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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
List of Abbreviations
Preface
Part I Setting the Agenda: Biophysical Resources and Societal Self-Understandings
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
Part II An Alternative Historical Sociology of Modernity and Capitalism
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 CO₂ 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-ecological 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
Part III The Social Logic of Fossil Fuels: Climate Change and the Politics of the Great Acceleration
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?
Part IV The Future Social Logic of Fossil Fuels
10 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
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Global CO₂ emissions during the nineteenth century
Figure 1.2
CO₂ emissions, selected countries, 1800–1940
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Global CO₂ emissions, 1750–present
Figure 2.2
Global atmospheric CO₂ concentration, 1530–present
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Global CO₂ emissions due to fossil fuels and land-use change, 1850–1950
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
CO₂ emissions, world, United States and Europe, 1890–1945
Figure 5.2
CO₂ emissions, selected countries, 1930–1972
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1
CO₂ emissions, selected countries, 1980–present
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
List of Abbreviations
Preface
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Carbon Societies
The Social Logic of Fossil Fuels
Peter Wagner
polity
Copyright © Peter Wagner 2024
The right of Peter Wagner to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5710-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024935058
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
List of Abbreviations
BCE
before the common era
BRICS
association of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa
CBDR
common but differentiated responsibilities
CDR
carbon dioxide removal
CE
common era
CO
2
carbon dioxide
COMECON
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
COP
Conference of Parties
COVID-19
coronavirus disease originating in 2019
EU
European Union
IPCC
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NIEO
New International Economic Order
OECD
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
OPEC
Organisations of Petroleum Exporting Countries
SDG
Sustainable Development Goals
SRM
Solar Radiation Management
UK
United Kingdom
UN
United Nations
UNCTAD
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
UNFCCC
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
US
United States of America
Preface
This book has two main concerns, one of which is more intellectual, the other one more practical or political: On the one side, it aims to contribute to understanding the dynamics of long-term social change, which needs to be studied in global terms, in terms of world-history. On the other side, its writing was driven by the urgency of global warming, of the climate crisis, which has come to be experienced more strongly than ever before during the work on this book. The two concerns indeed come together when we consider the climate emergency as the most recent turn of world-history. Then, the task is to understand if and how the preceding history of human societies and their engagement with non-human nature has led – unavoidably, contingently, irreversibly? – to the current situation. This is a big task, and the hope is that this book can make a small contribution to accomplish it.
Looking back, I can say that these concerns were both already important for me when I started studying the social sciences. But they became separated, and for extended periods the scholarly interests in long-term social change overtook the practical ones in thinking about how to sustain the conditions for human life on the planet. To bring them together again, a stay at the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Futures of sustainability’ at the University of Hamburg in 2019–20 has been very fruitful. Between 2016 and now, furthermore, I have been able to present the ideas, at early and at more advanced stages, that have crystallized in this book at Ural Federal University and at the Yeltsin Centre, Yekaterinburg; the Institute of Philosophy and Law of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences; the 4th International Symposium on Philosophy, Education, Arts and History of Science, Mugla; the Congress of the Swiss Sociological Association, Geneva; the conference ‘Global history and the modern world’ at the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Stockholm; on various occasions at the University of Central Asia; the Centre for the Study of Culture, Politics, and Society (CECUPS) at the University of Barcelona; the University of Tours; and the Congress of the Catalan Association for Sociology, Barcelona. I am grateful for these occasions that have allowed me to further develop my thoughts and would like to thank all those who made comments and expressed criticism.
During the final stage of writing, I have benefitted from discussions in an informal research group on environmental sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Barcelona and would like to thank Anna Clot Garrell, Oriol Batalla, and Iris Hilbrich, visiting fellow from Hamburg for some time, for their comments. Special thanks go to Angelo Pichierri, who read the whole draft manuscript and made numerous suggestions that certainly have helped improve the book. All remaining errors and misconceptions are my sole responsibility.
Last but certainly not least, I would like again to express my thanks to John Thompson and his collaborators at Polity Press for the continued confidence in my work and a smooth and highly competent interaction from first ideas to the published book. This expression of thanks includes the reviewers for Polity for comments and suggestions on both the initial proposal and the final draft that helped to clarify the argument and its presentation.
Barcelona, August 2023
Part ISetting the Agenda: Biophysical Resources and Societal Self-Understandings
1Climate Change, Modernity and Capitalism
The year is 1889. There had been ongoing debate about the consequences of industrialization for the climate on the earth. The burning of coal led to carbon dioxide emissions that accumulated in the atmosphere and were likely to make the average temperature rise across the globe. No clear hypothesis had been formulated yet. But the reasoning showed strong plausibility, and the amount of coal being burnt increased quickly year by year. In the moderate climate of the North, where industrialization took place, this prospect did not cause much concern. Rising temperatures could be an opportunity rather than a threat. After a tense international negotiation between the northern powers, a US-based hedge fund supported by its government acquired the right to exploit any resources that would be found in the Arctic. Once the ice shelf had melted, this would be the business opportunity of the next century. The engineering company working on behalf of the investors was actively developing geo-engineering measures to speed up global warming. The first experiment was scheduled to be undertaken later this same year.
This occurrence is largely forgotten. And maybe rightly so because it never happened. It only took place in Jules Verne’s novel Sans dessus dessous, published in 1889 (in English translation entitled The Purchase of the North Pole). Verne may have invented the first case of climate change as intentional human action.
The plot of the novel had many of the elements we see today in debates about fossil fuels and climate change. A company driven by the profit motive acts internationally with the support of its government while hiding the detail of its planned actions and their possible consequences. An international negotiation takes place in which the great powers as well as other concerned northern states are represented. But no southern country is present, even though the geo-engineering device is to be stationed in East Africa, on the territory of the current state of Tanzania. In the end, the project fails due to a measurement error, demonstrating human hubris.
Climate change as problem solving
There is no shortage of books about climate change. The standard introduction goes as follows: climate change is one of the greatest challenges that human societies have ever faced. It has been internationally recognized as such for more than three decades, at least since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Adequate action, however, has not been taken. The atmosphere continues warming towards unsustainable levels; extreme weather events become more frequent; the need for drastic action increases; and time is running out (for a most recent update, see Forster et al. 2023).
This is all true. But it has also often been said, even in very similar ways, and increasingly so. Over the past decade, numerous books, articles and speeches have started with sentences closely resembling the ones above. So why should there be another book?
In much of public debate, a great discrepancy between the available knowledge about climate change, on the one hand, and the lack of action, on the other, is identified and deplored. This discrepancy is often seen as the core of the issue, and this is so because climate change is considered as a highly urgent problem. Very rightly so. What is missing, though, is a convincing explanation for the persistent discrepancy. And maybe the reason why we fail to understand precisely how climate change can be combatted is exactly because from the start it has been seen as an unsolved problem that somehow emerged and with which we are confronted. This book will provide a new perspective by turning the question around. To put it provocatively: before climate change became a problem, it was a solution.
A bit more concisely: before becoming the highly urgent problem that it is today, those actions that we now know as generating climate change were, on the contrary, intentional problem-solving actions. Humankind did not ‘stumble’ or ‘slide’ into the Anthropocene, as Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021: 40) had rather infelicitously put it. Only by understanding precisely which problems human beings intended to solve when they increasingly resorted to CO2-emitting fossil fuels, and under which circumstances they embarked on the resource-intensive trajectory at the likely endpoint of which we now stand, will we be able to change our socio-ecological trajectory. In other words, we need to understand how our societies became so dependent on fossil fuels that we may well refer to them as carbon societies and how a social logic unfolded that made fossil fuels evermore entrenched in the fabric of these societies. To enhance this understanding is the objective of this book.
This agenda may, initially, open up more questions than it answers. To name just the most important ones:
We agree today that current climate change is human-made, but what exactly does it entail to analyse climate change as a social phenomenon?
Thanks to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we operate with a very clear connection between carbon dioxide emissions and the warming of the atmosphere, but how is this connection embedded in the broader issue of the human use of biophysical resources and the human need for non-human sources of energy?
There has long been an opposition in our societies, often unacknowledged, between those who hold that there are ‘limits to growth’ (Meadows et al. 1972) and those who consider human innovativeness as opening an ‘endless frontier’ (Bush 1945). Has the insight into climate change altered the terms of this debate, and if so how?
And last but not least: if we analyse climate-changing actions as attempts at problem solving, were these problems of humanity at large or problems of specific categories of human beings, defined by class, gender, ‘race’, location on the globe or otherwise?
The remainder of this introduction will, first, explore these questions in more detail and explain how they will be tackled and, second, give a brief outline of the way the analysis and argument will proceed.
Figure 1.1 Global CO2 emissions during the nineteenth century
Source: Hannah Ritchie, Max Roser and Pablo Rosado, 2020, CO2and Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. at https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Climate change as a social phenomenon
That human action may cause the climate of the planet to change is not a new thought. The hypothesis was first raised in the nineteenth century and directly related to the rapidly increasing burning of coal (Figure 1.1).
However, the evidence was insufficient to convincingly support the claim that a continuation on this trajectory would have catastrophic consequences for the habitability of the planet for human beings. This latter insight is due to advances in the climate and earth sciences over the past few decades, as they are now regularly assembled and interpreted by the IPCC. In due course, the new planetary knowledge has given rise to a debate about the need for a radical rethinking in the humanities and the social sciences, in which two strands of thought converge. First, it is argued that the ‘modern’ humanities and social sciences have been built on a radical separation from the natural sciences and that this separation needs to be undone (Descola 2005; Latour 1991; these works precede the intensification of the climate change debate but are increasingly referred to in the current context). Second, the new knowledge about the planet is seen as requiring us to reframe our search for social and historical knowledge in articulation with the planetary condition (e.g., Chakrabarty 2021).
These are fundamental questions, but they are not at the centre of this book. Rather, the following analysis is based on two quite straightforward assumptions regarding these questions, which need to be made explicit: first, human life has at all times been part of what we call ‘nature’ and has necessarily engaged with non-human nature. The ways in which human beings conceived of ‘nature’ and have engaged with non-human nature have undergone radical historical transformations, some of which will be the centre of attention in what follows. However, the view that there has at one point been a radical separation of the human and social from the natural and the concomitant rise of an instrumental relation to nature is misleading and unhelpful. In particular, this view jumps to the conclusion that there is today a need for either a return to or the creation of a more harmonious relation with nature instead of a critical analysis of the changing forms of engagement. Second, there is no doubt that the new knowledge of the planet changes our view of the ‘human condition’. Not least, the insight into the dependence of human life on the state of the planet and the dangers of engaging in any action that risks altering the planetary condition without knowing the consequences, while not entirely new, has become much more concrete and specific. However, this knowledge does not profoundly alter the concepts and methods of the humanities and social sciences, provided that human beings, as just emphasized, are seen as part of ‘nature’ and engaged with non-human nature. Rather, it provides them with the new task of understanding phenomena of which they were not fully aware until recently.
Having said this, this book will analyse climate change as a social and historical phenomenon. But is this more than merely stating the obvious? Who speaks about climate change today means human-made climate change. Without bowing to the decreasing number of people who hold against all evidence that current climate change happens without human intervention, it is worthwhile to contemplate this possibility for a moment. It is conceivable that the temperature of the atmosphere rises due to non-human, planetary changes. This has happened before and may happen again. If current climate change were of this nature, which it is not, humankind would be employing all its available tools, including social science knowledge, to search for measures of mitigation and adaptation – just as it should be doing now. But it would not look at history and society for explanations because none would be found there. Humankind would just be trying to react to something that is happening to it. This, though, is not the situation with current climate change.
We have made it, and we need to understand why and how we have made it. (The problems that may arise when one uses the collective personal pronoun ‘we’ to refer to humankind will be discussed later.) This is a quite common, indeed fundamental, assumption of the social sciences. There is no reason to deviate from it in the case of human-made climate change. In turn, there is reason to reflect on the specific conceptual and methodological obstacles that pose themselves with regard to this phenomenon.
Climate change is a social phenomenon of large scale and long duration. Its scale is global or planetary. Its duration is more contested, depending on the definition, but a plausible conceptualization would date its beginning in the early to mid-nineteenth century (another issue to which we will need to return). Importantly, anthropogenic climate change is considered to be a phenomenon that, once it exists, perpetuates itself and cannot be easily undone.
These features make climate change a relatively rare, but not an exceptional, social phenomenon. Nations, civilizations and states are large-scale, long-lasting phenomena that, once created, tend to persist, even though they may also ‘decline’ and disappear. But in contrast to climate change, they have limited spatial extension and they exist in plurality. Coming closer, ‘modernity’ and ‘capitalism’ are large-scale, long-lasting phenomena that tend towards being global. Indeed, they are often considered as not only persisting but even expanding – in space, time and also in social permeation (see chapter 2 for more detailed discussion). Furthermore, a question to be explored in detail throughout this book, modernity and capitalism are often – though in competing ways – seen to coincide with, maybe even be causally related to, climate change.
The origins of all such social phenomena of large scale and long duration are difficult to determine; this question has occupied much of the historical social sciences (e.g., Tilly 1984). While debates are ongoing and unlikely to ever be fully resolved, it is often possible to point to some agents and arguments that supported the emergence of those large-scale, long-lasting social phenomena. Let us just recall Albert Hirschman’s (1977) expression that there were ‘arguments for capitalism before its triumph’. In contrast, for climate change this was not the case. While technologies of weather making have been experimented with for quite some time, nobody ever wanted to explicitly bring about climate change as we know it today, as far as my knowledge extends (or should Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous make us think otherwise?).
But even such a situation is not alien to the social sciences. There are social phenomena that have been created through human agency without any human being having ever intended to create precisely this phenomenon. Max Weber’s (2002 [1904/5]) analysis of the rise of modern capitalism out of an entrepreneurial spirit that emerged from the Protestant ethics is the prime example of such an approach: ‘The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so’ (let us note in passing that he mentioned the exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves in this context). To put it briefly, we can analyse social phenomena as being created through meaningful human actions and – often spatio-temporally widely extended – chains of interaction, while acknowledging that the outcome of such actions and interactions may deviate strongly from the meaning and intention with which any of the human agents involved in it endowed their actions. For phenomena emerging over a long duration, furthermore, earlier sets of action create interim constellations, which provide different conditions and frameworks for later sets of action. Over time, thus, a trajectory of interim outcomes emerges that can be reconstructed as a causal narrative of interaction chains. It is from such a conceptual and methodological perspective that climate change will be analysed in this book (for the notion of ‘unintended consequences’, see Merton 1936; for its use for analysing long-term social change, see van Parijs 1982).
Climate change, energy, biophysical resources
‘Climate change’ is the current term for a social phenomenon that became known as such only during the second half of the twentieth century but has much earlier origins and a longer duration (e.g., Weart 2008). Due to the steady work of the IPCC since the late 1980s, we currently have a rather concise view of the issue: the rise in temperature is mostly due to the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 levels continue rising because the gas keeps being emitted, in some settings even increasingly so, despite international agreements on emission reduction. Most of current CO2 emissions stem from the burning of fossil fuels, in particular coal, oil and gas. For this reason, the reduction of fossil fuel use, ideally its phasing out, has become a key target of climate policy.
At the same time, the connection of climate change with fossil fuels provides the basis for the longer history of the issue. Coal was more intensely exploited from the late eighteenth century onwards, oil and gas from the late nineteenth century onwards, with their use increasing rapidly after the middle of the twentieth century when in turn the use of coal started to decline (e.g., Smil 2021; for detail, see chapters 4 and 5 below). While this framing is broadly convincing (we will raise specific queries later), it takes the form of the history of a problem. Here, though, we are interested in understanding what intensified fossil fuel use was (seen as) a solution to.
Human beings, like all living beings, need energy. In contrast to other animals, though, they have learned how to harvest energy. They have used the energy stored in wood for cooking and heating; they have used wind for transportation on the sea – and, less successfully, in the air – and for grinding wheat; and they have also used the energy of falling water for grinding grain and, later, for generating electricity. Until recently, it has remained difficult to directly transform the energy coming from the sun, the ultimate source of most energy on the earth. In contrast to wood, wind, sun and water, fossil fuels provide for a highly condensed and, at the same time, relatively easily transportable storage of energy. This can be seen as the main functional reason for the rising share of fossil fuels in human energy consumption, as most standard accounts of history would have it, not free of technical determinism. However, there have been alternatives that were not obviously functionally inferior. This is the case for dammed water, still today a main source of electricity and in many so-called developing countries a core part of energy policy after the middle of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the so-called civilian use of nuclear energy, after its military use in the Second World War, held the promise of a long-term cheap supply of energy for some time from the 1950s to the 1980s. Today, some argue for returning to that promise, given that nuclear energy does not contribute to climate change (see chapter 7 below on alternatives to fossil fuels). But it is only after the threat of climate disaster became imminent that work on improving the harvesting of wind and solar energy has seriously been undertaken. Given these alternatives, the question reasonably arises why, beyond the functional argument, our societies embarked on a fossil fuel-intensive trajectory two centuries ago and accelerated on this path until at least the end of the twentieth century. Andreas Malm (2016) developed a politico-economic argument on ‘fossil capital’, focusing on coal, and Timothy Mitchell (2011) had earlier elaborated a sociopolitical argument on ‘carbon democracy’, focusing on oil (see also DiMuzio 2015 on ‘carbon capitalism’). These analyses will be critically assessed later (see chapters 4 and 5 respectively; Victor Seow’s [2021] ‘carbon technocracy’ will be addressed in chapter 7). Let it just be said at this point that the aim of the current analysis is to be socio-historically more comprehensive. That is why we speak of ‘carbon societies’.
However, the socio-ecological trajectory over the past two centuries should not exclusively be analysed as a switch from other to fossil energy sources. The period witnessed an overall growth in energy consumption, to a considerable extent enabled by resorting to the condensed energy in fossil fuels. Part of this growth can be attributed to an increasing population. But in the early industrializing countries, which carried the lion’s share of energy use, energy consumption per capita also increased, in particular during the twentieth century (which is why it is mostly more appropriate to think of ‘energy additions’ rather than ‘energy transitions’; see York and Bell 2019). The second half of that century has been labelled the age of the ‘Great Acceleration’ (Steffen et al. 2015), referring to exponential growth not only of energy use but of consumption of biophysical resources in general as well of the burden on the environment which goes along with it.
These brief introductory reflections show that a longer historical perspective on climate change goes along with a widening of the framework of issues. Under its current denomination, climate change appears to be an issue of the last three decades. But it refers back to the turn towards fossil fuels two centuries ago. And the switch to fossil fuels had recast the ways – in quantity and quality – in which human societies employ and exploit biophysical resources. Based on this insight, the book will first consider transformations in the ways in which human societies engaged non-human nature in the pre-fossil fuel age (chapters 2 and 3). This is a necessary step for two reasons: first, to understand the socio-ecological dynamics of human societies in general; and, second, to concisely grasp the nature of the transformation of those societies towards the intensive use of fossil fuels.
Boundaries, frontiers, hierarchies
The current debate about climate change is closely aligned with the theme of planetary boundaries. It is argued that the warming of the atmosphere is one key indicator showing that the way in which human beings inhabit this planet has limits, and that these limits are identifiable and some of them are close to being reached, if they are not even already exceeded. Bringing together a larger set of indicators, so the argument goes, one can define the ‘safe operating space of humanity’ (Rockström et al. 2009; most recently, see Rockström et al. 2023) and determine how far humankind can go, and no further. Moreover, a differentiated analysis can show in which world-region boundaries are already exceeded, in the sense of going beyond the average amount conceded to every inhabitant of the earth with a view to staying within the boundaries (O’Neill et al. 2018).
While the reasoning is new in the current form and in terms of the evidence by which it is sustained, it has had predecessors, of which two stand out. The 1972 Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) rang alarm bells in the very middle of what we now recognize as the Great Acceleration. It focused on limited availability of biophysical resources at a moment when consumption of these resources rapidly accelerated and at the same time the global population was still growing quickly. The report argued that the continuation of resource use was not sustainable, given planetary boundaries – already using the first but not literally the second of these two expressions, which became core components of ecological thinking later. The Limits to Growth was the first such reasoning at planetary scale, but a similar argument had already been elaborated by Thomas Robert Malthus (1798) at the very end of the eighteenth century, at smaller scale but with the ambition of demonstrating a general law. Living still largely in the pre-fossil fuel age, Malthus saw available soil for food production as the limit. From his angle, human industriousness was fully deployed, and without further natural resources available on a planet that was ‘already possessed’ (Malthus 1798: 63), no further growth of population was possible.
We shall look later in more detail at the contexts in which these analyses emerged and the fate they met (in chapters 3 and 8 respectively). Let it just be noted now that their findings and predictions appear to have been invalidated over time and by future human action. What was seen as a limit turned out not to be such a firm boundary at all. Such experience – or, rather, interpretation of an experience – feeds into a different view of the relation between human societies and biophysical resources: Rather than having boundaries, human existence on earth encountered frontiers that can be transgressed. The term ‘frontier’, today widely used in economic and environmental history, entered into the language of the historical social sciences through Frederick Jackson Turner’s (2014 [1893]) thesis about the role of the western frontier in the history of the United States, which, interestingly even though problematically, links changing recourse to biophysical resources with sociopolitical change. (The term ‘frontier’ will be further explored and used in chapter 2 below.) In US history, it was prominently reappropriated in the 1945 report to the president entitled Science: The Endless Frontier (discussed in chapter 8 below).
This preceding experience of seemingly fixed boundaries having been overcome has opened the possibility of also seeing the current planetary boundaries as less firm than they are claimed to be. There is no reason to assume, so it is argued, that human ingenuity could not find ways to transgress this frontier and open up new horizons. In current debate, this view is held by many economists who use their standard toolkit to argue that the transformative power of ‘innovation’ will effectively mitigate climate change and create new sustainable growth paths (e.g., Aghion, Antonin and Bunel 2021 [2020]). Such supposedly expert advice is appreciated by politicians eager to claim that they can combat climate change while avoiding rocking the boat of the established resource-intensive way of life. The distinction between, on the one hand, rigid boundaries and, on the other, challenging frontiers raises the question of the certainty of scientific knowledge, in particular in relation to the action that it may provoke (to be addressed in chapter 8).
A third view manages to stay rather indifferent about the firmness or malleability of the boundary/frontier by insisting that the main issue is global social hierarchy, in more than one sense. In terms of limits, first, the risk of reaching or breaching a boundary would be much lower if resources were more equally shared. Second, existing hierarchy also entails that some groups in society are more able to impose their views on social problems and their solutions on others. Therefore, third, social hierarchy can also turn into a main cause of climate change, as the dominant classes avert calls for greater equality by enabling widespread material well-being provided through resource use (a nuanced version of this argument stands in the background of much of the analysis in part III below). And despite the global nature of the issue, fourth, the consequences of climate change will hit some world regions much harder than others, one of the reasons being the limited capacity to protect oneself from dangers (Leichenko and O’Brien 2008).
The three approaches to climate change (see Huff and Mehta 2019 and Jonsson 2019 for rather similar readings) are not entirely incompatible with each other; in many statements they are indeed combined in one way or another. But the different emphases lead to different inclinations towards action, an issue to which we shall come at the end of this analysis. Moreover, they are often also supported by different socio-theoretical approaches to climate change, thus increasing the difference of perspective between them.
Modernity, capitalism, power
The proposal by earth scientists to call the current planetary age the Anthropocene was motivated by the insight that humankind itself had become a geological force, altering the state of the planet by its actions (Crutzen 2002; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Climate change is one key outcome of this force. Within the intense debate triggered in the humanities and social sciences, as already mentioned above, one key question has been the precise role attributed to humankind when using this new epochal designation. Clearly, a large part of the current global population contributes little to almost nothing to climate change in terms of CO2 emissions – while many of them suffer over-proportionally. Historically, there have been negligible CO2 emissions from outside Western Europe and North America (except the Soviet Union from the 1930s) until the middle of the twentieth century (Figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2 CO2 emissions, selected countries, 1800–1940 (‘European Union (27)’ refers to the current territory of the EU)
Source: Hannah Ritchie, Max Roser and Pablo Rosado, 2020, CO2and Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. at https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
While it is doubtful whether the mere reference to the human being (anthropos) already implies that all human beings contribute to altering the state of the planet, or even that they do so in equal measure, the debate has at least had the merit of raising the question of the impact of different people and world regions on the planet and its atmosphere, now legally loosely defined as a case of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ (the principle was developed in the 1970s; from the 1990s, it has appeared in many international documents, including the Paris Agreement on climate change of 2015; see below, chapters 6 and 8).
As we have seen before, climate change is closely associated with fossil fuel use, and the use of fossil fuels reached new dimensions with the deep mining and industrial employment of coal from the early nineteenth century onwards. This observation coincides neatly with theorems about the origins of ‘modern society’ or ‘modern capitalism’, as elaborated in the historical social sciences. From this angle, theorists of modernity and capitalism have intervened in the debate about the Anthropocene, not least aiming to identify the sources and dynamics of the new geological force, with the former tending to accept that the human species is at the root of the issue and the latter seeing only the capitalist class in this position.
For our purposes, this dispute translates into the question of which kinds of problem were meant to be solved by increasing the use of fossil fuels – and thus generating climate change – and whose problems these were. The mainstream thinking about modernity, crudely summarized, holds that pre-modern societies tied their members into prescribed customs and ascriptive hierarchies and showed only limited material development. Modernity addressed both problems by, first, promising and, later, largely achieving ‘abundance and freedom’, to use Pierre Charbonnier’s (2020) recent formula (the historical promises of modernity and capitalism before their triumph are analysed in chapter 3 and reviewed as possible driving forces of climate change in chapter 10). Current critical reviews of the history of modernity in the light of climate change, however, point to the way in which these problems were solved. In Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2021: 32) striking expression, ‘The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use.’ This reasoning suggests that the problems are indeed those of the human species. Even if not all human beings benefited from their solution at the same time, or some human beings not at all until now, the trajectory is clearly outlined: the increase of freedom and material well-being goes along with the increasing use of fossil fuel and, thus, climate change.
In turn, critical theorists of capitalism would mostly not entirely deny the achievement of (some kind of) freedom and functionality due to the combined political and economic revolution towards modernity. However, they underline the existing social hierarchy at the origins of modernity and capitalism, which entails an asymmetric capacity for agency or, in short, an asymmetry of power. Social problems may be very widely defined as freedom and material well-being, but they will tend to be addressed as the problems of the dominating class, which are capital accumulation and control of workers, entailing exploitation and oppression of the dominated class. In this view, as updated for our times, the resort to fossil fuels leads onto that way of politico-economic development that serves the dominating class (this is, in short, Malm’s [2016] reasoning). The approach implies that other ways may have been possible, which would not have had climate change as a consequence, but that they were not adopted for reasons of domination and hierarchy.
Undeniably, most human societies are marked by social hierarchies, and this was very pronouncedly the case for those West European societies that were the site of the supposed origins of modernity and capitalism. Ahead of more detailed investigation (in chapter 4 below), it is less evident that the dominant class at the time was a capitalist class and that using fossil fuels solved its problems, disregarding the social problems of the rest of society or even at the expense of those. In a long-term perspective covering several socio-ecological transformations, it is advisable to take a broader approach: social hierarchies entail an asymmetric distribution of power – not only within but also between societies. From positions of higher power, the chances of defining the problems that are going to be addressed and solved is greater than from lower positions. But, moreover, it is useful to distinguish different sources of power, such as political, economic and ideological power (broadly following Mann 1986 who in turn draws on Giddens 1984), and to allow for the possibility that the powers are variably distributed. In other words, the power of specific social groups needs to be identified and the potential of power struggle with other groups explored (this conceptual reasoning is further developed in chapter 9).
This approach still leaves open the possible conclusion that the combined political and economic power of a capitalist class was overarchingly dominant and set modern societies on the trajectory of climate change. However, this is no longer the starting assumption. Rather, this approach would introduce the ideological power that comes with the ‘promissory notes’ (Wittrock 2000) of modernity from the beginning. And, as indeed the following analyses will show, the picture has subsequently become much more complicated, in particular since the middle of the twentieth century.
Problems, resources and interpretations: the approach
To further explicate the approach to climate change that will be taken in what follows, these two socio-theoretical explanations of long-term social change serve as a backdrop. Systematically investigating resource constraints, as well as the sociopolitical opportunities that the exploration of resource frontiers offered, a step towards an ‘alternative history of modernity’, which Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021: 183) saw as urgently needed in his writings on climate change, is taken. Such an alternative history of modernity develops a new angle on human history in two main respects: First, it connects the history and sociology of modernity and capitalism to the ‘long’ history of humankind by focusing on continuities and ruptures in the human use of biophysical resources. Second, it provides a larger frame for understanding human social organization, emphasizing biophysical resources, on the one hand, and societal self-understandings, on the other. ‘Material’ and ‘ideational’ elements, in Max Weber’s sense, are thus joined in a more fundamental way, turning the available theories of modernity and capitalism into specifications, as well as indicating what they are specifics of.
The two main approaches, namely, share two characteristics, one of a general, the other of a more specific kind, which are problematic and in need of revision. First, they operate with some notion of a determining, or at least hegemonic, logic. Thus they leave only a very limited space for human agency and historical contingency. It would be wrong to say that they do not leave such space at all; some analyses go deeply into what is seen as decisive actions. However, the point of such analysis mostly is to show that such action made sense and could hardly be otherwise because of a functional requirement or the state of competition and class relations. While there is detail and nuance in the more sophisticated historical reconstructions from either side, one will be hard pressed to find ‘events’, understood as structure-transforming occurrences (Sewell 2005), other than those that confirm the presupposed logic.
Second, both approaches show only limited openness to the questions as to how a problem and the need for action are defined and who does the defining and the acting. For functionally oriented social theories, there is an obvious answer. (Mainstream political theories, it may just be said in passing, link freedom to reason to determine the superior solution by theoretical fiat.) Functionally superior decisions and actions tend to be rewarded, and inferior ones penalized. Over the long run, inferior social arrangements will be abandoned and will collapse and disappear, as was recently argued with regard to Soviet socialism. From this linear-evolutionist perspective, which has certainly not disappeared from social theorizing, though, it is a problem, and not a minor one, that the apparently superior trajectory of increasing fossil fuel intensity has run into a dead end. Theories of capitalism are somewhat more open because of their less monolithic assumptions. There are two key collective actors that are in conflict with each other, the capitalists and the working class, even though one of them is hegemonic. And the hegemonic class is exposed to two key issues: the competition among enterprises, and the resistance of the working class. These more complex, as well as more conflicting, assumptions encourage the painting of a more nuanced picture. Most importantly, they locate the dynamic of resource expansion directly in social conflict.
Nevertheless, the range of problem definitions and of interest of actors remains reduced, and to a considerable degree predetermined, in theories of capitalism. There are conceptually preconstituted groups – social classes – whose interests are basically known beforehand. These classes confront each other in different historical constellations, and the chances of asserting their interests vary, but the greatest advantage always resides with the capitalist class. The possibility that a changing constellation may require collective interpretative work to define what problems have arisen and what action may be demanded by whom and for what purpose remains underestimated. Such an approach falls short if the histories of capitalism and modernity are to be more adequately understood as sequences of major social transformations, the experience of which mobilized collective creativity to interpret these experiences and act in the light of those interpretations, always granting that such interpretative work is undertaken in hierarchical contexts with an asymmetric distribution of interpretative agency and power (Wagner 2008).
Therefore, the following analysis will focus on such reinterpretations of key societal problems, given the changing foundations of societies in biophysical resources. In doing so, the two approaches to social theory just described will be drawn upon, but they will be placed in a broader conceptual frame. More concretely, chapter by chapter, social transformations will be characterized, first, in terms of the changes in the use of biophysical resources and, second, in terms of the societal reinterpretations of their situations and the main problems they face, or what I have called elsewhere their societal self-understanding (Wagner 2012). Functional achievement, social conflicts and hierarchies, and institutional transformations, all of which are the focus of standard historical sociologies of modernity and capitalism, will be ‘sandwiched’ in between and, as a consequence, often take on a different meaning and significance.
This broad approach translates into a sequence of research questions. First, it needs to be explored whether any prevailing logic of social interaction shapes the path of increasing fossil fuel intensity, and, if so, from when. Second, assuming that no single logic prevails globally across long stretches of history, there may be changing constellations of plural logics, which need to be identified in their historical contexts. Third, as just outlined, not even a plural constellation of logics will fully determine the path of human use of biophysical resources. Thus we need to get a sense of to what degree regularities impose themselves under certain conditions and to what degree creative reinterpretation of problems alters the course of history. Towards this end, I postulate that there may be critical junctures at which a social configuration encounters limits and is more open to creative change than at others. At the same time, a path of development may also lead to social tipping points, after which change is difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. (These historico-conceptual reflections are pushed one step further in chapter 2, and the findings of the historico-sociological analysis in this light will be summarized in chapter 10.)
On method
One straightforward objection to this approach is that it is quite simply not feasible. At first sight, it appears as if the ambition were to provide a comprehensive analysis of global history over several millennia, adopting a perspective from which it has not yet been studied. Some recent works in global history have indeed been very ambitious. But those authors who aimed at developing a comprehensive perspective on all – or at least most – aspects of social life limited themselves to periods of a century or little more, and furthermore they focused on the more recent past for which more sources are available (e.g., Bayly 2004; Osterhammel 2009). Others who dared to consider longer time spans scrutinized more specific questions, such as empires (Burbank and Cooper 2010; Darwin 2007), migration (Belich 2009), economic transformations (Parthasarathi 2011; Pomeranz 2000), even single commodities (Beckert 2014), and more recently also climate impacts (Brooke 2014; Leroy Ladurie 2004–9). To try to do all of this at the same time would appear to be mere folly.
But, on a closer look, the task seems less daunting because it can build on foundations that are already in place. First of all, works in global history, like those just mentioned, are being drawn on. They do not only offer synthetic overviews over periods and questions; at least as importantly, they provide a truly global way of observing and reflecting, in symmetric terms, on world regions that hardly existed a few decades ago. Similarly, second, established ways of viewing human history have been challenged across the last few decades due to new research findings as well as different conceptualizations. For early history, say, roughly before 1500 CE, intersecting debates in archaeology, anthropology and history have questioned a prevailing view of a largely linear evolution of human history (e.g., Graeber and Wengrow 2021; see chapter 2 below). For early modern and modern history, that is, later than 1500 CE, these have been debates that questioned the binary of viewing the last half-millennium either in terms of the unfolding global debates originating in Europe or in terms of the rise of capitalism as shaping an emerging world economy. For both of these macro periods, these are ongoing debates, which keep raising new issues and refocusing questions. Thus, while the analysis proposed here cannot rest on firm conclusions, the debates serve as frames of reference against which to develop the new perspective as suggested here (see, in particular, chapters 3 and 4 below). Third, stimulated not least by rising public concern about resource exhaustion and environmental degradation since the 1960s and about global warming since the 1980s, research activity in environmental history has intensified (surprisingly, Jürgen Osterhammel [2009: 541] still claimed there was little such research on the nineteenth century that he could draw on). In parallel, research in intellectual and conceptual history, which is a lively area of study in the works of Reinhart Koselleck, Quentin Skinner and Michel Foucault, has turned to connecting political ideas with resource availability (key recent examples being Charbonnier 2020 and Jonsson and Wennerlind 2023). Bringing findings from these two areas of historical research together permitted me to connect resource regimes with societal self-understandings.
Fourth, I need to comment on some differences in approach and sources between the long-term perspective (in part II), here called an alternative historical sociology of modernity and capitalism, and the more fine-grained – even though necessarily still somewhat sweeping – approach to the period after the middle of the twentieth century (in part III). The former leads the historical analysis up to the middle of the twentieth century and draws on the kind of sources mentioned above while reading them from the contextual angle of identifying problems and the search for their solutions, thus enlarging the existing conceptual frame. In turn, the analyses of the more recent period, during which the ‘Great Acceleration’ generated global climate change, draw on political and economic sociology, environmental sociology and politics, sociology of scientific knowledge and science and technology studies, as well as contemporary history, which now throws light on events until the 1970s and 1980s, crucial both in terms of resource regimes and of a changing global constellation due to decolonization. Specialists in any of the just mentioned fields may find that the coverage of the findings is insufficient or even inadequate, maybe in particular for environmental sociology and politics, which are of core concern here. I would ask them to bear with me and consider whether my approach opens up a new perspective on the issues they are dealing with. At various points, I will try to show exemplarily why I think this to be the case.
Throughout, the focus on self-understanding and interpretations of problems requires the consultation of contemporary sources. For earlier periods, this can be done through using up-to-date historical analyses, as well as reviewing classical sources in a new light. For the more recent period, selected contemporary diagnoses will be analysed in greater detail. Still, no claim can be made that the selected interpretations are representative, which would require analysing entire interpretative fields with their various positions. Rather, the claim is that these diagnoses are exemplary in the sense of revealing something about the societal (often: elite) self-understanding of the time. Read from the current moment, furthermore, fresh insight is provided into what was known and focused upon and what neglected. The selection of texts can obviously be questioned, as no detailed reasoning can be provided here supporting their exemplariness. Even so, I hope such questioning would further the debate, rather than merely rejecting my conclusions.
Having thus set out something like a method, let me come back to the notion that this may be an impossible enterprise. As the reflections above should have made clear, climate change is a highly complex social phenomenon of large scale and long duration that defies analysis in many respects. To make it amenable to analysis, I made a few assumptions, partly for reasons of concise presentation, but partly also to keep focus in my analysis. Thus I narrowed the argument by focusing on fossil fuels as the main cause of climate change and, in a second step, by using carbon dioxide emissions and carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere as the main indicators of climate change – broadly following the IPCC mode of reporting. This is clearly a simplification, which can be subjected to valid questioning, but it seems to be a defendable one given the significance of fossil fuels and carbon dioxide. To elaborate the reasoning and guide the presentation, I will repeatedly use figures representing CO2 emissions (as above in Figures 1.1 and 1.2) not as conclusive evidence but to open up the questions that need to be asked.1
Clearly, there is much more knowledge available on issues of interest here than I have been able to consult. In general, I have followed the maxim of marginal utility: when consulting a further source on a specific topic and finding that little or no additional insight was gained, I concluded that I might have explored this topic in sufficient depth. This may often have been true, but certainly not always. Furthermore, I am aware of the fact that there are some issues of relevance where my research should have gone further, but I decided against it for the simple reason that I might never finish this book if I did so in all those situations. Thus there are cases in which further exploration is necessary, but I hope and trust that what I say on those issues reflects a depth of knowledge that is sufficient for the argument I am trying to make. Or, in other words, that it is sufficient to spark a discussion and further research in order to improve on the analysis.
