Green economics is about sustainability. Such is the claim. I worry that the discussion of clean energy and energy infrastructures assumes the continuation of the expansionary, accumulative dynamic of the current economic system and, tragically, employs the global heating that is an inevitable consequence of that endless growth as an appeal to 'necessity' justifying the choice of contentious technologies, many of which are opposed by communities, but which will be imposed over their heads. A green movement which promised a democratic technics thus comes to be associated with an authoritarian technics. From nuclear to fracking, take your pick of energies, the principal agents in the current economic system - the ones whose central position within production relations gives them real power of choice and allocation - will take it all, demand more, and make the public pay one way or another, taxes, subsidies, prices, the lot. There are a lot of false fixities in play in these debates, the biggest one of all being the capital system itself. Accept that as the only economic game in town, and the 'choices' follow. You can forget all about democratic choice. The massive investments that companies have made in these areas will not be written off as a result of public opposition. And you can forget about the common good too. The common interest or the common good used to mean something positive, the social and environmental justice generating and sustaining human and planetary flourishing. We flourish as parts of an integrated, interconnected whole. Now, a certain strand of environmentalism - detached from the practical movement for bringing about the ecological transformation of society from the roots up - is employing the common interest to justify the imposition of some very contentious forms of energy upon communities. That is 'common interest' defined in terms of human survival, rather than in the original, ancient sense of politics, as associating together to create the public life which embodies and articulates the human good. The things that ought to be a matter of public debate, deliberation and decision are being presented as technical necessities and inevitabilities if we are to address the problem of climate change. I am the last to deny that problem. The climate crisis is the biggest problem we face and should concentrate minds. And we need cool heads. We need to debate these various technologies and energy infrastructures. The situation is so serious that we need to think like foxes, keep our minds open to various possible solutions and work through them pragmatically. I would just argue that without active consent connecting short and long term interest, individual and collective good, there will be a democratic deficit in those solutions generated in abstraction from the individuals composing the demos. They will be hollow. It will smack of a green authoritarianism, betraying the promise of a movement which originated in a grassroots effort to reclaim the global commons. But can resolving the environmental crisis await democratic growth? This is the political problem that seems hardest to crack. Governments are subject to such systemic and structural constraints with respect to 'the economy' that they lack political autonomy (and this is even before we mention corporate capture of public business). Electorates are made up of individual voters who necessarily vote out of self-interest, not collective solidarity, not the long term good for all. To argue for altruism over egoism in politics is to appeal to a social identity which does not exist in the prevailing social relationships. Aristotle argued that human beings are social beings, politikon zoons, but in a market 'society' we are atoms, each seeking self-interest, all becoming playthings of external forces (from business imperatives to climate change). And all for what? What will an authoritarian technics achieve? Will it really address climate change? The idea that we can choose our energy infrastructure in the 'common interest' (defined negatively in terms of dealing with climate change by purely technical means) involves an inadvisable degree of faith in the power of contingent, incremental change within the larger system. The capital system is not a public domain subject to democratic deliberation and choice in this way, but a regime of private accumulation. At a time when serious social transformation needs to be on the global political agenda, we are debating energy infrastructures in abstraction from social relationships. These relationships - the relations we have to each other and to our environing society and nature - need to be addressed directly, challenged and transformed so that we live more harmoniously with each other and with the planet. Rather than transforming the way we organise our interchange with nature, we are in danger of making ourselves experts in how to fuel the very economic system that is eating up the planet. And being fair to the environmentalists who are proposing technological solutions to climate crisis, it is the failure of government and politics that has brought us to this. And that, ultimately, is our failure. We may talk about 'choice' when it comes to the energy infrastructure and mix, but, in the absence of real social transformation, we seem to have no option but to seek a technical solution to the problem of global heating. Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, has demanded accelerated research into geo-engineering and called for a worldwide nuclear power station "binge" in order to avoid runaway global heating. Those views are worth considering because, make no mistake, that is what we are facing - runaway global heating. And when the planet is on the move, politics will be no more than a rescue squad at best, reacting rather than adapting. I'm not criticising the scientists or the technologists here at all. They are having to fill the void left by the collapse of a genuine politics, politics in its true sense. But technique is not politics, is not philosophy; it is a means being pressed into the gap where ends once were. And techno solutions are a gamble. Wadhams himself acknowledges that such technical solutions possess inherent dangers and offer no guarantees. And being fair to Wadhams, he is correct to point out that time is running out. "Co2 levels are rising at a faster than exponential rate, and yet politicians only want to take utterly trivial steps such as banning plastic bags and building a few windfarms. Having done almost nothing for two decades we need to adopt more desperate measures such as considering geo-engineering techniques as well as conducting a major nuclear programme." I can accept this reasoning, certainly in light of decades of political failure, of governments and political leaders but also of electorates, both too wedded to 'business as usual' to change in any substantial respect. For me, though, the question is not 'energy' as such but why energy demands are so large and continually increasing. We have used more energy this past hundred years than every civilisation in history put together. And that points to an unsustainable demand derived from an endlessly expanding economic system. Why do we need so much energy in the first place? That is the real question. We are in danger of turning a socio-economic problem into a technical one, and that is a blatant moral and political evasion (born of political failure). Capital, subject to its endless, expansionary imperatives, will take all your energy forms and still want more. It's a time to recover a sense of political economy, to investigate issues of control and power in order to understand how our social relations are arranged and to what end. I find the abandonment of the politics of social transformation in favour of technical solutions deeply depressing, an admission, indeed a confirmation of political failure. Of governments, yes, but also ourselves. We are selling ourselves short as citizens. We can employ technologies, certainly. But I set technology within a wider understanding of technics. Technics involves much more than hardware and embraces tools, machines, skills, knowledge and arts within the whole cultural matrix. Technics revolve around a special role for human creativity and require a new relationship of culture to the economy for their potentials to be realised. The new productive forces express, and are grounded in, a creative human culture that, as culture, is capable of being an end in itself. At the moment, these new productive forces are being used merely as a means of accumulating capital, means for the accumulation of more means in an endless process. It's a nihilism. And to subordinate such potential to such a narrow purpose is a waste, a waste of our creative capacities as much as of nature's own capital. We need to restore the true relation between means and ends. And that means affirming creative human self-realisation - conscious choice on the part of the sovereign citizen body - against external imperatives and fixities imposed by 'the economy', that slippery euphemism for specific, historical and alterable social relationships. Realising the potentials of culture as a co-evolution with nature is precisely what ecological activism is about. You can cover the planet with wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear reactors, the lot. And I don't doubt that the capital system is in the process of doing precisely this, not by choice but by necessity. We could have a city planet, we could rebuild the planet as one vast factory, pour concrete, glass, iron and steel over the green and pleasant lands of every nation and every people. But even if successful, this enterprise is self-defeating when considered in terms of the human ontology. We would survive on the outer landscape, but we would die in the inner landscape. I see little that is 'green' in such environmentalism, just what James Lovelock calls the green wing of the very techno-urban industrial system whose accumulative dynamic is generating the climate crisis in the first place. I find the groups working in the fields of restoration ecology, rewilding, reforestation, reclaiming the global commons and such like much more appealing. They certainly reclaim ethics and politics in the true sense. Against the accumulative dynamic of the endlessly expanding global economy, I don't think wind turbines and the like will make one iota of difference. They could buy us time, yes, to make the bigger transformations needed. They could also confirm our disabling dependence on technology and ensure a continuation of the crisis. We need to think in terms of technics, setting our capacities and their use and development within a cultural matrix, and not just of technologies on their own. The great flaw in engineering solutions is that, alone, they are unable to address the social and political problems at the heart of the environmental crisis and, what is more, may even add fuel to the fire. The problem lies with human demands on the environment and the way we arrange our technics within specific social relations. Scientist Stephen Emmott is clear that all such engineering ‘solutions’ threaten to produce as many problems as they may solve. For Emmott, the only genuine solution is behavioural change. And that is a moral and political solution. Historically, the practice and study of politics first emerged amongst the ancient Greeks as a concern with the quest for the good life. The word politics derives from the Greek 'polites', meaning those concerned with public affairs. Human beings are social and political animals who need to associate with each other within a public life, a politikon bion, in order to be themselves. This defines an associative politics as creative self-realisation. How to achieve this public life as the good life remains the central question of politics, not the bargaining and negotiation between and choosing of necessary evils. Choose a lesser evil and you will find that not only do you fail to address the real problem, but that the problem has grown to become a bigger evil. The ancient Greek awareness - and I'm thinking of Aristotle here - was that not only are human beings social animals, they are also rational beings. The growing consciousness of the difference between an existing reality and a future, potentially existent reality formed the essential, creative, democratic component of the quest for the good life throughout history. The idea that we have reached the limits of our political capabilities and creativity either expresses a confidence that we have achieved perfection already, and are happily living the good life, or a despair that the good could ever be defined, let alone achieved. For my part, I argue for an engaged philosophy. I would argue that philosophy does its best work in that gap between the 'is', the world we see all around us, and the 'ought-to-be', the morally desirable future, the good life we envisage and feel as an ontological need, a society which qualifies as 'good' in corresponding to and enhancing the human ontology of each of us and of all of us together in community. The use of certain technologies could buy us time to recover this politics of human self-realisation. We could survive and, maybe, in time, at last learn to how to thrive. But it is not an either/or. I'm not arguing against green technologies at all, just against the tendency to evade moral and political questions and fall back upon technology alone. At best, the use of technologies may give us time to organise more concerted action to deal with climate change. We need means and ends to work together in their proper relation. But, sooner or later, the time for the recovery of our political and moral capacities must come, if we are to be at all. To dispense with the good life and our role as moral and political beings in constituting it would be to renounce a large part of what it is to be a human being.