“Carbon Nation” Examines How Fossil-Fuel Culture Stands in Way of Change
Historian Bob Johnson's Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture examines the start of the fossil-fuel revolution in the US in the 1800s and shows how it created more than a new energy economy. A new American culture came into being. "We became a people of prehistoric carbon between 1885, when the United States experienced its first energy crisis, a 'crisis of abundance,' . . . and 1970, when we experienced a second, more depressing crisis of malaise," Johnson explains. "In these years . . . prehistoric carbons grafted themselves onto and embedded themselves deep with the American self."
Johnson mines historic materials to make his case--much as we found, in researching our forthcoming book, Life After Carbon, that examining the interconnected rise of the fossil-fuel economy and the modern city was driven by new ideas that became deeply embedded in urban development and global urbanization. And, as he points out toward the end of Carbon Nation, what became embedded in the modern self--the ideas, feelings, symbols, art, and so on--can be hard to change.
"The urge to look sideways at our energy dependencies goes well beyond unhampered propaganda and lax political contribution laws. It also derives from the fact that most Americans--on the political right and left and in the center--have very strong short-term incentives to want to believe that the status quo can be maintained." Certainly the same is true about the underlying model--the assumptions--for modern urban development. Johnson continues: "To imagine life without prehistoric carbons . . . means engaging ourselves in the very messy and uncomfortable work of finding out who we are and what we might be without combusting fuels." This is precisely what cities that have been most aggressive about decarbonizing themselves are discovering: the work is not just about technical solutions that reduce GHG emissions; it's about reimagining the city's identity and future.
Johnson makes another point about carbon culture in the U.S. that seems fresh. The rise of the fossil-fuel economy in the early 18th century occurred before Americans had experienced the limits of exploiting natural ecosystems--and the pain of economic contraction--that Europeans had already been through. In the US there was still much more land, trees, minerals and the like to consume. Americans evaded "the logic of organic constraints felt so viscerally in more land-strapped early modern regions such as England, France, Germany, Japan, and China." As a result, Johnson concludes, "Americans became subsequently vaccinated against talk of ecological constraints."
Climate change presents a great challenge to this nation's deeply held cultural aversion to ecological limits. No wonder Johnson says that "disentangling ourselves from prehistoric carbon implies, in other words, that we are willing to cleave off a part of ourselves."
