Large-scale European electricity providers are increasingly replacing coal with renewable biomass wood pellets produced from working forests of the U.S. South. Adopting a posthumanist interpretation of the labor theory of value, this article argues that wood pellet manufacturing constitutes an attempt by energy capital to substitute the “dead labor” of prehistoric plants, embodied in fossil fuels, with the living, “vegetal labor” of forests of the present day. More specifically, the article contends that by capitalizing on the hybrid labor regimes through which the real subsumption of nature in working forests is achieved, energy interests seek to position wood pellets not merely as a viable alternative resource for electricity generation but as a socioecological fix for capitalist crisis linked to climate change in the European energy sector. The legitimacy of this apparent fix depends, however, on normalizing a view of forests not as gradually accumulating carbon sinks but as high-throughput carbon conveyors. Wood pellet manufacturing thus has important implications for conceptual understandings of the role played by labor—both human and vegetal—in efforts to institute socioecological fixes and also for practical efforts to challenge the inherently productivist logics of expanding forest-based bioenergy systems, whether rooted in the U.S. South or elsewhere.

欧洲大型电力供应商越来越多地用美国南部工作森林生产的可再生生物质木材颗粒代替煤炭。本文采用后人文主义对劳动价值理论的解释，认为木屑颗粒制造是能源资本的一种尝试，用森林中的活“植物劳动”代替了化石燃料中所体现的史前植物的“死劳动”。今天。更具体地说，该文章认为，通过利用混合劳动制度来实现对工作森林中自然的真正包容，能源利益不仅将木屑定位为发电的可行替代资源，而且还将其作为社会生态学的定位。资本主义危机与欧洲能源部门的气候变化有关。但是，这种明显的解决方法的合法性取决于对森林的看法是否正常化，而不是逐渐积累碳汇，而不再是高通量碳输送机。因此，木屑颗粒的制造对于概念性理解劳动（包括人类和植物）在建立社会生态学解决方案中的作用，以及对挑战扩大基于森林的生物能源系统的固有生产主义逻辑（无论是否植根于）的实践意义具有重要意义。美国南部或其他地方。