Noah Gordon

Battery export boom: China has exported approximately $60 billion in battery energy storage systems and components in the first three quarters of 2025, up 24% from last year www.reuters.com/markets/comm...

US export comparisons in 2024: Soy, $25b. LNG, $28.9b. Auto exports, $59.2b. 🔌💡

Capitalism and Its Critics--crib notes!

"Nobody believes any more in a moral revival of capitalism. The Weberian attempt to prevent it from being confounded with greed has finally failed, as it has more than ever become synonymous with corruption." -- Wolfgang Streeck

"Every human society must justify its inequalities... unless reasons for them are found, the whole political and social edifice stands in danger of collapse" - Thomas Piketty

"To say that we want wages for our housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking" - Silvia Federici

"Every Cadillac produced at any time means fewer lives in the future... Future Generations are not, simply because they cannot be, present on today's market"- Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen

"While they received a low wage, they were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white." - W.E.B. Dubois

"One of the most important functions of fascism, as typified by the Nazi system, was to remove capitalist objections to full employment." - Paul Sweezy aka Sweezy F. Baby

"There was nothing natural about laissez-faire: free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course" - Karl Polanyi

"Are we aware of our obligations to a mob? It is the mob that labor in your fields and serve in your houses-that man your navy, and recruit your army-that have enabled you to defy all the world, and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair"- Byron

"Most people are too lazy to read stout tomes such as Das Kapital and hence a slim little pamphlet such as this has a much more rapid effect" - Engels
"The continual newspaper muck annoys. It takes a lot of work, disperses my efforts, and in the final analysis is nothing" - Marx

"The tramp comes with the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of 'material progress' as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches" -- Henry George

"Berlin is the most repulsive place... cold, ugly, massive--a real barracks, and the charming Prussians with their arrogance as if each one of them had been made to swallow the very stick with which he had got his daily beating" - Rosa Luxemburg

"Practical Men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slave of some defunct economist"- J.M. Keynes

Capitalism and Its Critics by
@johncassidysays.bsky.social is a tour de force of primary research. Here are some of the best quotes he found:

Extraction by Thea Riofrancos is really good—and beautifully written.
It’s refreshing to see a warning about the risks of mining for decarbonization that is neither bad-faith fossil propaganda nor a call for fatalism and hard degrowth. @triofrancos.bsky.social

If you liked this piece, check out @adamtooze.bsky.social on the “climate Kalecki” moment adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...

🤡OIL DEMAND WILL KEEP RISING🤡

What are the IEA assumptions that make rising oil demand so improbable?

Dave Jones says it’s not so bad and the assumptions behind rising oil demand are incredibly flimsy. I should have read the full report first bsky.app/profile/clea...

Oil and gas demand to rise for 25 years without global change of course, says IEA International energy watchdog sets out new scenario to reflect fading commitment to climate change

This is from the FT coverage of the new IEA world energy outlook www.ft.com/content/8696...

No oil peak until 2035, even under stated policies (pink line). No gas peak in sight. Grim stuff

It’s a brilliant overview. As good as The Worldly Philosophers

The seat in the British Museum where Karl Marx studied “productive forces”? It was G7.

Fun nugget. @johncassidysays.bsky.social really did his homework for this book

Small Modular Residences?

Wealthy Americans were about to moderately inconvenienced. There was simply no choice

Insightful thoughts here on why capital owners may oppose decarbonization.

It's like opposition to unions: it's not about wages necessarily but about who has the power in the workplace

The big story we're missing about AI is the opportunity cost of having all the electricians build data centers instead of constructing power plants or electrifying homes.
OpenAI claims it needs 20% of US electricians and mechanics! www.latitudemedia.com/news/openai-...

A quarter of the power added in the US this year will be batteries--four times as much batteries as gas. This is your fossil fuel king? www.eia.gov/todayinenerg...

Opinion | Bill Gates Has a Point

I like Stephen Lezak and the piece is nuanced, but this is frustrating after a week where climate obstructionists congratulated Bill Gates for saying global heating would not wipe out the human species www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/o...

We've made such progress on climate change that we've cleared the very high bar of "less bad than a extinction-level meteor"

@robinsonmeyer.bsky.social for @heatmap.news on solar geoengineering : heatmap.news/climate-tech/s…

Hannah Ellis-Petersen for @theguardian.com on cloud seeding against smog theguardian.com/world/2025/oct���