seemingly radical, anti-systemic critique of capitalism in order to provide moral legitimacy for proposals to create a better, greener version of the modern industrial economy. As a term, planetary improvement references the discourse of agricultural improvement that helped legitimize enclosure and colonial land grabs in the first centuries of capitalism’s ascent. Agricultural improvement targeted ‘inefficient’ forms of agricultural production – from those practiced by European commoners to a wide range of indigenous agricultural practices throughout the colonized world. In a similar way, planetary improvement recasts ‘dirty’ or ‘wasteful’ forms of industrial production and consumer-driven lifestyles as a terrain of potential improvement. Instead of inefficient commoners or inefficient laborers, here it is capital itself that is guilty of being wasteful.