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The early 21st century witnessed a boom in green building in San Francisco and similar cities. Major downtown property owners and investors retrofitted office towers, commissioned green certification, and critically, explored how greening might pay. Greening initiatives transcend corporate social responsibility: they represent a new attempt to enclose and speculate upon "green" value within the second nature of cities. However, this unconventional resource discovery requires a highly partial view of buildings' socio-natural entanglements in and beyond the city. I illuminate these efforts and their obscurities by exploring the experience of an exemplary green building in San Francisco, an office tower that has successively served as a headquarters organizing a vast resource periphery in the American West, a symbol and driver in the transformation of the city's own second nature, a financial "resource" in its own right, and most recently, an asset in an emerging global market for green property.

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This paper argues that taking up questions of value can help political ecologists and economists develop a more powerful analysis of the green economy, as it introduces new urban, industrial, and technological dimensions into a self-identified green capitalism. More specifically, I maintain that processes of green devaluation, decommodification, and techno-industrial replacement are as important in understanding green economic development as new value enclosure and green growth. Twenty-first-century green economic politics have been marked by Schumpeterian ambitions and zero-sum intra-capitalist struggles, alongside a more general hardening of anti-fossil fuel industry politics from both grassroots climate justice activists and, increasingly, mainstream investors. I explore three interrelated initiatives-disruptive innovation in Silicon Valley cleantech, the US fossil fuel divestment movement, and the global financial industry's stranded assets organizing-as windows into these struggles. Themes of devaluation, obsolescence (both technological and "moral"), and (more or less absolute) decommodification carry through this discussion as activists struggle to translate quantitative advances against fossil fuels into a more profound qualitative break. Understanding these fights is essential to developing more effective engaged scholarship on climate change and a just energy transition. Keywords: green devaluation; fossil fuel divestment; green economy; decommodification; obsolescence The economic crisis of the late 2000s provoked a major shift within neoliberal capitalism and, centrally, neoliberal environmentalism. Alongside its unleashing of global finance and attacks on Keynesian and Developmentalist welfare states, neoliberalism had pioneered new forms of accumulation by dispossession at the periphery; notably, "green" value enclosures and land/resource grabs. Nevertheless, the 2008 collapse demonstrated to many the neoliberal turn's failure to secure capitalism. As more radical voices called for breaks from a system in crisis, heterodox economists fought back from the margins to gain the ear of powerful governments. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and other national recovery programs adopted neo-Keynesian rhetoric, advocating technological rejuvenation, the creation of quality manufacturing jobs, and a return to "real" economic development. Critically, many looked to a "green economy" as the driver of this economic transformation (Block 2011; UNEP 2011; Bailey and Caprotti 2014). Green economic development programs reframed neoliberalism's environmental project as industrial and innovation policy-the dream of ecological modernization (Mol and Spaargaaren 2000) prioritized and funded to an unprecedented degree in countries like the United States and China. Programs pledged support for rising "cleantech" industries, particularly ones developing renewable and alternative energy. At the same time, by moving to wean their economies off fossil fuels, they sought to mitigate the longer-term crisis of climate ...

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In the 2010s, major US initiatives framed urban retrofitting as a decarbonization solution. These programs address an obtrusive legacy of industrial capitalism: its built environments shed energy and emissions when they fall into disrepair. Political ecology and economy have been slow to engage retrofitting, an absence that is conspicuous as these fields take on planetary repair as a conceptual provocation and turn in mainstream conservation. This paper explores US retrofitting as a distinctive material repair practice, one born as an energy poverty program amid the scarcity fears of the 1970s Energy Crisis but seeing a renaissance today as a program for green capitalist growth. I interrogate two economies of repair now emerging around retrofitting, energy market and cleantech aspirations to make energy efficiency a resource and articulated efforts to sell retrofits as new green value for real estate development and investment. Such urban revaluation efforts join an expanding array of green gentrification schemes today. Paradoxically, even as would-be green entrepreneurs are drawn to these seemingly intangible and “clean” forms of waste and value-in-waiting, retrofitting presents intransigent materialities. Its decarbonization ambitions demand not just profit-generating urban repair today but large-scale urban maintenance into the future. This need confronts longstanding efforts to render US cities and built environments flexible to recurrent creative destruction in service of ongoing economic growth. Such logics of de/revaluation and essential disposability permit concurrent US programs for gentrification and urban abandonment today. However, decarbonization requires a more substantial confrontation with capitalist ruination-as-usual.

Progressive movements today call for transformative state-led investment in renewable energy and other climate infrastructures—in the United States, a vision that confronts inherited legacies of austerity. I argue that a significant obstacle is the neoliberal toolkit through which the US federal government subsidizes renewables, an indirect, highly opaque system of tax credits and incentives. For forty years, tax subsidies have ‘paid’ private financial players to invest in renewables, via allowing them to claim legal tax shelters against their other income. In this political economic analysis, I question, first, how US renewable energy acquired this peculiar form of public finance ‘through the tax code’, unique in the global industry. Second, I explore how the model has shaped US renewables financing, development, and ownership. I center two decisive moments: the California ‘wind rush’ in the 1980s, and the ongoing renewables boom of the last fifteen years. This history articulates financial experiments and tax sheltering scandals of the Reagan Administration with exploitation returned today in more organized (and lucrative) form, as ‘tax equity’ finance. Via tax equity, a handful of major US banks dominate financing for renewables and other politically embattled public goods. They exert a troubling ability to extract rents for their capital, gatekeep what projects get built and by whom, and stall US renewables development altogether. Today, the practice is increasingly strained by these and other problems—growing public costs, private capacity ceilings, and amplification of sectoral crises. Under Biden, it faces probable reform, but may need more comprehensive reimagination.

Using a regional political ecology lens, this paper explores emerging geographies and politics of a "postnatural" ecomodernist turn in mainstream environmentalism. We examine the unfolding case of ecological restoration and renewable energy development at Southern California's Salton Sea. Ambitious proposals to restore the massive, increasingly degraded lake (and finance restoration) by reengineering it as a hub for geothermal energy generation and high-tech green industry hinge upon the ambiguity and malleability of restoration in an environment long classified as postnatural. These plans coincide with a broader rush on renewable energy sites in the California desert, and mounting conflicts over water and land with legacy agro-industrial interests. The case illustrates significant problems within postnatural environmentalism. First, it demonstrates how theorizations of the postnatural can intersect with green capitalist projects of re(e)valuation and development, as the Sea's managers manipulate environmental framings to support accumulationminded projects, and accumulation imperatives swamp other functionalities of restoration. Meanwhile, despite the flourishing of postnatural discourses, the "pristine" is shown to do continued work as the Sea becomes a sacrifice zone for development deflected from betterprotected spaces. This postnatural positioning has rendered the Salton Sea vulnerable to neoliberal austerity and speculation in ways that compromise its future existence.