Carbon Societies: The Social Logic of Fossil Fuels.

Peter Wagner. Carbon Societies: The Social Logic of Fossil Fuels. Cambridge, UK, and Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press, 2024. Pp 277. References, index. Cloth, $24.95.

The threats posed by climate change are well known, as is the primary cause: the intense and still increasing burning of fossil fuels by the human species.  Nevertheless, adequately addressing the threat has proven to be a vexing problem for humanity.  We can imagine explanations, like the disproportionate influence oil and gas companies have on political decision-makers or the reluctance of people to give up the benefits that fossil fuels offer, but given the dire consequences of allowing climate change to advance almost unchecked, we may find those explanations unsatisfactory. 

Peter Wagner’s Carbon Societies: The Social Logic of Fossil Fuels presents a much deeper examination of the problem posed by the complexity with which human societies function.  Wagner is a German philosopher and historian of the social sciences who is a research professor of social sciences at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies and the University of Barcelona.  Carbon Societies is his contribution to an understanding of how humanity has reached this crisis point.  Hopefully greater understanding of that complex history can help to move us in directions that will more effectively address the crisis.

Wagner’s analysis is founded on two realities, broadly speaking: 1) humans are organisms that require energy in order to survive and reproduce, and we must rely on our planetary systems to provide us that energy; and 2) humans are social animals whose societies have complex economic, political, cultural, and geographic dimensions that organize how we acquire the energy we need.  Across the history of human evolution, different groups of people developed different strategies for acquiring energy (food, in the first instance), and those strategies have birthed increasingly complex political, economic, and cultural institutions, each with their physical realities (characterized as the plow, the sword, and the book, respectively, by Ernest Gellner in his 1988 book with a title naming those three objects).  To embark on his history of human evolution in the context of human-caused climate change, Wagner starts from two key assumptions: 1) humans are part of nature, even as the ways we interact with non-human nature have changed dramatically; and 2) the depth of our understandings of our planet and our relationships with it have significantly increased in recent human history.

Throughout the history of humankind, groups of people have encountered problems focused often on resource use.  As they thought they have found solutions to their problems, changes to the groups’ social structures have accompanied the evolution.  Wagner understands this dynamic partially in terms of geography, as limits, boundaries, and frontiers.  If groups encountered limits to the resources locally available, there may have been optional courses to follow.  They could find alternative resources in their locale, they could find new ways of engaging their local resources, or they could look to expand the boundaries of their local area.  They might even move beyond their frontiers.  In analyzing this history of problem-solving by human groups, Wagner introduces a profoundly helpful term, “problem displacement.” Often, when humans have tried to address a problem, it may have seemed that the problem was solved, but really all that happened was that the problem, or the burden of the problem, was displaced to some other place.  The problem wasn’t necessarily solved.

For most of human history, expanding beyond frontiers occurred only on the horizontal, terrestrial plane.  It might entail moving a community to gain direct access to new non-human resources, and it might also entail gaining access to human resources by enslaving other humans.  A major horizontal frontier, a maritime frontier, was crossed beginning in about 1500 when Europeans crossed the Atlantic to the Americas, not only gaining access to resources of new continents but also putting enslaved humans to work across that frontier to send resources back to Europe.  But when people began deep mining for coal, first in England about 200 years ago, and then in Europe and North America, they started moving across a vertical frontier beneath the surface of Earth’s crust to expand their access to energy resources.  Tapping oil and gas was a further crossing of vertical frontiers, leading to a dramatic increase, beginning in about 1950, in resource use and carbon dioxide emissions.  Energy historians call this “the Great Acceleration.”  These stages have all been what Wagner calls energy additions, not energy transitions.

At about the time in history when humans started crossing vertical frontiers, according to Wagner, two new institutions arose: modernity and capitalism.  Those two institutions have been the drivers that have accelerated fossil fuel use to a worldwide phenomenon.  Prior to our current era, most pre-modern people were tied to customs and hierarchies, and they had little expectation of abundance.  Modernity promised both abundance and freedom for all people, and fossils fuels appeared to make that promise a reality for an increasing share of the human population.  Nevertheless, modernity has not eliminated hierarchies, and capitalism has been a driver for modernity that has offered, to a dominating class, capital accumulation and power over workers.  (Wagner does not mention them, but we can think of Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire.)  The rise of modernity and capitalism created the rise in carbon emissions beginning about 200 years ago, with virtually all those emissions coming from Europe and North America.  While emissions from Europe and the United States have leveled off in the past quarter century, emissions from China and India have grown dramatically as those two countries, in their own ways, have used fossil fuels to access the promises of modernity.  This is the Asian Great Acceleration that began in about the year 2000.

Problem displacement has also been integral to these histories.  As capitalists grew annoyed with the demands of labor for higher wages and better working conditions, they displaced their problem by moving beyond the vertical frontier to extract coal from deep in Earth’s crust to power industrial processes, supplanting paid labor.  As capitalists sought to reduce the costs of labor to operate coal-fired and oil-fired industrial processes at home, they displaced the problem by moving industrial operations to countries with cheaper labor.  As communities in Europe and North America grew displeased with the pollution caused by industrial operations, companies displaced the problem by moving polluting operations to other countries.  One consequence of all this displacement has been increasing carbon emissions into the global atmosphere, resulting in a problem for which there is no option for displacement.

I have provided a simplified summary of Wagner’s energy and social histories of human evolution.  He delves into the political, economic, and cultural intricacies of this history across 250 pages.  Chapter 11, “What Is To Be Done,” occupies only the last ten pages of text.  Much of that space is devoted to noting the daunting task before us, given the power dynamics in the world today.  Wagner quotes Vaclav Smil, an energy historian who has written a number of excellent books on human uses of energy.  Smil notes on page 290 of his 2021 book, Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made, that sound climate policies are “promises that have yet to win any election.”  Wagner asserts that effective technologies to address the crisis are not what is lacking.  We began to awaken to the problem in the 1970s, but there remains a gap between our knowledge of the problem and the action we must take.  We need a social reorientation, but this will be even more difficult because, on the international level, political power is more diffuse than it was in the colonial period before the 1960s.

Carbon Societies does not offer any easy fixes.  Rather, it is a sobering analysis of how humankind arrived at the climate crisis and of the embedded economic, political, and cultural institutions that make it challenging to address the crisis on a time scale that can avert the catastrophes we see before us.  There is a glimmer of hope, perhaps, buried on page 200, where Wagner describes the difference between knowledge and belief.  They are both attitudes toward knowledge, with the former being a result of a rational process and the latter being tied to an attitude that “one could if only one wanted.”  To illustrate, Wagner cites Matthew 17:20-21, where Jesus says that belief can move mountains.  Belief cannot change the physics of the climate crisis, but perhaps belief can move our social reorientation toward the political power dynamics that are keeping us on our current trajectory.

Fredric L. Quivik