Carbon Societies: The Social Logic of Fossil Fuels

Description

The climate crisis is humanmade. Its main cause is the burning of fossil fuels. To combat climate change, we have to understand how we arrived at where we are. This book explores the reasons why human societies have embarked on the trajectory of ever-increasing use of fossil fuels. Population growth, desire for freedom from want and profit-seeking all played major roles in shaping human history, but there has been no inevitable drive towards heating up the atmosphere in the pursuit of social objectives. To sustain a growing population, more natural resources are required, but their use does not need to generate climate change. No logic of modernity links freedom with a kind of material abundance that requires the burning of fossil fuels. No logic of capital necessarily ties the search for profit to the extraction of fossil resources. Examining the critical junctures in human history when resource regimes changed, this book identifies the social problems that were meant to be solved by burning fossil fuels and the power hierarchies that shaped the decisions to use them. Wagner argues that the key choices that led to the climate emergency were made relatively recently, during the second half of the 20th century: they are close enough in time for us to undo the prevailing social logic of fossil fuels.  By redefining the key problems that humankind is facing and reshaping the existing mechanisms of power, we can take the decisive action needed to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and avert the worst consequences of climate change. 1 Climate Change, Modernity and Capitalism Climate change as problem solving Climate change as a social phenomenon Climate change, energy, biophysical resources Boundaries, frontiers, hierarchies Modernity, capitalism, power Problems, resources and interpretations: the approach On method On terminology A sequence of socio-ecological transformations: overview of the reasoning 2 Logics of History Scarcity and frontiers Logics of history (1): unstoppable expansion Logics of history (2): contingency and hierarchy The Little Ice Age as a case in point Logics of history (3): problem solving 3 The Advanced Organic Economy of ‘Early Modernity’ The great historical divide: 1500 or 1800? The maritime frontier and new parameters for resource-based interaction A new foundation for organized social life The frontier thesis revisited 4 Vertical Frontiers and the Great Divergence The problem that the 'original' rise in C02 emissions meant to solve The market-industrial and the liberal-democratic revolutions The industrial 'transformation of the world' and its interpretations The social question, domestic and global The democratic political imaginary The special case of the United States 5 Fordism and the Path Towards the Great Acceleration The second vertical frontier and the socio-ecoiogical transformation of modernity The 'stagnation' of European societies The combustion engine and mass consumption: the US answer A world regionally comparative note The social divide and the energy divide The Western Great Acceleration and its interpretations 6 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: The Politics of Material Well-Being Reinterpreting the world at mid-century The social requisites of democracy The requisites of 'economic development' Democratic capitalism in one world region The Rawlsian moment: the self-understanding of post-colonial democratic capitalism Displacing the global urgency: from the social to the ecological question 7 Why Fossil Fuels? Alternatives to ‘Development’ Growing up during the glorious years Biophysical resources and material well-being The multiple convenience of fossil fuels Critical junctures The possible non-fossil bifurcation at mid-century 'Development' and its alternatives The actual change of trajectory: from one Great Acceleration to another 8 Enabling and Constraining Knowledge: Frontiers, Limits, Boundaries Climate change as unanticipated consequence of human action? From frontiers to limits, apparently Time: endlessness Space: frontiers Certainty: towards cognitive mastery Stabilizing the future Unstable futures: predictions and scenarios Knowledge attitudes: constraint and enablement 9 Problem Displacement: The Social Logic of Fossil Fuels Self-understandings, forms of power and biophysical resources Problem displacement: the key to the social logic of fossil fuels Problem displacement as a historical pattern The western 'problem squeeze' and the Asian Great Acceleration The end of problem displacement? Other Endings: Reviewing the Logics of Expansion Path dependency? Reviewing the logics of expansion Power hierarchies and problem definition Other endings: ways of reading the present 11 What Is to Be Done? Reinterpreting the social question: a historical analogy Interpreting the ecological question Power imbalances The entrenchment of fossil fuel interests Mechanisms of change