Carbon Societies The Social Logic of Fossil Fuels

About this book

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.

Contents

Part I - Setting the agenda: biophysical resources and societal self-understandings
Chapter 1. Climate change, modernity, and capitalism

Part II - An alternative historical sociology of modernity and capitalism
Chapter 2. Logics of history
Chapter 3. The advanced organic economy of ""early modernity""
Chapter 4. Vertical frontiers and the Great Divergence
Chapter 5. Fordism and the path towards the Great Acceleration

Part III - The social logic of fossil fuels: climate change and the politics of the Great Acceleration
Chapter 6. Capitalism, socialism, and democracy: the politics of material well-being
Chapter 7. Why fossil fuels? Alternatives of ""development""
Chapter 8. Enabling and constraining knowledge: frontiers, limits, boundaries
Chapter 9. Problem displacement: the social logic of fossil fuels

Part IV - The future social logic of fossil fuels
Chapter 10. Other endings: reviewing the logics of expansion
Chapter 11. What is to be done?

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Biography

Peter Wagner is Research Professor of Social Sciences at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and at the University of Barcelona as well as Research Advisor at the University of Central Asia.