Against High-Tech Global and Grid Approaches to Energy Transition: Post-Liberalism, Open Sourced Metabolism, and the Telos of Local Sustainability

Green political agendas rooted in ecological modernization (EM) are distinguished from antecedent visions predicated on biophysical limits. Net zero is shown to be rooted in a project of global EM. Ecomodernism is analysed in relation to its principal actors, geopolitical context and underlying metaphysics and anthropology. It is driven by non-negotiable societal priorities (‘ends’) which themselves derive from a particular set of technical ‘means’. The top-down version of the 4th industrial revolution (IR4.0) and new paradigm of global net zero constitute an integrated agenda of eco-modernism. Global net zero cannot hope to achieve its own metabolic goals in respect of either energy flows or the circular economy. A competing, bottom-up and distributed model of the IR4.0 could potentially achieve these targets without falling prey to the Jevons paradox. This potential turns on the greater capacity of low-overhead, prosumer models to nurture less materialist cultural priorities that are more communitarian, and family oriented. A smart energy system that emerges in the context of distributed, domestic and informal production is much more likely to mirror the complex, infinitely gradated and granular pattern of oscillating energy transfers that are characteristic of biological systems. From an ecological economic perspective, such a bottom-up approach to the IR4.0 is much more likely to see the orders of magnitude reduction in the unit energetic cost of social complexity envisaged, in principle, by Net Zero.