Abstract
Much of the contemporary discussion about the climate crisis or emergency focuses on the need for profound changes in the design and policies of energy development and consumption. Comparatively little has been done to understand the reasons why contemporary societies have embarked on a trajectory of intensified consumption of fossil fuels, a historically complex problem that is often circumvented by the adoption of general interpretative schemes based on broad concepts such as modernity, capitalism, or technological innovation. It is precisely on this issue that Peter Wagner offers an original contribution to the debate, trying to unravel the underlying logic of ‘carbon societies’, which is at the origin of the so-called ‘great acceleration’ and the current problems.
The book is divided into four parts and 11 chapters. Readers interested in theory will find in the first part a sophisticated model for dealing with historical trajectories, built on a unique research experience that combines elements of historical sociology, political philosophy and social theory. It makes possible to tackle some of the blind spots of research into long-term processes in social theory, moving away from the excesses of teleology present in many of the big theories and deal with the contingencies and indeterminacies of historical processes without, however, giving up on establishing the logics that make them comprehensible to us.
In this approach, the pragmatist idea of ‘problem solving’ has methodological relevance. Situations of crisis, emergencies or critical junctures are appropriate for observing the most significant changes in trajectory. Wagner dialogues with some of the best works of historical sociology, such as those by William Sewell Jr., Anthony Giddens and Michael Mann, to articulate the interpretation of problems and the constellations of power in these junctures, both in terms of the use of biophysical resources and in the forms of social organization and self-understanding.
For Wagner, the need to transform nature in order to produce human life indicates that an instrumental relationship with nature is always present; the issue, however, lies in the different ways in which it can be interpreted. Thus, the theme of the scarcity of resources provides access to the logics of expansion of human societies, but does not in itself constitute a determination, always requiring further interpretation.
The relationship between problems and interpretations is worked around the concept of ‘problematiques’, which refers to basic needs that societies have to deal with, but which can be interpreted in different ways. In modernity ‘human beings do not consider the solutions to these “problematiques” as predetermined and given, but as being open and determined through human action and interpretation’ (Wagner, 2024: 205). Economic, political and epistemic ‘problematiques’ are at the core of the explanatory model. Thus, the movement by which societies expanded their natural resource base, must be seen in combination with the ways in which they have constituted their forms of knowledge and how they have concentrated power resources in the answer of these basic problematiques. The consequence, for Wagner, is that history does not unfolds in a singular ‘logic’, but in an intersection of logics, which is very different from imagining that there is no logic at all, just ‘chaotic’ sequences of events. What can be tracked are different configurations of problems, interpretations and capacities for action.
Throughout the historical chapters, that constitute the second part of the book, Wagner discusses the relationship between societal self-understanding and the use of biophysical resources from early modernity to the Great Acceleration. He shows how the transposition of the first ‘vertical frontier’, with the new applications of coal in industry, especially after 1830, is connected to changes in societal self-understanding. The political philosophy of the previous century in Europe was conceived within the framework of an economy of organic resources, in which the scarcity of land is a limit to expansion. Its ‘commercial republicanism’ which connected personal freedom and markets, was weakened by new interpretations of social life in terms of both industrial organization and political expectations of democracy. The emergence of a ‘social question’ revealed the selectivity of a social understanding centered on the association between freedom and wealth, linking the pauperization of the working classes to the restriction of their political rights, which gave impetus to the political struggles of the workers’ movement in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The discovery of fossil fuels signs the transposition of a second vertical frontier. It entails the socio-ecological transformations that would lead to the Great Acceleration in the twentieth century, combining industrial Fordist capitalism, based in the intensified use of fossil fuels, with liberal democratic institutions. Originated in the US experience, the diffusion of this arrangement should not be taken for granted, but related to what was understood as problems and the power relations that constrained the search for solutions. After the wars, Western elites concluded that the previous democratic institutions collapsed due to their inability to deal with the social question, a problem that became more relevant with the organization of socialism as an alternative and an international geopolitical force. Concomitantly, as Joseph Schumpeter have argued, the rise in consumption and levels of material well-being should not be seen as a threat to capitalism, but as part of the process of accumulation, with the expansion of industrial production being a form of political stabilization. Economic growth would become the decisive political orientation of the post-war period.
Even so, it would be necessary to explain why exactly fossil fuels and not others were considered the solution to economic growth. The comparison of national trajectories that are more or less dependent on fossil fuels shows that besides logistical conveniences, there were also political arrangements. Alternative energy sources were not always geographically available and could require major state projects, as was the case with nuclear or hydroelectric power, which suggests affinities between the option for fossil fuels and the liberal understanding of democracies. The social question could be addressed at the level of national citizenship through economic growth. On the international level, the decolonization movements pointed out that each national state would be responsible for dealing with its own set of problems, without actually creating institutions of solidarity.
The cumulative effects of crossing the first and second vertical frontiers transforms the global energy divide into a social one. It entails a great divergence between both the levels of material well-being and of CO2 emissions at a global level. The characteristics of inequality change: less internal inequality in Western societies and greater inequality between countries and regions of the world. The West has become more capable of exercising power over the rest of the world, but the majority of its population has gained power over its elites.
Wagner’s interpretation is that this trajectory can be understood as a dynamic of problem-solving that involves decision and non-decision, that is, ‘the choice to consolidate democracy by using fossil fuels to answer the social question’ and the ‘inability to deal with the consequences of this choice’ (Wagner, 2024: 241). For him, the idea that the ecological and environmental effects would be an unanticipated consequence of the intensification of emissions is weakened by the evidence of very early knowledge about their effects. Rather than a lack of knowledge, it is a question of different ways of dealing with knowledge about limits and boundaries, that opposes science as an infinite capacity to cross boundaries or as a calculus that determines limits and constraints on human action.
Instead of solving problems, that was a logic of displacement, which means a dynamic of problems reinterpretation in which the solution becomes possible by allocating costs and burdens ‘elsewhere’. This presupposes agents, usually collectives, who have objectives and problems as difficulties in achieving it from its initial interpretation. However, for Wagner, in the logic of displacement, the problem is not exactly solved, as it becomes a problem for others and elsewhere, in this case, for other populations, for nature and for the future, compromising new generations. Current crisis would therefore be ‘the outcome of long-term sequences of large-scale problem displacements’ (Wagner, 2024: 213).
Since the 1970s, displacement strategies have been hampered by its own effects. The interdependence in international relations increased with economic development in Asia and Western hegemonic policies have become highly questioned. It also entailed an intensification of resources and consumption that is already being called the Asian Great Acceleration, what limits new options for displacement. However, the understanding of exhaustion of displacement strategies is not consensual. Scientific knowledge is divided between the calculus of limits, the ‘last frontiers’ as non-manipulable environments, and ‘geoengineering’ that argues that global warnings could stimulate technological innovations to sequester carbon or reduce the incidence of solar radiation in the atmosphere. If there are difficulties in demonstrating the logic of limits, because of its dependence of scientific discourses, the contrary perspective also lacks convincing powers. If the book’s argument is correct, major technological changes must be accompanied by social transformations, so betting only in enabling knowledges and technologies could lead to a widening of global inequalities, a world that would not be uninhabitable for everyone, but perhaps for the many.
Wagner believes that the way to tackle the crisis should be to interrupt the strategies of displacement and reinterpret the problems that led to the Great Acceleration in a different way. In other words, thinking about the ‘social question’ without being committed to the intensification of fossil fuel consumption. However, this is not simply a cognitive or interpretative problem, but also a political one. Difficulties are not due to a lack of knowledge, but to a constellation of power at domestic and international level, in which there is a high concentration of powers that escape the circuits of public justification, in which environmental concerns are stronger. This is why they need to be confronted by a democratic and solidarity-oriented policy, a theme accessed in the final chapters of the book.
In addition to the merits of his theoretical model, Wagner’s book offers a solid interpretation of the logic of carbon societies. There are two points, however, that I propose further discussion. The first concerns the relative weight that the problems intrinsic to capitalism occupy in his interpretation in relation to the problem of post-war political stabilization. Wagner has good reason to reject generalizing and reductive interpretations of the great acceleration as simply a ‘capitalocene’; however, it would be necessary to investigate to what extent the intensification on the consumption of fossil fuels did not also solve intrinsic problems of capitalism’s logic of accumulation, with the development of Fordism, industrialism and mass consumption, as a response to historical tendencies of falling profit rates and accumulation, something that the Marxist argument has successfully exploited. This could increase the weight of the economic ‘problematique’ and even strengthen its more general argument about the logics of history.
The second point concerns the politics of dealing with the crisis. One of the most interesting aspects of Wagner’s theoretical model is precisely that it combines the interpretation of problems and the analysis of power constellations. In doing so, it would be necessary to try to clarify the status of the climate emergency in the broader configuration and hierarchy of contemporary political problems. The complexity of contemporary crises has made it difficult to define a clear hierarchy of problems, with many intersecting threats, objectives and interests. Displacement strategies, as the author himself argues, also involve a temporal dimension, a hierarchy of problems over time, in the hope of controlling their effects, which tends to postpone more ambitious energy transition or environmental transformation policies. Environmental campaigns have not been electorally attractive, often remaining restricted to enlightened circles of experts and activists in affluent societies. All of this makes interpretative work as difficult as necessary, and in this sense Wagner’s contribution is a valuable starting point for diagnosing the present and confronting the crises.